Content from a letter to Sarah #5

7/28/09
I have been meaning to finish this for awhile.  I also couldn't think of how to start it.  So, here is the final part of the initial life story I started out with.  I wrote this before a bunch of the other letters I sent.

After high school... I was lucky enough to get into Brown University where I majored in Anthropology. It introduced me to lots of other cultures and way of thinking about the world; I really couldn't get enough of it. While I was there I helped rebuild the student activist left after it collapsed the semester before I arrived (some huge fight between factions of a grand anti-war coalition that caused most of the active people to stop being active). Being in activist groups was probably the best and most meaningful educational experience I got at college. We built a strong community and managed to get a few victories too. I saw such inspirational dedication and courage from my friends, willing to suffer arrest and harassment from the authorities. (I think I told you this part already, but I will leave it in anyway) Our most awesome victory was with financial aid. Now anyone attending Brown whose family makes less than 60,000 doesn't have to take out loans. I am still active with Students for a Democratic Society (sds), and our national democratic and accessible education campaign. After I graduated I moved to California, because the job market is non-existent in Kentucky, my brother is out here, and a bunch of my friends moved here. The job search took me to Tikkun Magazine where I landed a job as Rabbi Michael Lerner's assistant. He is the editor and has a very appealing vision for a better world. It is a good job, I get to build my skills in alot of random areas, and read and make corrections to the magazine before it goes to print.  But it is very time-consuming.

So that is the short history of my life.  Looks like it is only like 25-ish pages.  I think i might have the beginning of an auto-biography :)

Lets see... what else did I want to talk about.  Ah yes, generosity.  So, as people are my purpose (and indeed, i think people are the meaning of life), being generous to others is very much my MO.  Like excessive generosity.  I think it makes people uncomfortable sometimes, how generous I want to be toward them.  It is one reason that I have acquired 5 mattresses over the past year.  I want to have places for people to sleep, especially my friends who lack a job and a place to live.  My friend Jacob might come stay on one of these beds while he looks for a job.  Liz is staying with us right now. Elisabeth stayed with us while she looked for a place to live.  Sidney stayed with us for like 6 months.  It is very important to me to have space for people to stay if they need to.

  

But back to generosity.  I think it is incredibly important to give, and give often.  It is the glue that holds society together, giving.  It makes everyone feel good, it helps people who need help, it promotes and maintains robust reciprocal relationships (which are by far the most evolutionarily stabilizing kind of relationships for people to have).  Giving just makes everything better.  I have gotten to the point where I always keep an eye out for someone I can give to.  (I think I already explained that I have qualms that I am not actually helping homeless people when I give them money... feeding addictions and so on.  If I ever have food on me when I am asked, I always offer that)  There is a passage in "The Prophet" about how the true believers in life give without thought of joy seeking or moral virtue, and give all of the little they have.  I try to aspire to this, although I fail.  I am always on the search for someone to give to.  The search is almost as fun as the giving.  

Much of my thinking on generosity has been shaped by the short paragraphs that are written in "The Prophet."  I have come to see giving as an essential part of life, something that is so inherent in what it means to live that to not give would be like half-living.  I think that is why I have never been a money seeker, it always seemed burdensome and much like a living death... a death of the soul.  Maybe that is too harsh... maybe it is more of an oppression and silencing of the soul.  

The Prophet section on generosity that has stuck in my head for years is "all you have shall one day be given."  I wish more people could intuitively get that (including myself).  I want to bring into question the whole concept of property, because it seems to me like an embodiment of the negative aspects of individualism.  Keeping things from other people for fear you will go without... it is utterly illogical and only "works" (if you can call it that... maybe functions in a semi-predictable manner is a better way to phrase it) when everyone does it, like in American mainstream culture.  I never ever want to be rich.  That is an oppression I have the power to avoid, and so I shall. There was a sign on a wall in one of the buildings at Friends Camp that was quoting a song.  It went "it's a gift to be simple, it's a gift to be free, it's a gift to come down to where we aught to be."  I love that.  I want to live a simple life, to share my little wealth with people, and to live in a supportive caring community.  In my mind, that is the logical outcome of generosity, if everyone were to take it up.  

Oh, there is a great song by Johnny Cash called "Man in Black."  Aside from being a great melody, it has fantastic lyrics.  This one has particularly stayed in my head:

"I wear the black for those who never read,

Or listened to the words that Jesus said,
About the road to happiness through love and charity,

Why, you'd think He's talking straight to you and me." 

