• Tag Archives authenticity

  • I Shrugged

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane                                                              Waning Last Frost Moon

    “Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the hopeless swaps of the not-quite, the not-yet, and the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration for the life you deserved and have never been able to reach. The world you desire can be won. It exists … it is real … it is possible … it’s yours.” – Ayn Rand

    Sounds pretty good at the start, doesn’t it?  Don’t let your fire go out?  Even the hero in the soul could be an archetypal reference, one that is pro-Self.  Then, Rand goes completely off the rails.  Lonely isolation because the life you deserved has been beyond reach.  The world you desire can be won.  It exists and so on.  This is the most specious sort of pseudo-logic.

    First of all.  Life you deserve?  Oh, who said?  There is no metaphysical realm filled with wonderful fulfilling lives created especially for you and your desires.  That’s simply a happy talk version of heaven, the old pie in the sky idea, just not when you die, but delivered now, right now.  Fast food, fast destiny.  Delivered to your home.

    A world you’ve never been able to reach?  So.  If you haven’t reached it yet, why not?  Because you haven’t believed in it enough?  Because you don’t have the right gender, color, sexual preference?  Could it be that the life you want and don’t have is one fed into the culture by vapid self-help gurus like Ayn Rand?  Who says you can have whatever you want?  What’s good about that?  That’s the adolescent girl screaming at a rock concert or an adolescent boy watching hockey or football, pumping his fist and imagining.  Is it possible that the dream you have is not your dream, but the dream of a culture with achievement as its number one value?

    I’m no stranger to this thought.  I dreamed of becoming a published author, admired for my prose and my inventive fiction.  I wanted it.  I haven’t got it.  Is my life over because I don’t have what I dreamed?  Far from it.  My dream, and others I’ve had like it, came into my Self via a male focused culture, one that said, Be all you can be.  You can do anything.  B.S.

    I can’t, for example, run a 4:00 minute mile.  I can’t, for example solve Fourier Transformations.  I can’t paint the next great American painting nor am I able to put on a white coat and figure out what’s the matter with you.  Would I like to be able to do these things?  Sure.  Is not desiring them what puts them beyond my reach?  No. It’s my limitedness, the peculiar package of skills and abilities I had from birth and have accrued over years of life experience.

    We each have limitations; they make us unique.  The trick is not desiring a life you “deserve”, it is finding the life that only you can live, the peculiar, one-off life you have to offer to the world and to the rest of us.  The big difference here is the inward look goes toward self-knowledge, toward humility, toward knowing what only you can do.  This boot-strap, Horatio Alger, American mobility notion only pulls you further and further away from self-knowledge.  Instead, your life becomes an attempt to shoe-horn yourself into a cultural vessel, one not designed for you, not at all, but one designed to keep the culture moving in the direction it knows.

    You are different.  You deserve nothing.  The hero in your soul will not perish in lonely isolation because you don’t get what you deserve.  The hero in your soul perishes when it uses its power and energy to cram you into somebody elses version of what you deserve.

    In summary:  I don’t like Ayn Rand.


    📂This entry was posted in Aging Commentary on Religion Faith and Spirituality Humanities Letters Writing 📎and tagged

  • Political Action: It’s Personal.

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Imbolc                                              New Moon (Wild)

    Politics.   Sigh. I feel bad for all those bright young things who worked their butts off for Obama and instead ended up with a President.  To be political is to be cynical.  All of us who move outside the coziness of home and into the political fray will confront a sobering realization:  change is slow and change that isn’t usually wrecks something in the process.

    Not only that.  The change that is possible at any given time has little to do with the righteousness of the cause, the clarity of the facts and the obvious path to a particular solution.  The reason?  All things happen within a context and nothing, let me repeat that, nothing transcends context.  Consider early efforts against Jim Crow legislation.  Look at the long protest against the Vietnam War.  The twisty, tortuous path of health care reform.  Political financing.  Matters related to a woman’s right to choose an abortion.

    Climate change is the issue of the current moment that I would nominate as most likely to transcend.  Has it?  No.  Lobbyists muddy the water with false research.  A few loud conservative voices make it seem as if the questions are still in debate, when they are not.  The long curve of climate change effects makes change now difficult.  Not to mention health care reform is in the pipeline. We may fail on climate change because this mix of factors makes us dither until New York is underwater and the south a burnt over district.  Time will tell.

    Why not give up then?  If change is unpredictable, then why give any effort at all?  So many people drop out because their first taste of politics or their first taste of issue advocacy ends in failure.  Or, worse, ends in a success that does not produce the results imagined.

    Here are three reasons for staying on the ancientrail of political life.

    1. Change does happen. It may be slow and off point for a long time, but we no longer have slaves or Jim Crow laws.  A woman’s right to choose an abortion has remained steady in spite of considerable agitation.  Gays and lesbian can be married in several states now.  The Vietnam war is over.  If many activists had not stayed engaged, then none of these long term victories would have happened.

    2. To give up gives the victory away. If Martin Luther King and his generation of civil rights workers had decided the work had cost them too much, or the probability of success was too low, we would not have an African-American president or burgeoning African-American middle class.  If the folks in the Sierra Club Northstar Chapter had backed off in their support of the Boundary Waters because the opposition was too strong, there would be motorboats now where thousands, hundreds of thousands canoe quietly.

    3. If not you, who?  If not now, when? Politics is personal.  We have, in a democratic society, a gift of political engagement that matters.  It matters, though, only if you engage.  This is a question of authenticity, of being the person you are and can be.  At this level success or failure does not matter.  What does matter is that you listened to  your own heart; and when it said, here I stand, you stood up.


    📂This entry was posted in Politics 📎and tagged