X factor

Life is getting away from me. I am trapped in a tiny bubble through which I can watch others live but can’t join them. I have no passions anymore, only obsessions. Things that should inspire me to embrace them and grab them by the horns only nag at me and remind me how far behind I am at everything. Nothing I am doing is enough, or even close.

            What the hell am I here for? Such a stupid question, like something right out of the script of some godawful “outreach” effort to Reach Troubled Youth For Christ, those horribly misguided attempts of shiny happy evangelicals to make sense of the flutter they’d gotten their tits in over “Generation X.” I hail from that generation, but I’m not a troubled youth anymore. I’m forty-one years old and completely bereft of anything to offer God or the world He claims to love. I still believe His claim. I just have nothing to lend to its proof.

            I looked over my Facebook page at all the things I’ve been “liking” and posting lately, and I realized that they came from fear. Fear of having been found too lazy to stand for the things I have made so much noise about claiming to believe in, however pathetic and inconsequential any “stand” via social media may be. Fear of having nothing to bring to the party. I have to bring something, to be something, right? I know people who will call that a lie. Why can’t I believe them? Not like I haven’t tried. God, I’ve tried. I can’t do this. There is no true face. There is only a pile of masks that I have run out of ways to shuffle.

            So goddamned self-obsessed, pretentious, unreal. But it’s not unreal. It’s honest, and I should be punished for that. But I probably won’t learn, no matter how much I try. I wish they could have known how I envied them on Wednesday night, so blithely singing the praises of failure, sagaciously expounding on the human propensity to respond to pain with learning and change, as though it was some particularly engaging novel or movie plot. Yet I know they say those things because they learned them the hard way. They have earned the right to pontificate. They have come through, and I have not. So I envy them, and wish I could join them, even while their words kick and punch and shave slices off whatever I have that passes for a soul. Failure and pain, perhaps the two things I despise and fear the most, yet so familiar, constant, and defining that you’d think I’d have learned some. Fucking. Thing. By now.

the glorious Fourth

Independence Day. I am amazed at how strange and formal that sounds even to me. It’s the Fourth of July, or simply the Fourth. Fireworks and charcoal and a day off work. Why does it take so much effort to focus on the real meaning behind the holiday?

           

            I thought about how to mark this day on my Facebook feed and kept getting frustrated. There is no way to succinctly express what this means to me, or what it makes me yearn to do and to be in response, even knowing that I’m likely to fall contemptibly short. A good friend wrote a piece in his blog that I thought of sharing, but it was too easy to envision a vast snarling ocean of debate and empty commentary surging forth at the merest trigger of this or that phrase or definition or mention of a historical event. I no longer possess the energy for that, and that is very frustrating, because that seems to define us as a culture more than perhaps anything else. It may well be that said lack of energy is only proof of my falling short in my response to the freedom I have been incalculably gifted with. Nolo contendre.

            But at least we are free to do such things openly, or at least more so that the majority of people on Earth. I travel very little and must rely on the observations of people I trust for my insight into how the rest of the world lives. Their consensus is clear on this one point if on none other: this is about as good as it gets, all things considered. The Occupy movement, the Tea Party, and nearly every buzzword and media staple we take for granted would be met with drawn guns at every public event, and bloggers would disappear into whatever gulag the powers that be could contrive, were we only as “free” as the rest of the world. Just ask a Syrian. To be sure, outrages are perpetrated on U.S. citizens and their constitutionally guaranteed freedoms by all levels of government as a matter of routine, and few of us even seem to grasp that it happens at all, let alone how often or how blatantly. But for all that, it’s a bigger deal here than it would be nearly anywhere else. It’s status quo for much of the rest of humanity, and in most countries on the globe it raises few if any eyebrows beyond those who are directly and immediately involved. Abu Ghraib, the cop with the huge can of pepper spray, any scandal involving abuse of power with which Americans are familiar, is a scandal precisely because we have a deep-seated knowledge that Americans aren’t supposed to be like that.

            America is an ideal. Those ideals are plain in the documents that founded her, particularly the one drafted 236 years ago. It is chilling to see so many similarities between the grievances listed against King George III and today’s headlines. And it is heartbreaking to take any close look at our ideals and contrast them with the playing out of our history. We have fallen so tragically short of the good to which we have aspired, trampled on the very freedoms we claim to espouse, become in so many ways the things our founders bled and died to oppose. Yet we have not given up. I have not given up. I may fail every bit as badly, but I will fail forward. I am willing to live these ideals rather than preach them, share them rather than hoard them, encourage toward them rather than blame you for failing in them. If, and only if, there is no other way, I am willing to shed my blood or another’s for them.

            And that is because of love. A famous son of a Holocaust survivor has been quoted as saying, “I wasn't born here. But I have a love for this country and its people that knows no bounds...[My mother] is alive and I am alive because of America. And if you have a problem with America, you have a problem with me.” I seek to avoid or resolve conflict whenever and if at all possible. But it isn’t always possible. There is good in this world, and it’s worth fighting for, and I am freer to do that here than perhaps anywhere else. I wish and work for peace, stability, safety, and harmony. But if the choices of others put those things out of reach, then I aim to misbehave.

I want you to be that free, wherever you are, whoever you are. America may never live up to her ideals, but you don’t have to be perfect to be the best around, and you need never stop trying to improve. Never. Happy Independence Day.