how I came to be where I am around the current election.
 |
| Image credit: Photo by feastoffools on Flickr Licensed under Creative Commons |
Recently, I've noticed a particular tense, worked up feeling I get about how wrong other people are. It's a kind of quivering moral outrage that makes me latch ferociously onto anyone who will listen and tell them how messed up the world is and what a better place it would be if only the target of my outrage would do things my way. The target could be anyone: my coworkers, my family, my neighbors, the American voting public or the television executives at CBS whose terrible decisions doomed American Gothic to failure 12 years ago (oh yes, believe me, what CBS executives did to that show does indeed constitute a crime against humanity). But it does tend to center on politics, and the presence of this pattern hit me at long last, with blinding clarity, in my anger in the wake of my beloved Hillary's loss in the presidential primaries this year.
The odd thing is that I never paid attention to this earlier. After all, this is not a new feeling or a new behavior; I've done it all my life. In fact, I remember being extremely outraged when I learned, back in the 1970's that I could not run for president at the advanced age of seven. The world was pretty messed up, and with all the moxie of a bright elementary school student, I was pretty sure I knew how to fix it. I actually spent several days (which is a long time in kiddom) stewing over the injustice our founding fathers had foisted upon us by setting a minimum age requirement for the office of president, and attempting to get a petition drive started to change that pesky Constitution of ours.
But now, more than thirty years later, I'm beginning to see that this insistent, stubborn need to raze other opinions and rebuild the world in a way that suits me isn't very productive. It may be ambitious for a seven-year-old to attempt to change the U.S. Constitution, but it's definitely not wise (which, by the way, is why seven-year-olds, even very smart ones, don't get to be President of the United States). And unfortunately, not much has changed in the intervening years. I've spent too much of my life trying to figure out how to convince Christians fundamentalists not to take the Bible so darn literally or libertarians to see the wisdom in a central government or my Fox News watching relatives that Obama isn't a Muslim and it wouldn't matter if he were.
I'm finally noticing that my discomfort doesn't go away, even if the object of my outrage complies with my plans. That feeling, like a leech that has sucked its host dry, just swims off to attach itself to some new warm body. It turns out that my outrage has much less to do with the world's problems than it does with my problems. And it's not when the world changes, but when I change -- when I'm in a place of mental, emotional and physical balance and health -- that my painful outrage disappears.
That rage, rage, rage against the imperfect world, the less than my ideal world, the messy, complicated, real world hasn't helped me. It hasn't made the world a better place. In fact, in many ways it has damaged me, gone against my professed ideals and deeply angered, hurt and alienated many people I professed to want to understand and win over. My personal obsession with politics, my passion for convincing the country embrace my opinions, isn't healthy for me or good for the nation. So, I may be exploring my feelings around the election this year, but for once, I'm trying not share my choice of candidate or urge anyone to vote in any particular way. It's a little experiment, to see how it feels. And so far -- it's been difficult; I haven't always succeeded -- but overall, letting go feels really, really good.
6 comments: