Sacrifice

One of my favorite movies is Thin Red Line.  There is a scene where Sean Penn asks Jim Caviezel “what difference do you think you can make, one man in all this madness?”

The answer, of course, is to sacrifice himself for others.  To die nobly.

I ask myself: how can we possibly stop this madness?  These tens of millions of people, many young, bred to hate, bred for slogans, bred to obey orders, bred to crap on people, bred to hurt them.  These millions of people, filled with fear, filled with confusion, unfit for liberty, unfit for maturity, unfit for anything like a dignified life, unfit for a future, merely a perennial Present.

And I think of all the ways I can die.  Thomas More was given a noble death, because in the era of kings, they still believed in nobility.  But we live in an era of dogs.  Dogs tear their prey apart, and scatter it.

But, perhaps worse, we live in the era of humanity, of humanity at its worst, in aggregate.  Humans like to torture their enemies, to make them bleed, make them plead, make them hurt.

There is nothing I can do to guarantee I won’t die on my knees.  I know this.  But what I CAN do, what is in my control, is to consecrate my spirit to nobility.  If it is taken from me, there was a spark for a moment, for a brief moment.  I moved towards what was best in me, and what is best in all of us.

I feel the currents of emotion under the public waves more than most.  I trust in the decency of most people, but I do not trust in their intelligence.  Most people are easily misled, and misleading is what our political apparatus, our universities by and large, and substantially all our media exist at the moment to do.  All our problems could be fixed overnight, if truth were simply told reliably.  But it isn’t.  Lies fill the air, everywhere.

I believe I am going to start referring to our media as the Fascist Media, in aggregate.  There are exceptions–I am a big Tucker Carlson fan–but most of them would be making Goebbels proud.  As he rightly understood, the propaganda is not even in the telling of lies.  He tried to include relevant facts in everything he did.  The lie is in the interpretation, the meaning of Jim Acosta, for example, more or less flipping Donald Trump off to his face, then screaming he is being suppressed when the President–or the Secret Service, on his behalf–responds appropriately.

And the lie, of course, is in the omission.

My rebellion, I am convinced, needs to consist in me becoming the best version of me I can.  The rest is up to Fate.  Maktub.