"Just Believe."

We are a culture defined by “you are good enough.”

A thousand times a day, we are exposed to words in quotation marks. “Be the change that you want to see in the world.” “You are worth it.” “...Because you are worth it.” “You’re perfect just the way you are.” “She really loves you if she swallows.”

For a long time these thoughts were floating around in the ether and on billboards. But now, we have integrated them into our society. We have social networking sites like twitter which serve two primary purposes – one is nonsense and the other is sharing these anecdotes. Empowering us to become not only perpetuators of the infestation, but also authors. Now, as I personally often do, we can share our own quotes.

Sometimes they act as veiled messages to others we hope are reading. Often it is the emo-like yearnings of a soul who feels via these websites connected enough to hope for a reaction, but disconnected enough to despair no matter what is said. On a rare occasion, they’re prayers or the silent written desires of our soul.

We have other websites dedicated to text messages or life happenstances that are quotable. That make us laugh, sigh, cry, and emotionally yearn for them or against them. Something in most of them makes us feel, regardless of whether the quotable is real. Online videos and comments have us calling out for the underdog, and cherishing ways of life that we admire. Just yesterday I watched a breathtaking motivational video from a guy with no arms and legs, who was nonetheless “making the best” of his life. He encouraged all his listeners to realize that they were good enough. That they were beautiful.

We are a society of clichés. And there is a hidden falsity here that is tragic.

A gorilla that I talk to once in a while opened my eyes to the 60’s. It’s a time period that I am honestly not particularly interested in, but has a few valuable lessons. The people revolted in a hippie revolution which went nowhere. A few cliques continued, even to this day. But everything else reverted within the fullness of time back into “business as usual.” Try as they might, nothing changed. The Man is still in charge.

That’s what I’m beginning to hear, over and over again, today with clichés and quotables. We continually convince ourselves that we are beautiful, worth it, and important, just to forget it by the evening. Just in time to need to be reminded of it again. Mom-n-pop shops hold the banners of being different high only to sell out to corporations to enjoy the profit of those banners. But they will say to themselves, over and over again, like Sunday Prayer – “we are different. We are good enough.” As if they can make it true by saying it. As if it will sustain them or make them all better.

It has moved from life advice to an opiate. An opiate with very dangerous withdrawal symptoms. I fear that we are nothing better with it, yet descend into anarchy now when denied it.

To be clear: We are not defined as a society that finally realizes that it is beautiful. We have become a society that tells itself over and over again “we are beautiful.” Sadly, there’s nothing pretty about that. Just a broken addict needing their fix to get through another otherwise unbearable day. But “I can quit anytime I want.”

When I told my father (a man with significant working experience) the whole story about my being fired a year ago, everything made sense to him. The corporate reasoning, the corporate decisions, the way it was handled. He didn’t approve of most of it, and certainly not the way he runs his ship, but it made complete sense to him. But the thing he had the most difficulty with was this – the thing I, his son with little-to-no real world job experience – had to explain to him was why my close friends hadn’t done anything to support me.

What a sad realization about society, that I would have to explain to my father why my friends had handled the situation differently than his friends would have not 10-20 years prior. Why my friends appeared to sound so much more supportive and then acted so much less supportive then his own co-workers had “back in the day.” And we call ourselves more civilized. A terrible price for an inaccurate label.

I knew a person once, who wore a quote on her online-sleeve: “call it like you see it.” I’ve never seen someone gossip and backroom chat more. I’ve also never seen someone avoid so much honest confrontation.

I’ve lost count how many people I’ve met that – in one form or another – demand that someone else “put their money where their mouth is” but don’t follow through themselves. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard people dream out loud that they wish their potential lover would not hesitate. They wait wistfully, hoping that s/he will act. The hypocrisy, I trust, is evident.

My gorilla friend proposed that the hippies of the 60’s failed in their revolution because they didn’t know where they were going. They knew that they didn’t like how things were, but didn’t know what to go about changing things to. I think our quotable society suffers the same problem. We earnestly want to “be all that we can be.” We want to believe it, but we haven’t got a clue how to go about it. We’ve forgotten. And we’ve also forgotten that the alternative – not being – is far more frightening:

“All it takes for evil to succeed is for good people to stand aside and do nothing.”

My co-worker, when I told him about what the gorilla had said, asked me what I was doing to fix it. A great question. I told him I was living my life in a way that would hopefully open eyes to the reality. Being a believer in treating other people like individuals and not like drones or automatons (see Immanuel Kant and his Categorical Imperative), means that for me, changing people involves a lot more hope and openness than it does control and demands. Now I know how God felt, having to give man free will instead of perfection, hoping that he would find the latter on his own.

Here goes: We do not make things true by saying them over and over and over again. It’s not true in church, it’s not true at the coffee shop, and it’s certainly not true in love or the workplace. We make things true by making them true.

Yes, this may involve “drama.” Yes, this may involve offending people. It will almost certainly involve great risk to your personal, emotional, financial and/or physical health. But we’ve watched enough stars and tabloid shows to know that getting clean naturally involves these things. Rehabilitation has never, ever been an easy process. When we are addicted, there is no way past withdrawal symptoms but through them.

“Act now, and save big!”

C. S. Lewis and I rarely disagree on things (except, you know, about God), but I have to take issue with his implication that we can never create Heaven on Earth. I happen to believe we can. Our “progress” as of the past few decades (read: our generation) has been a bit backwards, it’s true. But it’s never too late.

I’m not perfect. Indeed, a lot of people could read this post and say: “you hypocrite! You do all those things too!” That too is truth. I’m no prophet, much as my ego would love me to be. I’m in the trenches too, making mistakes with all of you. And being down and dirty has helped me to understand.

Helped me to understand why people “fake it.”
To understand why people say one thing and do another.
To understand why people yearn for love but don’t dare endanger friendships.
To understand why we separate our well-being from our words.
To understand why it’s easier to tell an open digital world that you’re aching than it is to look into someone else’s eyes and say it.
To understand why joy is contagious but brief, but what lasts a lifetime is grief.

To understand why it’s so important to “dance like no-one’s watching.” Because it is. And everyone is watching. But fuck it, you are beautiful, right?

Dance!

- Z