I started writing for the most selfish of reasons. I wanted to change the world around me. Or, failing that, I wanted to leave the slightest imprint upon it, during dark days, so that I could feel I had stirred the dust in some small way. Like a leaf pressed in the pages of a book, rediscovered long afterwards, I wanted the thin veins of words to exist somewhere, even if only as memory of the true thing itself.
We have plenty of people who write about politics, these days. And some of them are rational people, and the larger share are butchers. It is easier to be bloodthirsty than not; it requires no courage. It is easy to shave the smallest possible straws of principle from the larger sheaf, and the smallest possible slivers of paper from the law; it is the harder challenge to leave them there. It is the easiest thing in the world to be a bigot: it requires no knowledge, no sense, no logic. It is harder not to be.
And that is, in a word, insanity. It is a flaw in the fabric of the world. We are, apparently, monstrous creatures, and if we are truly created in God's image than God would have to be a more petty creator than we can possibly imagine. It seems more likely we are beasts.
Translation? "People who do not think exactly as I do are evil sons-of-bitches. I hate them so"
Somebody, please give this guy a lolipop, a hug, and a clue.
4 comments:
If he REALLY wanted to change the world around him, he'd get off his ass and do something positive in his own community.
I used to ask people in blog communities what they did in their own communities in real life to make their own world a better place. Not politics, but volunteerism. The answers were so disappointing that I gave up asking. I didn't want to tempt otherwise good and decent people into lying.
Yeah, we have plenty of people who write about politics. And then there's a subset of those who actually work in politics, including at the most basic local level. And then there's a subset who work in their communities trying to improve them in a hands-on non-partisan fashion. And then there's the intersection of those two subsets, which is small to the point of microscopic.
He doesn't need a lollipop, hug, and clue. He needs a slap upside the head and a few months dishing up food at a homeless shelter, or tutoring poor kids from single-parent families, or cleaning up bloodstains from gang shootings. Then maybe what he says will deviate from whining self-pity.
Related thoughts: Cry Me A River
lol
Maybe he is just a pseudo follower of Sartre for whom "hell is other Americans."
I also wonder if he is betraying his age. I get a surprising number of papers from college students informing me how fabulous their generation is. My standard reply is "Oh yeah? Says who?" They are shocked to learn the world does not revolve around them.
I'll gladly play Copernicus for them.
Huntlet's Soliloquy (Tags: torture of language, punditry, personal; View Comments | 229 comments):
"Is hard to be, or, it is harder not to be? That is the solipsism."
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Take one Boethius, and please don't call me in the morning.
"Is hard to be, or, it is harder not to be? That is the solipsism."
I've never seen a more convincing argument against the value of a liberal education.
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