Is love alive?

A reminder, today, of why I've always liked nice people and the bighearted more than anyone else.

Reading the national political coverage, today, it occured to me that most of politics, frankly, is shitty people doing shitty things to other shitty people. And doing shitty things to not-so-shitty people along the way.

As the National Review put it very well, today, "The love of power can prove at least as corrupting as the love of money, and the American political class does not seem likely to resist either temptation, much less both at once."

It's kinda stupid, really. Most of it. It's remarkably stupid, actually. Since so little of it does any real good.

And, lately, even though an enormous commitment of my life is to clean up the mess and to have something more honest in the way of governance and life, I've just found myself wanting to avoid it all, frankly. I understand my friends, now, who feel overwhelmed and powerless to do anything about it all. It's understandable. But if noone does anything to think bigger than our problems and work on more honestly viable solutions, we'll be stuck with the same mess a hundred years from now as much as we are today. So our children get stuck with the same shit.

And everyone pretending that being shitty really does more good than it really does.

That's the part that I can't handle. I can't handle the idea of my kid growing up to be a nice kid, a good kid, I hope, only to have assholes come at him or her from every direction telling him or telling her how they're the cause of all the bullshit in the world. Because they're so nice. All so those very same assholes never have to face up to the fact that the problem is assholes not wanting to face up. And so it'll be easier to blame the nice kids, like my kids, I can only hope, so dicks can go on being dicks. Sociologists call it scapegoating. I just call it bullshit.

It's fucked up to the nth degree, is what it is. It's shitty people doing shitty things to other shitty people. And along the way, doing shitty things to the not-so-shitty people in the world, while they're at it.

After awhile, I understand the cynics and the apathetic. Who gives a shit if people keep fucking up in the same direction just so they never have to consider that they might be wrong. About anything. Nevertheless anything important.

All of it makes me want to just avoid it all, is the truth. And hang out with folks like Ingrid.



I just want to find someone to spoon with like noone else. And leave to its own devices a world bound and determined to fuck itself into oblivion because it is too stubborn to face it's own bullshit. And it's own failure.

But I'll have to leave my teaching position to do that. Because it is sadly, and so unnecessarily, bound up in all this bullshit.

I keep thinking maybe that will be for the best. So I can get out of the way of all this progress. And let the shitheads have their way and make everything anew.

I may end up doing just that. I'm tired of the heartache of it all, is the truth. And something with a little less of it would be just fine by me.

In the meantime, I'll try to keep Ingrid and Sara and their Wintersong close to my heart.



I'm tired of shitty people justifying their shittiness on my back of my decency. And the decency of people who really do give a shit.

But there's not a damn thing I can do about it.

And I just want to hide away from it all, is the truth. With a woman who will love me honestly and unconditionally. I don't give a shit how unpopular that notion is. And never will. And I want to have kids that I can count on that woman to love unconditionally with me. No matter what shape the world or their lives are in.

Because the truth is there's not a goddamn thing anyone could ever do to convice me not to love my children and my wife and my family unconditionally. There is no amount of force anyone could offer up that would ever change that. Ever.

And if my experiences during this period have taught me anything, it is that I will be kinder, more understanding, more decent, more compassionate with them than before we took this tragic turn, not less. Because I'm much more aware of just how stubbornly fucked up the world is, today, than I was when we started down this ugly path.

And fuck every last asshole who defends things otherwise. What comes around goes around. And so it goes.

Though the truth is that we will, none of us, be out of this mess until we finally figure out that treating each other like shit is not the path of progress or anything else for that matter except for the same path to oblivion that has ever futily consumed our energies and never taken us anywhere resembling forward.

The damned human race. Until it learns its lessons. And that only happens with an open mind and an open heart and a little honesty with ourselves.

I'll take the company of someone who brings both to the conversation over just about anything else in the world, is the truth. Be nice for one of those someones to be a woman, at some point. And to raise a couple kids with the same. So maybe somebody can do something to unravel this godforesaken mess that is the human race, at some point.

Is love alive? I don't know. All I know is that if it isn't, we're all in much more trouble than anything any law or party or belief could ever offer us. That's just a fact. And no amount of stubbornness on our part will twist our way around it. I sure hope love is alive. Because we're in deep shit, if it's not.

