Meta thoughts on the InterTubes and other arts

[I've brought this over from kos, and decided not to edit it, so my apologies for the kos references. I find the need a hundred times a week to thank each and every one of you, my BlueNC family, for writing, for reading, for commenting ... for caring ... whether I agree with you or not. You FP'ers are my touchstone to reality. When life pulls me away, you pull me back. Each of you makes a difference in my life. So this is "Thanks."]

This is a mini-memoir, I guess. For some reason this personal theory from long ago feels more relevant to our here and now than it has ever felt.

Years ago I took a class at UNC-CH in ancient western philosophy. I read a lot of stuff by old dead white guys. Great volumes of reading were required and I even remember some of it ... but the final exam is what I remember best. It changed my entire world view. It changed my life. Seriously.

Each class that semester fulfilled some General College requirement, otherwise I wouldn't have taken it. Never in my life would I have freely chosen these classes. I was an Art/Biology double major way back when. I dreamt of being a medical illustrator. I dreaded what I thought would be hours of trying to memorize names and dates and titles and all manner of pointless crap in history, philosophy and literature classes. My assumption was that THIS would be the most boring four month period of my entire life. I was monumentally wrong, and never before nor since more happily so.

I know this sounds incredibly nuts, but bear with me for a little longer.

Like I said, we read a lot of stuff. And it was, oddly, interesting stuff. I actually enjoyed it. I was also enjoying all my other classes. I mean I was really getting into them. It was crazy.

At the end of the semester I had normal exams in three classes ... went to each exam period with nothing but a pencil and a blue book. But, after reading Plato, Aristotle, various Roman philosophers, parts of the Bible, Thomas Aquinas, Thomas Moore, ... and I forget who else ... this guy, this odd little grad student who was obviously too smart for his own good, assigned a paper. Christ!

It was a question we were to answer. Double Christ! He had trouble forming the question, the class had trouble transcribing the question, and because I can't recall the exact wording of the question, I'll have to paraphrase:

"How does one challenge tyrannical power, or the status quo, while living under a Tyrant or in a society that will not tolerate a challenge to the status quo?"

The question was a mouthful then and it's a mouthful now.

We all shifted out of the classroom that afternoon, fairly silently. I went home. I waited. I thought. I pondered. I cursed. I read. I re-read. I cursed some more. And eventually I wrote a 5-10 page paper, though it didn't take 5-10 pages to answer the question. It took a couple of weeks for me to crash over it in the wee hours one morning, but the answer was simple. The examples I had to find so I could defend my answer, my brash assertion, were not short but they were fairly simple as well.

It was two simple words: One writes.

When Sophocles needed to challenge his King, he wrote about a young woman who challenged her King. When Plato needed to challenge the status quo, he wrote about wise men who mistook shadows on a Cave wall for reality. When Sir Thomas More needed to challenge the ugliness of his world he wrote about a beautiful world through the eyes of a stranger who had been there.

So many kossacks are so much smarter than me I'm a little reluctant to even write this. No doubt there are problems with this theory, thought up just before sunrise one exhausted morning. No matter. I still believe the theory.

I believe it because even in modern literature there are examples of moral characters who challenged Authority or the status quo through the telling of stories; fables, tales, dreams, parables, allegories, satires, plays, movies. Even on the rare occassions that I've felt the need or desire to speak to or write to my own governmental representatives, it has only been a personal experience that has ever had any affect on any politician. It's the only thing that has ever had any effect on the opinion of neighbors, family, friends or acquantances. Nothing else ever seems to make a dent. Logic, ifs and thens, debunked assumptions, laborously explained histories ... none of those things ever makes a ripple. But telling a personal story, yours or someone else's, does.

And that, I believe, is why this place, this website started by this guy, maintained by this mass of people, makes a difference.

As power is tightening it's grip on the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave, we still write. Others are writing. Others are filming. Others are painting. Others are lecturing and making students read. We still write. Because the power of the written truth doesn't stop when the last page is read. Written truth is as close to eternal as humankind has ever gotten or will ever get. We still write.