Tuesday, December 23, 2003
(1:45 AM) | Anonymous:
The situation is entirely hopeless
I must apologize for my long absence of any substantial posts lately. I now know I could never work as an editor because the winter hits me with such debilitating depression that I have trouble forming normal thoughts. I tend to become very pessimistic and operate much like a bipolar person moving from one extreme to the other until spring heals my weary mind. Thankfully Adam and Robb have reclaimed their spots on the journal as level-headed bringers of truth, justice, and the liberal America-hating way.
I will now add my normal pessimistic and much too hopeless assessment of the current state of the world.
My generation, whatever us 20-somethings and younger are, is conservative because they, and me too though I am not conservative, are scared shitless about the future. We also happen to have formed some kind of unholy alliance with those in power and, though these students are the either the majority or control the silent masses, we are starting to control academia by killing it off. We will fight to keep those lives comfortable even if it means losing the world. It is nihilism in the negative sense of that term.
Our comfort, that is to be neither very rich nor poor in our life, is essentially the way we protect ourselves from the lack of meaning in our lives. Finding and maintaining this kind of comfort makes sense when you are a modern nihilist, it follows from this kind of mindset if life has no meaning and you don't really have the passion to kill yourself then you just ride the wave and try not to get bored. This seems to be characteristic of late capitalism; something even Marx fortells in Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, that old Jewish prophet. You find a decent job doing something you don't really like but can deal with, you watch a lot of news that scares you and a lot of reality TV that convinces you that "life is sure funny", if you read you tend to not think about it, you have sex to break up the monotony and though you may have watched American Beauty or gone to church neither really effects the way you live. Our unnoticed despair, our nihilism, is precisely the sickness unto death; we deal with the sickness by bringing death upon all that threatens our despair or nihilism and watch that death on our TV as if it never happened. Death to those who would challenge our comfort even though this eventually means our own death.
"Therefore we proclaim the mystery of faith:
[Say it out loud and say it with me]
Christ has died.
Christ is risen.
Christ will come again." - Book of Common Prayer (Episcopal)
Adam has remarked, and I think accurately, that Christianity seems to offer the answer of speaking up for the oppressed and poor, waiting patiently for someone to kill you after getting pissed off and then hoping for a miracle. That is the mystery of our faith in slightly non-poetic form. There can be no human understanding of hoping in this. Christ, by all accounts of science and reason and good ol' common sense, did not rise and if he is coming back again it sure is taking him a hell of a long time.
Adam is dead on again concerning the Book of Mormon and the Bible. Human beings want to be led, religion is a form of guidance towards some ultimate end and it works a lot better when it is set in stone (or metal or read-only file). Much of what makes the situation hopeless for me is that Jesus hasn't come back and the Church hasn't done anything to act like he is coming. Part of this problem is contemporary Christianity's understanding of religion as such. I will now sum that up in a parody to be heard in proper accent:
"We have this here book that explains exactly what we should do to live a good life. Pretty much we have this grace thing which allows us to sit on our butt and as long as we follow some arbitrary moral guidelines we make it to heaven which I hear is for rich folks. Oh and we should support our conservative leaders cause they are a lot like heaven."
I could use some hope in the form of a smoking gun over Chicago. I hate that it has come to that and I hope some miracle happens but miracles tend to be even worse than smoking guns. We passed up revolution and the only thing left is to kill us all or die trying but the mystery of faith says we will rise again.