Because it's about the only thing that can possibly get this foolish species through the rough spots of its own making, as much as any of the rest.

I want to take Twain's outlook and laugh at what a stupid, stubborn species we are. But, the truth is, like Twain, I think, as one of his admirers, H.L. Mencken, wisely observed, though he could be shy about sharing it, I just want to experience the tragedy, sometimes, that I feel on my heart, of just how lost and awful we are.

That's where Sara and Ingrid come in. I appreciate it, girls. Gives a heart or two to connect with when mine feels heavy with the world on it.

I wish I didn't care, most days, is the truth. And I wish it was funnier to me than it is, at this moment, most of the time.

But there's just a part of my heart that really does give a shit that we get it figured out. And that part weighs heavily with me, tonight.

I know. I need to get laid. Drink some beer. Watch a comedy.

Thanks for the advice, bro. It's just that sometimes, I just need to feel what's really there. And not pretend that I feel better for someone else's sake or to pretend that I feel better than I do.

Because if I don't, I never get to feel the good stuff, either. And there's too much good stuff out there in the world to forgo just so I don't have to feel the bad stuff.

And if I want to fall madly in love, to love my wife fully on our wedding day and every day after that. If I want to love my kids with as much depth as I can muster after a long day of work. If I want to love my family and my friends and my colleagues and everyone I care about in my life with as much as they deserve, then I gotta feel the bad stuff when it comes, too. It's just part of the deal.

And that's why I love these girls and their beautiful songs. Because they open up that part of my heart that feels all of it. The good. The bad. All of it. Whatever is there. So that I can keep love and hope and all the rest alive.

This is how we keep it alive. And this is how we find real strength. The kind that loves fully and thoroughly. The kind that Christ and the Buddha, Ghandi and King, Mother Theresa and Mohammed Yunus, Desmond Tutu and and all of the strongest among us bring to life. And remind us what real strength looks like.

I don't know why we take all of their efforts for granted. Why we take all of it for granted. I don't know why.

I just know that a world that operates like that without something more honest to help people correct it will consume itself. As North Korea, Iran, Cuba, Zimbabwe, as much as Nazi Germany and Soviet Communism are testament to.

And I don't want that for my children. Or anyone else in my life, frankly. And I'll do everything in my power to make sure that they live in a world that is as free and safe, decent and good, loving and kind, abundant and hopeful, and all the rest that makes for the kind of life that makes life worth living.

Is love alive?

That is the question to ask if we're wondering if we've made a world worth living in for our children.

It's the central question, really. All the rest, after a certain point, for which Maslow has more details, is just window-dressing, really.

Perhaps some folks are satisfied with window dressing. I'm just not. And never will be. No matter how much bullshit we engage in.

Is love alive? That is the question that my children will ask me for whether we have made real progress in the world.

At least I hope they will. I'll be damned disappointed if they don't. And I'll be goddamned proud, if they do.

Is love alive?

Good goddamned question.

We get to decide.

Let's hope the answer is yes. For all our sakes.

In the meantime, it's nice to have someone ask the question.

Progress and other matters of the heart

After watching a long period of people in all walks of life, futily and foolishly, try to scare the world and one another into some bizarre and dangerously distorted notion of progress in the world, this is what I have to share as a bottom line.

It is clearly a failed path. It's not just a failed path for us, as is so clearly is to anyone not trying to defend the failure.

What has been bizarre about this path, from the beginning, is that it was the most clearly failed path of the 20th century, and really the failed path of the long length of any honest history of humanity. It was the failed path of Adolph Hitler's Nazi regime and Joseph Stalin's and the Soviet Politburo's Communist government. It was those failures that vindicated the efforts of liberal democracies, like our own, that took freedom and democracy seriously in a world that, at the beginning of that century, oppressed the majority of its people under the auspices of the very same logic that has animated this bizarre and failed period of repression as some proxy for a more honest path to progress.

The world got substantially freer over the course of the 20th century. And it's inhabitants had lives that were substantially better by almost any measure one could take of quality or quantity of life offered by this freedom.

And like every period of regression and repression in human history, the world looked at all of that real progress and said, "But it has not kept us from making the mistakes that frighten us." And they started turning the clock backward.

