How can we change our culture of violence? How can we reach for higher ideals? How can we defeat, on any level, huge, enormous vested interests and be more human?
I had this wonderful friend. We called him "The Great Peter Fish". We knew him in college and he was older than we were so we knew him in real life after he graduated and we looked up to him mightily. He was handsome, brilliant, funny, creative, and he enjoyed life to the fullest. He was also a man of excess, beating out almost everyone we knew. He could out-drink, out-party, get better grades, finesse everyone, mix perfectly with anyone, he lived large.
After a few years we started calling him "More Peter Fish", because his reaction to anything good was "More! More! More!" He was a huge success after college. He went to Madison Avenue and used his creativity. He was in off off Broadway plays. He drove a gorgeous sports car. He died large, also. He was hiding in California from the Chinese Mafia which his wife had gotten messed up with. He missed a curve while driving his motorcycle over 100 miles an hour on a curvy road. I am sure he was stoned and most likely drunk. He was no longer writing, acting, or working. His mother would never talk to us. It took us ages to track down even that much info about his death. I miss him 45 years later.
It's this "More!" thing that I am thinking about. "If a little is good, then more must be better." I think that is one of the causes of violence in America. Manifest Destiny. We learned that in school, in one of the few historically correct lessons of US History. God gave us the right to take all the land, kill all the Natives, import all the slaves. It was inevitable, it was written. And we grew and grew this feeling that if a little is good, a lot more must be better.
If one TV is fun, more TVs are better. If one car is good, more would be better. You know the picture. This also seems to be our theory about guns, about power, about control, about food, about booze, about stuff. None of this is without consequence. We are now victims of our own greed. We, aside from everything else, are the greatest consumers on the planet. You know this. We are the polluters. We are extremely violent. I think being heavily armed all the time, being a control freak, domestic violence, bullying in schools is about being afraid and being out of control. Once any addict gets out of control, there first has to be an inner shift before change can happen.
Lama Marut suggests that we Americans need to have a mantra. That mantra needs to be "I have enough." You don't need to fill in the rest, your soul will. "I have enough stuff, power, control, booze, love, friends, pets, world dominance, electricity" and so on. After we 'get' this, maybe we can start to make the transformation our society needs for our actual survival. That is what is at stake here now. Our survival as humans, as an environment, and the survival of how we think of ourselves is important to the whole planet. Looking at us from afar, we look very weak right now. We are people who are so weak that a man takes automatic weapons and kills unarmed children to show his power.
Peter Fish was a good guy. Many of us are good guys, but we are losing our grip a a culture. I have enough. Do you?
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