As disappointing as the loss of Sandy Pasch to Alberta Darling may be, we are once again reminded that electoral politics is not on the side of the common good. The system has been corrupted to the point of serious dysfunction. Many would argue that it was never set up in the first place to serve the common good, thus the restrictions both historic and present on women, blacks, felons, not to mention the electoral college, voter ID bill, and many other restrictions.
How many times do we have to be abused before we pursue an alternative path? The first election to demoralize me was the 2000 Presidential election, decided by the Supreme Court. Then again the 2004 Presidential, and most recently with the "irregularities" in the Kloppenburg/Prosser election.
Not that we should abjure the responsibility of voting (although I completely understand why some marginalized people have given up on it completely), but that voting should be only one of a myriad other actions. Don't put all your food into a broken refrigerator. Everything will get spoiled. And don't spend thousands of dollars trying to fix that refrigerator. Instead, create alternative ways to preserve food without refrigeration.
So many friends invested all their hope into the recalls, and were left devastated in the wake, besieged with dozens of "if only's": If only I had given more money, if only I had spent another weekend canvassing, if only I could have convinced so-and-so to volunteer....
It's conceivable we could with tremendous effort and expense fix that damned refrigerator. But isn't our energy better spent elsewhere? What if we had spent the millions of dollars generated by the recalls and given it directly to the poor?
Because electoral politics is inextricably part of the system of white supremacy, to invest all our hope and energy in it is to support continued racism. As Jimmy Boggs points out, "Democracy to white people is fascism to black people." Democracy via electoral politics only works for a percentage of the population: the (shrinking) middle class and above. The poor and people of color have been excluded by both Democrats and Republicans throughout our history, and regardless of the party in charge, white supremacy has remained intact. Thus, the subtext of the "I Voted" sticker proudly worn on election day is, "I benefit from and uphold the system of white supremacy."
The fact is anyone benefiting from banks, media, stores, and elections upholds white supremacy. Our focus on electoral politics feeds our delusional conviction that equality is possible in our current system. As plummeting stocks and recent rebellions in Milwaukee, London, Philadelphia and elsewhere reveal, we have nothing close to justice in the USA nor abroad. Our global system of white supremacy maintains oppression and exploitation, and elected officials from both parties all too often vote in the interests of banks and multinational corporations, and are funded by them.
What are the alternatives to our dependence on electoral politics? This is a profound question addressing every single aspect of our lives. I'm building housing cooperatives. What else?
- Stop shopping. Make it, trade it, grow it, forage it.
- Band together with your neighbors to grow food, potluck, share childcare and eldercare, car-share, and keep trouble away so the police are unnecessary.
- Move your money to a local credit union.
- Stop driving. Walk or bike. If you have to use fossil fuels, carpool or bus it.
- Stop consumption of media: TV, radio, internet, phone, newspapers. All mainstream media is owned and operated through the system of white supremacy. Even much alternative media is funded by the same sources, and depends on fossil fuels for transmission. Reduce your consumption by having one or more days a week with everything turned off. Soon you won't want to turn back on.
- Learn how to be healthy. Stop going to the doctor. Learn homeopathics, naturopathy, yoga, nutritional healing, meditation, etc.
- Quit your job. I'm serious. Then you can stop or at least reduce coffee consumption, stop eating out, stop buying clothes, reduce your stress and medical bills, reduce fossil fuel consumption, and have time to do the stuff above.
A ridiculous if not impossible list? That's why we are stuck and at the mercy of our elected officials. But they will not save us, our health insurance, or our retirement accounts. Even a temporary "save" will soon come crashing down, for we no longer have the global resources to sustain a 20th century lifestyle. We have to band together and save ourselves, step by step.
Thursday, August 11, 2011
Saturday, July 30, 2011
My Terribly Ironic Friends: Reconciling Cognitive Dissonance Through Art
I had a group of friends in college, virtually all white men, who were, and still are, as far as I can tell, terribly ironic, sarcastic, clever, irreverent guys. They made fun of everything. Bascially they were my drinking buddies. On some level, I'm still drawn to people like that: it's the Jon Stewart syndrome. But it's been decades since I've gone out drinking, and now I recognize this attitude as something more than fun, but rather as an attempt to reconcile cognitive dissonance through irony and humor.
My ironic friends are educated enough and moral enough to recognize their unearned privileges. They never use the term "white supremacy" and rarely discuss or recognize race. They have gripes with capitalism but accept it as inevitable. But deep down, my ironic friends feel conflicted about the suffering of others: crippling poverty, failing schools, foreclosures, prisons, endless war.... And they're smart enough to connect the dots and understand that the extreme disparities between rich and poor are due to a global system of oppression, intended and designed to benefit a few. They understand that this global system is one of white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism. They oppose this system, yet recognize they benefit from it. Yikes!
So Irony and Art come in. We use these practices to let just enough air out of the white supremacist/patriarchal/capitalist bubble to relieve our anxiety and allow us to sleep at night, but don't release enough air to actually burst it. We stand outside the bubble and question it, poke it, make fun of it, and talktalktalk about it, but don't actually change it. In this way, art and humor become palliatives, Marx's opiate for the masses, which is why we can't get enough of Stewart and Colbert.
So instead, can we actually use art and humor to change our lives and our behaviors? Can we use art for the revolution? Instead of retreating into the palliative of art, we have to make our lives the work of art itself. It's not enough to create art, to BE an artist. That's so 20th century. We actually have to LIVE it.