Apparently oblivious to the fact that no philosophy, or religion, or form of governance, or any institution or rule or law or belief or system of belief whatsoever will ever keep people from making mistakes in the world, even the mistakes that fighten us.

Quite to the contrary, most of the most serious mistakes in the world that frighten us are a function of the very kind of cynicism and fear about the world that animates that belief. Nazism and Communism being but only two of the many plethora versions of that tragic and foolish and clearly ineffective means of making all of our mistakes and our fears about all of our mistakes go away.

Here's the bottom line for our personal lives.

If we do not take responsibility for our failures, including our failures trying to force one another to stop failing and stop making choices we don't want them to make, it does not make our failure go away.

Pretending that you haven't failed doesn't mean you haven't. It just means you're pretending.

And the most important failure we are experiencing, right now, outside of failing to keep ourselves safer or more financially secure or have more honest safety around our health or to address our environmental or other common problems effectively, is raising our children and believing that trying to force them to be better people really is some kind of compensation for our own failures to be better people and the examples they need.

In all our fear-mongering, we have desperately lost sight of being the kind of honest, decent people that our children need to look up to.

And trying to pretend that we are being those people when we very clearly have decided to take the route of dishonesty, manipulation, fear, and base impulse, is really the saddest fate of all.

Failing and honestly facing your failure so you can move forward and avoid making the same mistakes is by far a better path than screwing up again and again, pretending like you are not, and then refusing to face your failure.

And failure as a parent, on this mark, is the saddest failure I can imagine.

Which is why it becomes all the more incumbent for us to get honest. And to face that failure, rather than stubbornly refusing out of an ego that betrays us because it fails to allow us to move forward and learn from the failure and our mistakes. And, ironically, the reason why threats and force and power are so counterproductive is because they undermine this very kind of open acknowledgement of mistakes and failure that allow us to move forward.

So here's the bottom line.

We want to keep failing as parents and teachers and political leaders and citizens because we stubbornly do not want to face the much more stubborn fact that our efforts to force others to be who we want them to be is counterproductive and demonstrates a lack of respect for their own ideas of what kind of people they want to be, so be it.

Don't face it.

And live with it.

And at the end of the day. When you're making excuses for how it's the pop culture or the schools or capitalism or the government or Western decadence or whatever dumbass excuse people have come up with, this time, for why they're not responsible for their failures as parents to treat their children with kindness and respect or why they're not responsible for the failures as citizens, neighbors and political representatives to treat their fellow citizens, neighbors, and colleagues with respect for their conscience and understanding and choices.

Just know that pretending that we are not failiing does not make the failure go away.

If you doubt that, ask the Soviet Union. They did it for 70 years. And only stopped because people just wouldn't put up with it anymore when it became crystal clear what a failure the whole dumbass idea of Communism was.

If you don't want to face your failures - as a parent, in your career, as a leader, as a human being - noone can make you. That's just a fact. And there is no talking or leveraging or manipulating our way around that fact.

You want to keep failing. So be it. Keep it up.

But no amount of pretending makes the failure go away.

Facts of life are stubborn like that. Much more stubborn than anything denial of them could ever muster.

That's why it's been so important to me to keep this one straight, no matter how much people try to bullshit they're way through it.

Because that failure, the failing as a parent, is the one that would break my heart more than any other. And I would count myself as a failure not if my child made mistakes or failed, themselves. That is an inescapable fact of life. There is no learning that happens without it.

I would count myself as a failure as a parent if my children either held back their own dreams to please some distorted notion of my own ego desperately trying not to face my own failures or if they decided just not to talk to or deal with me anymore, at all, as a parent, because I just persistently refused to face the fact that they are their own people with their own chosen courses in life and that I am there to help facilitate their growth, not to determine it's direction.

And if we don't want to face our failure to force people to be the kinds of people we want them to be, either as parents or teachers, or through politics or any other forum, then we will live with those much more serious failures.

Failures of the heart. The most serious failures of all.

Sara Bareilles and Ingrid Michaelson offer a more honest way forward.



It is in opening our hearts that we will more honestly move forward.

Without it, we are lost. As long as we take the path that avoids it.

And that really is the most tragic fate of all.

Perhaps it is time to reconsider what our hearts have to offer.