See Also: Opposing & Creating -- The twin tasks of a movement, by Sam Smith
          and
          Introduction to Why Bother? Getting A Life In A Locked-Down Land
          by Sam Smith (2001)

The following is mirrored from its source at: http://prorev.com/downer.htm



                     Politics, Discouragement and Despair
                                by Sam Smith
                              19 December 2004
       UNDERNEWS is the online report of the The Progressive Review,
        edited by Sam Smith, who has covered Washington under nine 
           presidents and edited alternative journals since 1964.


THE ELECTION has spread discouragement and despair among many decent and
thoughtful people. And for those in the business of pursuing the truth
journalistically, there has been another blow: the suicide of investigative
reporter Gary Webb, the victim of nasty malice by the major media for his
expose of the complicity of the CIA in the drug trade. Your editor didn't
know Webb but he did know two other men of admirable purpose who took their
own lives: DC city council chair John Wilson and homeless activist Mitch
Snyder. In each case it was not only a loss but a wound -- reminding one how
thin the skin of psychological stability really is and how dangerous
speaking truth to power can be. It is a subject I addressed in my book, "Why
Bother?" and may be of interest to readers as they cope with the present
unhappiness. Here are a few excepts:


SAM SMITH, WHY BOTHER? -- About a half million Americans are treated in
emergency rooms each year after trying to kill themselves . . . If one comes
down off the bridge (metaphorical or real) and resumes endlessly pushing the
stone up the hill so it can roll back down again, you find yourself once
more living with the inexplicable, the insoluble, the absurd. Camus pulled
no punches on this score: "Living the absurd . . . means a total lack of
hope (which is not the same as despair), a permanent rejection (which is not
the same as renunciation), and a conscious dissatisfaction (which is not the
same as juvenile anxiety)."

Can we handle it? Or do we escape by saving our bodies and letting our soul
and minds leap for us? Do we become among those who, as Benjamin Franklin
suggested, die at 25 but aren't buried until they are 70?

Camus and Kierkegaard are called existentialists. When you see that term
these days it is often moored alongside another: angst. To suffer public
angst or ask deep questions without good answers is to be a bit quaint and
out of touch . . . In fact, even to admit such doubts is a sign of weakness
that might cost you a another date, if not a promotion or an election . . .

The most common reaction to despair may be no more dramatic than a sense of
boredom, of apathy, and indifference. In many ways, this is precisely the
response our culture would prefer. It makes us ideal consumers of experience
and excitement and assures that we won't interfere with the flow of goods
and services by introducing novel notions of how society might be better
rearranged.

Or one might take that leap of faith towards something that protects us from
the unknown. "Life is at the start a chaos in which one is lost," wrote Jose
Ortega y Gasset: "The individual suspects this, but he is frightened at
finding himself face to face with this terrible reality, and tries to cover
it over with a curtain of fantasy, where everything is clear. It does not
worry him that his `ideas' are not true, he uses them as trenches for the
defense of his existence, as scarecrows to frighten away reality."

And here lies the paradox of therapy or, as Ernest Becker calls it,
psychological rebirth: "If you get rid of the four-layered neurotic shield,
the armor that covers the characterlogical lie about life, how can you talk
about `enjoying' this Pyrrhic victory? The person gives up something
restricting and illusory, it is true, but only to come face to face with
something even more awful: genuine despair. Full humanness means full fear
and trembling, at least some of the waking day. When you get a person to
emerge into life, away from his dependencies, his automatic safety in the
cloak of someone else's power, what joy can you promise him with the burden
of his aloneness?"

You don't have to be a psychiatrist to confront this anomaly. I have spent
my journalistic life attempting to tell people things that will help them
understand what is really happening around them. Yet the closer I have come
to succeeding, the more resistance I have found. For some, even asking hard
questions is a suspect activity. And why not? After all I am stealing their
scarecrows.

