Freedom
Ignazio Silone
Freedom is not a thing you can receive as a gift. One can be free even under a dictatorship on one simple condition, that is, if one struggles against it. A man who thinks with his own mind and remains uncorrupted is a free man. A man who struggles for what he believes to be right is a free man. You can live in the most democratic country in the world, and if you are lazy, callous, servile, you are not free, in spite of the absence of violence and coercion, you are a slave. Freedom is not a thing that must be begged from others. You must take it for yourself, whatever share you can.
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i�had an argument with a friend at a party on friday nite, who told me that he only votes when he is strongly opposed to something. WTF?! not only did this incense the poli sci major in me, but it also made me rather depressed. cos i think this is a common sentiment… at least, the idea of “letting the leaders handle it” is a popular feeling in our country. people think that “democracy” lets us off the hook… when, in fact, i think democracy only makes us *more* responsible to fight for our beliefs and struggle to uphold justice and truth (i know i’m not alone here). �it sickens me when i think about what a lazy bastard our country is… a massive, doltish ogre that smashes up any obstacle in its way and seeks only to satisfy its needs… and we just sit and smile and feel lucky to live the American Way.
in other news, it was a nice looong weekend with *two* VIPs:� seth woods and ryan dohoney. it was heavenly to see them both, and too soon to see them go. sigh. weekends like this make me want to run my own b&b so my friends can come and visit and it’s like, my business to host them!
in response to your saying…”i had an argument with a friend at a party on friday nite, who told me that he only votes when he is strongly opposed to something. WTF?! not only did this incense the poli sci major in me, but it also made me rather depressed.”…here is a rather long quote. “It is a simple enough matter to level the whole of existence down to the idea of the State or to the concept society. If one does that one can no doubt also mediate; for in this way one does not come to the paradox at all, to the single indivisual’s as such being higher than the universal, which i can also put pointedly in a proposition of Pythagoras’s, that the odd numbers are more perfect than the even. Should one happen to catch word of an answer in the direction of the paradox in our time, it will no doubt go like this: ‘That’s to be judged by the outcome.’ A hero who has become the scandal to his generation, aware that he is a paradox that cannot be understood, cries undaunted to his contemporaries: ‘The future will show I was right!’ This cry is heard less frequently nowadays, for as our age to it’s detriment produces no heroes, so it has the advantage that it also produces few caricatures. Whenever nowadays we hear the words ‘That’s to be judged by the outcome’ we know immediately with whom we have the honour of conversing. Those who speak thus are the populous tribe which, to give them a common name, I shall call them ‘lecturers’. They live in their thoughts, secure in life, they have a permanent position and sure prospects in a well-organized State; they are seperated by centuries, even millennia, from the convulsions of existience; they have no fear that such things could happen again; what would the police and the newspapers say? Their lifework is to judge the great, to judge them according to the outcome. Such conduct in respect of greatness betrays a strange mixture of arrogance and pitifulness, arrogance because they feel called to pass judgement, pitifulness because they feel their lives unrelated in even the remotest manner to those of the great. Surely anyone with a speck of erectior ingenii [nobility of mind] cannot become so completely the cold and clammy mollusc as to lose sight altogether, in approaching the great…” in my lifetime i have not seen one politician a hero. some have come close in certain events , but the landslide of honor, compassion and diginity have certainly piled at the bottom of the mountain. i don’t presume that i have the capacity to judge a politician fit. for i have only been lied to before. even if i was to finally believe enough in a canidate i can only assume now that the results of the election will be milaciously changed. so i no longer look to the state for answers, because the only answers that are given are hollow attempts to appease me and my concerns. i have to agree with your friend.