This night, I want to talk about politics. I want to touch on channels and processes of power. First off, we live in society, society being a mass of people who think and offer judgement on similar topics. In the United States at the current time, there is perceived to be a great divide in political thought. What I want to tell American society; is that we are discussing topics as if they were completely abstract. I mean that, we have a great many people who offer opinions based solely on personal vindication, forgetting the larger world in which these topics exist. Our current society seems to be in one word; immature. We expect change to occur tomorrow, or the next day, and we forget that the world is fairly unforgiving in its openness to dramatic change. The sacrifices of those great heroes and heroines of the past seem to us appropriate and correct because we perceive that those people were “correct” or living a “life of truth and justice”. It seems to me that we have forgotten what it means to live this life of truth and justice, what it means to take correct action. The actions we take and the words we speak, may be true, and still, they may not be met with a welcome reception and a feeling of satisfaction. There is more to this life than being in the right. So, how do we deal with this reality? Here I attempt to emphasize the qualities of grace, compassion, and bravery. To address the first two, grace and compassion may seem, according to some, to exist in a situation of weakness or inability to solve some problem. This is not the case. Grace and compassion are actions that include the life and experience of all those around us, including our strengths as well as our weaknesses and shortcomings. These qualities emanate from a person who is strong and true in their direction, from a person who understands the frivolity and whims of a harsh life. This person is strong and provides a foundation for society to have discourse and to disagree with one another. We need not only be right, we must stand together as a people. Society is constantly fragmented and divided, this is the given. It is given that not all of us believe the same thing and have the same experiences. What is not given, is that we will stand together through the winter. That we will stand unified against opposition. And I am not speaking about opposition to that which is right. Right and wrong truly only exist in society. I am speaking about that opposition which comes from our natural lives. Our whimsical and passionate lives. Lives that will end in death. We are humans, and this is something we must remember. To be correct is not what is required to form the foundation of society, what is required is a strong and dependable person. To be strong and dependable, is to create a world where understanding is manifested between people while they are unaware of the foundation they stand upon. What that foundation requires is grace and compassion for our fellow men and women, as this will allow for weakness and failure which is ever present in the human experience and which must be included in discourse and perception. To exclude this weakness is to ignore an enormous part of human character, and ignoring people in this way will alienate them which will further the gap between persons and will ultimately breakdown our channels and processes of communication. Lastly, bravery is the internal journey which decides how we can provide this foundation to our loved ones and our community. Believe it, live it, breathe it. I can only hope that my message has been received, as my intentions do not lay with commenting on what is right or wrong. I only mean to point out, that society is the game by which rules we play. If we create an uncompassionate and ungraceful society. We can expect to foster hate, dis-ingenuousness, and ill-temperateness.
-Zazzo
Zazzo's Well 