How do we daily live outside the white supremacist/capitalist paradigm? How do we daily refrain from buying anything produced through exploitation, using unrenewable energy, ingesting corporate media, supporting big pharma, depending on corrupt banking systems, and participating in racism/classism/sexism/heterosexism/ageism? These are the only ways to overcome cognitive dissonance. Irony is only a first step, a harmless little poke to the bubble of white supremacy.
My ironic friends are educated enough and moral enough to recognize their unearned privileges. They never use the term "white supremacy" and rarely discuss or recognize race. They have gripes with capitalism but accept it as inevitable. But deep down, my ironic friends feel conflicted about the suffering of others: crippling poverty, failing schools, foreclosures, prisons, endless war.... And they're smart enough to connect the dots and understand that the extreme disparities between rich and poor are due to a global system of oppression, intended and designed to benefit a few. They understand that this global system is one of white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism. They oppose this system, yet recognize they benefit from it. Yikes!
So Irony and Art come in. We use these practices to let just enough air out of the white supremacist/patriarchal/capitalist bubble to relieve our anxiety and allow us to sleep at night, but don't release enough air to actually burst it. We stand outside the bubble and question it, poke it, make fun of it, and talktalktalk about it, but don't actually change it. In this way, art and humor become palliatives, Marx's opiate for the masses, which is why we can't get enough of Stewart and Colbert.
So instead, can we actually use art and humor to change our lives and our behaviors? Can we use art for the revolution? Instead of retreating into the palliative of art, we have to make our lives the work of art itself. It's not enough to create art, to BE an artist. That's so 20th century. We actually have to LIVE it.
How do we daily live outside the white supremacist/capitalist paradigm? How do we daily refrain from buying anything produced through exploitation, using unrenewable energy, ingesting corporate media, supporting big pharma, depending on corrupt banking systems, and participating in racism/classism/sexism/heterosexism/ageism? These are the only ways to overcome cognitive dissonance. Irony is only a first step, a harmless little poke to the bubble of white supremacy.
Friday, July 29, 2011
Revolutionary Diary, Entry 3
A while back, a friend made an observation that we have a natural resistance to things that are good for us. She was referring to people who know they would feel better doing yoga, but they just can't get themselves to do it. I'm thinking about this in light of Grace's first chapter in her new book, "Growing Our Souls."
The observation points out that deep down, most of us know what we need to be healthy. We see this in healthy animals who know what to eat and when. It's a physical rather than intellectual knowledge, this feeling of "hmmm, I need something crunchy and green," or "I've overworked my legs today, I need to raise them up," etc.
So why do we resist these things that are good for us? Perhaps we also have a deep-seated resistance to change, which is connected to instability, which is connected to survival. I would surmise that the higher our level of privilege, the more we resist change, for we could compromise our very privilege.
This is the disservice unions in the late 20th century have wrought: replicating the system of privileges which they were created to resist. Unions, dependent on an economy based on exploitation and abuse, contributed to a growing middle class which has despoiled the earth, and made us unfit for survival in a post-oil world.
To do what is good for us will require us to renounce our privileges. The goal of leveling the playing field by "bringing people up" is a 20th century concept. Now we all must come "down" to the same level. Yvette Mitchell pointed out last night that "privilege is a disease." Unfortunately it's a disease few want to be cured of, ie an addiction. Growing our souls means overcoming the resistance to do what is good for us. What do you do to overcome that resistance?
The observation points out that deep down, most of us know what we need to be healthy. We see this in healthy animals who know what to eat and when. It's a physical rather than intellectual knowledge, this feeling of "hmmm, I need something crunchy and green," or "I've overworked my legs today, I need to raise them up," etc.
So why do we resist these things that are good for us? Perhaps we also have a deep-seated resistance to change, which is connected to instability, which is connected to survival. I would surmise that the higher our level of privilege, the more we resist change, for we could compromise our very privilege.
This is the disservice unions in the late 20th century have wrought: replicating the system of privileges which they were created to resist. Unions, dependent on an economy based on exploitation and abuse, contributed to a growing middle class which has despoiled the earth, and made us unfit for survival in a post-oil world.
To do what is good for us will require us to renounce our privileges. The goal of leveling the playing field by "bringing people up" is a 20th century concept. Now we all must come "down" to the same level. Yvette Mitchell pointed out last night that "privilege is a disease." Unfortunately it's a disease few want to be cured of, ie an addiction. Growing our souls means overcoming the resistance to do what is good for us. What do you do to overcome that resistance?
Saturday, July 23, 2011
Revolutionary Diary, Day 2
In this interview, a Palestinian American anthropologist describes her privileges in Israel, and she says she appreciates where she can go etc, but also these privileges make her very uncomfortable.
As awake and aware revolutionaries, are there any privileges that do NOT make us uncomfortable? Is it possible to accept privileges without what I think of as a nagging, divine discomfort? Can you think of any privileges you have that you are indeed comfortable with? It seems like much of the political rhetoric of national pride is a weak attempt at justifying American privilege, thus continuing our delusion of American exceptionalism.
At the same, we are deeply attached, and even addicted to our privileges, and we long to keep them. Transition Milwaukee is discussing whether a 12-Step group for those trying to break away from a fossil fuel lifestyle might be appropriate.
On another note, in my iCalendar, I changed the category of "political events" to "community building." Thus the GLB study group is now a "community building" event. I have been deleting emails from Obama, Barbara Boxer, Harry Reid, and others. My focus is on Eight Limbs Housing Coop, gardening and foraging, yoga and singing and certain podcasts to grow my soul, community-building events like hosting potlucks, and naming and renouncing (to my capacity) my privileges.
