Something unwelcome is spoken, something proposed that seems unlikely in the extreme, and the hearer responds, “When pigs fly!”
Twenty-first century innovations come so fast and so bizarre (Unlock your car door from the other side of the world? …A car faultlessly drives itself?), and we fail to recognize that the span of the possible is continually widening; pigs may be somehow able to fly. Forego the wager; keep your money safely in your wallet. We’ve all seen things stranger than pigs flying.
We eventually come to the realization that the modern world requires us to be more and more creative, more and still more expansive dealing with our political, social and personal challenges.
The terrorist attacks on the United States in September 2001 still resonate with millions of Americans. And it is not because of the human toll, the lives lost and damaged and the tears shed. To give an example: evaluate the tsunami that struck Thailand and surrounding regions in late 2004 and observe that the death toll there was on a scale of at least 100 times as great as the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington (and Pennsylvania) on September 11, 2001. The terrorist attacks were and are significant for Americans because it was a watershed moment in American history; on that day Americans were rudely introduced to the fact that their power and prestige were not going to be enough to insulate themselves from obscene misfortune and injustice. The twenty-first century world was mobile, integrated, global, connected… unalterably so. We were all getting richer, and a big part of that growth stemmed from a new “globalization”, which brought as many new realities, responsibilities and worries as it did benefits, boons and profits.
It is unfortunate, but the United States had very poor leadership in 2001 – indeed, so very poor that the United States was, to the utter astonishment of many American intellectuals, voted off the United Nations Security Council for the very first time in the history of the UN. This was shocking! This being voted off occurred only a few short months after the George W. Bush seizure of power in January 2001.
The reality of feeble and improvident American leadership meant that creative ideas and moral suasion would be inconsiderably supplied in the years after the September 11 attacks. And this was definitely the case. The attacks conspicuously targeted two of the very tallest buildings along the Atlantic coast of the United States, and these were the two tallest buildings of the several that constituted the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan. (And it is of great historical significance that the attack in New York was not on a government structure, but on a symbol of American wealth and prestige, American capitalist accomplishment. The terrorists’ selection of the New York target made evident that it was America’s place in the world that was resented, not specific policies of the American government.)
September 12th was a Wednesday, a workday. People had to go to their jobs that day, of course. And going to the 80th or 90th floor of any building in North America had to be a nervous proposition that day. And the day after too. And continuing into the future.
The American president had only predictable, trite, boilerplate answers to American security concerns. In the wake of the attacks, President George W. Bush never once explained to the American people the great importance of steadfastness and determination and fighting through our apprehensions. The problem seemed divisible into the subjective-personal – the ways we each felt about the catastrophic day, and the social and national – the things we could do and perhaps should do as a community, collectively, as an entire political entity. And understandings and approaches that were a combination of the personal (like sweaty palms) and the social (like the understanding that we are all here on the 90th floor experiencing sweaty palms) were not considered much by anything other than intellectuals. Bush was no intellectual.
After September 11th, there were articles and stories on broadcast news that treated the fact that Americans were uneasy about flying on passenger jets. Still, these never seemed to evolve into a full-scale consideration of the usefulness of societal fortitude, a widespread and ongoing effort to encourage each other to more deeply appreciate that there is no crime and no immorality in nonviolently suffering the sweat of nervousness in situations where we were obliged or inclined to go in the weeks and months after the terrorist attacks. Americans could purposely do and go, not just because they had to carry on, but because they felt determined to find more meaning in their carrying on even when it was emotionally uneasy. Such an approach as this could have come from the foremost political figure, from the nation’s president.
History reveals that no such (American) presidential leadership was evident 2001 to 2005.