The road to happiness IS through love and charity.  I am so happy when I am allowed to give.  It has made my life so fulfilling and rich in so many ways.  I think that is why like 5 years ago I wrote this statement: "The generous life is the happy life" 

My freshman year of college, I really confronted the fear of not living up to my potential and discovered a way to deal with it in a very good way. (btw, I have always fancied my life's work as activism.) Whenever I am afraid that I am not being effective, I think to myself that I have helped lots of people, and even inspired a few.  The MOST important thing I can do to make this world a better place is to be good to the people around me and try to make their lives better.  That is the social change I want, that is the life's message I want to embody.  We may idolize people who lead mass movements, but it is not them that made the change, it is us.  Small groups of people, doing to each other what they thought was right, that is how things are always done.  A few years after deciding this, I discovered an amazing quote by Thomas Merton: "In the end, it is the reality of personal relationship that saves everything." 

Attached to that quote, is another amazing quote, here it is: "Do not depend on the hope of results. You may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. You gradually struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationship that saves everything."   I love Thomas Merton, I visited the Monastery he lived at when he was alive.  He died in 1968, like so many of our prophets.  

So yeah, when I worry I am not living up to my potential, I remember that what really counts is how I live my life and how I impact those around me. Doing that is accomplishing something for humanity, probably the most important thing anyone can do.

That reminds me of a story... the winter after I reached this conclusion, I was walking with my high school friend Ben, talking politics.  He was just turning lefty at that point in his life. And I think he was a bit overwhelmed at the impossibility of the problems we are confronted with.  In his despair he asked something like "but what can we do, what should we do."  So I gave him this answer, about treating others well as being the most important thing.  I think I took him aback, because after I explained it, the convo kind of died.  I think it fits in very well with his brand of Catholicism.  

Hmmm... I looked through some of the old letters I wrote to you, and I need to talk about feminism.  I feel very lucky that my Mom was such an amazing ethics teacher, she imbued me from a very early age with a feminist outlook.  She put alot of emphasis on treating everyone equally (no matter gender, race, sexual orientation, etc.), and would consistently correct my language usage when I said gender-specific things that should be gender-neutral, like fireman or policeman.  She told me to say Firefighter or police officer.  That is one of hundreds of examples of the way she taught me to challenge the status quo and try to live by a feminist set of values.  I think it is because of her (and my Dad, too, but I think my Mom spent more time doing it) that it is my default setting to treat people with as much respect as possible.  She helped me notice how women were treated differently (a skill that I have developed alot thanks to activism and collective liberation stuff), and to try to point it out and do something about it.  Noticing gender roles is very important to me, and can disturbing sometimes when I notice it.  Especially when I feel compelled to point it out to conservatives, to whom I am still trying to figure out how to do it in a constructive way.

There are so many ingrained things in our society that are hard to even recognize, much less fight, that I feel very blessed that my Mom started developing my recognition tools very early in my development.

I get quite annoyed at egotistical men who always try to dominate discussions and prove their points.  It really bugs the hell out of me.  And it is really hard to deal with productively in a group setting.  I have seen groups dissolve because of the problems that arise from men doing this.  It is a really selfish thing to do, to push and push your point just because you think you are right and that everyone needs to agree with you.  They really disempower those around them, and make them feel apathetic.  I have seen it in activist groups, in corporations, and in friend groups.  There is probably a corollary with women, but I have not had it destroy my communities in the same way that it has happened with this phenomenon in men.  It is really scary how unaware so many of these men are this effect on others too.  sigh.  

So that is something I fight against.  The communities I have helped build have tended to be supportive and caring and have managed to deal with these issues in a way that has allowed them to survive instead of completely collapsing (which i have seen happen from a distance several times). Brown sds did this about a year and a half after I left. The activist communities in the Bay that I have hung around with have tended to be really cool and aware of these problems.  And for the most part, there aren't any men in them that do this, which has been lovely.  You know, I should really write an article on this and try to get it published. 

For some reason I am reminded of a quote I once heard... this idea has stuck with me powerfully ever since I heard it uttered.  In the context of something that was happening in their family the person said "the greatest sin someone can commit is to intentionally hurt someone else, either physically or mentally."  And I was like yeah!  that is so true.  It seems to me that so many selfish people do this on a daily basis, and it is not only destructive to their communities, it is an oppression unto themselves as well.  See, that is something most people have not yet realized, that the oppressors are greatly harmed by the oppression too.  Doing bad things to people hurts you as well as them.  Freeing the world from oppression frees the oppressors as well.  A large segment of the left does not realize this, they are too overcome with the Us vs. Them mentality.  They believe that through defeating your enemies, you will win.  This set of means is a false prophet.  I do not believe that in defeating your enemies, you win.  Only through mutual freedom can we ever hope to achieve justice.  Winning should be defined as converting your enemies to your cause.  I think Christ grasped that, which is why he told us to love our enemies as ourselves.  Loving our enemies allows us to free ourselves from our egos, and our need to have our beliefs be publicly vindicated as truth... and to act in the best interest of all. It allows us to treat enemies in such a way that they will be forced to cease to consider themselves our enemies.  Atleast, that is the way I see it, and have seen it work.