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writing for godot

On Heroes

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Written by Jeannette de Beauvoir   
Monday, 02 December 2013 05:46
It seems to be a universal longing – the need to have people to whom we can look for inspiration, for leadership, for guidance: people we can hold up as icons of what we think of as good and right and pure. Ancient tales are filled with stories of feats of prowess and of the subsequent veneration of those who perform them; the cult of the saints in Catholic and Orthodox churches is a clear attempt to recognize ordinary people who have risen above their situations to become extraordinary. Perhaps we hope that, faced with the same adverse conditions, we too would rise to the challenge; perhaps we are simply glad that these people exist. In an often dark and frightening world, heroes serve as the touchstones that assure us that there is some meaning in what often seems like chaos.

We have a plethora of examples from which to choose, depending on what it is that we look for in a hero. I find inspiration and hope in remembering those whose beliefs and challenges are similar to my own and who behaved well when those beliefs were put to the test: Emma Goldman, Lillian Hellman, Dorothy Day. My former spouse, a scientist, looked to those who created something where there had been nothing, individuals who looked at the darkness of their age and made it light: people like Leonardo da Vinci and Isaac Newton. Your heroes are no doubt different; your heroes are people who made a difference in your life, changed your way of thinking, enabled you to dream. That personalization is part of our need for and pursuit of heroes – our heroes are people whose words or actions speak directly to each of us in a very personal and meaningful way.

And that works, don’t get me wrong; it works really well, as long as we keep them – so to speak – on the wall, safely ensconced in books, regarding us from behind glass, unquestioned, venerated. They live in picture frames, in carefully gathered quotations, in holy cards and flashes of images or memories that have been imprinted in our brains and psyches. It’s lovely, and safe, and romantic. And that kind of admiration will continue to work as long as we can create our heroes in our own image, the way we want them to be (think of all the pictures of an insipid and Caucasian Jesus). All we have to do is keep them there. Ignore, refuse to hear anything else.

Because that’s where the problem lies. For as long as there have been idols, those idols have, naturally and predictably, had feet of clay; and the real question is not whether one exists that does not, it’s what happens to our admiration of and respect for our heroes when we are confronted with those feet, with the things we don’t want to see, don’t want to hear, don’t want to know. And it will happen. At some point in our life, at some point on our psychological/spiritual journey, we have to ignore the wizard’s admonition and pay attention to the man behind the curtain. And what happens then?

For my mother, it was simple. When I was sixteen, she found me listening to Joan Baez and told me that it was wrong, “because of her politics.” No uncertainty there.

When I was working on my doctorate at Boston University, a major topic of conversation was the then-recent revelation that former student Martin Luther King, Jr., had plagiarized someone else’s work to complete his doctoral dissertation. No academic action was being contemplated, obviously; but there was a general wave of disappointment and anger throughout the School of Theology. How, asked some people, can we continue to admire him, now that we know this? How can we respect what he subsequently did with his life – with, in point of fact, his doctorate? In other words – How can we love and admire him now that we’ve seen his feet of clay?

Growing up in France, I naturally as well as by inclination have always shared my country’s ongoing love affair with John F. Kennedy. His presidency, I fervently believed, represented in many ways a watershed in American politics; I measured all subsequent politicians of any nationality against his shining example. And then I learned that my hero had, at best, what sociologist Todd Gitlin has called a “poor race policy” – while giving inspiring speeches about civil rights, it turns out that Kennedy’s record on jobs, health benefits, and antipoverty action was discouragingly insensitive. Not to mention his participation in the buildup of the military-industrial complex. Feet of clay? You bet.

I could go on, but you get the point. What’s an admirer to do? Is there anyone we can believe in?

I think that one of the hardest things in life is to separate people–their essence, their soul, if you will–from their behavior, their thoughts, their decisions. I’ve given this issue a lot of thought; I’ve spent most of my literary career, in fact, exploring it. In Legende, my first novel, a whole community turns against two longtime village inhabitants, previously loved and accepted by all, because of the discovery that they were lesbians. In Wings and Flight, an intelligent, loving, and caring individual – a major character in the story arc – is shown to be an active engineer of corporate greed, political manipulations and the instigation of war for profits. In The Illusionist, the protagonist struggles with the meaning of her love for her father once she discovers that he may have played a significant role in the extermination of Jews and dissidents during the second world war.

And that is the point, of course. At some point we have come to believe that to know something or someone is to control it, him, or her. In a frightening and uncertain world, it’s a natural impulse to want to feel in control; and part of that sense of control is the ability to label, to organize, to define that which we encounter. We “know” people or things, and we put them, mentally, into categories, onto shelves, inside boxes. We even give them names, labels, words that control, explain, encapsulate: he’s a Republican, she’s an attorney. “Oh, okay,” you think, “now I know what to expect.” Am I wrong? What’s the first question you ask someone you’ve just met? Ten to one it’s “What do you do?” Subtext: I want to predict your behavior, see if we’re compatible, make judgments about you. I want to fit you in to one of my boxes, put you on one of my shelves. I don’t want to have to think too much about you.

