I want to write today about the death of Mohammed Morsi. I want to write about the complicated flirtation between Egypt and democracy, between the secular state and religiously motivated political ideology. I want to write about the sad continuation of policy as usual in Egypt since his ousting. I want to write about these things I feel matter in the scheme of my long life and that of my children.
But I can’t bring myself to care and I can’t bring myself to fully write that article out, because I’m unemployed and have been for a year. I can’t because I am just another voice thinking it matters with no creedence from which to speak other than my own understanding of my own experiences. I think that gives me more experience than most others I know, because one can experience everything in the world and grow not a jot due to possessing none of the necessary understanding to nourish that experience.
But it does not translate on a resume.
There is no glamor in understanding, there is glamor in action, doing, creating, achieving. There is value in the external alone, I come to understand, and that’s a difficult truth to grapple with, a difficult truth to accept, for it means that my being has no value inherently. Yes, perhaps there is added social value, but social value does not drive the hiring process, realizable and tangible value alone hold the key to employment.
So here we are unemployed.
No doubt I am to blame for my condition, nobody has more time to sit with that truth than I. We have in fact become smoking buddies we two, sitting together pulling in a deep drag and talking long into the night about our history together. I studied the most esoteric of the professionally useless liberal arts, making sure my minors only further added to the uselessness of my degree. If forced to attend university–and make no mistake we are as-near-as forced as coercion gets, so heavily pushed into the higher studies as to become unable to see that ever another pathway existed–then I would at least like to go for something I found interesting and for something that might improve the so very flawed form of “me”. So I did, and I did, and I now suffer like they all said I would.
My peers, equals on all fronts, now attend to careers where they feel adequately fulfilled, and are paid duly so, and they look now beyond at the far horizon of the rest of their lives, they have the benefit now to look to the long future, while I struggle with the present and the mistakes of my past.
Yet are they mistakes?
Did I screw up? Does suffering today mean I’ve walked the wrong path? Will I still struggle on this path tomorrow?
When I sit with these questions, and I have sat with them through many a long, dark tea-time of the soul, I can only answer with a resounding and clear no. This is just life. There is no winning, there is no losing, there is no ahead or behind, there is no path. There is only what we do with what we are given, and most importantly, how we experience these gifts. I have lived in each moment, felt myself awakening to the experience of existence itself and so was able to fully take stock of my life around me, to appreciate the beauty of the world and the struggles powering it along every day. I came to find the path that led to the garden of my inner peace. Though I never took to living in the garden, I know with a certainty I rarely see mirrored in my peers the path to returning to peace. I acquired the ability to perceive the unified nature of life in our universe and see myself as just a small speck in the maw.
What Buddhist tripe.
I only know a single koan: If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.
I only subscribed to liberal schools of thought for as long as I’ve subscribed to any form of belief. Yet I feel these liberal beliefs slowly strip themselves away in this melee of existence, because all around me–and fundamentally–I am told that I do not matter. From the DMV, to the grocery store, through the thousands of interactions happening constantly throughout the day, the disrespect and disregard for my personhood and right to peaceful existence is heaped out in buckets and spades. I am a nobody. I am a point of data to be analyzed and used, but never something with which to empathize. That’s fine, there’s no laws or rules saying things should be other and nor do I think there should be, but I used to believe I mattered. I used to believe that my experience of something mattered, and I can feel the push back now even upon writing. Of course I don’t matter, I am just one of many.
Yet that’s the central belief of the liberal world order upon which civilization has attempted to stand since the end of Hitler’s Wars. Now we wonder why it crumbles around us, why the illiberal world order springs forth anew. I know why it crumbles. I feel it crumble all around me, and I feel it crumble within me. People do not any longer know respect, care, or shared responsibility. We only know the self. From the central knowledge of the self our knowledge expands in a very limited scope, our loyalties diminishing with every layer from the center.
Self -> Family -> Creed -> Ethnicity -> Nation -> Species
As the hope of nation failed, we revert backwards now, fall back on our old ethnic loyalties, then back further to our ancient religious roots. When that fails we go deeper, back to the family ties that bind us back to the primordial laws of evolution itself, and when that inevitably fails, we revert back to that final, permanent resting ground of the self. In the greatest form of natural savagery there is nothing to trust in but the abilities of the self. The weakest, smallest, and most fundamental aspect of existence, and that we now continuously disregard. When the center breaks, the rest folds too.
The liberal world order rests on the fact that individuals matter. America was established as the land for the self, individualism reigns nowhere on Earth in greater force. Yet that too now slips. We fall now fully into classical European ethnic groups, split by our political divisions that just so happen to mirror our racial, economic, and religious. We begin to inherit fully our political opinions, dooming us to a permanent cycle of contention, so that our manipulation becomes all the easier for the increasingly empowered operators of the ruling nobility.
The American Promise is that here things are different, here any person can become any person as long as they work smart, hard, and lucky. We have failed to uphold that promise almost from the moment we made it, but it’s still there. It still exists beneath the mud of oppression and the muck of obfuscation and the blood of the children continually sent out as martyrs and the worldly weight of history bearing down upon its shoulders. The American Promise still lives, broken and feeble, black and blue, and ready soon to throw in the fight. It now fades into the memory of what once was, and survives only on the prospect of what perhaps again may be.
I want to talk about democracy in Egypt and the great struggle of creating a world of order that is also free, but I can’t focus on anything but the immediate struggle for purpose in front of me now. I want to tackle the clear injustices being done to my fellow human beings across the globe, but I must first overcome that which is being heaped upon me. I want to be a citizen of the world, but I struggle to just be a citizen of Texas.