we be ogres

Sometimes I feel like an ogre who has just noticed he stinks. All the other ogres stink, too, but this ogre realizes that among all putrescent examples of ogerity, he is the most noxious. While most ogres actually see this as a sort of a virtue, this ogre begins to cringe at his truly awful smell, and to try all manner of methods to kill the swill. He sleeps in rosebeds. He eats scented candles. He gives orations to packed halls on the Problem of Stink. In the end, though, it’s like spraying perfume on a fresh turd – it just makes a nasty smell sicker.

Despite my Eau de Ogre, though, I keep getting onto this website and writing about the problems in this world. I blather and blather, slathering the internet with the glop off the top of my head – and am unlikely to stop. In fact, my purpose in getting on here is to spout off once more about what the heck is up. So without further ado…

THINGS YOU / I / WE NEED TO CHANGE:

1. We need to re-examine the real and imagined delineation between the concepts “I need” and “I want”.

Having done this, we need to re-evaluate how much money (that hallmark of our temporal-obsessedness) we are spending on each.

Because we are all native English speakers on the internet here, we probably spend a lot more on “I want” than we are willing to be aware of. We need to evaluate, in light of this, the sickening global reality that “we want and we get” while “other people need and they die”.

If we happen to be Christian (or even if we don’t), we ought to evaluate what our answer is to a Christ who is perpetually asking us why we saw this manifestation of his person in the faces of the world’s underprivileged majority and turned our backs for the more interesting/self-gratifying realm of “I want”.

We need to change – not towards legalism and a pinching of pennies, but towards a glorious freedom that allows us to give ridiculously until our pain becomes a glowing pleasure. We need to stop serving the relentless, unsatisfying master of our insatiable whims and start serving the truth.

2. Rather than just giving people money (give a man a fish…) we need to give them ourselves (teach a man to fish…), or at least to give our active support to people who will actively become involved in changing the patterns that have created the problems.

We need to become aware, and then to act wisely and responsibly - beyond some palliative minor wallet-opening - to create real, lasting change.

3. We need to re-examine the way we live in relation to other people. We need to question our culture of unchecked individualism and discover ways to create more and better community. We need to stop staring, in groups and alone, at glowing boxes and start listening to each other’s stories.

Maybe we need to move from the suburbs to the city. Or maybe we just need to re-calibrate our typical suburban lifestyles to become more involved with other people. One thing is certain, though - the rampant individualism that sends us crying into the arms of expensive therapists is just not cutting it. We need each other.

4. We need to take responsibility for the way we are pissing all over the earth, metaphorically speaking. We need to own up to the fact that as the most consumptive, wasteful people group in the history of the planet, we are wrecking our most precious gift for the titillations of a moment.

We need to have compost heaps and to recycle and to make a game of minimizing how much goes into the round green roadside receptacles of greed.

We need to vote with our wallets and take economic responsibility for our ecological reality. We need to pay more for products wrapped in recyclable materials and products made in an ecologically responsible manner. I know it sounds crazy, but we need to stop buying so much stuff we do not need, so the amount of material ending up in landfills and the amount of energy and pollution required to shape those materials will be diminished.

5. We need to stop writing this stuff on websites and start doing it. Seriously.

The problem with any utopian vision is that it is just that. “Utopia” literally means “no place”, so the word implies its own impossibility. We pretend to yearn and strive for an ideal, but in an ideal world, every individual’s mind/heart/soul would be in perfect alignment with the Truth. There would be no need for reform because any necessary or useful reformation would occur spontaneously, out of the Truth-derivative essence of the compendium of humanity. This will not happen.

In light of that, why write or paint or think anything? Why struggle for change in myself and/or others? Is it vanity, vanity, vanity to think that I – a slug among men - should presume to prescribe for the ills of my kind? Indubitably, yes.

And yet, I remember again that glorious scene in The Lord of the Rings when that King dude says, “What can men do against such evil?” and that other king-to-be dude replies, “They can ride out to meet it.” And who knows? Maybe some Gandalfian Deus-ex-Machina will come charging down the hill with a staff of light to make the bad, stinky ogre-men go away.

That, I suppose, is the hope that this faith is all about. In the meantime…