As awake and aware revolutionaries, are there any privileges that do NOT make us uncomfortable? Is it possible to accept privileges without what I think of as a nagging, divine discomfort? Can you think of any privileges you have that you are indeed comfortable with? It seems like much of the political rhetoric of national pride is a weak attempt at justifying American privilege, thus continuing our delusion of American exceptionalism.
At the same, we are deeply attached, and even addicted to our privileges, and we long to keep them. Transition Milwaukee is discussing whether a 12-Step group for those trying to break away from a fossil fuel lifestyle might be appropriate.
On another note, in my iCalendar, I changed the category of "political events" to "community building." Thus the GLB study group is now a "community building" event. I have been deleting emails from Obama, Barbara Boxer, Harry Reid, and others. My focus is on Eight Limbs Housing Coop, gardening and foraging, yoga and singing and certain podcasts to grow my soul, community-building events like hosting potlucks, and naming and renouncing (to my capacity) my privileges.
Friday, July 22, 2011
Revolutionary Diary
[Last night we had our first study group for Grace Lee Boggs's new book, The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Action for the 21st Century. It was an extremely productive session, bursting with ideas and questions. As an accompaniment to the discussion, I will blog a bit between meetings.]
In the 21st century we will no longer be defined by work. There simply are not enough jobs to go around, and few resources left to exploit to grow our economy to create more jobs. What does this mean as we try to get our physical needs met? How do we survive without a paycheck? GLB emphasizes that marginalization brings liberation. Can we be liberated from our jobs and still live?
God knows millions in America are in deadening, stressful, energy-draining jobs. Are all jobs by definition hegemonic? What about unpaid jobs? GLB continually asks "what does it mean to be human?" Part of being human, I think, is contributing to the common good through labor, whether growing food, raising children, making baskets, building shelter, creating art .... Can we fulfill such responsibilities of being human without oppression or hegemony? This takes sensitivity, an inner drive, seeing the big picture, trust... what else?
How do we proceed through our daily responsibilities while engaging in the revolutionary struggle? For instance, I have to order tshirts today for Riverwest Yogashala members. Why do I need to do this and how does this strengthen or detract from the necessary revolution?
- I contracted with members of RY that they would receive a member shirt. This is a gesture of thanks and exchange for supporting us.
- Why is membership encouraged? To help RY pay for its free and reduced classes and make yoga accessible to all.
- I'm ordering organic cotton shirts from a local print shop. Is even growing organic cotton harmful to the environment? What is the toll on the land? Where is it grown and what are the conditions for workers? How are the shirts produced and by whom? How do the shirts arrive here? What is involved in the printing process and how does it affect the workers and the environment? Finally, do any of our members really need another shirt?
- As GLB says, we need to grow our souls. Is this shirt more soulful because it has a Sanskrit excerpt from Patanjali's yoga sutras? Does this make it a work of art? Are some works of art more useful for the revolution than others?
On another matter, I am sitting at my laptop this morning, blogging, instead of doing pranayama. I am using fossil fuel to charge my computer. My laptop contains precious metals which are causing wars in the Congo and elsewhere. Is the internet inherently oppressive and corrupt because it depends on commerce, is exploitive and addictive, and violates privacy? Does blogging accomplish anything for the revolution?
So you see where I am going.... Please contribute your thoughts here or in person at our next meeting, 28 July, at People's Books, 2122 E Locust, 7pm. Discussing Intro and Chapter 1 next week.
In the 21st century we will no longer be defined by work. There simply are not enough jobs to go around, and few resources left to exploit to grow our economy to create more jobs. What does this mean as we try to get our physical needs met? How do we survive without a paycheck? GLB emphasizes that marginalization brings liberation. Can we be liberated from our jobs and still live?
God knows millions in America are in deadening, stressful, energy-draining jobs. Are all jobs by definition hegemonic? What about unpaid jobs? GLB continually asks "what does it mean to be human?" Part of being human, I think, is contributing to the common good through labor, whether growing food, raising children, making baskets, building shelter, creating art .... Can we fulfill such responsibilities of being human without oppression or hegemony? This takes sensitivity, an inner drive, seeing the big picture, trust... what else?
How do we proceed through our daily responsibilities while engaging in the revolutionary struggle? For instance, I have to order tshirts today for Riverwest Yogashala members. Why do I need to do this and how does this strengthen or detract from the necessary revolution?
- I contracted with members of RY that they would receive a member shirt. This is a gesture of thanks and exchange for supporting us.
- Why is membership encouraged? To help RY pay for its free and reduced classes and make yoga accessible to all.
- I'm ordering organic cotton shirts from a local print shop. Is even growing organic cotton harmful to the environment? What is the toll on the land? Where is it grown and what are the conditions for workers? How are the shirts produced and by whom? How do the shirts arrive here? What is involved in the printing process and how does it affect the workers and the environment? Finally, do any of our members really need another shirt?
- As GLB says, we need to grow our souls. Is this shirt more soulful because it has a Sanskrit excerpt from Patanjali's yoga sutras? Does this make it a work of art? Are some works of art more useful for the revolution than others?
On another matter, I am sitting at my laptop this morning, blogging, instead of doing pranayama. I am using fossil fuel to charge my computer. My laptop contains precious metals which are causing wars in the Congo and elsewhere. Is the internet inherently oppressive and corrupt because it depends on commerce, is exploitive and addictive, and violates privacy? Does blogging accomplish anything for the revolution?
