Thursday, February 13, 2014



                                                      The Unexamined Life


It's hard, I think, to be happy with reality when you are an American watching the Olympics.  Because, sometimes, the Americans don't win; and that can make for a sullen, dispiriting,
nearly unbelievably bad time.  Say you are watching those muscularly immaculate young men ski and there's a guy from the Netherlands, a guy from Germany, a guy from The U.S., a Dutch guy and a guy from Japan.  And, of course, they're all great.  And you're an American.

Who ya gonna root for?

Well, okay, why not?  Root for your country, right?  Right.  Now, though, say the American doesn't have the speed or the stamina this time and - oops - not a chance. He's out.  Now, watch what your brain does. It starts bashing it's way through its neural library shelves, deciding with alarming speed, who's next.  Who do you root for next?

At this point, do I think you are a free thinker, capable of making an entirely free choice?

Uh-uh.  No, I don't.

I think whatever it is your going to think, whoever it is you're going to decide you want to win, is utterly dependent upon your age, your history, and a number of other variables I can't even come up with now.  You're  hog-tied to your next-best choice and your next next best choice and on down the line.

If you're my age, let's be honest. There was that war. It's always there. That war. That huge human stain. My age group has to slide into a massive death before that particular prejudice ends, because we're wired, friends. So that's Germany and, oddly, to a lesser degree, Japan. My age group just isn't going to cozy up to those boys as our first next choice.

So it's the Dutch guy and the guy from the Netherlands.  They're it.  That's who. You can just feel it in your blood, can't you? Or am I the only one around here who's still prejudiced, even if it's on a normally unconscious level"

The Olympics are good for this kind of noticing.

The thing about the Olympics that I really love, because it is SO unAmerican - - are all those little countries, I mean those really little ones, with five or nine people, marching in with heads held high and astonishing uniforms and proudly held flags - - and these countries show up, year after year after year, and some of them have maybe never even won a medal.  And yet there they are.
Countries like, I don't know, Slovenia, although I think they have won a medal,  but you know what I mean. 

How do you think they feel?  Take a look at them, marching into the stadium. What's in it for them? Well, something IS in it for them, obviously. And I want some of that. But, what IS it? Someone once said, "Allowing yourself to want something is an act of courage."  I think that is true.  To openly want something, whether with reason or beyond reason --is a noble thing.  Or maybe it's being/feeling like you're a part of something huge and that's a great feeling and we're so huge already, we American's, that we've forgotten what that particular feeling is.  Because what matters to us is the meals.

Oh, the medals, the medals, the medals.

"And now, here's So and So, if he wins this medal it will be his third gold medal in a row, bringing it home to the U.S., wow, won't that be something....."

Why will that be something?  Medal hog. How many medals does he need?  It's like he's a great big mouth, swallowing medals, year after year.....

(See how cynical I am).           (And yet- - I love the Olympics).          

Well, I don't know. Last night I cried when the Russian skaters won the gold medal.  I wanted them to win so badly.  When I was a little girl I read every book I could read about the great Bolshoi ballet and its magnificent Russian dancers. When the Russian male skater, tears flowing from his eyes, went to his knees on the ice, and threw his arms up to the sky,  it brought back to me my love of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, which take up at least one large shelf inside the library in my brain, cancelling out Kruschov pounding his big black shoe and shouting out, "We will bury you!"

 So we not only have cultural responses, but individual responses which, if strong enough, can cancel out the mainstream neural imprints.

Socrates said it.  "The unexamined life is not worth living."  Do you live by your own rules or by the rules of others?   But to know what you are "living by," first you must go deep, deep down and acknowledge that dark stuff, the black moss, the stuff you don't want to know about yourself.

The Olympics is as good a place as any to begin the examination.        

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