I pushed Henry around and around and around a massive distorted circle and I thought about the article I read in Adbusters yesterday as well as the subsequent reader comments. I thought about how it really isn't enough to just identify how the current incarnation of liberalism is a joke or to play the game of oneupmanship with your fellow oppressed or even to buy the t-shirt sold at the radical gift shop. There has to be a solution. I mulled this over as I passed plastic shoes and headless male manequins with their facsimile crotches baaarely peaking out of cargo shorts. Hubris to think I could come up with a workable solution, that I could be the innocent child who deftly plucks the needle from the huge bale of hay every one else is demolishing feverishly. Where's the lynchpin? Is it that we need to talk to our neighbors to sate the loneliness and isolation that draws us to malls like the one I'm circumnavigating? Is it that we need to slap accusatory stickers on billboards to reveal the deception behind the capitalist spectacle? Get rid of cable TV? Bomb the shit out of each other? Destroy religion? Beg states to seceed? Boycott all stores?
Yet I remember that war and power struggles have always, always plagued human interaction. Any small idea I think of, I instantly shoot down as not good enough, not sweeping enough or too big for anyone to expect to occur. My brain starts to ache with an overwhelming and shortcircuiting amount of criticisms and frustrations. Diamond rings, Starbucks, lotions, more shoes. Bursts of air conditioning and thumping music. It's just not enough, these little actions I think are rebellion. And yet, what else is there? And sometimes, it's too much and I do want to sink back into my assumed role of United Sheep of America and watch a little Cartoon Network. Beating back those thoughts seems sisyphusian and am I really making a difference anyway?
Later I think I just need to pick a movement, any movement. Just step into a stream and swim for all I'm worth. But what if it's the wrong stream that dribbles into a drainage pond and I'm left feeling foolish, surrounded by empty soda bottles and plastic shopping bags? My desire to remain positive and idealistic wars with the notion that I'm too old for that, and that I should be succumb to the inevitable jaded bitterness. Neither of these attitudes seems quite right either.
By your trip to Oswego, I see. Trust me, you'll never get over it.
I feel too, though, that it's unsettling to be on a train that seems to be traveling high-speed on tracks that dead end into a ravine, without trying to at least drag your foot to slow the train down. Reducing it of course to a painful nub, but still.
Enjoy the ride!