As you know, faithful readers that you are, I'm currently involved in this cabinet-installation project in a nascent palace on Lake Sunapee. Turns out that the house is being built for an Executive Vice-President of, of all things in this campaign season, the bane of many people's existence: BainCapital. Go figure. One response I got to that info in the last post came from an old college friend and frequently infrequent email correspondent. The gist of it was (and this is a total paraphrase) How do you reconcile your bleeding-heart viewpoint, so evident in your blog posts, with dropping everything to go build a house for someone whose values you apparently find so repulsive?
That's an excellent question and one that I wrestle with frequently in my work. I'm using lots of raw materials and energy, destroying trees and wild places, to create, frequently, unnecessary, ostentatious, and ostentatiously unnecessary dwellings, monuments to someone's unthinking greed. This place is such a classic example of what I was initially tempted to call American conspicuous consumption ( a term coined by Thorstein Veblen in 1899!), but it's hardly limited to Americans, as evidenced by the lavish palaces we're discovering that were built by various dictators we've recently killed. It seems a general human impulse--if we can, we do, for the most part.
The person who raised this issue is a devout Catholic; in fact she has written several books on the value and efficacy of prayer. One way I thought of to respond was to ask how one reconciles faith in and devotion to an institution so rife with scandal and its own excesses; clearly it's possible to get past some ugly stuff if one can perceive some value on the other side. In this instance, in my case, the short answer is ugly and prosaic: I do it to pay the bills and to provide for my family. I think that we all make choices and compromises every day, to varying degrees of personal psycho/moral comfort. Do I feel guilty? Am I guilty? You bet. "And I'll be guilty for the rest of my life...."
But what of the posts and liberalness-on-my-sleeve posture? There's a better response to the question, I think: I'm gonna call it "Secular Prayer." See, I've never really understood the concept of prayer, at least in the narrow way I approached it. If there were a god, and an all-powerful one, who chose to give some people terrible things to contend with, and then was swayed by their supplication or petition (which brings to mind Jim Morrison's shrieked "You cannot petition the Lord with prayer" in the spoken-word intro to "The Soft Parade") to change his mind and make those things better--WTF (as the kids say.)? That just strikes me as perverse and vain; why in the universe would we want to honor and pay obeisance to an entity who toyed with lives like that?
Recently, though, it has been explained to me, primarily by my son the religious scholar, that prayer frequently--and maybe most appropriately (my words, not his)-- serves as an end unto itself. The simple act and fact of praying is itself healing, even with no real expectation of Occult Result, and there have apparently been studies showing just that. Now, that certainly raises the possibility that those positive results were proof of Divine Intervention but, as Jake said, "Potato, potahto."
I think, upon some reflection and my friend's challenge, that my missives/diatribes function in just that way: I have no illusion that I'm going to change the world, that I, of all people in the history of the world, will find just the way to express a point of view that I believe in, such that suddenly all of the peoples of the world will rise as one and say "Oh, yeah, that's it. Why didn't anyone tell us this before?" Nope, plain and simple, it makes me feel better just to put it out there. It's Secular Prayer, an attempt to self-heal and to cope with all of the negative stuff I see going on all around me, while at the same time finding some sort of community. And if I don't live, or live up to, my espoused ideals? Guess I'm just another human, rolling around in the mud and the blood and the beer of my shortcomings, vowing to do better next time. As Walt Whitman was the inspiration for the title of my radio show and this blog, so let him speak again: "Do I contradict myself? Well then, I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes."
So, of practical necessity, no show this week either. I hope like hell to be back next week, though.
And remember: "Guilt is magical...."
The question that begs to be asked here is "Who are we accountable to...?". All of us adults (I use this term loosely here) are put in a position to provide for ourselves and many times there are others that come long for the ride (usually for some period of time, hopefully not for ever). We find our way, many times inspite of our education and training, to earn a living. Most people I know have a story to tell as to how they got to where they are. But of course there are some that set their sights at a young age, and somehow live the dream.
ReplyDeleteI'm not one of those... I'm a child of the '50's that got lost in the '60's only to land firmly in the '70 when I met my wife and we had our children. I remember hating "plastic". "Plastic people! oh baby now you've such a drag..." I would sing that out loud over and over along with "Brown shoes don't make it". And of course the memorable line in the "Gradute". It went something like "son, I have one word for you...plastics". Inspite of all this "noise", I have spent most of my life designing and building products made of this $#!@. I'll tell my story some other time.
But now back to the question. The answer is: No one. Not a damn soul, except ourselves. Its just like everything else... Ask yourself- did you treat people fairly and kindly? Do you face the day, each day with a smile on your face? Do you offer a hand? Do you honor your debts? Do you contribute to the growth and development of those around you (be sure to include yourself here) every day? Ponder the answers to those questions and then ask yourself if who you're accountable to...