Angels on the sideline, puzzled and amused.
There are no shortage of tragedies in this world.
And perhaps the premiere curse of idealism is that one is never satisfied with the present, even when it is by all marks satisfactory, simply because it is not the vision.
But one of the impulses underlying that dissatisfaction is the impulse to "care." I imagine it's what drives a lot of our response to tragedies like what's befallen Japan, what befell Haiti earlier, and any such catastrophe that enters the modern consciousness, particularly in this age of unsurpassed connectivity. I imagine it plays a part in much of the aid work done in the world, going beyond humanitarian aid to rule of law and democratization assistance. Having worked (re: interned) briefly in the areas of humanitarian aid and democracy assistance, one sees a lot of idealists, albeit along the perpendicular spectrum of pragmatic thought.
I saw/experienced similar impulses as a Political Science major in undergrad as well. We were some of the generation's brightest, learning about macroeconomic trends and the features of autocratic regimes and labor flows in developing economies so that we could, when we grew up and launched ourselves into the world and the workforce, set about solving the world's problems. Or, at least, working towards those solutions, bridging the gap between the "is-ness" of the world and its "ought-ness."
This has domestic applications as well, and the civic duty as motivating factor is one very tangible manifestation of this. It's as benevolent a motivator as anyone perhaps has for campaigning for a government office. Things ought to be better, so let me see what I can do from a position of authority to bring the situation to where it ought to be.
And for a long time, as regards responses to international tragedy like the natural disasters buffeting Japan or the repression of democratic movements in Iran or blockades of the Gaza Strip, I wondered about the legitimacy of caring. (Which, when all is said and done, is probably a silly thing to "worry" about.)
I could say I dodged the White Liberal Guilt bullet because I'm not white, but it was the same sort of concern about this drive towards "ought-ness". From my Ivory Tower, who am I to tell the Iranians how they should do democracy? Or, if I truly cared about Japan, I'd reach into my wallet and buy a plane ticket to put hands and feet to my concern. Or, I'm not Palestinian so who am I to comment on the rights and wrongs of their situation on the ground or how the people or the leadership should go about building their institutions?
I guess these worries have come to a head as a result of two bits of circumstance.
The one is a personal and ongoing project of bridging the gap between the is-ness and the ought-ness of myself (of which, quitting alcohol was one of the biggest and most difficult and most visible steps). The second is that I'm currently writing a screenplay featuring a British character living and working amongst Palestinians in the West Bank in the period between the First and Second Intifadas.
After a scene where he and a fellow teacher use improvisational theatre workshops to allow kids to vent aggression that would get them arrested or killed in the streets, the fellow teacher confronts him, suspecting his motives.
She floats the idea that he could be a spy or some sort of agent provocateur, which he adamantly denies, insisting he is there (albeit illegally and underneath the radar of the Israeli government) simply because he cares and wants to help. She retorts that the foreigners like him say exactly the same thing, then end up leaving anyway. He insists he will stay and backs up his claim by telling her about how he first came as an adolescent part of a Christian church mission and simply refused to get back on the plane in a single moment of existential defiance, forsaking the world he'd known beforehand and everything in it for a life in the refugee camps in the West Bank.
His is an exaggerated case and some would look at it and say he's simply "gone native," but he embodies a lot of my dueling notions about helping. About caring for a place and trying to improve the situation there, even if your connection to it is nothing more than the fact that you and the inhabitants there both bleed red blood.
Why do I care? I'm not quite sure why. There's an element of "look at me, going into this place and making it better", you know, the more show-offy bits of Manifest Destiny at work, which is perhaps inevitable when your origin is the First World. There's also an element of putting to work many of the things I learned in school, marrying civic duty to knowledge gained in an effort to assist others in the simple act of living. That's humanitarian, no? There's an element of Christian will as well, seeing as that's what I was raised with and the philosophy that governs me and my actions more than any other. "It's what Christ would have done."
But what is the use in worrying about the why if the care is still given? What do a man's motivations matter if the hand extended still helps his fellow off the ground? Is it not a pointless query? If it, however slightly, mitigates disaster or helps cast a vote or brings food to a table, why question? The end is what's important, who cares how or why it got there, right?
I guess part of why I've found myself asking these questions now is that I'm exhausted. It's an existential exhaustion brought on, I believe, by throwing myself into too many projects at once. Monitoring the situation in Kosovo, tracking the uprisings blazing across the Middle East and North Africa, healing myself, tracking the dismal course of global financial regulatory reform. I'm burned out.
