Saturday, February 16, 2008

Of space and dreams

We are battered by soliloquies of song and sonnet and psalm proselytizing, advocating, marketing fear as a commodity, amassing a supply that far exceeds demand proving only to devalue all emotion and delivered with fervor unmatched by whispered pleas for justice or reason. These profiteers and prophets feed on the stew of madness while brewing larger and stronger batches of hatred and xenophobia as a layer cake iced with nationalism, and seasoned with blood.

Offering tears of solace in one glass and the blood and wrath of vengeance in another they approach us as saviors, asking only for our consent to be saved from the bogeyman, the unknown, the other, the very threats they've worked so hard to make real. We are asked to suspend our cynicism and distrust of power and their misappropriation, misinterpretation, misapplication, peculation, of our rights and offer in trade the irrational, aberrant, injudicious, incongruous concept of both trust and fear based on faith in their word.

Our modern McCarthyistic marauders against reason, thought, debate, dissent, and dialogue, are starting to face the inevitable swing of the public opinion pendulum for their sophistry and praetorian adherence to profligate methods. All people have fears, concerns, hopes, dreams, desires, phobias, doubts, and needs. The longer and more stridently you scream that the sky is falling, it's falling, it's falling, the longer and more determinedly you prove yourself and your claims false. We live our lives from day to day, from week to week, and from year to year, within our spaces, and in search of our dreams. Fear is a fleeting thing. A gnat purposefully and perpetually on a cyclic flight searching ever to feast on the core of our being. But in order for it to succeed, for it to win, we must surrender our will to believe in ourselves, and in our own ability to prevail. And even if every last man and woman but one succumbs, it takes but one voice to begin a chorus that reminds us all of the substance of who we are, and the strength of our purpose, and that fear is nothing more than one more emotion to be felt and acknowledged like any other in the effort to understand not only ourselves, but each other and the world around us.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home