So you see where I am going.... Please contribute your thoughts here or in person at our next meeting, 28 July, at People's Books, 2122 E Locust, 7pm. Discussing Intro and Chapter 1 next week.
Monday, January 10, 2011
THE KINGIAN LEGACY
To celebrate the relief of completing my last yoga assessment in Atlanta this weekend, I decided to sojourn to the King Center. I wanted to lay my eyes upon the landmark Ebenezer Baptist Church, see the King archives, and more.
I got on MARTA in Midtown, and watched the passengers shift from white to black as I transferred to the east-west lines. When I exited at King Center station, I walked into a cavernous, run-down station in a neighborhood alongside the interstate, and we know what interstates do to do neighborhoods. I’ve seen it in Buffalo, Detroit, and Milwaukee where I live now. Wealthy neighborhoods don’t have highways running through the middle of them, but they often break up working-class communities and create urban decay. In contrast to the lively, well-kept Midtown neighborhood where I was renting an apartment, the ¾ mile walk to the King Center was desolate, marked by vacant lots, houses needing some stimulus, and a mega-church.
As I experience all over the nation, the 2 people I passed on my walk, both African American, met my eyes and nodded hello. Rarely do white people do this. Instead, typically they assiduously avoid eye contact. Anyone else experience this? In my Milwaukee neighborhood, on the east side of Holton (primarily white), we don’t say hello, and on the west side of Holton (primarily black) we do: a topic for another essay.
I felt a surge of complex emotions as I spotted Ebenezer and became teary, recalling all its historic events and sermons. The entire region had been turned into a campus honoring MLK, with sculptures, a rose garden, community center, crypts for MLK and Coretta Scott King, an eternal fire, and a reflecting pool.
However, after spending an hour or so in the museum, I felt quite agitated and exasperated. It seemed that the radical message of Dr. King had been co-opted by foundations, the middle class, and the dominant culture. I sat down on a bench to jot some notes. An African American woman about my age sat down next to me, casually asking, “How are you doing?” Instead of exchanging pleasantries, I poured out my heart to her.
I shared my frustration with her and tried to briefly explain my impressions. All the exhibits were about historic racism, and largely focused on racist acts of individuals. Exhibits like these give the wrong impression that racism is part of our past, and that since Jim Crow is over, white supremacy is also over. Displaying images of hooded KKK members implies that white supremacists comprise a fringe group, and not that it’s a mainstream political/economical/educational/social/cultural system that continues to dominate our country to this day. I was angry that the language of systemic, institutional racism/white supremacy was not used at all in the Center. I felt there needed to be an exhibit of why Dr. King’s work is still necessary today, as evidenced by our failing public schools, overflowing prisons, rising poverty, unemployment, and more.
My patient benchmate listened and completely assented. Then she quickly let it go, and told me she was here with a children’s gospel choir from Savannah, who was going to sing at the capitol the next day. We went on to some pleasant small talk, and bid farewell.
The Center, in fact, was bustling with children and teenagers, many of them enjoying each other more than the exhibits, joking and goofing like normal kids. In this light I was particularly interested in a 15-minute film about the role of children in the Civil Rights Movement, a film funded by Coca-Cola. The famous opening quote about children not being judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character, had some disturbing resonances in this context.
The fact of the matter is, white children and adults are constantly judged by the color of their skin. The color of your skin makes an impression at job interviews, getting an apartment, school admissions, how authority figures like teachers and police officers perceive and treat you, and how store clerks and neighbors and others respond to you. White people routinely benefit from the color of their skin as evidenced by statistics on every measurement, from social to economic.
What King really meant was,
“May black children NOT be judged harshly for the color of their skin,”
which implies,
“May race be invisible so as not to hurt my children,”
which prompts conservative whites to say,
“Now race doesn’t matter anymore, Dr. King’s message has come true,”
as a justification to cut social programs and render white privilege even more invisible.
I’m afraid Martin Luther King, Jr.’s legacy has become a message of color-blindness rather than a message of radical social transformation to uplift the oppressed.
Color-blindness is race-negating rather than race-affirming. Rather than celebrating our differences, people of color are literally being white-washed. This makes complete sense if we are being hurt for our differences. Although Asians are sometimes upheld as successful examples of the American dream, in reality, this is a result of strict immigration limitations, in which only doctors and professionals were given access. Now that we have more working-class Asian Americans, including refugees, our statistics more closely reflect the strains of all marginalized groups.
Recently a Filipina friend was admiring a t-shirt I was wearing. I told her I had more shirts like it that I had brought back from India, and that I would bring her one. The following week, I presented her with a half dozen shirts for her to choose from, ranging in colors and designs. She was immediately attracted to a shirt with the figure of Ganesh, the elephant god of beginnings who removes obstacles and bestows good luck. But she rejected it because the shirt was a bright, vibrant yellow.
How many times have Asian women been advised not to wear yellow because it brings out our sallow, olive skin tones? We’re supposed to look more like the dominant ideal: white and rosy. “Yellow is a beautiful color,” I told her. “It’s good to be yellow!” I insisted, feeling a little like Kermit the Frog. “Yellow skin is beautiful! Wear the yellow shirt!”
A white friend who was in the room went on to comment on her yellowish skin as well and we looked at her slightly puzzled, but she explained that next to her husband who was kind of pinkish, she was much more olive, and she seemed rather proud of herself. My Filipina friend tried on the shirt and took it after all, but not only until her skin color had been affirmed as beautiful by the white person in the room. We are still under the thumb of the dominant culture of white supremacy.
