Today’s quote had to do with many dramatic situations beginning with screaming.
It was a quote from Jane Fonda whom I remember my mother screaming about and I’m not talking about Make It Burn Jane Fonda as in my mother was not screaming because her buns were on fire. She was pitching a fit about Jane going to Vietnam, about Jane being a traitor, about Jane causing the demoralization and even the death of United States Servicemen. Jane needed to be taken down, as far as my mother was concerned. She had no right to call herself an American.
I presume that if my mother and Jane sat down today there would be a lot less screaming.
Don’t you think it’s funny how certain we are about things at one time in our lives only to find out later on that most things are not very certain. That things change. That we change.
I remember feeling as though I would not be one of those people who yearned for serenity or strove for satisfaction. I wanted nothing to do with either of them and I was quite certain that not only were they just a cover story for apathy, but they were what was wrong with the world. That, like Jane Fonda, our job was to rise up and make a stink; make a spectacle of ourselves so that people would see the error of their ways and change them. That our job was to change wrong things.
Actually, I still feel that.
Funny.
Here I was thinking that I would write one of those things that would be all reflective and subdued – all GROWN UP.
But actually, I’m not much more grown up than I ever was. I still want to change things. I’m just a bit less certain that I know the way.
The answers seemed so simple then – MAKE LOVE NOT WAR, END WORLD HUNGER, GIVE PEACE A CHANCE. I meant it when I said them and I thought older people were just cynical and lazy to have arrived at such a state of complacency that their highest hope was for a livable compromise; that what they seemed to celebrate was simply slowing down the rate of things getting worse.
I thought that if everyone just agreed, if we all just put down the guns and helped each other instead of trying to take each other’s things and killing anyone that got in the way, that we could have peace and could end world hunger.
I thought that love was the answer.
And that part hasn’t changed.
That while I get that life is more complicated than I realized and real change happens slowly and because we are different from each other we disagree on what the changes are that we need to make, that while I get all these things, I still know that finding what we love and acting out of that is the best chance we have to be happy and to be a good person.
My father just voted for a Democrat for the first time in his life. My mother has been gone almost 6 years but long before she died she became a pacifist. I don’t know what Jane is up to these days but I know she married Ted Turner. And I no longer see change and love and serenity and peace and compromise as mutually exclusive.
But I do think that we could all use a good scream every once in a while.
