We Know What We Feel

Dear Kate,

Politics and religion do not make good bedfellows, and thus the separation of church and state, we all know that.

But why?  Because both are too controversial for civil conversation?  Sure--but aren't we civilized enough to know a dialog between two people, an interlocution, is meant to involve disagreement and learning from our differences?

I think one big reason is that politics and religion are both incorrigible adulterers, serial traitors.

Betraying whom?  Ideals.  Beauty that is more beautiful than we wish it to be.  Goodness better than what we dare it even in our life's bravest moments.  Truth we can allow to be true, but only to a certain degree, so long as it doesn't cross a certain threshold, drop beneath a certain bottom line, the certainty of the certain degree we must observe, but the degree itself could and would certainly vary, from one generation to the next, one demographic to another, a day's headline against the lines on our forehead drawn by our next preoccupation.

Can't you hear it?  When you need to say something "political" or "religious," you know there's a voice at the back of your head telling you what everybody can frankly hear, that you are full of shit?

Sins of our fathers and mothers drop our jaws and roll our eyes, like they are aliens with an outer-space morality so barbaric that it's a miracle they could give birth to such a much superior species like ours truly.  Like, residential school? cultural genocide?  How did they even dream that crap up?

Then came the heatwave, a predicament that asks for no deliberation, only deliverance, and we, without much thought--Why think when you can feel the truth?--cranked up our energy consumption to match the record-breaking temperature pound for pound, because...Why not???  Why not do what I want if the infrastructure is there to sustain my comfort, for which I have paid a dear dollar and more than a few mighty sweats to earn my keep?  If this heat is here for a week, we would call our energy consumption craze infatuation, a one-night-stand, a what-the-hell-just-came-over-me? lapse in our otherwise state-of-the-art moral judgment.  But if this heat is to stay, for a month, for a season, and to repeat itself next year, we would call our energy demand a "lifestyle," a "new normal," an "is-your-air-conditioner-wifi-enabled?" cosmic camaraderie.

As we think--we feel--the heatwave pushing our lives to the limit of our endurance, are we considering how this world, our "togetherness," is now facing two related planetary challenges that threaten to drive billions of lives to the brinks: climate change and the global energy crisis?  If we are truly moral, we would been doubly aware and stay thrice as vigilant against our thoughtless felt needs.  The more reason to let go of beauty, the more we would give to preserve and make it flourish.  The worse my heart says Yes to selfish desires, the better my resolve to offer the peace of a No, firm and gentle.

We are all traitors, adulterers, much more shamelessly than our fathers and mothers, rocking an easy chair that we don't even know how it's built.  That superiority we feel, not incidentally, is built on the authority of our ungratefulness, ignorance, and laziness--and, that, too, we know nothing about.  Don't want to.  They earned it; we spend it.

You can see why we can never go deep into any talk of politics or religion; it's like walking into a land mine of bullshit detectors, having things we don't want to know about blowing up in our face.  Get to the point and quickly leave it, if you must talk politics.  Flip the burger and see if you can see the face of Mary carrying Jesus on the other side.  Stay frivolous in your words and deeds, stick to doctrines, especially those that work in your favor, don't test people's patience and generosity and cross those scared thresholds or try to carry them to seek beneath those nonnegotiable bottom lines.  Being inconsequential is the key, skillful always in diverting the best of our glorious humanity to the next dizzy distraction and call it a project, an errand, a hobby, a team-building endeavor, a coming-together-and-getting-to-know-you share of life.

No, I don't want to know you.  People fight when they can't let go of vision of glory in each other.  I only want to know what I want to believe about you.  The best quality I can see in a person is for me to say, with a smirk, a scorn, a sigh, "Oooooh, you are just like the rest of us...and now I am feeling better about myself."

Sorry for wasting your evening.

Yours, Alex