I've been thinking lately that if every person in this world did only what they WANTED to do and nothing else we would all be better off.

That's not really what religions tell us.  They, for the most part, or at least in my experience, tell us that we must be constantly viligant in fighting our natural inclinations towards sin and deny our desires to submit ourselves to the Divine Will.  To let people decided for themselves what was good, without restriction, would lead to the ultimate moral decay.

It's not what political structures tell us.  They pass all sorts of laws to stop us from making choices out of passion or lust that would harm oursleves or others.  They also tell us that "they" are necessary to force us, kicking and screaming, to carry out certain unpleasant activities, means that are justified by their ends (paying taxes, fighting wars...).  A people without the limits of law and polity would live in utter social chaos.

It's not really what capitalism tells us.  Capitalism tells us WHAT we want, which of course is more material junk than we have landfills to bury it in.  And  it tells us that we should definitely deny those silly desires (a meaningful, fulfilling, dignified vocation or deep, sincere relationships...) because they will never lead to success or further achievement, and certainly not to that STUFF they say we really want.  To do only those things which one likes is to be self-indulgent and even lazy.

But I don't think that people WANT to kill each other.  They really want to connect in meaningful ways with other people, to know them and share their humanity with them. 

I don't think people WANT to steal someone else's possessions, or to, say, sit down to a five-course meal next to someone with nothing to eat.  Because of the desire to share their humanity, people have a desire to nuture it in others.  There is a drive for all people to serve life.

I don't think people WANT to sit around all day.  They inherently have a drive to participate in the creative force of the world, to be a part of the pulse and activity going on around them.

The biggest problem is not that we have allowed too much freedom that people are running around harming others and the planet with their actions, that people have no direction.  But that we hav been given too much direction, we have not encouraged each other to seek out that which deeply calls to us personally.  We have saddled ourselves with so much duty and obligation that we no longer even KNOW what we want.  We only know what we SHOULD.  There has been a serious wedge driven between us, as our daily lives allow us to be, and our true selves.  We have lost touch with our soul.  This is the most devastating crisis we face.  Not lawlessness or war or hunger or disease or environmental destruction - we could easily solve these if we were able to reconnect with our own truths and bring them to action.

So maybe I will sit outside and read poetry today instead of working on my research for my degree.  Or go for a walk instead of washing my laundry.  Or meet up with a friend instead of go to work.  They seem closer to accomplishing peace than a dozen degrees, or negotiating an agreement between the big suits.

That's a pretty hopeful thing, I guess.  That all I have to do for peace is read poetry.

So I've always had a hard time keeping myself from being intensely emotionally engaged in politics.  My friends make fun of me because after the 2004 elections I would determine whether or not I could go on a second date with a guy by who he had voted for - a man could only be an idiot or an asshole if he had voted for Bush a second time, right?  However, I found some of my close friends falling into neither of these categories and yet still voted for W.  Then it must be confusion, right?  How can smart, good people vote for such a stupid and amoral leader?  Is it on principle?  (I'm a Republican.)  Because of a select issue?  (I'm pro-life.)  I just don't get it.

I have found that my difficulty in understanding the political decisions of others is in my fairly unique (though not exclusive, thank the goddesses!) perspective on politics.  For many politics is removed from their daily lives; they do not connect the policy decisions made by elected leaders with the facts "on the ground" (i.e. lack of progressive taxation leading to increased wealth for the very wealthiest, forced cuts in social programs and more families without housing, etc.; subsidies to oil companies lowering prices of gasoline, encouraging consumption and increasing the air pollution encountered by children on their walk to school; shit and let's talk about schools...). 

To me, politics is about how you treat other people.  It's about recognizing how a single vote contributing to the election of a policy-maker and a single decision by that elected official has an impact on the lives of other human beings.  It is NOT theoretical.  It is real and immeadiate and we all hold a place of responsibility in this global community.

How have international politics, and American politics, deterioted into a little boy's game of king of the hill?  In the end we will lose all the children on the playground in this mindless competition.  In the end?  In the end, we will even lose the hill itself, though no one will be left to mourn it.

Sometimes I’m bitter.  Sometimes it’s hard to believe it’s not RIDDICULOUS to hope anything will change.  But then I remind myself that the alternative will get me nowhere.

So at the present I find myself wavering between hope and less hope.  I try to focus on those things in which I find simple truth, and beauty, those things that have been stripped bare of pretense – my sixty-year-old unlce with tears in his eyes, the belly laugh of my toddler nephew, the gray gray of leafless winter trees.  Those things that are honest because they have no choice but to be.

 

In it all I find an emptying of myself, a hollowing out, a weathering.