This is just a small example of how presumed colorblindness as a function of white supremacy damages us. More serious damage can be seen daily in schools, in the media, the legal system, and most recently in the shooting of Congresswoman Giffords in Tucson, Arizona.
The emphasis of the film and the exhibits at the King Center was on personal indignities, like the rude store clerk, rather than widespread, socially sanctioned oppression. It strikes me that poor whites resort to physical attacks when they have no other tools to defend white supremacy. Bankers, teachers, judges, and government officials have multiple means other than physical violence to defend the status quo. They are not morally superior to working-class whites when it comes to racism, they can just be less overt.
Later on my King Center tour, I perused the archival rooms of the Kings and Gandhi. The Kings’ room had all the marks of middle class life and high accomplishment: Dr. King’s elegant shoes, a photo of him tuxedoed and Mrs. King in a ballgown at the Nobel laureates ceremony, photos of his house.
The Gandhi room, by contrast, was marked by simplicity: images of Gandhi at the spinning wheel; his personal artifacts of wooden bowl, spoon, and sandals. Gandhi understood that as a spiritual and political leader, his power lay in his identification with the poor. He recognized the need for solidarity, and he renounced his economic and class status in order to serve the nation.
King was headed in this direction, especially in his later years, recognizing that the real problem in the nation was poverty, created by militarism, and fueled by racism. He became an increasing threat to the nation as he organized the Poor People’s March on Washington. Our government was able to contain the damage of the Civil Rights Movement to some degree, but uplifting the poor meant an attack on capitalism itself, which is as sacred as anything gets in the USA.
I’m further concerned that King’s message has been about idealizing, embracing, and uplifting a few to, the middle class, instead of dismantling the crippling system of capitalism. Certainly, better distribution of resources is central in uplifting the oppressed, but an emphasis on building wealth takes the focus from society and systems, to individual success which does not alter white supremacy. King’s message is one that particularly assuages the liberal class. Liberals can feel good that civil rights legislation passed, Jim Crow ended, and blacks and whites can go to school and work together. And white supremacy is still in place.
Personally, I believe the trajectory of King’s life indicates that he would have embraced Gandhi’s, and of course Jesus’s, principles even further, regarding the poor, had he lived beyond his 39 years. It’s up to us now, to complete the work he started. What does the Kingian legacy mean? The holiday is just a token. We need to reform our schools, make our government leaders listen to us, invest in local communities, eradicate poverty, and end wars. Are we willing, as Martin Luther King, Jr. did, to lay our lives on the line? Can we put our self-interest, careers, and comfort aside to continue his work? May we fearlessly confront systems of oppression. May we speak truth to power. May Dr. King not have died in vain.
I got on MARTA in Midtown, and watched the passengers shift from white to black as I transferred to the east-west lines. When I exited at King Center station, I walked into a cavernous, run-down station in a neighborhood alongside the interstate, and we know what interstates do to do neighborhoods. I’ve seen it in Buffalo, Detroit, and Milwaukee where I live now. Wealthy neighborhoods don’t have highways running through the middle of them, but they often break up working-class communities and create urban decay. In contrast to the lively, well-kept Midtown neighborhood where I was renting an apartment, the ¾ mile walk to the King Center was desolate, marked by vacant lots, houses needing some stimulus, and a mega-church.
As I experience all over the nation, the 2 people I passed on my walk, both African American, met my eyes and nodded hello. Rarely do white people do this. Instead, typically they assiduously avoid eye contact. Anyone else experience this? In my Milwaukee neighborhood, on the east side of Holton (primarily white), we don’t say hello, and on the west side of Holton (primarily black) we do: a topic for another essay.
I felt a surge of complex emotions as I spotted Ebenezer and became teary, recalling all its historic events and sermons. The entire region had been turned into a campus honoring MLK, with sculptures, a rose garden, community center, crypts for MLK and Coretta Scott King, an eternal fire, and a reflecting pool.
However, after spending an hour or so in the museum, I felt quite agitated and exasperated. It seemed that the radical message of Dr. King had been co-opted by foundations, the middle class, and the dominant culture. I sat down on a bench to jot some notes. An African American woman about my age sat down next to me, casually asking, “How are you doing?” Instead of exchanging pleasantries, I poured out my heart to her.
I shared my frustration with her and tried to briefly explain my impressions. All the exhibits were about historic racism, and largely focused on racist acts of individuals. Exhibits like these give the wrong impression that racism is part of our past, and that since Jim Crow is over, white supremacy is also over. Displaying images of hooded KKK members implies that white supremacists comprise a fringe group, and not that it’s a mainstream political/economical/educational/social/cultural system that continues to dominate our country to this day. I was angry that the language of systemic, institutional racism/white supremacy was not used at all in the Center. I felt there needed to be an exhibit of why Dr. King’s work is still necessary today, as evidenced by our failing public schools, overflowing prisons, rising poverty, unemployment, and more.
My patient benchmate listened and completely assented. Then she quickly let it go, and told me she was here with a children’s gospel choir from Savannah, who was going to sing at the capitol the next day. We went on to some pleasant small talk, and bid farewell.
The Center, in fact, was bustling with children and teenagers, many of them enjoying each other more than the exhibits, joking and goofing like normal kids. In this light I was particularly interested in a 15-minute film about the role of children in the Civil Rights Movement, a film funded by Coca-Cola. The famous opening quote about children not being judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character, had some disturbing resonances in this context.
