American Revolutions: A Continental History, Alan Taylor

This book takes an impartial view of the American Revolution, the kind we aren't used to hearing about. We're used to a more romanticized version of events, one with war heroes and hard-fought battles, followed by the intellectual leaders who shaped our great country. What isn't often told are the failures, debates, and differences in ideology that separated large amounts of people during our nation's founding. We certainly were not united against the British Empire. And no matter how much we like to think the founding fathers were all on the same page as a collective group of influential geniuses, the answer is anything but that. Conflict and dissent gripped our country long before the revolution, continuing on through it, stemming a long, arduous path of bickering that ultimately led to the Civil War. 

Author Alan Taylor takes a less intimate, realist approach to telling the story of America's foundation. Not just in the United States either. The plurality of the title alludes to several revolutions that took place in the western hemisphere during that time period, including that of Haiti. Instead of an adventurous telling of events, which might include vivid descriptions of famous battles, or the biographies of our founders, Taylor dissects what went on behind the scenes, in political, moral, economic, and cultural terms; namely, it's the social burdens of the people that are highlighted, not the heroes who fought for them. It's a refreshing look at something that has been so overly-glamorized that we automatically call the founding fathers geniuses when they were really just as divided as we are. 

 

Judge Not, Lest Ye Be Judged

"No man should judge unless he asks himself in absolute honesty whether in a similar situation he might not have done the same." 

-Victor E. Frankl 

 

I shouldn't have to tell you how important it is not to pass judgment prematurely.  When a man judges someone he knows very little, it causes more strife in the world than he's aware.  Passing judgment means he has closed his mind to an understanding.  His inflexibility puts constraints on his capabilities, causing his emotions to harvest deep grudges that rot with the foulest of bitterness.  He broods on the unfairness which has affected him, often because he has been misled by a misunderstanding, hearsay, or some other source of false information. 

Likewise, premature judgments isolate victims from the community they were part of, causing unnecessary separations, which motivate revenge for whatever wrong has been done to punish the innocent.  The bitterness in the judge's own mind becomes doubled by the bitterness of the victim's being judged unfairly.  Conflict ensues, fights erupt, families become divided by the ostracizing of some poor soul, all unnecessary in the eyes of those with open minds.  

Often our judgments are tainted by our perception of things, so they are rather meaningless in the grand scheme of life.  Our worldview is highly influenced by how we were raised, what we were taught, and who shaped our lives.  The worldview we subscribe to likewise shapes our perceptions, painting any new information we learn with the bias of our own experiences.  Judgments reinforce our worldview; that's why we're comfortable with them.  They further convince us that we'd been right all along, and that like a glutton who doesn't know he is hoarding things from others less fortunate, we obstruct justice by our blind allegiances to the ideologies we serve. 

It's important that we don't cling too closely to these ideologies, lest we make it a habit of judging people we haven't yet met, simply because their worldview doesn't reflect ours.  This would open our minds to discussion, understanding, and forgiveness for people who simply live differently than us.  Intolerance is the gasoline that makes judgment go.  The less we tolerate, the more we let our judgments castigate others, for the fleeting pleasure of convincing ourselves that we were right, that brief ego boost affirming that the world would be a much better place if we were in charge. 

Even after all that, we must consider that had we been struck with the same misfortunes of someone we've judged, we might not have turned out to be the person we are today.  A man who was beaten reacts differently to people than a man who wasn't; if you'd been beaten, would you turn out the same way as him?  Possibly.  Put yourself in another's shoes before you place judgment upon him, that way you'll better understand why it is he sees things the way he does, and acts in ways that you deplore.  Without discovering such empathy, you'll stumble through life thinking you have all the answers without really knowing anything at all. 

Why the Nicest People Suffer the Most

All suffering finds meaning through sacrifice.  This is one of the tenets of logotherapy, a theory developed by Viktor Frankl, the psychiatrist who survived a Nazi concentration camp.  I'm reading his book Man's Search for Meaning, and it's greatly changing my perspective on life.  It's helped me realize why the nicest people tend to suffer the most.  It's because they generally sacrifice their happiness for others, enduring their sufferings for the sake of people they love, even strangers- though this is rarer. 