I'm at the point where the routine, the checking of tabs on my browser, is simply meaningless habit. I've turned into the aid worker whose itinerary is rote, who stands by the election polling place in one country in exactly the same stance he adopted in the place before, not because his being there means anything but because he has become accustomed to that posture.
I want to care, but more than that, I want to care productively.
matociquala once shared this quote with me: "We cannot weep for the entire world. It is beyond human strength. We must choose."
And I've tried. It's to me a much more palatable and morally justifiable position than giving in to the futility of it all and allowing oneself to be buried beneath the suffering of the world.
Conversely, I fear I've strayed too far in the opposite direction where caring too much about the goings-on in the world has damaged the personal relationships I need to make me a better person than I would be on my own.
I guess, now, I find myself at a peculiar crossroad, one embodied by this character I've dreamed up out of an impossible circumstance. I mean; what British national arrives in Palestine in the 1970's as an adolescent and chooses to grow up in the refugee camps because he hates his life in London that much, then lives and works under the radar until family tragedy finally exposes him to the powers that be? It's an utter and complete fabrication, but it holds within it a lot of these questions I've been wrestling with, which are either precursors or the result of that other, more often asked question: "What am I to do with my life?"
I have these ideas, these beginnings to the answers of those questions, but at the bottom of it all, I simply don't know.
The crisis in Japan, I guess, has brought all these worries to a boil because I'm not sure if my lack of contribution is itself a contribution.
There are problems in the world I feel passionately about, the situation in Israel/Palestine and the situation in the Balkans foremost among those concerns. And I feel my education and the experiences I've amassed over the course of my relatively brief life so far have armed me with some of the tools that would enable me, in concert with enough people, to help build solutions to some of those problems.
I know things can change, I've seen it happen enough times in my own life as well as on the world stage. And I know things ought to change. It's the blessing/curse of the idealist to always believe that.
Maybe I'm just frustrated that I'm not there yet, that my arms aren't yet long enough to box with those problems that fascinate and frustrate me.
"Patience is the antidote!" someone screams from the audience, reminding me that there are others who believe, as I do, that the ought-ness, of the world and of ourselves, deserves our efforts.
Which leaves me with this quote from Robert Browning:
"Ah, but a man's reach should always exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?"
And perhaps the premiere curse of idealism is that one is never satisfied with the present, even when it is by all marks satisfactory, simply because it is not the vision.
But one of the impulses underlying that dissatisfaction is the impulse to "care." I imagine it's what drives a lot of our response to tragedies like what's befallen Japan, what befell Haiti earlier, and any such catastrophe that enters the modern consciousness, particularly in this age of unsurpassed connectivity. I imagine it plays a part in much of the aid work done in the world, going beyond humanitarian aid to rule of law and democratization assistance. Having worked (re: interned) briefly in the areas of humanitarian aid and democracy assistance, one sees a lot of idealists, albeit along the perpendicular spectrum of pragmatic thought.
I saw/experienced similar impulses as a Political Science major in undergrad as well. We were some of the generation's brightest, learning about macroeconomic trends and the features of autocratic regimes and labor flows in developing economies so that we could, when we grew up and launched ourselves into the world and the workforce, set about solving the world's problems. Or, at least, working towards those solutions, bridging the gap between the "is-ness" of the world and its "ought-ness."
This has domestic applications as well, and the civic duty as motivating factor is one very tangible manifestation of this. It's as benevolent a motivator as anyone perhaps has for campaigning for a government office. Things ought to be better, so let me see what I can do from a position of authority to bring the situation to where it ought to be.
And for a long time, as regards responses to international tragedy like the natural disasters buffeting Japan or the repression of democratic movements in Iran or blockades of the Gaza Strip, I wondered about the legitimacy of caring. (Which, when all is said and done, is probably a silly thing to "worry" about.)
I could say I dodged the White Liberal Guilt bullet because I'm not white, but it was the same sort of concern about this drive towards "ought-ness". From my Ivory Tower, who am I to tell the Iranians how they should do democracy? Or, if I truly cared about Japan, I'd reach into my wallet and buy a plane ticket to put hands and feet to my concern. Or, I'm not Palestinian so who am I to comment on the rights and wrongs of their situation on the ground or how the people or the leadership should go about building their institutions?
I guess these worries have come to a head as a result of two bits of circumstance.
