Letter to a friend

Let me begin by saying, you’re not the only one on that ship. I would like to blame a good part of this on the governing administration, but it goes deeper than that. All of the people that I consider good friends are at a place, where too much is wrong, and they just cannot continue sticking their heads in the sand like nothing is wrong, with good conscience.

We are the members of a really fucked up culture, and I feel like it is incumbent upon us to make the change. But I don’t know where to begin. I find that I am so pissed at so much all of the time. The administration is a given. But breaking it down, and starting on a very personal level and broadening to the global scope, there are recurring themes. And I truly believe that it can be categorized by two emotions. Fear and Love.

My family is a perfect example of what I am pissed about on a personal level. You know most of my siblings. They are all smart people. Not one of them is outraged about the state of the world. They are busy raising their kids and as long as their little bubble is not shattered, they don’t give a flying fuck about anything or anyone else. We were all raised by the same people so I don’t understand where their apathy comes from.

I guess being from the white upper middle class, you don’t have to worry about much, unless you decide to go looking for it. That however is a really trite answer for a really complex question, and I am tired of people living their lives with platitudes that they either:
Do not believe in
Refuse to recognize all of the ramifications that go along with their decisions (lack of accountability)

It was interesting Mike and Sarah came to visit, and once you had removed them from their environment of their children and their jobs, they had no idea how to relate to people. They could not even answer simple questions like, what do you want to do. They relinquished all control. Maybe some of that was, they really had no idea. But I think a part of that is a prevalent attitude in America. If you let other people decide what it is that you are going to do, if you have a bad time or something does not go exactly as planned, you have someone to blame it on. No one ever chalks it up to, well we tried that and we wont be doing that again. We are so used to being lied to and not being held accountable for our actions. It has become so ingrained into our minds that I don’t think most people are even aware of what they are doing. Think about your friends, and among them at least one of them is one of these people, whom, when asked what do you want to do, they say they don’t care, but when someone offers up an idea, they say no, yet they never counter it with an idea of their own. Too many of us spend our life in react mode instead of acting, and seizing the responsibility that goes along with that control, or freedom or choice or whatever verb you would like to insert here.

Moving outward into the social structure that I am most familiar with, I find it to be so tedious and vapid and boring and all about posturing. So many gay men have had retarded adolescence, and after finding a social network in which they are accepted, they don’t move forward. They revert back to seventh grade and recreate that social hierarchy that caused them so much grief and made them doubt themselves as human beings, except they are no longer the ones on the outside looking in. Really it is seventh grade all over, with credit cards.

Revisionism on a micro level.

But isn’t that what most things are about on a global stage? Trying to rewrite the history books? Trying to change, what we think peoples perceptions of us are. We have no control over other people. Let alone what we perceive as their perceptions. We have even less control over what has happened in the past. Yet we use that as driving motivation for our present actions. So the question has to be asked. What primal instinct is being sated:
If we think we know what someone else is thinking
If we feel that we are being accepted by them

Why do we care so much about something that is so out of our control? Is this the human condition? Or is that the only way that we are capable of viewing our perception of our own frailties and shortcomings. Is it all an exercise in futility?

One of the best things I like about about being a gay man, is that since we are not even acknowledged by the status quo, we don’t have to try and attempt to hit those milestones, which everyone measures whether you are living a worthwhile life. But so many gay men want to model their lives after hetero people once they have coupled off and are ready to settle down. I don’t think many people are aware of the box that they allow themselves to be contained in, let alone trying to live outside of it.

I am really sick of the indifference. I am so tired of everyone being so afraid. Did you see Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind? The overwhelming message that I brought away from that movie, was allow yourself some compassion. You did not know. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with not knowing. Most of the smart, educated people I know have crafted irony as a defense mechanism. God forbid they should actually express an actual opinion about what they feel. No one ever expresses anything that someone might hold them to task for somewhere down the line. When did it become a crime to actually feel something and have the resolve to actually follow through on that emotion? For all of the communication devices that we have access to it is amazing how little is actually said. I think there is truth to the statement that we can never really know what goes on in the soul of another man. However that should not preclude us from trying to figure out or trying to express to those around us what it is that we would like at this moment in time. And it is a constant struggle to be yielding enough to hear what others are saying that they need. But we are so occupied trying to figure out what other people are thinking about what we are doing that we forget to check in with ourselves and see what we think about what we’re doing.

What I think western culture has not fully comprehended, is deep pride. Obviously pride, like anything for that matter, gone unchecked is a huge stumbling block. But we have been indoctrinated into a culture that views pride as a sin instead of a virtue. Black. White. Why do we limit ourselves to only those options? Life’s rich pageant comes in so many shades of gray and I refuse to have someone else legislate how I experience life.