PISH-POSH FROM MY VIRTUAL SPACE 

He was ready to admit that his political thought was a mere whimper in the temper of the time. He had counted three, distinct "tempers of the time" since he discovered himself as a political animal in his teen years. The first was the temperment of critique and liberation based on the collapse of authority and the apparent fracturing of the body politic; then a scary embracing of the irrational. This temper was followed by malaise and stagnation; a sense of helplessness, and, finally, the return to the foundations of money, family, and religious faith.

"What is the temper now?" he mused to himself.

There were positive and negatives up and down the temper of the time. Certainly, the awareness of destruction of the environment was a positive thing and the increase in the democratization of the culture but the negative included a collapse of disipline, fracturing of the body politic, alienation. The positive was reflection and questiong of American values. The negative was withdrawal, anomie, desperation. The postiive was a solidarity that has been lacking for 20 years or so, therefore, a kind of rehabilitation of the individual. The negative was an unleashing of greed that undermined the foundations.

All he could do was take the reality as it passed through him in his development and then re-form it according to his sense of wisdom. "Devil take the hindmost!" he thought, wondering where such a fine cliche had come from.

"It's a goddang monster of a society," the man was saying. "All these odd creatures organized pretty decent but filled with nastiness ready to burst out at any moment."

He listed down the few things that characterized the society.

1. Speed of things
2. Separateness of things
3. Necessity of capital
4. Politicization of the citizens
5. Breakdown of infrastructure and services
6. Drugs and violence
7. Sex for mass marketplace
8. Family problems
9. Over-population
10. Pursuit of happiness

Only an inexperienced, naive, or malicious person would say it was all bad. Or that everything was coming apart or that everything was breaking down.

Even in the cities he found more stability than chaos.

However, every individual went from the sense of protection to a sense of vulnerability where they spotted the fragile nature of things; where they saw their own nature as limited.

"Ah, many myths emerged from the confluence of these states!"

It was during the transition states that the male in the female and female in the male came to be highlighted in the individual person. Then, the process of regaining a sense of swimming towards the islands of stability, sober and experienced, now.

He quickly reviewed the various circles he'd traveled in: First was the family, the second was the peer group, the third was the ambiguous aspirations or collective dreams of the generation. And then a series of branches that didn't make any sense to him but which were real and part of his passage through the democratic life: Down and out artists, folks, working mothers, unattached young females, activists, bureaucrats, elitist intellectual cliques, musicians who retire at an early age into the mountains, riff-raff, stay-at-home thieves, dope brokers, unattached middle-aged women who still harbor a passionate heart, college students on the make, educated individuals foundering in affluence and bad jobs, the insane, the suicidal, the ad nauseum.

There were, he reasoned, finer circles to travel in. But then, there were worse ones. After all, life had decided to be this way and tomorrow it would decide to be another way. "Accept all the manifestations," a woman in a dream told him.

On reflection he came to the conclusion that alienation was the most dangerous quality for the democracy. Alienation allowed for no credibility to the "process" or "system" so that the individual was forced to assume the burden of the whole. When, in a healthy state, it was the political system that should assume the burden of problems. The citizen should be turned into a problem-solver.

The process of assuming problems and then transferring them to the state or system was a significant one for any generation to learn.

When the problems leapt out and onto the hypothetical citizen he thought evil magicians were using the mind as a conduit to their darker purposes. He could laugh now. But, still, there seemed something sinister about it, a robbery of all that was young and innocent.

How to capture the problem and yet remain effective?

The citizen acting on the local level appeals to the democratic conscience. Acting on a grand scale, on the actual working of things, appeals to the democratic ambition.

The country was built up out of regions. It was far more dynamic than any dogma could capture. The right, left, and fundemtalist captured fear to use it and try to gain power which, he recognized was an old, primitive ploy always defeated in a healthy culture.

© 2003 David Eide. All rights reserved.