Cynicism and self-fulfilling prophecy...

Melissa and I rented Date Movie, tonight:)...

It was a lot of predictably dumb fun:):):)...it's a lot of stupid gags and some curiously poignant social commentary about our unrealistic expectations about love and romance, our cynicism as a consequence, and a needed affirmation that even though love doesn't always look like a movie, that doesn't mean that people have to settle for less:):)...

I have to say that I do understand much of the disenchantment that many of the folks from around the world that I chat with and discuss stuff with on the internet have with America, right now...

This is the single most cynical period that I remember living through in this country in my lifetime...

Now, that may and is likely because much of my time in this country has been as a kid when adults shield you from the ugly realities of life only to bash you over the head with them as you get older to snuff out any remaining hope that you might have that people can be better:):):)...

And what I loved about Date Movie is how it makes fun of both of these sentiments when it comes to love...

Our innocent romanticism of love without pain or frustration or all of the less than pretty realities of relationships...

And our simultaneous and resulting cynicism about what love can never be:):):)...because we never did the work involved with reconciling our ideals with reality in a way that realizes ideals with a sense of groundedness in the world of the living:)...

It's so ironic, to me, that so many people have such sentimentally romantic views of life and how it should be and simultaneously nasty, ugly, cynical views on that same life...

The whole thing just seems so immature to me...so foolish...

Most of us are like this, truth be told, at some level...

But the sad thing is how we use our fears about how life might be unfair or how life might gip us or how we or someone we love might be hurt or how life might not give us the best deal...

And we use that fear to rationalize just how fucked up life might be without enough willingness on our parts to accept ugly realities and to take responsibility for improving them and correcting them with as much love and acceptance in our hearts, as possible...

There is much about the world that is wrong...there are terrorists and gangsters and power-hungry politicians and political groups and money-hungry businesspeople and investors...and all kinds of bad stuff in the world...

But the sad thing is that when we take a step back from all of it we might see that the saddest consequence of all those terrible realities that we can't control (no matter how much we try)...

Is what Pogo said about us 60 years ago...

"We have seen the enemy and he is us"...

Obviously we have to deal with serious threats and problems that face us...

But what has gone wrong in America in the last 5 or 6 years or so is not partisan or unique to any individual...it's not a few bad apples...it's not President Bush...or the Democrats...

What's gone wrong is that we've let our fears and our cynicism get the best of us...

And we've become this sad, fearful, pale image of our best selves....

What I loved about Date Movie was how it pokes fun at both sides of this tendency of ours...

The tendency to imagine the world as far better than it really is...and ourselves as far better than we really are...

And simultaneously to get lost in our cynicism which is the consequence of our failure to reconcile our dreams of how much better we can be...to each other and to ourselves...with the realities of the world and our own efforts that are persistently falling short...

It is the flaw that the Greeks held up as humanity's worst so many years ago...

Our hubris...to think that we can face problems that humanity has faced for millenia...and think that we can correct them with more of the uglier practices that we've been engaged in for a millenia...it's insanity...the thought that we can do the same thing over and over again and get the same result...

Except this time the insanity is the context in which we think about problems...the cynicism that undermines any serious effort to solve serious problems that we face...

The last few years...particularly post-911...have been a pretty bad case of that...for America...and for the world...

For America...as we persistently look like a sad, unrelenting version of Network, the 1970's era drama about news anchors losing their heads "mad as hell and not going to take it anymore"...finally going to put an end to all this terrorism and corruption and greed and incompetency by bringing down the hammer and making sure that everyone knows who's boss...it's not just Iraq...it's everywhere...it's baseball and steroids...it's gay marriage...it's calling Bush a war criminal...it's life and hard time sentences for every crime we think, foolishly, that we're going to end with such nonsense...

America looks like a land of hypocrisy and like a country that can never quite accept it's and it's citizens' falls from grace...

And an international community with cynicism enough to fan the flames...

And the sad reality of the whole thing is that it will go on...until we begin to better reconcile who we wish people were...and who they are...

Including ourselves...

The cynicism and power-hunger and retribution and and greed that has so openly animated American politics and American culture in the last few years, in particular, will not go away by trying to identify the few bad apples that let the rest of us pretend to be better than we really are...

That cynicism will only go away when we do the really tough thing that so many people seemed bound and determined not the do...

To take responsibility for it...

To own it...and to recognize how much the cynicism creates so much of the self-fulfilling prophecy that we say we want to end...

But which we persistently make excuses for why we don't give it up...

Moments like these when so many institutions in our culture seem to have eroded their trust with the publics they serve and so much of their credibility...

Eventually...if that is to change...

People have to step back and take responsibility for their part in the great big mess we've created for ourselves...

The truth is that it is not only that we are cynical because the world is so afoul of our expectations...

It is that the world is so afoul because we are so cynical...

And the only people we have to blame for that...

Is ourselves...

And what I loved about Date Movie...was that around one little small and so important area in our lives where our cynicism undermines our intentions...

Love...

That we can take a moment...and laugh...at just how foolish and dumb we can all be:)...

I guarantee everyone that I have ever had this conversation with on this one...

There is only one way out of the great big mess of a world that we have created for ourselves, at this point...

And that is by treating each other better...

And doing so means looking at ourselves more honestly...

And acknowledging our own personal responsibility...for what insanity that we all so often engage in when it comes to dealing with the most serious problems that the world has to offer...

That can only happen with more freedom, not less...

But the world will still be a mess...

Until we both take the personal responsibility involved with our role in cleaning it up...but it also involves leaving people with more responsibility and trusting them, more, to care for problems that until now we have fruitlessly put our trust in others to do for us...
And in the meantime...we might as well relax...and learn to appreciate ourselves and one another...for all of our less noble and impressive qualities...as we do for our more noble and impressive qualities:):):)...

Joe Nye is right...that the thing that matters most in international policy and politics...is how much our ideals and our living up to our ideals reflects something to which others want to aspire...

But it's more than that...there's more than a touch of cynicism in Joe's and so many peoples' focus on how we are perceived to be living up to their ideals...

Rather than how much we ARE living up to those ideals...

And when our children...and our neighbors...and our friends...and our international neighbors...

When they watch us living up to our ideals...

They have something to aspire for...

The problem is that everyone...everyone...well, almost everyone...is simultaneously cynical about both the ideals and the freedom that is needed to achieve them...

And that cynicism, right now, has been weighing on us...

It has been focussing our visions downward on what we think is so wrong with ourselves and with one another...

And not up and outward to who we can be...and reconciling that, better, with who we are now...

The importance of idealism is that amidst our honest reflections on how disappointing the current reality can be...

That it creates a vision of how much better that reality can be with thought and effort... But mine, at least, is definitely not a messianic or even quasi-messianic vision of how some leader...some politician...some celebrity...some drill seargent...some teacher...is going to make people be the people they dreamed of being...

Because such visions are false ones...they don't exist...Jesus or Buddha or King or Ghandi can inspire us to be better people...but they can't make us be so...

We choose to do that or not...

And neither can law enforcement, political parties, church communities, bosses, parents, or teachers or anyone make us be better people...

We either choose to be...or not...

And once we make peace with this fact of life...then we can affect change on it in a way that is genuinely realistic...and not just some romantic
cynicism about some image that the world never lived up to...

When we choose to be ugly to face ugly realities of the world...

We become part of the ugliness...and there is no way around that...

Than to take responsibility for it...

And noone can make anyone do that until they are willing to face it in their own hearts...

I'm going to try to sleep:):)...have a great night everyone:):)...

Love,
Ben