Meaning for Frankl meant living through torture to bring love and knowledge (his books) to those who would be waiting for him after the war.  He also found solace in the fact that he was suffering in someone else's place.  Suddenly it made sense to me why Christians always say, "Jesus died for our sins".  Like Frankl, he gave his body up for other people.  If it weren't for him, another innocent person would have taken his place, possibly a much weaker one who wouldn't have endured it as well.  More importantly, and this is according to the mythology, he gave up his body so all mankind could live eternally in heaven with God. 

It was as true for Frankl during the Holocaust as it was for me during my troubled youth.  My growing pains were so severe that I had no one to turn to for help.  My development stagnated, I had nowhere to go.  In a sense it was like being in a prison.  Not as bad as Frankl's, for sure, but in a metaphorical sense it was like his experience in the camp reflected my internal struggle.   

In my case it was my mother who I suffered for, though I have never told her about it and don't intend to.  She was stressed out all the time, trying to support us on her own.  I kept quiet because my need for guidance would only give her more anxiety.  My brother already had a father to turn to for advice, so it felt like I would be more of a burden asking her about things a father should know.  I kept this need for parental advice to myself, hardly ever seeking it from her, for fear of a reaction.  I became my own teacher, which was a great struggle, and still impacts me to this day, for I'm sure there are still basic things about being a man I don't know about.  That's not to say my mother was never there for me.  She'd have given her right arm for me if I asked for it.  She was concerned that I stayed in my room so much, and for good reason; I did have social difficulties, but I have always been more open around family.  I just can't bring myself to tell her the truth, that I was avoiding her to prevent a meltdown, for it seemed she was always on the edge of collapsing or doing something crazy. 

Logotherapy has helped me recognize all the other sacrifices I've made for people; my brother, when I was very young, who always seemed to get his way; the teams I've worked with, where I always took on a heavier load to make it easier for others; the customers I've served, who I've always tried to help as quickly as possible, so they could be on their way and the next people in line wouldn't have to wait long; and finally, for my wife, whom I waited patiently for, and kept my dastardly job so we could make our life together work. 

We suffer for the people we love most.  Some of us even suffer for those we don't know, seldom realizing how spiritually benevolent and selfless we'd been all along.  If you want to make a difference or are asking yourself if there's any meaning in life, or why it's all worth it, look no further.  The answer lies in self-sacrifice, for the betterment of mankind. 

Ephemera

Beyond the horizon an event occurs, born from the strengths of insight and memory.  It's man, for the first time glimpsing a realm afar, glancing skyward into spacious caverns that glisten with vanilla-faced diamonds, a surfacing of expanding globes, all containing original kernels for the vault of thought.  He sighs, he ponders, he searches for more in that everlasting fire, for something so immense that an infinitude of lives couldn't possibly piece it all together.  Out there, beyond the confines of his planet- where monkeys screech and hyenas howl, where the sun circles 'round his formerly geocentric kingdom- all speculation surrenders to fact, ideas are discarded by the hollowness of time, beliefs that for centuries resembled the rise of civilization fall from Elysium in a shattering crunch, to shake him off his pedestal, that he may witness the divine, to inherit the myriad possibilities spread out before him in sequences of scope that contain more things than his short life can observe. 

Before him the waters stir, churning earthward the residue from whence he came, embodying some latent soup that held the ingredients which brought him forth, out of Eden and into the mystical light of the seraphim, bound by matter yet liberated from it in ways unavailable to his primitive brethren.  He's scavenged the world and found all that he wanted; now he looks skyward, where everything he now wants mocks the futility of having it all.  It measures his life in grains of sand, in specks of dust corrugated from the principal elements, tossed about in the clay like something that shouldn't have been created, yet was, in all these series of improbable happenings.  He's a lark in a meadow surrounded by dark mountains, domesticated beyond turning back, catapulted from the jungle out into a playground of stars, where he searches for more, for what he considers an eternity, and will never come close to finding.  The magnitude of it all is overwhelming; he can't process it all, like an insect trying to understand why the sky keeps turning the creamy galaxies, without caring what he finds, until something even greater than himself lays claim to their dynamic and wastes away at their splendor. 