When we do not take care to emphasize something doable, understandable, in solidarity with our neighbors and compatriots in the wake of horrific tragedy, we will incline relatively more substantially then to other remedies, approaches, framings and reactions. Then, to the extent that Americans were not cleverly and astutely guided to continually deepen their personal, fear-overcoming commitment to civilization and civilized values, they would be inclined – especially in the halls of power – to consider military action. Among the subtlest threats of the immediate post-attack world was the vulnerability to flail; with such an enormous military at its disposal, and so many dozens of nations and putatively aggregated terrorists and “militants” to elect to attack, there was the great worry that we (Americans) would tend toward a violent military action. If we do not deeply value the great worthiness of the sweat emanating from our own palms, it is inevitable that we will incline more considerably to making others’ palms sweat.
A second anti-terrorist war, this one against Iraq, commenced in March 2003. It is not necessary here to detail the circumstances of that war and its consequences.
Among the most difficult problems in promoting the idea of our collective honor and esteem in each of us enduring nervousness and overcoming fear is that these experiences are invisible. The affected person can herself/himself attest to it, but there is no video record, nothing changing discernably in the physical world, no evidence set before the jury of the eyes. Nearly everything we do is performed with some degree of expectation of personal gain. And I have sometimes given to a charity and then sighed in the very personal awareness that no one will ever credit me with kindness, altruism, compassion, or decency, and my conscientiousness is set upon the wind.
Still, it is not too late. There is still time. But we must not dally. We must spread the word that there are things well worth experiencing that are not ever going to appear in news headlines. Our guide must become virtue itself, for itself. We must, as a whole of modernity realize that we’re in this together – Chinese, Japanese, Australian, Filipino, Korean, Russian, German, British, French, Canadian, American, Brazilian, Indian, Pakistani, Turkish, Italian, Mexican, Venezuelan, Colombian, Indonesian, Argentinian, South African – and ours is now to deliberately consociate in the experience of our sweating and fearing. Endure, with the goal of consciously advancing the shining promise of human achievement.
Learn! Vote! Get on the plane! Get into that skyscraper elevator! Write the unflattering and candid letter! Speak that which contains only high truth and is itself inconsistent with the agenda to be promoted there in the cocoon-auditorium or in the fora that is tendentious, ideologically driven TV punditry. Endure the sweat under your arms and in your palms. Feel your lungs suck at the ether anxiously. This is the task of unshakable, unyielding moderns. Nervousness in our earlier manifestation, in prehistory, for example, may have warned us that we were in danger, and the instinct may have inclined the person thus experiencing to actions conducing more appreciably to survival. But today the opposite is often true. We can determine to sweat in our sedulous and unambiguous affirmation of our civilized values. The time of effective and strategic militancy has substantially past, and a new philosophy and a new social ethic must now take up the mantle of human progress. Human survival in these challenging times will require that we explore more deeply that untapped potential that is the courage within the human soul.
It is not the coward who merely sweats. It is not the truest loser who merely loses. Bravery and prevailing are most impactful and important in the personal sufferance, not in the outward outcome. We are obliged, inasmuch as we are respectable and ethical, to prevail through difficulty and the unsteadiness of nerves, to see to the end of uncomfortable experience – not to the realization of accolades or elevated status. Let your action follow the dictates of who you are, not what you want to achieve. Do not confuse the socially recognized and rewarded with the worthy, the visible with the eternally valuable, the measurable with the moral. Attend to what you are (the solaces therein are infinite), not to what you outwardly achieve. Live in the fullest realization of your role in the immeasurably mightier span of all human experience.
Question: Are we each constituents of modern civilization?
Answer: Yes, we are.
Then….
Sweat!
And do it not for yourself. Endure the uneasy for worthy humanity; beyond the puny self, sweat for the whole of caring, intent humanity. The most estimable of all volunteers are those who volunteer to endanger themselves for the greater good, to suffer in the understanding that their suffering is conscious, unabashedly and unapologetically purposeful. Suffer knowing that you are giving to your brothers and sisters beyond recognition and utterly unconcerned with personal recompense. Suffer; yes, sweat – and continually remind yourself that this is only the experience of being a self-respecting modern. That no one other that you sees it will not mean it isn’t yours. That you yourself are not directly and extrinsically rewarded does not mean that it did not happen, nor that it did not have as its singular motivation an unassailable and unconquerable devotion to civilizational peace.