The fact of the matter is, white children and adults are constantly judged by the color of their skin. The color of your skin makes an impression at job interviews, getting an apartment, school admissions, how authority figures like teachers and police officers perceive and treat you, and how store clerks and neighbors and others respond to you. White people routinely benefit from the color of their skin as evidenced by statistics on every measurement, from social to economic.
What King really meant was,
“May black children NOT be judged harshly for the color of their skin,”
which implies,
“May race be invisible so as not to hurt my children,”
which prompts conservative whites to say,
“Now race doesn’t matter anymore, Dr. King’s message has come true,”
as a justification to cut social programs and render white privilege even more invisible.
I’m afraid Martin Luther King, Jr.’s legacy has become a message of color-blindness rather than a message of radical social transformation to uplift the oppressed.
Color-blindness is race-negating rather than race-affirming. Rather than celebrating our differences, people of color are literally being white-washed. This makes complete sense if we are being hurt for our differences. Although Asians are sometimes upheld as successful examples of the American dream, in reality, this is a result of strict immigration limitations, in which only doctors and professionals were given access. Now that we have more working-class Asian Americans, including refugees, our statistics more closely reflect the strains of all marginalized groups.
Recently a Filipina friend was admiring a t-shirt I was wearing. I told her I had more shirts like it that I had brought back from India, and that I would bring her one. The following week, I presented her with a half dozen shirts for her to choose from, ranging in colors and designs. She was immediately attracted to a shirt with the figure of Ganesh, the elephant god of beginnings who removes obstacles and bestows good luck. But she rejected it because the shirt was a bright, vibrant yellow.
How many times have Asian women been advised not to wear yellow because it brings out our sallow, olive skin tones? We’re supposed to look more like the dominant ideal: white and rosy. “Yellow is a beautiful color,” I told her. “It’s good to be yellow!” I insisted, feeling a little like Kermit the Frog. “Yellow skin is beautiful! Wear the yellow shirt!”
A white friend who was in the room went on to comment on her yellowish skin as well and we looked at her slightly puzzled, but she explained that next to her husband who was kind of pinkish, she was much more olive, and she seemed rather proud of herself. My Filipina friend tried on the shirt and took it after all, but not only until her skin color had been affirmed as beautiful by the white person in the room. We are still under the thumb of the dominant culture of white supremacy.
This is just a small example of how presumed colorblindness as a function of white supremacy damages us. More serious damage can be seen daily in schools, in the media, the legal system, and most recently in the shooting of Congresswoman Giffords in Tucson, Arizona.
The emphasis of the film and the exhibits at the King Center was on personal indignities, like the rude store clerk, rather than widespread, socially sanctioned oppression. It strikes me that poor whites resort to physical attacks when they have no other tools to defend white supremacy. Bankers, teachers, judges, and government officials have multiple means other than physical violence to defend the status quo. They are not morally superior to working-class whites when it comes to racism, they can just be less overt.
Later on my King Center tour, I perused the archival rooms of the Kings and Gandhi. The Kings’ room had all the marks of middle class life and high accomplishment: Dr. King’s elegant shoes, a photo of him tuxedoed and Mrs. King in a ballgown at the Nobel laureates ceremony, photos of his house.
The Gandhi room, by contrast, was marked by simplicity: images of Gandhi at the spinning wheel; his personal artifacts of wooden bowl, spoon, and sandals. Gandhi understood that as a spiritual and political leader, his power lay in his identification with the poor. He recognized the need for solidarity, and he renounced his economic and class status in order to serve the nation.
King was headed in this direction, especially in his later years, recognizing that the real problem in the nation was poverty, created by militarism, and fueled by racism. He became an increasing threat to the nation as he organized the Poor People’s March on Washington. Our government was able to contain the damage of the Civil Rights Movement to some degree, but uplifting the poor meant an attack on capitalism itself, which is as sacred as anything gets in the USA.
I’m further concerned that King’s message has been about idealizing, embracing, and uplifting a few to, the middle class, instead of dismantling the crippling system of capitalism. Certainly, better distribution of resources is central in uplifting the oppressed, but an emphasis on building wealth takes the focus from society and systems, to individual success which does not alter white supremacy. King’s message is one that particularly assuages the liberal class. Liberals can feel good that civil rights legislation passed, Jim Crow ended, and blacks and whites can go to school and work together. And white supremacy is still in place.
Personally, I believe the trajectory of King’s life indicates that he would have embraced Gandhi’s, and of course Jesus’s, principles even further, regarding the poor, had he lived beyond his 39 years. It’s up to us now, to complete the work he started. What does the Kingian legacy mean? The holiday is just a token. We need to reform our schools, make our government leaders listen to us, invest in local communities, eradicate poverty, and end wars. Are we willing, as Martin Luther King, Jr. did, to lay our lives on the line? Can we put our self-interest, careers, and comfort aside to continue his work? May we fearlessly confront systems of oppression. May we speak truth to power. May Dr. King not have died in vain.
Thursday, November 25, 2010
David Foster Wallace on Life and Work
Please read this in thanksgiving, love, and community. peggy
Adapted from a commencement speech given by David Foster Wallace to the 2005 graduating class at Kenyon College.
There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, "Morning, boys, how's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, "What the hell is water?"
If at this moment, you're worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise old fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don't be. I am not the wise old fish. The immediate point of the fish story is that the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude -- but the fact is that, in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have life-or-death importance. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense.
A huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. Here's one example of the utter wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely talk about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness, because it's so socially repulsive, but it's pretty much the same for all of us, deep down. It is our default-setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: There is no experience you've had that you were not at the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is right there in front of you, or behind you, to the left or right of you, on your TV, or your monitor, or whatever. Other people's thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real -- you get the idea. But please don't worry that I'm getting ready to preach to you about compassion or other-directedness or the so-called "virtues." This is not a matter of virtue -- it's a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default-setting, which is to be deeply and literally self-centered, and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self.
People who can adjust their natural default-setting this way are often described as being "well adjusted," which I suggest to you is not an accidental term.
Given the triumphal academic setting here, an obvious question is how much of this work of adjusting our default-setting involves actual knowledge or intellect. This question gets tricky. Probably the most dangerous thing about college education, at least in my own case, is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract arguments inside my head instead of simply paying attention to what's going on right in front of me. Paying attention to what's going on inside me. As I'm sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head. Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal-arts cliché about "teaching you how to think" is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: "Learning how to think" really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about "the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master." This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in the head. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger. And I submit that this is what the real, no-bull-value of your liberal-arts education is supposed to be about: How to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default-setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone, day in and day out.
That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. So let's get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what "day in, day out" really means. There happen to be whole large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I'm talking about.
By way of example, let's say it's an average day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging job, and you work hard for nine or ten hours, and at the end of the day you're tired, and you're stressed out, and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for a couple of hours and then hit the rack early because you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there's no food at home -- you haven't had time to shop this week, because of your challenging job -- and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It's the end of the workday, and the traffic's very bad, so getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it's the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping, and the store's hideously, fluorescently lit, and infused with soul-killing Muzak or corporate pop, and it's pretty much the last place you want to be, but you can't just get in and quickly out: You have to wander all over the huge, overlit store's crowded aisles to find the stuff you want, and you have to maneuver your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts, and of course there are also the glacially slow old people and the spacey people and the ADHD kids who all block the aisle and you have to grit your teeth and try to be polite as you ask them to let you by, and eventually, finally, you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren't enough checkout lanes open even though it's the end-of-the-day-rush, so the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating, but you can't take your fury out on the frantic lady working the register.
Anyway, you finally get to the checkout line's front, and pay for your food, and wait to get your check or card authenticated by a machine, and then get told to "Have a nice day" in a voice that is the absolute voice of death, and then you have to take your creepy flimsy plastic bags of groceries in your cart through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and try to load the bags in your car in such a way that everything doesn't fall out of the bags and roll around in the trunk on the way home, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive rush-hour traffic, etcetera, etcetera.
The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing comes in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm going to be pissed and miserable every time I have to food-shop, because my natural default-setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me, about my hungriness and my fatigue and my desire to just get home, and it's going to seem, for all the world, like everybody else is just in my way, and who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem here in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line, and look at how deeply unfair this is: I've worked really hard all day and I'm starved and tired and I can't even get home to eat and unwind because of all these stupid g-d- people.
Or, of course, if I'm in a more socially conscious form of my default-setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic jam being angry and disgusted at all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUV's and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks burning their wasteful, selfish, forty-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers, who are usually talking on cell phones as they cut people off in order to get just twenty stupid feet ahead in a traffic jam, and I can think about how our children's children will despise us for wasting all the future's fuel and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and disgusting we all are, and how it all just sucks, and so on and so forth...
Look, if I choose to think this way, fine, lots of us do -- except that thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic it doesn't have to be a choice. Thinking this way is my natural default-setting. It's the automatic, unconscious way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I'm operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the center of the world and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world's priorities. The thing is that there are obviously different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stuck and idling in my way: It's not impossible that some of these people in SUV's have been in horrible auto accidents in the past and now find driving so traumatic that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive; or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he's trying to rush to the hospital, and he's in a way bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am -- it is actually I who am in his way. Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket's checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have much harder, more tedious or painful lives than I do, overall.
Again, please don't think that I'm giving you moral advice, or that I'm saying you're "supposed to" think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it, because it's hard, it takes will and mental effort, and if you're like me, some days you won't be able to do it, or you just flat-out won't want to. But most days, if you're aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-lady who just screamed at her little child in the checkout line -- maybe she's not usually like this; maybe she's been up three straight nights holding the hand of her husband who's dying of bone cancer, or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the Motor Vehicles Dept. who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a nightmarish red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it's also not impossible -- it just depends on what you want to consider. If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is and who and what is really important -- if you want to operate on your default-setting -- then you, like me, will not consider possibilities that aren't pointless and annoying. But if you've really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars -- compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things. Not that that mystical stuff's necessarily true: The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship...
Because here's something else that's true. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship -- be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some intangible set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things -- if they are where you tap real meaning in life -- then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already -- it's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power -- you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart -- you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.
Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default-settings. They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing. And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default-settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the "rat race" -- the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.
I know that this stuff probably doesn't sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational. What it is, so far as I can see, is the truth with a whole lot of rhetorical bullshit pared away. Obviously, you can think of it whatever you wish. But please don't dismiss it as some finger-wagging Dr. Laura sermon. None of this is about morality, or religion, or dogma, or big fancy questions of life after death. The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head. It is about simple awareness -- awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over: "This is water, this is water."
It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive, day in and day out.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122178211966454607.html
Adapted from a commencement speech given by David Foster Wallace to the 2005 graduating class at Kenyon College.
There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, "Morning, boys, how's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, "What the hell is water?"
