I have an aphorism that I like to use for just about everything, because it is applicable to just about everything. And I've got no idea where I learned it (get moving, Google freaks!), but try it on for size: "You're going to learn one day. The hard way or the easy way is up to you."
Sure, it's not "Make my day," but it has a particular existentialist zing to it. And could we ever use more existentialist zing these days. Because whether it's Freud's theories on the return of the repressed or its more scientific-leaning cousin, the Newtonian physical principle governing the momentum and movement of forces and actions, there is just no escaping the inevitable byproducts of both our theories and the dangerous decisions we make based upon them.
Let's take the Iraqmire, for starters. Americans and their coalitions of the willing safely squired away in their comfy houses and apartments may not feel like they're the ones pulling the triggers in the streets of Baghdad or Fallujah, but they are. From the outsider's perspective, one we are all too often loathe to assume, we are the guilty party dropping incendiaries from the skies, imprisoning and torturing innocents and then getting on with our "matters of consequence," as Antoine de Saint-Exupery wrote in The Little Prince, such as whether or not Tom Cruise is a homo or Katie Couric will destroy the CBS news division. (Sorry to disappoint you, but that boat sailed long ago).
The fact that we cannot bother ourselves with keeping track of who we kill, on purpose or by accident, portends a disturbing bias towards ignorance, especially of the ramifications of our well-intentioned violence. So it's no wonder that the Israeli army thought it could get away with murdering a British filmmaker for documenting the impossible lives of Palestinian children, even though a subsequent inquest jury found them guilty. Or that the Bush administration, in full denial mode over the coming global warming catastrophe, decided to punish truth-telling scientists for their evidenced beliefs rather than just let the truth, which every American absolutely needs to confront, be released to the public without prejudice.
The fact that we're even having a discussion about censuring the president shows how far we have to go. With increasing evidence that the president himself was behind the Valerie Plame leaks -- a serious violation of not just the Intelligence Identities Protection Act but also the Espionage Act and who knows what else -- we should be moving right past censure and into impeachment, a fate that befell our former President Clinton for making out with the lamest moocow ever to migrate out of Beverly Hills. And we haven't even gotten to the illegal NSA wiretaps in violation of FISA or the vote-jacking in Florida and Ohio, violations of the Voting Rights Act. Or the horrors of Abu Ghraib, illegal rendition and onward, violations of the Geneva Convention. The list goes on and on.
I mean, this is an administration that can't even deliver, or locate, millions of dollars in aid given freely by the world shaken by the destruction of Hurricane Katrina. One that
forces AT&T to disappear its privacy safeguards so that John Ashcroft and Alberto "VO5" Gonzales can read your emails and track your website visits. One that feels it's safer to censor the top scientists of the world rather than get their shit together on an uncertain future where climate change and peak oil will forever change not just the environmental but economic and sociopolitical landscape of the entire planet.
We live in a universe where two supermassive black holes can collide and swallow billions of stars, yet all we can talk about right now is whether or not we should build a fence around the country to keep the Mexicans out. But when millions of immigrants and their descendants and supporters rise up and buck society's so-called normalcy to speak truth to power, politicians like Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa show up to reap the political capital, only to turn on those who gave him the publicity in the first place with obsolete homilies about order and anarchy. How is it possible that a guy who never truly finished high school and who was once a member of MEChA finds the balls to tell a bunch of Latino kids to stay in school and stop protesting the government that is destroying the very American Dream he has sworn to protect? It's lunacy.
It's also the return of the repressed. Whether it's Mexicans tiring of American social and economic hypocrisy -- let's remember, after all, that the Mexicans called California, Texas and other states home before we "liberated" them -- or a climate change hangover the size of, well, the entire planet, these truths will find their way to our global village no matter how hard we try to subdue them with spin, lies, faith or whatever else humanity has in its hyperreal hand basket. We are all going to learn some very hard lessons over the next few decades. How we choose to absorb those lessons, whether on the environment or the petty politics and religions that divide us, is up to us. We can learn the easy way by embracing the overwhelming data and evidence around us and using that to make our decisions.
Or we can keep living in a fantasyland of our own construction, and hold onto it with all our might as the nightmares we've spent our lives creating in hopes of avoiding an inevitable future come calling for us, now or later. Call it psychoanalysis, call it physics, call it karma, but you better call it now. Because it's coming your way and, like all repressed phenomena, it doesn't discriminate.