Monday, September 21, 2009

9/12 is Over

(Now that my college schedule has settled itself, and I'm not running back and forth between the Bursar's Office or Financial Aid, its time to get back to work).

Despite, how much I hold the man in almost utter contempt, Mr. Beck just seems to keep drawing attention to himself. Most recently by using his usual pro-fear propaganda to to encourage support for the Tea Party rally that happened on the 12th of September. Yet, I don't want this blog to just be about bashing Mr. Beck, otherwise I might as well just change the title to Olbermannia or something. No, I think that today I'm going to discuss something that's rather important to my own outlook, and how I think we should be handling a lot of the problems we see today.

We're going to talk about stoicism.

Personally, I don't profess to follow the tradition as it was laid down by the Hellenes; despite how much I prefer to rely on logic and reason more than emotion, that doesn't mean we should completely forget to feel. Especially since doing so would almost certainly require that we also throw out intuition. I also reject the idea of determinism that typically coincides with stoicism, because I place more trust in statistics than "cosmic powers".

So then, why cry stoicism?

I consider myself to be some amount of a stoic because I believe that in the face of hardship or suffering, we must not cling to to the time and place in which they occurred. We must certainly address the issues that lead us to that place, and hope through analysis and extrapolation that we can avoid them in the future. But, in the end, as our ancestors have since the dawn of humanity, we must move on. If we bury out heads in the sorrows of the past, then we shall never see the future that awaits us.

Perhaps this notion will seem callous to some, particularly those who have lost greatly. But all of us have experienced loss, and, yet, this is the way of things. There will almost certainly always be disasters and catastrophes, just as there always have been. What is important is not the pain we feel for those who are lost, but how we come together as a community and address the problem. We owe far too much to those we morn to cloak ourselves in despair. We must move on.

This is why I take issue with people who keep reminding us of 9/11 and the abject terror we experienced, particularly those such as "you-know-who" who keep saying we need to go back and remember how we felt the day after. Why? So we can relive the pain and shock ad infinitum? At what point in our history has fear-and -despair-mongering provided anything positive?

Never. We need to move forward. It is true that upon 9/12/2001 this country experienced perhaps the single greatest rush of patriotism in our time (in mine at least), but 9/12/2001 has passed, and short of someone "reseting the clock", its not going to happen again. Should we remember what happened on 9/11? Yes. Should we remember the feelings of unity that we felt in the days and months after? Yes. Should we dwell upon the pain we felt? NO! No amount of morning or sadness will bring those who are lost. Instead, we must cherish our time with them, and carry them in hearts and minds as we continue down the path of life. Most of all, we must not let our melancholy turn to a rage that will blind us to truth of our circumstances.

In the long history of this country (and, for that matter, this species), catastrophe and panic have struck the polis, and yet we are still here. In the end, we have always achieved the most by looking forward, instead of turning back. We do a disservice to not only ourselves, but all of those who have come before us and strived for the sake of their progeny, to do otherwise.

Heads up, eyes ahead, and, in name of those who have come before, those who walk beside you, and those who shall come after: Forward.

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