And that makes us feel safe. A world that is polarized into extremes – good and bad, black and white, happy and sad – is a safe world, because it has rules, and rules provide us with the ultimate security: they evoke and prolong childhood. Therapists and sociologists alike note that children need to be provided with rules as they grow up; these rules, boundaries, and limits enable them to know what to expect, to experience an environment that is nurturing, neither arbitrary nor inconsistent; in other words, to feel safe. Why? Because they are too young to understand the complexities of life, because their brains are still developing, because they are ignorant and uneducated and need someone else to take care of them.

Children do need rules. And, small surprise, when they start to grow up, the first thing they do is challenge those rules. It’s a process that is both natural and healthy: part of becoming an adult is realizing that life, taken as a whole, simply doesn’t fit anybody’s rules.

And yet, oddly enough, many of us refuse to accept that fact. We fight the process of growing up, of taking responsibility; we want our world to remain consistent, fair, predictable. The world of our childhood, when everything was good or bad, black or white; life was good then. Life could be that good again, if we could just make all this stuff fit. So we try to make the world, our world of today, fit into our mold; we try to make it conform either to the rules by which we grew up, new ones that we invent for ourselves, or rules imposed by a community (religion, political party, profession) that we join in our quest to conform. And in order to keep ourselves believing that the world we’ve created is in fact reality, we have to show clearly who is us and who is them, who is in and who is out, who is good and who is bad. To keep the fantasy alive, we have to make judgments about other people, we have to condemn those who don’t follow our rules, who don’t accept our version of how things should be, of what people should think, of the way that the world should behave.

And so we fight reality, which is of course the ultimate useless expenditure of energy. What was it that Niebuhr’s prayer said – something about “the ability to accept the things I cannot change”?

Don’t just take my word for it. Read science, read literature, read philosophy, read theology, and you’ll see: the truth is there. We can’t own reality, we can’t predict reality, we can’t change or control or dictate reality. Reality slips through the cracks. Reality is wild, untamed, irrational. Reality defies logic, threatens our assumptions, challenges us to think, to change, to work. Reality encompasses emotions, fantasies, histories, myths, influences, beliefs, desires… and the occasional bit of insanity.

And what reality does in a big way, to come back to my original point, is reveal our chosen heroes’ feet of clay. It’s inevitable. Because there is no other human being on the planet, alive or dead, who will ever conform exactly to your world-view. We are each unique; and that fact entails thoughts, decisions, and choices that, when pursued honestly, will invariably at some point place us in opposition to others. Sometimes, even, to those we love.

Of course, it’s uncomfortable as hell. That’s why so many people spend so much time and energy pretending that it’s not true. They surround themselves with people who think as they do, who reinforce their rules, who need to keep the fantasy alive, who agree to divide the world into us and them: those who think like us (i.e., are right) and those who don’t (i.e., are wrong). George W. Bush, a virtuoso at not seeing what he doesn’t want to see, phrased it best: “If you’re not with us, you’re against us.” Nice. Simple. Clear. Beguiling. Seductive.

I wish he were right. I really do. I wish the world were simple, that the rules would always apply, that there weren’t any ethical dilemmas or complex situations or difficult decisions. I’d love to live in that world. Good and bad. Right and wrong. Follow the rules and everything will be safe, happy, secure. Paint by the numbers and nothing will go wrong.

But the problem is that I live in this world. And so do you. We’ve understood that we had to grow up, that we had to leave the safety of our childhood – with its easy answers – behind with our nursery toys. Like it or not, we live in the real world. A world that doesn’t often make sense. A world where “bad” people do breathtakingly wonderful things and “good” people make bad decisions. A world where good intentions count for a lot but don’t necessarily make things right – where there are no “take-backs.” A world where things aren’t always fair, where actions can have unforeseen consequences, where the unexpected is the only thing you can expect. A world where we live balanced in a fragile comfort that requires us to wear blinders to everything that might challenge that comfort: war, poverty, pain, death. To people who disagree with us. To people who tell us we’re wrong.

And at the end of the day, the energy required to keep those blinders on, to keep that comfort intact, to keep that fairytale in an endless loop in our brains – that energy demands too much. It sucks the life out of us -- all our feelings, all our caring, all our creativity.

There has to be another way to live. And sometimes, when we’re at our brightest and best, we can find it, we can be open to it. I don’t always manage – truth be told, there are people in my life I’d really like to see disappear off the planet – but sometimes I do. For many years my family and I rented a cottage in Falmouth, on Cape Cod. Our landlord, whom we knew for many years, holds views that I found – at the very least – repugnant. When he forwards me emails supporting his position, I delete them. But when we were staying at the cottage – situated directly across the street from our landlord’s residence – we were careful to always back our car into the driveway. We had bumper stickers that clearly stated our position on issues of social concern, opinions that are pretty much the opposite of his; but we saw no reason for him to be constantly confronted with this expression of our beliefs.

But while we didn’t respect his opinions, we respected him. He knew how we felt; we knew how he felt. Had we not had a personal relationship, we might have hurled insults at each other at a demonstration or a red light, written scathing criticisms in an op-ed piece in the paper, even (as so sadly happens frequently) made fun of each other. But the reality is that I really came to love this man, and I knew that he felt the same about me.

When I think about my relationship with Ken, I feel hope. I feel hope because I think that this is the only way humanity is going to survive: through respect. Through cutting each other a little slack, not because our opinions deserve it, but because we – as human beings – deserve it.

I’m going to rephrase this in religious terms – partly because it seems to be the currency of the realm these days, but more importantly because I cannot separate out religious experience from my world-view: as a Catholic, I believe that I was made in the image of God. I don’t always make good decisions, no doubt about that: I can imagine God wincing, sometimes, when I say something thoughtless or do something unkind; but what I read in Scripture is that God knew, all along, that I was going to make bad decisions, change my mind, blunder around, get in trouble. The God I have encountered through experience, through the Scriptures, through the liturgy, and through the community of faith, is a God who challenges me to grow, to do better, to learn from my mistakes. God isn’t wasting time telling me I’m wrong; God is holding up an ideal in front of me and telling me that I should keep trying to reach that ideal. Because God believes that I can.

I was made in the image of God. So were you. So was my Cape Cod landlord. So are certain people I encounter daily and have to live with, people I don’t particularly like. We don’t have to agree with each other, to enjoy each other’s company, to even tolerate each other. We can choose not to engage each other; we can choose to ignore each other, or to argue with each other, or to get frustrated with each other. But what we cannot do is choose to pass judgment on each other, to deny respect to each other – because that is denying respect to ourselves, to God, to life.

So I keep copies of the speeches of Martin Luther King and John Kennedy, and I re-read them and feel encouraged by them, and feel grateful for the good that they did; knowing that they weren’t admirable in other ways doesn’t detract from the importance and goodness of their lives.

Another one of my heroes is one of the saints of my church, Thomas Aquinas, a brilliant scholar who believed fervently that the evolution of humanity as a thinking creature was far from accidental, that using our minds is an integral part of God’s plan. And it is his words that I keep close to myself; his words that I repeat under my breath when I feel a natural human impulse to pass judgment on others’ words or actions. Speaking to one of his students, Aquinas advised, “Remember the good that you hear, and forget who it is who said it.”

Look at the good in everyone around you; listen to what they have to say to you, discard what you don’t need, keep what is valuable. Be irritated, annoyed, even angry when people disagree with you out of ignorance or willfulness. Challenge their opinions or behavior if you think that could be helpful or necessary, but immediately put your differences out of your mind if a confrontation is needless or inappropriate. Remember that we share a common humanity, a humanity filled with goodness and evil, joy and despair, brilliant acts of kindness and incomprehensible acts of cruelty.

Challenge what you see as wrong – not the person who has said it or done it. Don’t forget – at the end of the day, we are a community. We’re all in this together.

Listen: The world is crying out to you. Look around. What do you see? Spousal abuse. Child abuse. Animal abuse, for heaven’s sake – didn’t Gandhi say that a society can be understood by the way it treats its animals? Poverty. Illiteracy. Loss of hope. You can make a difference. You, personally and specifically. Don’t waste your time making yourself miserable by fighting what you don’t want to have happen. It’s happening. The world is not yours to control. But that’s not all there is to it.

Try something different. Just for a day; you can do anything for a day, right? Try this: try not to judge. Hear me: You don’t have to like it. You don’t have to understand. But when your thoughts are running along the lines of, “That’s wrong. He’s sinful. She’s a terrible person,” then try to consciously stop that thought. Right then, before you get angry, before your heartbeat accelerates, before you say a nasty word. Try thinking, “This is a person. He/she is wrong; but never mind. I’m going to think about something else now.”

You are in charge, you know. You can’t control the world around you, you can’t control what anybody else does, or thinks, or says; but what you can control is your thoughts. You can decide to feel angry – or to feel peaceful. You can choose to cling to bad feelings, or to let them go. It’s all up to you.

Be a hero. Focus on living your life well, and leave others’ lives to their consciences. Live so well, so morally, so beautifully, that others will want to be like you, will want to live up to your example, will quote you. Be a hero. You can do it.

Start today.







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