If at this moment, you're worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise old fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don't be. I am not the wise old fish. The immediate point of the fish story is that the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude -- but the fact is that, in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have life-or-death importance. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense.
A huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. Here's one example of the utter wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely talk about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness, because it's so socially repulsive, but it's pretty much the same for all of us, deep down. It is our default-setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: There is no experience you've had that you were not at the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is right there in front of you, or behind you, to the left or right of you, on your TV, or your monitor, or whatever. Other people's thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real -- you get the idea. But please don't worry that I'm getting ready to preach to you about compassion or other-directedness or the so-called "virtues." This is not a matter of virtue -- it's a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default-setting, which is to be deeply and literally self-centered, and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self.
People who can adjust their natural default-setting this way are often described as being "well adjusted," which I suggest to you is not an accidental term.
Given the triumphal academic setting here, an obvious question is how much of this work of adjusting our default-setting involves actual knowledge or intellect. This question gets tricky. Probably the most dangerous thing about college education, at least in my own case, is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract arguments inside my head instead of simply paying attention to what's going on right in front of me. Paying attention to what's going on inside me. As I'm sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head. Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal-arts cliché about "teaching you how to think" is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: "Learning how to think" really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about "the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master." This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in the head. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger. And I submit that this is what the real, no-bull-value of your liberal-arts education is supposed to be about: How to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default-setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone, day in and day out.
That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. So let's get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what "day in, day out" really means. There happen to be whole large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I'm talking about.
By way of example, let's say it's an average day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging job, and you work hard for nine or ten hours, and at the end of the day you're tired, and you're stressed out, and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for a couple of hours and then hit the rack early because you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there's no food at home -- you haven't had time to shop this week, because of your challenging job -- and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It's the end of the workday, and the traffic's very bad, so getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it's the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping, and the store's hideously, fluorescently lit, and infused with soul-killing Muzak or corporate pop, and it's pretty much the last place you want to be, but you can't just get in and quickly out: You have to wander all over the huge, overlit store's crowded aisles to find the stuff you want, and you have to maneuver your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts, and of course there are also the glacially slow old people and the spacey people and the ADHD kids who all block the aisle and you have to grit your teeth and try to be polite as you ask them to let you by, and eventually, finally, you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren't enough checkout lanes open even though it's the end-of-the-day-rush, so the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating, but you can't take your fury out on the frantic lady working the register.
Anyway, you finally get to the checkout line's front, and pay for your food, and wait to get your check or card authenticated by a machine, and then get told to "Have a nice day" in a voice that is the absolute voice of death, and then you have to take your creepy flimsy plastic bags of groceries in your cart through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and try to load the bags in your car in such a way that everything doesn't fall out of the bags and roll around in the trunk on the way home, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive rush-hour traffic, etcetera, etcetera.
The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing comes in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm going to be pissed and miserable every time I have to food-shop, because my natural default-setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me, about my hungriness and my fatigue and my desire to just get home, and it's going to seem, for all the world, like everybody else is just in my way, and who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem here in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line, and look at how deeply unfair this is: I've worked really hard all day and I'm starved and tired and I can't even get home to eat and unwind because of all these stupid g-d- people.
Or, of course, if I'm in a more socially conscious form of my default-setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic jam being angry and disgusted at all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUV's and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks burning their wasteful, selfish, forty-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers, who are usually talking on cell phones as they cut people off in order to get just twenty stupid feet ahead in a traffic jam, and I can think about how our children's children will despise us for wasting all the future's fuel and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and disgusting we all are, and how it all just sucks, and so on and so forth...
Look, if I choose to think this way, fine, lots of us do -- except that thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic it doesn't have to be a choice. Thinking this way is my natural default-setting. It's the automatic, unconscious way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I'm operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the center of the world and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world's priorities. The thing is that there are obviously different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stuck and idling in my way: It's not impossible that some of these people in SUV's have been in horrible auto accidents in the past and now find driving so traumatic that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive; or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he's trying to rush to the hospital, and he's in a way bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am -- it is actually I who am in his way. Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket's checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have much harder, more tedious or painful lives than I do, overall.
Again, please don't think that I'm giving you moral advice, or that I'm saying you're "supposed to" think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it, because it's hard, it takes will and mental effort, and if you're like me, some days you won't be able to do it, or you just flat-out won't want to. But most days, if you're aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-lady who just screamed at her little child in the checkout line -- maybe she's not usually like this; maybe she's been up three straight nights holding the hand of her husband who's dying of bone cancer, or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the Motor Vehicles Dept. who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a nightmarish red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it's also not impossible -- it just depends on what you want to consider. If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is and who and what is really important -- if you want to operate on your default-setting -- then you, like me, will not consider possibilities that aren't pointless and annoying. But if you've really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars -- compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things. Not that that mystical stuff's necessarily true: The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship...
Because here's something else that's true. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship -- be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some intangible set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things -- if they are where you tap real meaning in life -- then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already -- it's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power -- you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart -- you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.
Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default-settings. They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing. And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default-settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the "rat race" -- the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.
I know that this stuff probably doesn't sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational. What it is, so far as I can see, is the truth with a whole lot of rhetorical bullshit pared away. Obviously, you can think of it whatever you wish. But please don't dismiss it as some finger-wagging Dr. Laura sermon. None of this is about morality, or religion, or dogma, or big fancy questions of life after death. The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head. It is about simple awareness -- awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over: "This is water, this is water."
It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive, day in and day out.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122178211966454607.html
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