Saturday, April 07, 2007

the harder thing, part 2

Part 1 is here.

In the past month, I have been influenced by the voices of Mel White, Robert MacNamara, Michael Cunningham, NPR, and the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. What's most appalling to me is not the men who mutilated themselves and were institutionalized rather than admitting to same-sex attraction. It's not the similarities of the war in Iraq to Vietnam (I seriously need someone to explain how they aren't alike to me, because similarities are all I see), and it's not the notion that Hurricane Katrina was only a foreshadowing of our future. It's my own - and, as a generation, our collective - apathy about it all. I keep thinking about Auden's poem, mentioned here - "For them it was not an important failure." (About suffering Auden was never wrong.) If these aren't important failures, what is?

It's easy to be angry. It's harder to be motivated out of the monotony of daily life to DO, rather than just to talk. I'm so tired of talking, really I am. I'm ready to do the harder thing.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

do you really think our generation is apathetic...or just afraid?

Stephanie said...

Valerie, I know that the harder thing would be to do something - to be involved in some way, rather than talking about all that's wrong in the world. But what that actually looks like - what I can do - I don't know yet.

I hate to say it, but I think it's apathy. Do you disagree?

Stephanie said...

Brian said something interesting this morning. He thinks that talking (and voting) is what we can do.