Of The Empire

"We will be known as a culture that feared death and adored power, that tried to vanquish insecurity for the few and cared little for the penury of the many. We will be known as a culture that taught and rewarded the amassing of things, that spoke little if at all about the quality of life for people (other people), for dogs, for rivers. All the world, in our eyes, they will say, was a commodity. And they will say that this structure was held together politically, which it was, and they will say also that our politics was no more than an apparatus to accommodate the feelings of the heart, and that the heart, in those days, was small, and hard, and full of meanness." ~Mary Oliver

I thought for a long time about this quote. Mostly because each time I am in a classroom, I find myself questioning the validity of what I am learning. College, thus far, has been all about learning to question everything, as it should be. They show us all of the ways in which we've been deceived, by our culture, by our government, by our education. It is easy to sit there and be appalled by our history. It is easy to wonder how anyone could have debated what we now know as so concretely right or wrong. It is difficult to imagine a time when there was such ubiquitously apparent injustice.

But of course there is also the present, where it continues, where it intensifies, where it has somehow become easier to look away and pretend it doesn't effect us. In high school I took a class on the sixties and I remember how we all thought it so unfair that we didn't live in an era of rebellion. We didn't have things to stand up for, to protest, to feel passionate about. It wasn't until my life after high school that I realized the foolishness, for so many reasons, of that thought. It wasn't, of course, that our generation had no battles. It was that our lifestyle, our small world within our simple teenage years, was peaceful. There were worldly current events and then there were our own daily routines and the two were separate for us. We wouldn't have necessarily admitted it, but they were. I was aware of poverty and corruption and war of course, but mostly I was concerned with what to do on Saturday night and how much homework I needed to get done. Mostly we were concerned with ourselves, and that kind of egocentrism protected us from the meanness of the world.

The older I get the more blatant it becomes. The more I learn the more cynical I become. There are so many battles to be fought. There are so many obstacles to overcome. There are so many ways that I personally feel helpless and there are so many problems that feel hopeless, and it is discouraging to say the least. Each time we discuss something in one of my classrooms I feel like shouting "then what is the answer!?!" But of course there isn't one, not an easy one, not a right one.

What will they say when they are sitting in classrooms studying us? That we had only problems with no real solutions? That we were too busy watching TV and connecting on facebook and downloading music to care? That we knew how to sit around and talk and blog about injustice but not how to act on its behalf? That we participated in the perpetual destruction of the world?

And of course, there have been advancements in things that are to be celebrated, but often it feels as though we are constantly taking one step forward and two steps back, that nothing good can happen without a slew of new oppositions, new problems. It's not difficult to understand why we all close ourselves off, while we choose instead to concentrate on our own personal daily goals that seem more hopeful, more attainable. Trying to lose ten pounds is easier than trying to understand why there is enough food to feed twice as many people as there are in the world and why there are still so many starving. Trying to teach your child good values is easier than trying to understand why every seven seconds a child under the age of ten dies. Trying to take care of your home is easier than trying to understand why there are so many without one. It just is.

And I'm not above this, or by any means claiming to be. If we thought about the condition of the world before ourselves all the time we would go crazy, we wouldn't continue on. Sometimes I still need to be selfish to protect myself. I think we all do.

But I also think there's a balance missing. I think it's easy to get so wrapped up in one's own life that we forget to consider the rest. I think that when I'm sitting here on my laptop with my starbucks at my side, it's easy to forget the faces of the dying children on TV, or the women I bought rice for in India, or the men on the street I pass by after school. It's easier to concentrate on the pile of homework by my side or the laundry in the basket waiting to be cleaned. It's easier to make a to-do list than a should-do list. It's easier to live my life than most others. I know that.

What I don't know is the solution. I don't know what the right amount of guilt is. I don't know what the right course of action is. I feel like I am constantly screaming in my head "then what is the answer!?!" But I have none.

I think about the Mary Oliver quote and I wonder how we will come to be known. I fear for THAT answer. I fear that we have become the people who forgot that they were people, and I fear that it is the forgetting that defines us.