An Open Letter To A Young Friend

In the responses I received to my last post, The Wedding Bends, my young friend Jeffrey Johnson left one of his thoughtful, gentle comments that opened a heap of reflection for me. Jeffrey is kingcoyote, of Penny Candy & Shady Characters, whom I featured here in Allow Me To Introduce; for a real treat, go visit his most recent post, entitled Rocking Chair.  He writes of his young daughter, Abby, and his new daughter, Olivia, who is one month old.  I found myself writing way too much to Jeffrey for the Comments section, so I'm giving my answer its own post. For convenience, I will re-post his comment here and respond to it with an open letter.

kingcoyote:

About a year ago, I was stuck in traffic, waiting to get onto the highway. In the left lane, people kept going by at a good clip while my land was at a virtual stand-still. As I neared the highway exit ramp, I could see the problem... people were zipping up the left lane to the front of the line, and being let in. I really couldn't decide which one irritated me more, the people cutting in line (holding the rest of us up, as if WE didn't have places to be) or the people letting them in.

I can't help but feel the same way about the Westboro people, and the media. One thing that this interweb community that I've become a part of shows me over and over is that there really ARE many, many good peoples out there. Much more, I think, than the crazy creepers. Unfortunately, it's the crazies that sell papers... if we stopped paying attention to them, maybe they'd lose some of their power.

At any rate, I tend to feel like MFM [My Fellow Men] are (as a general rule) good people, but we tend to get so overwhelmed by the number of GLOBAL needs that it's easy to forget that what matters is an accumulation of LOCAL needs. I read a zen quote(ish) this week about community that went something like "We all see ourselves as waves, but forget that we are part of the ocean."

 Dear  Jeffrey,


You make a very good point, one that always generates some ambivalence for me when I feature Serious Crazy in a blog post:  maybe the Westboros of our world would go away if we ignore them.


I spent most of the last four years of the Bush administration in a news-fallout shelter. I yoga'd and Om'd myself into the present, local moment and stayed there as much as possible--especially after I discovered that New Zealand didn't need any retiring psychotherapists. I poked my nose out in 2007 to see if sanity had made any inroads and became re-engaged enough in '08 to do a little phone work for Hillary Clinton.  And to try to prevent my retirement savings from self-destructing in mutual fund hell.
 
I've stayed engaged--initially because I hoped that something really good might be happening in my country, something I could support and didn't want to miss. Then, just when I thought I was going to be able to handle the world again, in what seemed like the blink of an eye but was actually March through October of '08, something terrible and unprecedented, something only a few saw coming, began to happen, instead. I had ventured out to enjoy the view and found myself in a bucket brigade.
 
I think young families like yours, Jeffrey, do well to limit their exposure to the news, at least to some extent; whatever the emotional climate out there, there is a living to be made and there are babies to be rocked--Life demands some self-preservation of its reproductive generation and I'm all for it. For the sake of the species, please learn just enough about the larger world to make the necessary gross adjustments to conditions and then get on with the job at hand. Concentrate on raising children who take solar panels, wind energy, and locally-grown food as much for granted as their parents take cell-phones, gas stations, and strawberries in November.
 
I sometimes consider dragging out my mats, putting my feet up the wall, spritzing the lavender on my eye pillow, and disappearing into the Yoga Nidra meditation on my iPod. But a funny thing sometimes happens toward the end of our time here: some of us in the aged generation get riveted by imagining the sequel to the movie of Life--the one we won't be here to watch, the one that follows the movie WE found ourselves in and improvised from.  These days, it really is like watching that proverbial train wreck.


We want to do something to make the sequel better.  We do what we do best, naturally.  I'm a professional Warner; just ask my kids.  I've been practicing my entire life to warn you right now about...whatever it is that looms into my view and winds up in my next blog post.  In this case--or, rather, in the next post--it'll be Ron and Rand Paul and the surprising, threatening growth of Libertarianism in America. You're going to need to know about it, if you don't already. 


I like your focus on local needs.  I think it's just right both for managing life with Our Fellow Man and for building a sustainable life, rather than a growth-driven society. I'm probably preaching to the choir or missing the boat or...well, what I meant to say was that I'm convinced that forewarned is forearmed...okay, bad cliche and really AWFUL choice of words!  I'm convinced that the Libertarian movement will grow if it isn't understood and reckoned with. The term LOCAL isn't going to mean the same thing to everyone.


Localism as discussed by Bill McKibben in his book EAARTH is similar to the kind of community I grew up in during the early fifties.  Those were the conditions and the stories that gave rise to my liberalism and they were simpler, more manageable, far more family-friendly times.  And, although we didn't know it, they were the conditions that contained the seeds of the bitter harvest we reap now.  The New Localism will bear similarities to Fifties America, but it will be different in ways that you and I can't imagine yet, beyond some hopes and wishes...a localism that not even McKibben is willing to draw in detail.  It will be a wised-up localism.   It will not be, I feel fairly certain, the kind of laissez-faire localism that the Libertarians imagine.  


McKibben has written on the Libertarians,

I’m not a libertarian, because I think they’ve conflated “human nature”—their sense of the individual über alles—with the effects of the last couple hundred years of consumer society. I think humans are at their best when they’re social creatures; that’s why I’m a Methodist, not a Randian. But I don’t disdain libertarianism, nor conservatism. How could any environmentalist, who at heart is interested in maintaining as much as possible of the world we were born into? But each day that they remain in sly and subtle opposition to scientific fact draws them further into intellectual disrepute. It’s been a tough couple of years for laissez-faire ideology—Alan Greenspan pretty much dumped Ayn Rand overboard when he told Congress earlier this year that his worldview had been “flawed.” But at this rate, it’s going to be a tough geological epoch too—for all of us.

 And, lo!, I am launched on that next blog post before I've even finished this one.  This is not what I thought I'd be doing in retirement. I'm not really politically savvy enough to be weighing in with the heavy hitter blogs. I contribute my mite, and not without a lot of apprehension.  I was all set to gaze deeper into the Lotus, to join the Ocean, to tend my own garden. Instead, I find myself trying to have the courage to keep seeing the whole, ugly parts and all. I'm not very good at it, but, as the yogi would say, I can't stop until I do.

Jeffrey Johnson, Red Herring Illustration

Rock your precious little children with my warmest blessing.  Drop in here from time to time.  Visit the folks in my Blogroll.  Some of us are Warners, some are Scientists, some are Writers, some are scared and most are funny.  All of us want to help you.  Many of us are your web-local elders, and we love you because you are us...as we were and as it shall be.


Peace, honey.