I’ve always detested the Lie – the falsehood we embrace and put forth as useful, worthy, viable, and reasonable, and all because of some convenient, self-serving mental adroitness we’ve learned. Early this year (2017), I read one of my more recent blog posts and came to a chagrined awareness of what was happening to me psychologically. I’d continued to be utterly frank and honest. But the problem was that I thought the whole world was honestly doomed. “Well, what if it is true that we’re doomed?” I asked myself. “If it’s true, then what does mature responsibility recommend?” With misgivings, I told my truth.
But, by January, after having a couple of months to digest and adapt to the 2016 catastrophe, the world rendered faked-up, I looked at the matter a different way. The patient in the bed has a truly wretched and cursed prognosis. And that is surely important! Surely it is to the patient! But so too is hope important, however (contemporarily) sundered or obscured. I decided that I ought to shut up rather than have mine counted among the innumerable voices of hopelessness.
It has been about seven months. Incredibly, though I have not advertised my blog in any way, and it certainly cannot appear on the first page of any search, hundreds of visitors have subscribed – and they continue to subscribe. When I see such interest in my writing, I recall the doleful spectacle of the mother bird that returns to her nest, and there finds only desolation: the hawks have recently paid a visit. I still feel bitter and angry – not because my candidate and my politics did not prevail, but because the uncountable children born into this world will have to inhabit a place where competence and decency have been abandoned, rationalized as not so important and useful as…
And these diminutive worthies have been abandoned partly because the “grown-ups” were disgusted at not seeing enough manly, adamant militancy in response to beheadings, and partly because they were sickened at the idea of their franchise being gobbled up by someone eerily suggestive of a mob wife. And there is always something enduringly romantic about returning to a mirage-greatness past, isn’t there! (Oh, what a magnificent nation Teddy Roosevelt led!) Regardless of the adults’ excuses, the children have not deserved their fate. If the flag is utterly ravaged, it is a bad thing only because of what that flag might have represented or continued to represent that was prosperous to those youthful, blameless souls. The prettiness of red and white stripes flapping in buoyant confidence in the wind must not overshadow the more decidedly unprofane nonpareil that is the dignity of the individual human person, and the individual child.
But it is time to pick up my pen again. The children of the world deserve that perhaps one obscure and diffident (and well-intentioned, human spirit-respecting) blogger do this, however haltingly, however imperfectly. I may be the quintessential nobody, but I will declare with all the clarion unambiguity available to human lungs that the world’s children are somebodies!
As I look upon these unabashedly sentimental, self-righteous words I’ve written here, I am aware that they are reprobate in the discriminating eyes of Western-style intellectual scrutiny; Western intellectuals (generally) look upon such writing as non-self critical, naive, transparently manipulative. But I eschew the delete button: children are the final victims of the moral failings of adults. What is more, there is nothing veritably important in the world that is not traceable to the importance of a single child.
So there! Let eggheads lampoon where they like.
Very strangely, I have recently felt like a bird in paradise. And my reasons for resumption of writing here are not purely charitable; I don’t merely commiserate with the other birds who’ve suffered the hawk’s visit. I have no children, thank God! I resume in part because I feel, ironically, supremely free. The assumption of stupefying power by an idiot, and the blind populace (“24%” of eligible voters in the United States, I am told, but alas instrumental) that exalted the idiot have, as an unintended side-effect, conferred upon me a wildly liberated perspective on life. Surely a world flush with grief, jaw-dropping disbelief, irresponsibility, inanity, vulgarity, and preternatural radicalism – but finally, assuredly, fatefully flushed! – is not a world where one ought to be so anxious about a breeze that might possibly muss his hair! In this surreal existence, where the people have voted democratically for their own embarrassment and achieved that bewildering ignominy, it isn’t possible for me to be embarrassed anymore. We all swim now, like it or not, in a vast ocean of opprobrium. I still swim more honorably than 62 millions. I write, finally, because whether I’m morally compelled to do something or not, or whether I’m a grown man or a toddling child, I’ve a pen with ink in it and I wanna.
Many writers have treated this new political reality, where our freedom ethos and Internet technology and media (pseudo-news, especially) are now combining, however unwittingly sometimes, to divide society into camps of mutually hostile cynics, critics and skeptics; we have come to look askance more than veridically look, more than see. A substantial portion of Americans believes in disbelief: the fake and the false and the self-serving have come to the fore. Hence, it should come as no surprise to any of us that 2016 saw the last two political aspirants standing were the ones with the lowest trustworthiness ratings ever; with this new societal religion of suspicion-paranoia as most trusted advisor, Americans rejected all the good, decent and knowledgeable candidates, and left themselves with nothing but fanged ambition in the last two.
Human rights is still out there, still wafting availably. But we humans would have to somehow find the resolution to learn about them and promote them. We will find ourselves ever averse to agree as long as we act as if we were somehow separate and different than the rest of humanity – and this is the crux problem: human rights is uncontaminated by favoritism and selfishness; by advocating the individual ‘self’ (out there), human rights is paradoxically selfless. We need very desperately to more thoroughly understand and promote human rights. And this is a problem when our species is known to have selfish predilections. Still, our lethargy, indolence, and unseeing selfishness do not mitigate the urgency.
How does one lowly writer answer the beseeching keyboard?
Perhaps I ought to write what at this moment appears most relevant.
You believe you have rights, do you not? You believe that you have a right to walk the street maintaining basic security of person, without being murdered, yes? Then act on that self-awareness! Act on that fundamental truth. I entreat you to learn about human rights, reader, if not for the world’s children, then for yourself. This above all: to thine own self be responsible! Agree with yourself!
I earnestly entreat my reader: let the pieces fall in fortuitous place after you’ve accepted that North Star, that esteemed guide that is moral compunction. Let yourself move consequent to that superior animator that is non-hypocritical responsibility for yourself. From there that (figurative) ocular plank introduced to us via religious scripture may be removed, and from there transcendent, virtuous deeds actuated. Do, but do after you’ve regarded and honored the most enduring reasons for doing (anything): your self-respect.
And then I entreat you to entreat a kindred species.