Damn straight. In my own life I realized that I didn’t have to be great, but I did have to stop being ashamed. I don’t try to live to anyone else’s standards but my own anymore – and you know what? It makes you a lot happier.
The people who “lead” our country and “represent” us need to set their own standards – and they damn sure need to start setting them a lot higher than capitulation to an administration that wants to spy on us so they can control the political scene in this country, that wants to use the justice department as a freaking political tool.
I want my America back, dammit. I want it NOW. To hell with this farce that is costing us our rights and liberties – to hell with it.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot, about the ready-made excuses we all have for not doing what we know, deep down, we should be doing. I’ve got them myself, you know? I can’t call that person back, I’m too tired. I don’t have time to volunteer for that place, I have … important television to watch, or I need time for myself or my family … to eat things and not talk about politics with them, or I can’t commit to one more thing … because there’s a God-imposed limit of three, and what I really need is more time to sleep … because that’s totally what I want on my fucking tombstone, “she was very well-rested.”
I mean, we all have reasons we can’t be the people we know we should be, and we know they’re true because we spend that hour between 3 a.m. and 4 a.m. staring into the vodka shot that’s finally gonna knock us out telling ourselves that they’re true. Giving ourselves the courage to have no courage at all, because that inner voice is strong in us, the one that says, “Be more than this.” That voice is loud and it’s insistent and it’s a pain in the ass, and there’s not much most of us won’t do to drown it out just so we can have some fucking peace for once.
We all have reasons not to listen, and we all have stuff we throw out to get in the way, like the chase scene in an action movie, where guys are chucking stuff out of a van to create an obstacle course so the bad guys can’t catch them, like a desk and a big stuffed giraffe and shit. We all have all this stuff we put in the way of what we know we’re supposed to be doing, and the only breakthroughs that ever really happen to people are when the bullshit just suddenly stops working, and the excuses stop being enough, and the voice gets loud enough that we actually start listening to it for once. I’ve never had a religious conversion but I had someone explain it to me that way once, that her particular deity just sat her ass down one day and said, “Look, quit fucking around.”
And what we hear from our leaders lately is a lot of excuses, a lot of reasons why they can’t be the people we elected them to be. The Republicans will attack me. It’s too hard. Where’s the money going to come from? That’s not politically achievable. I need my powder dry for something else down the road. My constituents wouldn’t like that. Or this. Or another thing. They’ve thrown all this stuff out in the road, all this stuff they’ve told themselves is true about how they can’t be the people they know they should be and believe me, they know it, they wouldn’t be there if they didn’t, about how it’s the money, or the influence, or something else holding them back. Because if it’s outside factors, then it’s not that they’re failing. It’s not their fault. They can go home and be okay with the man in the mirror, they can sleep fine tonight.
And it’s not that far removed, really, from the wingnuts who sit on their couches and pretend it’s the women and minorities who are the reasons they can’t get good jobs or get laid. It’s all just stuff they’ve told themselves, conventional wisdom about not defying the president, stuff that’s only true because it’s been repeated long enough to sound like something that makes sense. It’s bullshit, all of it, and it’s exhausting, and sometimes I don’t know how they don’t get tired of it. It is tiring, throwing all that stuff out of the van into the road, it’s just as time-consuming to make up stories about how you don’t suck as it would be to not suck in the first place, so on balance, why not try not sucking for a while?
Because when you do throw out all those excuses, all those oh-so-acceptable reasons for behaving like muddleheaded spineless douchebags — I don’t have time, I have a family, I have a mortgage, I’ve gotta explain it to my district, I need this, I need that, me me me me me — and actually put yourself out there to do what you know you need to do? That’s how every glorious, God-given, leap-forward moment in anybody’s history ever happens. That’s how anybody does anything great, that’s the thing. It’s never that some new idea occurs to them that they’ve never thought of before. It’s that they stop making excuses and start acting like they knew they should have been acting all along.
I get this question a lot in my offline life and I’ll bet, in the face of the outrage of a lot of Democrats this morning congressional Dems will be asking it too: What was I supposed to do? In the face of all my excuses, what was I supposed to do? In the face of all the stories I tell myself about how I’m beaten down and the victim of a system that makes me a failure and the things I know are true for no other reason than I just know them, what was I supposed to do?
What are you supposed to do? You know the answer to that already. You’ve been trying to avoid it and shut it up for years. What are you supposed to do? You’re supposed to do what you’re supposed to do. You’re supposed to do what you wish you could do. You’re supposed to stand up when standing up is called for, and stop kidding yourself that you don’t know when that is. You’re supposed to stop being afraid of your own shadow, and of all the shadows you invent, and make your life mean something. You’re supposed to imagine yourself explaining to your children, when they come home with the book open to your time on this earth, to your opportunity, and say, “What did you do then?” You’re supposed to have an answer for them that doesn’t involve, “I had to pay my bills on time” or “I had to get re-elected.”
You’re supposed to be great instead of being ashamed.
Schmucks.
One Response
Wow. I’m with you. It’s a rough, frustrating road but we have to keep going.