It has been increasingly difficult to maintain this blog
over the last year. For the first
eight months of 2012, I was overwhelmingly busy with my theater life. Other than the summer event of the
siding, there was little of note to report on the house. It’s easy to understand how blogging
would fall Life's in priorities. But more than anything, I think it may have been
the bizarre course of the presidential election that took its toll on my will
to write. The lunacy of that
misbegotten group of candidates, the seemingly unending series of freak shows
called ‘debates’ - drained my will
to believe there was anything to write about. The ugliness, the name-calling, the bigotry and the sheer
idiocy from a “party” that is not an actual Party at all left me wondering who
we are and by extension who I am and so made me wonder did I want to be who we
are and do I want to be who I am.
I have lately come to realize that it has become more and
more difficult for me to know what is going on in the world – more difficult to
discern fact from fiction or real news from propaganda. One glance over to that party that is
not an actual Party tells me I am not alone in this. We may all be suffering the consequences of a failure of
real information in The Information Age.
It is all too exhausting.
The cynicism and duplicity of the GW Bush administration made it easy to
doubt our future and to lose hope in what we all thought we stood for. We could be forgiven for believing in
the hope and change promised in the election of 2008. But the ignorance and lies and misinformation/disinformation
coming from the Right for the past two years have nearly drained me of my ability to articulate my
thoughts and impressions of the world we live in. Indeed,
it’s all pretty much drained me of my will to care about the world; drained me
of my interest to know about the world; nearly drained me of my will to be in
the world. And then there was
Newtown. And then the spectacular
displays of idiocy that followed.
Aforementioned idiocy in only one of its many forms
Save us.
And today the President said it out loud: "We cannot mistake
absolutism for principle, or substitute spectacle for politics, or treat
name-calling as reasoned debate."
and "... preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires
collective action."
Thank you.
While we are still in the first month of the New Year, let
me embrace a fresh start. Let the
President’s speech today do its job.
Let me be affected by it.
Of course the speech was supremely tailored rhetorically but
nevertheless, it asked us all to aspire to what I hope we would all aspire to –
compassion, shared responsibility, equality for ALL. Let me take on my own responsibility then in this - I will
hit the snooze button on my cynicism and disinterest in all things outside
myself. I will try to again enter
the world and engage.
I know I cannot save the world. Maybe it is enough to let the world save me.
