NOISE AND SILENCE
Our critique began as all critiques begin. With doubt. Doubt became our narrative. Ours was a quest for a new story, our own. And we grasped toward this new history driven by the suspicion that ordinary language couldn't tell it. Our past appeared frozen in the distance and our every gesture and accent signified the negation of the old world and the reach for a new one. The way we lived created a new situation, one of exuberance and friendship, that of a subversive micro-society, in the heart of a society which ignored it. Art was not the goal but the occasion and the method for locating our specific rhythm and buried possibilities of our time. And discovering that true communication was what it was about, or at least the quest for such a communication, the adventure of finding it and losing it, we the unappeased, the unaccepting, continued looking, filling in the silences with our own wishes, fears and fantasies. Driven forward by the fact that no matter how empty the world seemed, no matter how degraded and used up the world appeared to us, we knew that anything was still possible, and given the right circumstances, a new world was just as likely as an old one.
TO BEGIN AGAIN FROM THE BEGINNING
I hope that you read that passage. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, may I reccomend renting, watching, studying and meditating on the movie that the above segment comes from? It is called Waking Life and I wish that every single JW in the world; in fact, every person in the world, would watch it. It is a work of art, it is touching, it is thought provoking. It is, in a scant couple of hours, a primer for philosophy and the contemplation of our existence. I like the passage above because it kind of sums up how I feel being an x-JW. It also touches on a philosophy that I have come to embrace. That of the uncertainty of life and what lies beyond. I think that, accepting such a philosophy, in essence, negates organized religion, or exclusive doctrines. In short, the great uncertainty in life is death and what lies beyond it, if anything. That is ultimately, the one question that holds no conclusive answer for us, as humans. In the absence of such a certainty, or objective, agreed-upon universal truth, there is only theories, conjecture and notions predicated on faith. The way I tend to look at it now is this : If the future is uncertain, if there is no verifiable, conclusive explaination of what happens to us when we die, then why is one person's theory any more or less likely than anyone elses? The same can be said about alot of things in life. Say you have a date. You go on the date, but you are worried that it will turn out badly. The thing is, you won't know how it turns out until the date's over, right? Since that is the case, and the future outcome is uncertain, why is it more likely that the date will turn out bad than good? Or vice versa? In the uncertainty of the future, the scale of the outcome is level. No one owns the exclusive rights to the secrets of humanity and existence and that is what allows us, as humans, to excercise our abilities to reason, to think, to grow in understanding, to use philosophy to sort out the existence we are a party too. To fail to do such things, or to subjugate our rational abilities in favor of a pre-packaged, blanket solution for all of humanities ills, to give up on human kind having the capacity to work out and solve it's own problems and instead give over all responsibility and with it any guilt or acclaim to God, and wait for him to take care of everything...who has the temerity to write off the human race like that? I would like to close with another little piece from that movie Waking Life. It is very honest and it touches on everything when you think about it. And it gives us an idea of what it will take for true and lasting change to ever take place.
You can't fight city hall. Death and taxes. Don't talk about politics or religion. This is all the equivalent of enemy propaganda rolling across the picket line. Lay down GI, lay down GI. We saw it all through the 20th century. And now in the 21st century, it's time to stand up and realize that we should not allow ourselves to be crammed into this rat maze. We should not submit to dehumanization. I don't know about you, but I'm concerned about what's happening in this world. I'm concerned with the structure. I'm concerned with the systems of control, those that control my life and those that seek to control it even more. I want freedom. That's what I want. And that's what you should want. It's up to each and every one of us to turn loose of just some of the greed, the hatred, the envy, and yes, the insecurities, because that's their central mode of control. Make us feel pathetic, small, so we'll willingly give up our sovereignty, our liberty, our destiny. We have got to realize that we're being conditioned on a mass scale. Start challenging this corporate slave state. The 21st century is going to be a new century. Not the century of slavery, not the century of lies and issues of no significance, of classism, of statism, and all the rest of the modes of control. It's going to be the age of human kind standing up for something pure and something right. Not a bunch of garbage: liberal, democrats, conservative, republican, it's all there to control us, it's two sides of the same coin. Two management teams bidding for control, the CEO job of Slavery, Incorporated! The truth is out there in front of you, but they lay out this buffet of lies. I'm sick of it! And I'm not going to take a bite of it. Do you got me? Our existence is not futile. We're going to win this thing. Humankind is too, good. We're not a bunch of underachievers. We're going to stand up, and we're going to be human beings. We're going to get fired up about the real things, the things that matter, creativity and the dynamic human spirit that refuses to submit. Well that's it. That's all I got to say.