 

On the bus I sat reading a book about a dog who wanted to be human.  I heaved a sigh and thought why, foolish dog, why would you subject yourself to a life like this, waking up to an alarm every day, reading about all the madness in the papers over morning coffee, groggily making your way to an office or a place on the assembly, or [in my case] the indelicate station of a hotel front desk, where for eight hours you have to pretend you're someone you're not, plastering fake smiles for partying orcs and the walking dead, something scraped from the surface of a soporific sphere dangling from your hunched shoulders, just barely hanging onto a last thread of life.  Why, oh why do you look forward to such a meaningless existence, when the only time you'd get to play would be during a brief segment of your childhood, when there are no worries and nothing holding you back?   

The bus hit a bump, I nodded off and slipped into a dream. 

 

Come with me into the screen, we'll hang out for a while.  Even if it's nothing, even if the air we breathe is artificial, we'll make believe it's something, built from dreams and limited by touch, elevating us from chairs that keep us glued to the chord.  Look at all the faces in the feed, dressed up in smiles and candy-colored emojis, eliminating any trace of strife, announcing to everyone they know that everything is fine, that everything is as it should be, that it's not simply an epidemic of self-consciousness that's infecting the network, but a bona fide funfest for all our friends to watch.  We must show them that everything we're doing has nothing to do with the interface, for that is the dreary prison of the bored, who camp out on the dial pathetically wishing they were somewhere else, somewhere we are.  We must do everything we can to impress them, for the more they watch us the more they want to be us, and it feeds our egos unlike anything else.  They, the disenchanted masses, wait for some exciting news story to fill up the tab, a story like ours, exaggerated by interjections of wit and pomp.  We must keep providing them examples of how to live, lest they forget, or worse, we. 

 

Everyone in the gym is staring at something on the wall.  They're all lined up like an army marching in place.  They've all got these watches on that tell them how many steps they've taken and when to keep moving.  They're all keeping count of their calories by logging every meal onto an app that tells them if they're still under the day's limit.  Nobody's lifting stones to build a temple or running to help a stranger; all their energy is spent on themselves.  Everyone's surrounded by people they don't know, only here to benefit themselves or impress others.  There's no interaction or camaraderie, just voluntary, soulless movement that's like factory work without a product.  The sweat smells of hard numbers and deadlines and broken mirrors.  Everyone's walking and cycling and running for that invisible place on the wall, going nowhere. 

Images float past like shifting glass, my unearthly sorrow drifts through the atmosphere, being absorbed into something more friendly, a break in the continuum that swallows me whole, transports me to a place in the sky where spirals of joy elevate me beyond the recognition of self.  I've become a fixture on the ceiling of time, limitless in understanding, embalmed in holy syrup slathered across the firmament, wrapped in sequins of meteoric diamond, swirling in a nebula burning with newborn stars that ferociously announce the dawning of a new era, every semblance of death banished from the interstellar frontier, blasted in phosphenes that dance across my eyes, spinning through this joyride, this everlasting trance giving me a chance to consider all that's transient about life passing through the mainframe gripped by my bionic hands.  A supernova tosses me back into the sea, once more a slave to the galaxy's anvil. 

I'm a child again, on a boat tossed upon the shameless ocean.  A choir sings the wisdom of a moral life, systematically entrenching itself on the blueprint of my psyche.  My soul, my soul, take these dreams and make them whole.  Let me suffer, like Christ on the cross, that I may stumble through the storm and into the eye, that I may witness the journey's end, the holy grail, the conclusion of the story I've seen so many times before, in lives past and lives that could have been lead, spiraling around a kaleidoscope of metaphors. 

 

Sing brother, sing mother, rise from the seats to sing, hallelujah. 
Sing wife, sing baby, sing to the savior who's come, hallelujah. 
Consecrate the machine, baptize the computer, rise from the seats to sing, hallelujah. 
Raise the curtain, right the ship, lead us through the forest of sin, hallelujah. 
Praise the son, praise the daughter, sing through the cycles of time, hallelujah. 
Blessed are the dreamers, blessed are the inventors, reveal the artist's work, hallelujah. 
Let him transform us, let him deceive us, enter the screens and preach, hallelujah. 
All of my children, all of my family, dance in the light and dream, hallelujah. 
Praise the creator, praise the destroyer, lift this anvil off the ground, hallelujah.  
When we get there, brothers and sisters, my children of the book, 
Let us walk hand in hand in the light of the rising sun, hallelujah. 
Wherever you are, wherever you go, whenever you sign on or sign off, 
Remember, I'll never forget about you.