Consider, for example, the problem of discovering unpleasant truths about
our land. If a revolution takes place in the forest and no one reports it,
does it make a sound? If the second coming occurred tomorrow, would the
media cover it? There seems little doubt but that the civil rights, peace,
and women's movement would have had far less salutary outcomes had they been
forced to confront today's media and the skill with which it ignores that
[which] it doesn't like. Gone is the ground rule that once required social
and political change to be covered -- even if the publisher didn't approve
of it. Gone is the notion that if you made news, they would come. In an age
of corporatist journalism, in which Peter Jennings has become the
professional colleague of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, it no longer
matters. News is just another item in the multinational product line with
little value outside of its contribution to market share and other corporate
objectives.

Worse, it has become just about impossible to find anyone in power who is
ashamed of this. In fact, it is just about impossible to find anyone in
power who is ashamed of anything. For centuries, shame has been one of the
most useful restraints on power. As Edmund Burke noted, "Whilst shame keeps
its watch, virtue is not wholly extinguished in the heart." But one of the
perks of contemporary power is to exist without shame.

Shame and its benign cousin, conscience, once served a less public but
equally vital role. The belief that if one tried hard enough, you could draw
clean water even from a seemingly dry well, kept many an activist striving
beyond rational expectations.

But disillusionment set in. The civil rights activist John Lewis would later
recall the attempt to unseat the all-white Mississippi delegation at the
1964 Democratic convention: "This was the turning point for the civil rights
movement. . . . Until then, despite every setback . . . the belief still
prevailed that the system would work, the system would listen . . . We had
played by the rules, done everything we were supposed to do, had arrived at
the door-step and found the door slammed in our face." The writer Dorothy
Allison has also spoken of betrayed optimism: "I had the idea that if you
took America and shook it really hard it would do the right thing."

As such possibilities faded we eventually found ourselves in a time when the
concept of wrong was just one more social construct to be argued about on a
talk show, one more small obstacle people put in your way on your climb to
the top. The effect on efforts for change was like trying to bake bread
without yeast . . .

The reporter risking status by telling the truth, the government official
risking employment by exposing the wrong, the civic leader refusing to go
with the flow -- these are all essential catalysts of change. A
transformation in the order of things is not the product of immaculate
conception; rather it is the end of something that starts with the
willingness of just a few people to do something differently. There must
then come a critical second wave of others stepping out of a character long
enough to help something happen -- such as the white Mississippian who spoke
out for civil rights, the housewife who read Betty Friedan and became a
feminist, the parents of a gay son angered by the prejudice surrounding him.
But for such dynamics to work there must be space for non-conformity and
places for new ideas and the chance to be left alone by those who would
manipulate, commodify, or destroy our every thought.

To be sure, thirty years ago some of those seeking change -- especially
those demanding justice in the south -- found themselves confronted with far
more life-threatening dangers than does today's cultural rebel. But on
average, activists today face a more hostile media, a more repressive
government, a more passive and defeated potential constituency, and an
extraordinary competition for people's time and interest. One reason for
this is that the dogs and clubs of Bull Connor's cops have been replaced by
far more subtle stratagems. For example, if you choose to challenge
authority, you may be labeled delusional, dangerous, or both. In recent
years, both state and media have taken to dubbing someone a `paranoid' or a
`conspiracy theorist' simply for not accepting the conventional wisdom about
a politician or issue . . .

To view our times as decadent and dangerous, to mistrust the government, to
imagine that those in power are not concerned with our best interests is not
paranoid but perceptive; to be depressed, angry or confused about such
things is not delusional but a sign of consciousness. Yet our culture
suggests otherwise.

But if all this is true, then why not despair? The simple answer is this:
despair is the suicide of imagination. Whatever reality presses upon us,
there still remains the possibility of imagining something better, and in
this dream remains the frontier of our humanity and its possibilities. To
despair is to voluntarily close a door that has not yet shut. The task is to
bear knowledge without it destroying ourselves, to challenge the wrong
without ending up on its casualty list. "You don't have to change the
world," the writer Colman McCarthy has argued. "Just keep the world from
changing you."

