I sometimes get afraid that the harsher experiences of my adulthood harden me.
I felt this most seriously the first time I was fired and had no money for rent and nowhere to go. I visited Melissa in Milwaukee only to have her roommate decide that I couldn't stay with them. Melissa and I left for Lawrence and to live together here. Melissa found a job, first. I found a job, second. But the whole experience was very scary and cold.
There was a time, in there, where Melissa and I had a fight and I left the apartment and spent the night in my car. I was overwhelmed with fear and the pain that people were so cold during my first experience with hardship.
That was the first time I felt myself getting hardened by life.
My most recent experience is similar, though not nearly as serious. I just find myself meeting new people and new colleagues with a lot of guardedness and mistrust.
I now know that there is virtually noone that I can really trust. Bosses are harsh. Friends, family, and colleagues rally for the very kind of treatment that they bemoan when it touches them, and, sometimes, when it touches me.
We just live in a world, right now, that is constantly rationalizing every harshest way of treating people. And then wondering why they have such a cynical, harsh world in which they live. It's the most foolish and bizarre form of hypocrisy and stupidity and cold-heartedness rationalized. But it is the reality we live until we choose something different.
I've decided there is only a limited amount that I can do about it. I am very well aware that every individual and every individual choice makes a difference. But I can't do this alone. So if people want an ugly, cynical, harsh world, then so be it, I say. Just give up the pretense that someone else is responsible for it, I say. Be a grown-up enough to admit that if you advocated for the harshness of this world, then you are responsible for it.
The idea that the nice folks of the world are somehow responsible for the ugliness is the asshole's rationalization for why decent people are responsible for all of the cynicism they breed and not their cynical rationalizations and treatment of people. It is the shitheads among us saying to themselves, "If more people were just like me and somewhere between Adolph Hitler and Mohatma Ghandi - Hitler and Ghandi being equally evil extremes, you see, who lack the wisdom and decency of average people - then this world would be a decent place. But until then, the reasoning goes, we need to harden up the fuckin' peaceniks, make 'em a little bit more like Hitler, so we don't have people going soft in the world (that was Hitler's problem, of course; he went soft...or he was too hard...I can't keep track of all of the rationalizations for why the dicks of the world really have "the right balance").
In the meantime, the only thing that makes us more decent and human and honest with ourselves and one another and make genuine progress (not the bullshit kind that we propagandize about to make ourselves look better than we really are) is folks like King and Ghandi and Jesus and Buddha and Desmond Tutu and all those softy intellectuals and freedom-loving scholars and thinkers and the occassional politician, like Bobby Kennedy or Bill Bradley or Dick Lugar or Mark Hatfield who have us stop and think to ourselves, "Have we lost our souls in trying to stave off our fears?"
I get afraid like anyone else does.
But my biggest fear is getting hard. And cynical. And old. And justifying everything I do as good for someone else, even when it's not.
I understand how and why people get like all of those things. I've been feeling like all of those things, lately.
But I have no interest in being like them just to make my life easier.
There's a lot of pressure to do so, of course. Just as there has been a lot of social pressure to do just about anything - good or bad - that people have wanted since since the beginning of humanity. Pressure, force, coercion, imposition. None of these things are new. They are the mainstays of every oppressive and repressive version of human society since the dawn of humanity. I understand why they are used. I also understand how easily they are abused. How easily they corrupt, as Lord Acton wisely observed. How easily authoritarian is confused with more genuine and concerned and wiser authority and self-governance. How easily self-interest is confused with the public interest.
As a teacher and as someone responsible for children, I understand much better today why they are used. I understand why aggression is substituted for reason, so often. I understand they are sometimes needed and why it's important to forgive their failures as much as criticize them. I also understand that there are failures of those who do not take the responsibilities that they are meant to impose seriously enough that have consequence, as well.
But I also know that there is no way out of the mess that the world finds itself in today without reason having a much more serious role in our lives and aggression having a much less frequent role. There is no genuine progress without that development. We are pretending and defending a bad idea without this development. We are being defensive of failures that cannot be resolved by defensiveness. They can only be resolved by thought and discussion and appeals to conscience. Everything else is pretending.
Perhaps that is what people will settle for, today. I certainly know an awful lot of good, decent, and nice people who seem to be settling for it, today.
I'm afraid that it, periodically, hardens me and makes me suspect that there truly is noone I can trust, neither trusting the power-driven ambitions of middle class and upper class partisans with balls and the cowardice of the less ambitious and more risk aversive folks of the lower and middle class.
There really is just no other way you can cut it, for me. I just don't trust anyone these days. Even the people I want to trust, I don't. Because I know that the closest people to me have turned their backs on me, at various points in my life. And I just don't trust people, anymore.
It's a sad way to live. But it's the only realistic way I know to live, right now, in the current political period when everyone is rationalizing what mean-spirited pricks they have to be to face down their fears of the world. The ugly, cynical world that they created, themselves, with all their fear and mean-spiritedness.
As with Jesus' time or Ghandi's time or King's time, it is a long-running self-fulfilling prophecy that can and only will change as we face our own responsibility and hand in creating the very world that we so fear. The people of each of those times killed the men who appealed to their consciences. Specific people were responsible. But everyone created the fertile soil for it, rationalizing their more aggressive, mean-spirited instincts. And so the world turns and turns and turns, until we face our hand in it.
Some of us won't. Most of will, long after the damage is done.
And I sometimes get afraid that I won't see that day without losing my own soul to a hardened fear that life will always be this harsh.
I can only hope that a more genuine faith is rewarded in this lifetime.
If not, this has all been for naught. And that really does scare me more than anything else.
Love,
Ben
