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When They Want What They Can’t Have
It’s inevitable that during our lifetimes, we will wish that we had certain things that we don’t have. There are times we can work towards having those things; my husband and I often tease each other that someday the person who really owns our house will come and take it back. (We would never have dreamed of owning a house like ours, and are sometimes still awestruck at living in one.) We’ve worked hard for what we have and often acknowledge how blessed we are.
At other times, any of us can find ourselves wishing for things that we find impossible to attain: to be tall and slim (when we are short and stocky); to hate ice cream (so that we’ll less tempted to eat it); to have a great singing voice or be a great actor (when we have no talent). We can certainly work toward improving all those areas of our lives: we can wear clothes that make us look slim and accept maintaining a reasonable weight instead of having a model’s figure; we can find other ways to satisfy our sweet tooth besides eating ice cream; and we can take singing or acting lessons. Several years ago, I was trying to improve my skills in leading our community in chanting, mainly to manage my breathing, and took voice lessons; I found out that I not only had a nice voice but a large range! But I will never be a singer.
That’s where the real problem emerges for some people. They never identify those areas where they have the potential to grow, and give up before they even start. Or they keep running into brick walls, trying to achieve something that is not in their skill set. (If I want to do acrobatics and be the base support for a human pyramid, I will be sadly disappointed or die in the process.)
Unfortunately, there are those people who are always dissatisfied. They don’t know what they truly want, but they know that this isn’t it. So, they decide to destroy their world and everyone else’s, assuming that there is Utopia on the other side, or at the very least they can create it. And they will act in this way at great loss to the society—and to themselves. They will spend their lives expecting they-don’t-know-what, and since they don’t know, they will make sure we don’t have what we want for a satisfying life. So, they tear down every symbol, everything of beauty, everything that represents our history. All that remains is destruction and emptiness.
I know, however, that I am not willing to settle for their destructive goals. I will fight for my right to speak the truth. I will write essays that defy their reckless and selfish goals. I simply will not accept their carrying out their disastrous plan, and will speak out for this amazing country and its people. I will speak out for all that it’s achieved and will accomplish for the foreseeable future, because I believe, I must believe, that we will survive and thrive through these difficult times.
These anarchists can only be successful if we allow them to be. That is a fact that I have recently come to realize. There are many people who want to be hip, to be accepted, to appear enlightened, and they will enable these destroyers. But there are plenty of us who will refuse to conspire with them. I will stand and shout and refuse to aid and abet their ignorance and narcissism.
I will celebrate those who are prepared to stand up with me.
Published in Culture
A great moral philosopher once told us:
No they will succeed because the government wants them too. If I were to protest them, resist them, even defend myself the full force of our government will take all I have and lock me up. The other side can burn, steal, loot, attack, beat and get off with time served if the government shows up at all.
Look at Seattle and Portland. The “protesters” rioters meet with government officials before going into neighborhoods to threaten people and demand to take their homes. They are well funded. More funded than grass root stuff. Like government type of money funding. Look at the politicians locking us out of our jobs, schools, bars, restaurants. This is government action where if you do not put on a face diaper you go to jail or shamed on social media so you lose your job. We are at war but not with the anarchists, but with our government itself. Soon more people need to understand this.
Maybe so. But I will not sit by silently in my neighborhood and then complain. Fortunately I live in a “red” community, or at least our sheriff is conservative; he warns intruders that he tells his citizens to arm themselves. As they say, it ain’t over till it’s over. . .
We have (had?) the nation we have (had?) through intention. Our country was never inevitable. That it would be a country, independent and separate from colonizing empires, may have been inevitable. But its form of government was not. And it is that form that enabled the creative energies to build it into the economic leader that it is and the broadly experienced prosperity and security of so many.
The destructors believe in inevitability, not intention. Marx prophesied their destructive acts to make way for inevitable communism. The COMINTERN preached this message. Orwell’s 1984 message is that belief in inevitability is at the core of those obsessed with collective power.
All great thrillers (e.g. Alien, Terminator) feature the conflict between intention and inevitability. Intention wins, but only if it is pursued with constancy and resolve. Inevitability is always there to destroy and must be fought.
This is terrific! We need to inspire our side to realize that we share valuable intentions that are worth fighting for–preferably without violence. Thanks, @rodin.
I’m waiting to see what happens after a terrified homeowner mows down the rioters when they threaten his home and family. It takes a higher level of violence to overcome violence, and the leftists have already shot at people . . .
The problem is that relationship between the two won’t be acknowledged. We’re all animals.