Oddly, those who instinctively understand this best are often those who seem
to have the least reason to do so -- survivors of abuse, oppression, and
isolation who somehow discover not so much how to beat the odds, but how to
wriggle around them . . . These individuals move through life like a skilled
mariner in a storm rather than as a victim at a sacrifice. Relatively
unburdened by pointless and debilitating guilt about the past, uninterested
in the endless regurgitation of the unalterable, they free themselves to
concentrate upon the present and the future. They face the gale as a sturdy
combatant rather than as cowering supplicant.

Judith Herman, a specialist in psychological trauma, says the most important
principles of recovery for abused persons are "restoring power, choice, and
control" and helping the abused reconnect with people who are important to
them. In short: choice and community. Survivors understand this implicitly
even if they can't or don't express it . . .

In The Resilient Self, Steven and Sybil Wolin list ways in which survivors
reframe personal stories in order to rise above the troubles of their past:
insight, independence, relationships, initiative, humor, creativity, and
morality. Survivors often strike out on their own, find other adults to help
them when their own family fails them, and reject their parents' image of
themselves.

The book is not only a personal guide for those who are or would be
survivors. It is, whether intended or not, also a political guide. After
all, our country and culture often stand in locus parentis and many of the
pathologies we associate with families are mirrored and magnified in the
larger society. Yet when we seek political therapy we repeatedly run up
against a damage model enticing or forcing whole communities or groups into
victimhood and leading them towards blame or surrender rather than
resilience.

If insight, independence, relationships, initiative, humor, creativity, and
morality form sturdy support for personal resilience, might they not also
serve us collectively as the abused offspring of a culture that is
chronically drunk on its own power and conceits . . .

H. L. Mencken once said that the liberation of the human mind has best been
furthered by those who "heaved dead cats into sanctuaries and then went
roistering down the highways of the world, proving . . . that doubt, after
all, was safe -- that the god in the sanctuary was a fraud."

Mencken made it sound easier than it is. It is a lifetime's work to clear
away enough debris of fraudulent divinities, false premises, and fatuous
fantasies to experience a glasnost of the soul, to strip away enough lies
that have been painted on our minds, layer after layer, year after year,
until we come to the bare walls of our being. Still, it is this exercise,
however Sisyphian, that helps mightily to keep us human.

Inevitably such an effort initially produces not beauty or satisfaction, but
merely a surface upon which we can work our will should we so choose, a
barren facade empty of meaning, devoid of purpose, without rules or even
clues to lead us forward. We stand before the wall as empty as it is.

It is at this moment that the deconstruction of mendacity and myth so often
fail the social critic, cynic, and ironist -- the street person overdosed on
experience, the college graduate overdosed on explanations, the journalist
overdosed on revelation. This is the point at which it is too easy to wash
one's hands and consider the job done. Hasta la vista, baby, see you around
the vortex of nothingness . . .

The problem, of course, is that void. How people handle it can be
drastically different. One may leave us with seven books, the other with
seven dead bodies. In either case, we can not stare life straight in the eye
without pain and without some longing for certainties that once spared us
that pain . . . That's why there are so many attempts to put the question
marks safely back into the box, to recapture the illusion of security found
in circumscribed knowledge, to shut down that fleeting moment of human
existence in which at least some thought they could do the work of kings and
gods, that glimpse of possibility we thought would be an endless future.

It is seductively attractive to return to certainty at whatever cost, to a
time when one's every act carried its own explanation in the rules of the
universe or of the system or of the village. From the Old Testament to
neo-Nazism, humans have repeatedly found shelter in absolutes and there is
nothing in our evolution to suggest we have lost the inclination, save
during those extraordinary moments when a wanderer, a stranger, a rebel
picks up some flotsam and says, "Hey, something's wrong here . . ." And
those of us just standing around say, "You know, you've got something
there." And we become truly human once more as we figure out for ourselves,
and among ourselves, what to do about it.

No one seeks doubt, yet without it we become just one more coded creature
moving through nature under perpetual instruction. Doubt is the price we pay
for being able to think, play, pray and feel the way we wish, if, of course,
we can decide what that is. Which is why freedom always has so many more
questions than slavery. Which is why democracy is so noisy and messy and why
love so often confounds us.

If we are not willing to surrender our freedom, then we must accept the hard
work that holding on to it entails including the nagging sense that we may
not be doing it right after all; that we may not be rewarded even if we do
it right; and that we will never know whether we have or not.

Further, the universe is indeed indifferent to our troubles. If God or
nature refuse to cheer or punish us for our mercies or misdemeanors, the job
is left up to us. We thus find ourselves with the awesome problem of being
responsible for our own existence . . .

Hectored, treated, advised, instructed, and compelled at every turn,
history's subjects may falter, lose heart, courage, or sense of direction.
The larger society is then quick to blame, to translate survival systems of
the weak into pathologies, and to indict as neurotic clear recognition of
the human condition.

The safest defense against this is apathy, ignorance, or surrender. Adopt
any of these strategies -- don't care, don't know or don't do -- and you
will, in all likelihood, be considered normal. The only problem is that you
will miss out on much of your life . . .

Says Ernest Becker:

     "The defeat of despair is not mainly an intellectual problem for
     an active organism, but a problem of self-stimulation via
     movement. Beyond a given point man is not helped by more
     `knowing,' but only by living and doing in a partly self-forgetful
     way. As Goethe put it, we must plunge into experience and then
     reflect on the meaning of it. All reflection and no plunging
     drives us mad; all plunging and no reflection, and we are brutes." . . .

The existential spirit, its willingness to struggle in the dark to serve
truth rather than power, to seek the hat trick of integrity, passion and
rebellion, is peculiarly suited to our times. We need no more town meetings,
no more expertise, no more public interest activists playing technocratic
chess with government bureaucrats, no more changes in paragraph 324B of an
ineffectual law, no more talking heads. Instead we need an uprising of the
soul, that spirit which Aldous Huxley described as "irrelevant, irreverent,
out of key with all that has gone before . . . Man's greatest strength is
his capacity for irrelevance. In the midst of pestilences, wars and famines,
he builds cathedrals; and a slave, he can think the irrelevant and
unsuitable thought of a free man." . . .

John Adams described well the real nature of change. He wrote that the
American Revolution "was effected before the war commenced. The Revolution
was in the minds and hearts of the people . . . This radical change in the
principles, opinions, sentiments and affections of the people was the real
American Revolution."

The key to both a better future and our own continuous faith in one is the
constant, conscious exercise of choice even in the face of absurdity,
uncertainty and daunting odds. We are constantly led, coaxed and ordered
away from such a practice. We are taught to respect power rather than
conscience, the grand rather than the good, the acquisition rather than the
discovery. The green glasses rather than our own unimpeded vision. Oz rather
than Kansas.

Any effort on behalf of human or ecological justice and wisdom demands real
courage rather than false optimism, and responsibility even in times of
utter madness, even in times when decadence outpolls decency, even in times
when responsibility itself is ridiculed as the archaic behavior of the weak
and naïve.

There is far more to this than personal witness. In fact, it is when we
learn to share our witness with others -- in politics, in music, in
rebellion, in conversation, in love -- that what starts as singular
testimony can end in mass transformation. Here then is the real possibility:
that we are building something important even if it remains invisible to us.
And here then is the real story: that even without the hope that such a
thing is really happening there is nothing better for us to do than to act
as if it is -- or could be.

Here is an approach of no excuses, no spectators, with plenty of doubt,
plenty of questions, plenty of dissatisfaction. But ultimately a philosophy
of peace and even joy because we will have thrown every inch and ounce of
our being into what we are meant to be doing which is to decide what we are
meant to be doing. And then to walk cheerfully over the face of the earth
doing it.


ORDER "WHY BOTHER? GETTING A LIFE IN A LOCKED-DOWN LAND" at
http://prorev.com/order3.htm



Copyright © 2001, 2004 Sam Smith
Reprinted for Fair Use Only.





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