Finding purpose in
...in Love and War
Elisha Maldonado
Issue date: 5/12/09 Section: Opinion
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Each time I began, I quit, telling myself it was of no use. The youth are deaf, too plugged in to their gadgetry to hear. And if they don't care, why should I? Just let them perish in their indifference, I said as I wrote you off.
But saying I don't care would be a lie.
I care too much to not say anything, to not write to you, to not entreat you to wake and to act.
I hope that you won't mind, and will permit me once more, to refer to Václav Havel, for it was he who worded best my thoughts in his 1993 "Summer Meditations," a memoir written while he was president of the Czech Republic.
Writing as he grappled with the challenges of political change, he "affirms his belief in politics motivated by moral responsibility; in an economy tempered by compassion; and in the central roles of art and culture in the transformation in society."
He wrote: "Criminality has grown rapidly, and the familiar sewage that in times of historical reversal always wells up from the nether regions of the collective psyche, has overflowed into the mass media, especially the gutter press.
"But there are other, more serious and dangerous symptoms. Hatred among nationalities, suspicion, racism, even signs of fascism, politicking, an unrestrained, unheeding struggle for purely particular interests, unadultered ambition, fanaticism of every conceivable kind, new and unprecedented varieties of robbery, the rise of different mafias, and a prevailing lack of tolerance, understanding, taste, moderation, and reason."
I could not agree more. It doesn't matter that the context in which he was speaking was about a communist, totalitarian state because, well, what we have here in America isn't proving much better. He is reminding us, warning us, of the morally degrading, downward slope we are on.
And the best part is that it's all ours. Bequeathed to us from those up top. The ones making the choices. The ones holding the power. The Big Brothers.
I wrote in an earlier missive that, as collegians, as the youth of this generation, we hold the power to change the face of the world.
Our generation can choose to give our power over to the thinkers (and doers), or we can choose to be thinkers (and doers), and make our mark. To lose your power is simple: do nothing.
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