Watched a movie (the only movie?) starring Mick Jagger with a friend two nights ago, and the apparent lesson of that was “Mick Jagger makes a very sad male escort.” Now that I can drive again, though, I’m using my playlists for that, including a lot of Stones music for 6 am monastery drives and this song.
Your point about personal dissatisfaction is very true (and well put). I think most of us, from time to time and sometimes quite often, struggle not to blur the line between ambition and perfectionism. Funnily enough, the two things that have helped me the most with that are monks and boxing. I started going to a Benedictine monastery my sophomore year of high school, and slowly noticed a very positive change within myself. Because I’m the type of person that lives in her own head, and doesn’t always like herself very much, I spent more time repressing the outward signs of stress and anxiety than actually dealing with it, but the 30-45 minutes I spent there (due to the nature of the Latin hours) forced me to focus and get out of my mind, and I felt a lot better for it. The kind of second family I got as a result was also immensely helpful, and such a gift. Likewise with boxing, I need an outlet to work out my stress and doubts, and while dance demands a lot of controlled perfection, boxing became for me a way to channel those negative emotions (like self loathing over a bad Russian presentation) into something that was beautiful and constructive (and destructive when the time called for it). Maybe it’s trite, but I think that most people that get in a boxing ring do it in large part to fight themselves, not because they have some uncontrollable amount of aggression towards others.
Society at large needs to absorb the same message. We aren’t perfect, the world and society and a thousand things are neither perfect nor perfectible, but they can get better (and happier) for everyone if we work within our little platoons towards that goal in all of its local variations.
I am reading an interesting novel currently, This is the Way the World Ends. It is a zombie apocalypse novel similar in style to World War Z. It occurred to me last night as I was reading one of the chapters how similar was the description of the behaviors of people as the disease spread. It struck me that the author was remarkably insightful. Then it occurred to me that what it was they were reacting to was fear, deep, existential fear. They were covering up that sense of helplessness by being “proactive”. That is, perhaps, what is happening on the streets of Portland, Seattle, and elsewhere. The coverage of the virus has been hardly better that it probably was during the 14th Century when the plague hit Europe. For every “expert” saying one thing, another has just the opposite to say. We are bombarded with statistics of infections and death which lack real context because they are being magnified in order to create fear and panic. In a word, those kids out on the streets are terrified. The world they knew is falling apart. The authorities they were taught to trust hold no credibility any longer. So, they are throwing off all semblance of civilized behavior and seeking material posssessions that in this insane world seem to be the only valuable things left. They want what they want, and they want it now before it all ends. It is certainly more comforting to rise up into revolutionary movement than it is to sit in depressed fear in your parent’s basement, cover the longer term fears with more immediate action and a sense of belonging. It is all grounded in a sense of “now”. I want it now. I must get it now before it is too late. What is lacking and has been lacking in this country for a very long time is real leadership, men and women who were something more than talking heads or tv personalities. People who rose to power because they exuded maturity, judgment, and a real sense of leadership. I saw it in the schools where administrators were chosen from inexperienced teachers who “took the classes.” I have watched one presidential candidate after another chosen for how they look on camera rather than what they actually had to say. We are being led by cardboard cutouts of human beings, and it time like these, so uncertain, so lacking is safety, the lack of real leadership is terrifying to the masses. Those who lack some stable sense of order within themselves will seek it in groups of the like minded, thus Antifa and BLM present a safe harbor.
Our times are not as perilous as they are being made to appear. That is, the peril we face is not organic — it has been manufactured by academia, political activists, and media. The risk of death and disease may be slightly elevated at this time, but our chaotic response has been the result of conditioning. Children and young adults fear because they have been taught to fear. They have not been taught that living involves risks and good outcomes are not guaranteed. With self-discipline and hard work within a system of laws, life can be enjoyable and fulfilling. But their self-discipline and work effort has been undermined by our education system and political activists and media have eroded trust in our systems.
I agree. The threat of the Covid-19, the unpleasant though far from perilous possibility of Joe Biden being elected are just two examples of crises and possible crises that are being used to manipulate and terrify the masses. I spent five years in the brokerage industry. It was there that I learned the maxim that people in the stockmarket react to two basic motivators, Greed and fear. Unfortunately, that does not only hold for the markets.
I’ll take this a step further. The rioters react with infantile id. And they were trained to behave this way. They were trained to believe a lie, that college was a stepping stone to great prosperity, that prosperity was a human right, and that there was nothing worth sweating for. This is the world they see dissolving in front of them. And so, they scream and fight.
There IS Utopia on the other side, in the original sense of the word.
I’m right with you @kirkianwanderer! Thank you.
I think Morpheus had something to say about this.