Trolling the Web
recently, I found Rick Banyan’s site for “kinder,
gentler” cynics. I hoped he’d help me get through this
season of jingles and fears that we’re not buying enough
stuff to make Christmas profitable for retailers. Banyan says
sarcastically that we “emerge from the holidays 10 pounds
heavier and several hundred dollars lighter.” Yet he allows
that he appreciates Christmas: He calls it “an annual
opportunity to rejuvenate our battered souls.”
It’s hard not to be cynical when the season gets mixed up
with negative campaign advertisements. They remind me of a saying
of the wit Oscar Levant: “He’ll double-cross that bridge when
he comes to it.” But political consultant Peggy Noonan warns
us not to fall so easily into cynicism: “It’s
unrealistic and kind of cowardly because it means you don’t
have to try.”
When I’ve lost a case in court
or a politician I’ve supported has gone down to defeat, I
recall Noonan’s comment and find it cuts short an easy
cynical reaction. It gets me beyond the notion that all I have to
do is unleash a scathing attack — preferably humorous — on the
forces that whipped me. t’s a shield against world-weariness,
which would otherwise leave me aralyzed and less effective than I
might be if I shed my contempt for those who whooped up on me.
Cynics conclude — probably from experience — that
self-interest is the primary motive of human behavior. Cynics
assume that we never act out of sincerity, idealism or altruism.
That is not the world I experience or want to live in. I
spent time in Ecuador last summer with 15 people — some as young
as 24, the oldest 75 — from the First Congregational Church of
Greeley, Colo. We were there to build houses for Habitat for
Humanity, and while the desire to help others motivated us, most of
us felt that we got far more out of the experience than the people
we helped. All of us had volunteered like this before, and
we’d come back for one reason: We needed to rejuvenate our
battered souls.
We were joined in Ecuador by a group of
15 young Americans from inner-city high schools in North Carolina.
A family from that state paid for their trip as a memorial to a son
and brother who’d died in a car accident the year before. The
circumstances of the boy’s death could make anyone despair or
become cynical. In this case, it turned out far differently. The
car the teenager was driving when he was killed was new, a gift
he’d earned. His parents said they’d told the boy
he’d have to “do something for somebody” before
he could have a car. What he chose to do was accompany his family
to Ecuador to help build houses. The experience, his family said,
changed him for the better, but then tragically, his life ended in
a crash in the car he loved.
After months of confronting
their depression over the loss, the family decided to do something
positive: They established a foundation in his name to fund
life-changing opportunities for kids who had never traveled beyond
their neighborhoods. Was their memorial self-serving? Well, what if
it was? Its lasting effect was to help disadvantaged kids. After
turning the impossible into the possible in Ecuador, the kids might
just be empowered to change circumstances in their own communities.
Here at home in this season of declining daylight,
it’s difficult not to feel discouraged about the presidential
hopefuls who spend much of their time practicing politics as the
art of the possible. In my idealistic moments — and I confess I
have a few — I think of politics as the art of the impossible.
Anyone can do the possible. Who in our lives has done the
impossible? Jesus Christ, Gandhi and Martin Luther King all had
their way of creating a better reality against long odds.
I’d like us to cast cynicism aside for at least a fortnight.
Let’s try to see beyond the sniping and dirt-slinging that
passes for political debate. In our own lives, we can choose to do
what we set out to do to make things better — whether or not
it’s considered practical or possible. We can even attempt
the impossible. And once more, the world may never be the same
again.
Russ Doty is a contributor to Writers on
the Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org). He heads New
World Wind Power and is also executive director of the Green
Electricity Buying Cooperative in Billings,
Montana.
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