Cog

I have been thinking more about Marla Ruzicka and about what I said about "feeling insignificant in my less than robust life" a day or so ago. Yesterday, I was in therapy trying to explain my thinking about her to my shrink, because one of the points that he makes all the time is how I need to focus on living, dealing with daily stresses, doing work on my house, saving vs spending, balancing rest with play as unremarkable, as normal occurences and dynamics to be managed with a minimum of anxiety or self-judgement. (I don't have an anxiety disorder or anything, but perhaps I am a wee bit prone to obsession.) I was saying that focusing on this as a goal in therapy is, in some respects, self-indulgent. To worry about living well and buying things for your home and organizing your life so you derive gratification from it seems to be such a capitulation. We are all such little cogs in the system that constantly puts up barriers to doing meaningful or valuable things, barriers to doing things that have real significance or meaning for people around us. And here is this woman that was concerned about the war in Afghanistan who just bought a plane ticket and set herself up as her own human rights advocacy outfit, started an NGO, got funding and, in some cases through the sheer force of her personality, made a measurable impact on the biggest crisis of the time. Yesterday, I actually found a conservative blogger, who I won't dignify with a link, that dismissed Marla Ruzicka as "a contributor to the World Socialist Web Site and an admirer of Fidel Castro." The very act of trying to do something to counterbalance the bloodiness of the Iraq war is called into question.

Now on paper, I realize this sounds like your classic leftie hand-wringing (apologies to Allison Bechdel) and perhaps I shouldn't be working myself into a state over some silly bloggers. I've allied myself with the tortured classically-white liberal guilt informed community organizing at various points in the past. At other times, felt really frustrated by them. So, perhaps I am engaging in pointless navel gazing, but I feel like I'm reflecting on something that a lot of people feel, which is that we are relatively powerless to change the course of things in this country right now and that organizing your life to make any sort of meaningful contribution against the less admirable dynamics of human behavior is tough.