It is not in me to submit to authority. I will HAPPILY put my shoulder to the wheel to help anyone do almost anything. But if you tell me I HAVE to do something? I'm going to at best resent it, and at worst try to make it obvious that compelling me makes us enemies. If you try to harness me, I will spit the bit.
I'm different. I mean we're all different, but I am *different.* I grew up playing Dungeons and Dragons. I competed in soccer and lacrosse as a young man, not football or baseball. I had a Bar Mitzvah. I spent a year studying in Europe. I can get my face slapped in several languages. "In toto nusquam corpore menda fuit." I love football, action flicks, science fiction and musical theater. I have an appreciation of art, cars, science, literature -- pretty much anything that involves the esoteric.
I'm proud to let my freak flag fly. Of course you probably already knew all this. Why do I bring it up today?
And as much as I bitch about this, that and the other thing, I am grateful to live in the United States. Any other country would have locked me up by now. I love our land. But I understand that we are engaged in a conflict.
The strongest weapon we have in this conflict is our culture. It trends, like I do, towards rebellion. We are in fact a nation birthed in rebellion and it remains central to our character. If the arc of history tends towards tolerance, we Americans have been outside of the standard deviation, but almost always the indicators of the curve. For a society to become more tolerant, it needs behavior different from the norm to tolerate. And here we lead the world.
I recognize that what happened on 9/11/01 was an attempt to change that. When photos of Britney Spears' bare midriff started showing up in authoritarian homes, the abstract threat of American tolerance and permissiveness was brought home to tyrants everywhere. When movies like "The Last Temptation of Christ" showed how willing we were to attack our own culture -- tyrants realized we were inspiring other to attack THEIR culture. Every time America criticized itself or lead itself to reform -- tyrants noticed. And as the internet age dawned our trend of rebellion and of tolerance of rebellion started to really spread.
And in September, at the beginning of the new century one tyrant struck back.
I wanted to do something. I was too old for military service. I thought perhaps I could join the FBI or an intelligence service. In the end I stayed in my job, and became more involved in civics.
And today, 14 years later, I think I'm helping...though it's often a pain in the ass. I hate politics and the political process. But I could not hate politics so much I did not love my country more. I have the liberty to be Dan, and I love that.
So on this solemn day I wish us all peace of mind and health of body and I wish us all the wisdom to recognize that we are all minorities of one. When we practice tolerance anywhere we make our own lives more free. When we seek to restrict other's liberty -- even with the best of intentions -- we eventually limit our own.
1 comment :
Lovely post, Dan. It reminded me of a passage I was reading last night:
"As a narrow bridge between prohibition and acceptance, toleration was not a place to stop. Toleration spanned a gap between what was legally forbidden and what was morally acceptable. If everything disapproved of were forbidden, or equally, if everything permitted were acceptable, toleration would not be necessary. Strictly, it would not be possible. The gap it spanned would vanish. Toleration was only possible when certain moral offences were legally permitted. If a moral offence was strong or widely felt, the case for legal prohibition grew. If the moral offence was weak or narrowly felt, the case for frank acceptance grew. In between, toleration was unstable, pressed by rigorism and restriction on one side, by laxism and permissiveness on the other. The state might shrink what was permitted by prohibiting more. Or society might shrink what it found unacceptable by objecting to less. As the balance between those pressures shifted historically in different areas of life, so the space for toleration in those areas grew or shrank.” -- Edmund Fawcett. “Liberalism.”
America is interesting and wonderful not because we've correctly figured out what should be forbidden and what should be accepted, but because we've established such a large, interesting space for what shall be tolerated.
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