The one is a personal and ongoing project of bridging the gap between the is-ness and the ought-ness of myself (of which, quitting alcohol was one of the biggest and most difficult and most visible steps). The second is that I'm currently writing a screenplay featuring a British character living and working amongst Palestinians in the West Bank in the period between the First and Second Intifadas.
After a scene where he and a fellow teacher use improvisational theatre workshops to allow kids to vent aggression that would get them arrested or killed in the streets, the fellow teacher confronts him, suspecting his motives.
She floats the idea that he could be a spy or some sort of agent provocateur, which he adamantly denies, insisting he is there (albeit illegally and underneath the radar of the Israeli government) simply because he cares and wants to help. She retorts that the foreigners like him say exactly the same thing, then end up leaving anyway. He insists he will stay and backs up his claim by telling her about how he first came as an adolescent part of a Christian church mission and simply refused to get back on the plane in a single moment of existential defiance, forsaking the world he'd known beforehand and everything in it for a life in the refugee camps in the West Bank.
His is an exaggerated case and some would look at it and say he's simply "gone native," but he embodies a lot of my dueling notions about helping. About caring for a place and trying to improve the situation there, even if your connection to it is nothing more than the fact that you and the inhabitants there both bleed red blood.
Why do I care? I'm not quite sure why. There's an element of "look at me, going into this place and making it better", you know, the more show-offy bits of Manifest Destiny at work, which is perhaps inevitable when your origin is the First World. There's also an element of putting to work many of the things I learned in school, marrying civic duty to knowledge gained in an effort to assist others in the simple act of living. That's humanitarian, no? There's an element of Christian will as well, seeing as that's what I was raised with and the philosophy that governs me and my actions more than any other. "It's what Christ would have done."
But what is the use in worrying about the why if the care is still given? What do a man's motivations matter if the hand extended still helps his fellow off the ground? Is it not a pointless query? If it, however slightly, mitigates disaster or helps cast a vote or brings food to a table, why question? The end is what's important, who cares how or why it got there, right?
I guess part of why I've found myself asking these questions now is that I'm exhausted. It's an existential exhaustion brought on, I believe, by throwing myself into too many projects at once. Monitoring the situation in Kosovo, tracking the uprisings blazing across the Middle East and North Africa, healing myself, tracking the dismal course of global financial regulatory reform. I'm burned out.
I'm at the point where the routine, the checking of tabs on my browser, is simply meaningless habit. I've turned into the aid worker whose itinerary is rote, who stands by the election polling place in one country in exactly the same stance he adopted in the place before, not because his being there means anything but because he has become accustomed to that posture.
I want to care, but more than that, I want to care productively.
matociquala once shared this quote with me: "We cannot weep for the entire world. It is beyond human strength. We must choose."
And I've tried. It's to me a much more palatable and morally justifiable position than giving in to the futility of it all and allowing oneself to be buried beneath the suffering of the world.
Conversely, I fear I've strayed too far in the opposite direction where caring too much about the goings-on in the world has damaged the personal relationships I need to make me a better person than I would be on my own.
I guess, now, I find myself at a peculiar crossroad, one embodied by this character I've dreamed up out of an impossible circumstance. I mean; what British national arrives in Palestine in the 1970's as an adolescent and chooses to grow up in the refugee camps because he hates his life in London that much, then lives and works under the radar until family tragedy finally exposes him to the powers that be? It's an utter and complete fabrication, but it holds within it a lot of these questions I've been wrestling with, which are either precursors or the result of that other, more often asked question: "What am I to do with my life?"
I have these ideas, these beginnings to the answers of those questions, but at the bottom of it all, I simply don't know.
The crisis in Japan, I guess, has brought all these worries to a boil because I'm not sure if my lack of contribution is itself a contribution.
There are problems in the world I feel passionately about, the situation in Israel/Palestine and the situation in the Balkans foremost among those concerns. And I feel my education and the experiences I've amassed over the course of my relatively brief life so far have armed me with some of the tools that would enable me, in concert with enough people, to help build solutions to some of those problems.
I know things can change, I've seen it happen enough times in my own life as well as on the world stage. And I know things ought to change. It's the blessing/curse of the idealist to always believe that.
Maybe I'm just frustrated that I'm not there yet, that my arms aren't yet long enough to box with those problems that fascinate and frustrate me.
"Patience is the antidote!" someone screams from the audience, reminding me that there are others who believe, as I do, that the ought-ness, of the world and of ourselves, deserves our efforts.
Which leaves me with this quote from Robert Browning:
"Ah, but a man's reach should always exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?"