The Adolescent Rage of a GenXer

Finding the will of veracity and obligation toward oneself during these times

I find myself in adolescent rage like when I was in high school and the fear of the Cold War and tensions between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. was looming. We banded together to form a club called S.T.A.N.D., Students Take Action Against Nuclear Disarmament, which met after school with Ms. Booth, our Algebra teacher. We were scared and wanted to understand what was happening and what we could do about it. It was short-lived, yet we shared our feelings, wrote letters, and made signs, and the club lasted a month or two.

These were also the 6 years I had a pen pal in the U.S.S.R. who wrote about loneliness, staying small and unseen, and loving Levis and the Beatles records I sent her. My family and I took action by writing letters to Senator Tsongas and the Action for Soviet Jewry to work towards getting her and her family out of oppressive Communism. They weren’t allowed to practice Judaism, so I had a Bat Mitzvah with her in spirit to honor her. The action to support this family who wanted to leave their oppressed country was clear.

These experiences allowed a clear path to cut through the bullsh*t one action at a time.

Photo by Rubén Bagüés on Unsplash

GenXers are scrappy; we are the last latch-key generation who walked home from school alone and let ourselves into our houses while our parents worked. We made ourselves snacks and played in the street until the street lights came on and then we went home for dinner. We moved out of our parent’s house at an early age and found ways to pay the bills.

Today, it’s more difficult to cut through the bullsh*t, and I find this adolescent rage for injustice rising to prove the truth and expose the con only it’s so multilayered much of it has to be dropped because who wants to spend the time shoveling through it. Shoveling this bullsh*t causes my sanity to waver, and there’s always another pile to sift through. And yet, I have a stirring to take a stand against it.

We are all taken in by the bullsh*t, and we all contribute to it. What function does it have? It’s not outright lying, the wavering between their version of the truth and the desire to be right, even if it is not true. The indifference behind the B.S. at the root of it is where the issue rests. This is a moral flaw to me and where my adolescent rage fumes.

I want to cut through it, understand why, and I don’t care if the truth makes me happy.

Harry G. Frankfurt wrote a short book about bullsh*t called “On Bullshit” which captures the distinction between lying and bullshitting. The liar is trying to fool you. The bullshitter doesn’t care about the truth, just about the impression he is making:

This is the crux of the distinction between [the bullshitter] and the liar. Both he and the liar represent themselves falsely as endeavoring to communicate the truth. . . .But the fact about himself that the liar hides is that he is attempting to lead us away from a correct apprehension of reality. . . . The fact about himself that the bullshitter hides, on the other hand, is that the truth-values of his statements are of no central interest to him . . . his intention is neither to report the truth nor to conceal it. . . . unconcerned with how the things about which he speaks truly are.

Bullshit is everywhere because people must create prose about things they don’t actually understand. The bullshitter is dangerous, not because he is lying, but because he doesn’t care about truth.

As we have seen in this last week, Mother Nature will win and burn it all down anyway. Those who continue to place blame on these fires in Los Angeles as a political issue are further contributing to the bullsh*t. They want to have the answers they do not know, yet are so sure of their answers, and they add flames to the fire of furthering us away from ourselves. These massive fires have impacted humanity, animals, and nature in an unfathomable loss, and the bullsh*tters want to place blame and shame on the Governor, the Mayor, and the Resnick family, who owns much of the water (!) and forget about their empathy for those who have lost everything because they have wealth. It’s all connected, we are all connected impacting every single person whether there is wealth or no wealth. We all need water resources and all live on planet Earth yet bullsh*tters are making their way in the world for their own selves. Ok, rage, slow down.

We all claim to be scientists seeking evidence of truth, but we are more like lawyers seeking the truth at any price, going for blood, making the pre-determined case instead of being open. This is exhausting and causes hearts to close down. Some people are ok with living in this cycle of fight, needing to make everyone else wrong, but I’m not.

Unlike the bullshitter, I do care about the truth. Sigh. It’s at this point where I have to go back to the cushion for refuge, to be in sangha or community, and I find an online mediation session or pull on the headphones for a high-frequency music sequence.

I come back to the veracity and obligation to myself.

I practice to find and remember the deep surrender to innocence. To put down the world with abandon, even if only for a little while, and then I can come back to it with a fuller heart and clarity. I breathe deeply to abandon the swirling of the world so I can regain the world with a fuller, more grounded heart. Letting go is only a transaction for the moment to allow for more strength in the next moment. It’s not a barter of time, a trading in for something else, but a way to find more strength to be able to tolerate the truth or the B.S. with a new energy.

Being in a community in person can provide the goodness of inner strength and compassion. When we are strong, we can tolerate the truth. When we give up the chaos and heed the samsara of this cycle of life, suffering, and the unsatisfactory nature of life, and we cannot make our sanity dependent upon the world.

Thanks for being here, it means a lot to me.

Practice metta with me here

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