The bosom of fools

I am angry nearly every day of my life, but I have learned not to show it; and I still try to hope not to feel it, though it may take me another forty years to do it.
Louis May Alcott[Character of Marmee in Little Women]

“Be not hasty in thy spirit to be angry: for anger resteth in the bosom of fools” (Ecclesiastes 7:9).

I generally am an even-tempered person. I am easy-going. But I have realized lately that there are some things that stir up my insides and for some reason I feel it necessary to share my insights into my imperfections

1. Not being able to do something seemingly simple makes me angry. I start a task, like beginning a sewing project when my mother gave me a sewing machine for my birthday, and I am all excitement and creativity. I have sewed before so this will be a piece of cake. Not so. I spent about 45 minutes (that is not an exaggeration) trying to thread the machine and after all of that exertion, I never successfully threaded it. I was filled with anger. An abundance of anger. A throw the sewing machine up against the wall kind of anger.




2. Computer viruses make me angry. What kind of person decides that they are going to devote their time, effort, and genius (not a productive genius, mind you) to computer programming that destroys the property of another person and can potentially steal valuable information. Obviously such a person possesses the skills to earn decent employment and a more than decent income performing tasks that could improve technology and do a lot of good. Instead, they choose to drive people crazy. This makes me angry. Very angry.




3. Racquetball makes me angry. I really have no idea why. I generally enjoy sports of all varieties, but for some reason, when I step through that dwarf door into that cave-like room, I transform into a Hyde-like personality. Forrest and Laurel can testify, I am really not pretty when I play racquetball. I do not know whether it is because the caveness of the court amplifies any and every minimal sound which consequently rings inside me head or whether it is because I am not yet skilled at helping the ball move from the back wall to the front wall; but whatever it is, it makes me furious.




4. Failed cooking attempts make me angry. One time I found a recipe online that looked delicious and I happened to already have all of the necessary ingredients in my possession. However, a recipe that claimed it would only require 35 minutes preparation time, in all actuality required over an hour’s worth of preparation time. I literally spent over 30 minutes standing at the stove, stirring some type of rice concoction that ended up tasting like glue. Almost as infuriating were the two times within a few months of each other that I burnt a frozen pizza. Who burns frozen pizzas? Apparently I do.




5. Comments about how LDS women are oppressed (whether the comments are stated by LDS women or other women or men) cause much anger inside of me. I am an LDS woman, I was raised by and LDS woman who was raised by an LDS woman and I was raised by an LDS man who was raised by an LDS woman and I was raised by an LDS man who was raised by an LDS woman. My father’s grandmother traveled from Sweden to the United States on her own. She married my great-grandfather (who already had children from a previous marriage) then they had six children together, all of which she raised, while she learned English, cooked meals, ran the house, sang in choirs, etc. My father’s mother raised six children, cooked a million meals, read extensively (I have heard that she would pick a section in the library and then try to read every single book in that section), taught in local schools until retirement, taught Sunday School to both men and women at church, served in the community until she died. My mother’s mother raised six children, moved and lived in countries all around the world (including Iran and the Philippines), was an expert cook, an expert gardener and flower arranger, an expert seamstress, and an excellent pianist. My mother, who I know more of than the others, does more with her time and self than any other person I know. She is more accomplished and well-rounded than any other person I know. She has raised six children, she is extremely well-read, could be a seamstress professionally, could write professionally, is an accomplished singer (is working on becoming an accomplished pianist J), is an excellent cook, and a lifelong learner- a dedicated student and teacher (she received a full-ride scholarship to BYU and maintained it all 4 years). I am proud of who she is and what she has accomplished. Her beliefs, yes her LDS beliefs and her LDS husband, have only encouraged and helped her in becoming as wonderful, as talented, as well-rounded as she is. I know that my beliefs can do the same for me. I love who I am and it makes me so angry when people tell me that I am being “oppressed” or that I am being treated as less of a person because I am not a man. Nothing could be more far from the truth.




6. Some things about society makes me angry. Pornography (not just that men allow themselves to partake of it but that women allow themselves to produce it), trashy movies, trashy music, trashy language, abusive behavior….it all makes me angry.
   
   So there is my list. On a happier note, the things that bring me joy, far outnumber those things listed above which are catalysts for my anger. You know what makes me the opposite of angry? Things like dictionary.com and people who contribute wonderfulness to the world (like whoever invented jellybeans and the author J.M. Barrie.) I am sorry that you had to read all of this. I really do love life!
   

If you have some time on your hands, read some of the quotes below (maybe you can read one quote a day….)

Recently I discovered David Bentley Hart (an Eastern Orthodox theologian and professor) and I love some of the things he has written. I think his words will stir your soul:

About the Janet Jackson Superbowl incident:

“…there is still something odd in the symbolic importance this event has assumed for many, given that far worse evidences of the rapid coarsening of our culture surround us on every side all the time (examples are too numerous and obvious to cite). I suspect that among those who professed their dismay after the game there were many who as a rule are willing to tolerate most of the corrosive influences that invade family life—from advertising, films, popular music, the internet, video games, the language we have all become accustomed to hearing every day—so long as those influences continue unobtrusively to operate in their “proper” places.”
Is there a remedy for this cultural/moral dilemma?

“I say this because my first impulse is to suggest that the simple (if not sufficient) answer to our cultural dilemma is probably censorship, against which almost every argument in the abstract is predictably fatuous. Upon this, it seems to me, any sane society should be able uncontentiously to agree. And yet ours cannot. That such a prescription should be either controversial or scandalous—as in fact it is—suggests that something is profoundly amiss in our culture, some defect that runs far deeper than any mere division between the pious and the profane, or between the puritanical and the hedonistic. Certainly there is nothing in the constitutional charter of free (political, religious, ideological) speech that obliges us to permit any product, no matter how depraved its content, to be created, sold, promulgated, procured, or kept. More importantly, though—and this should be obvious—a society that refuses all censorship is in some very crucial sense extremely unjust.”

Hart, David Bentley, “Freedom and Decency” In the Aftermath: Provocations and Laments, p.71

Censorship as stripping the artist the means to make great art ( I especially liked the passage below, probably because I have seen all of the movies he is referring to :)

“Consider one of the most obvious cases of commercial standards abandoned, that of cinema. For all the ponderous parochialism of the old motion picture code, it did at the very least demand of screen writers the kind of delicate technique necessary to communicate certain things to mature viewers without giving any hint of their meaning to the children also watching. Thus films had to be written by adults, and the best films required writers of some considerable skill. After all, everyone of a certain age in the audience was well aware of what things occurred between men and women in private. They understood, therefore, what may have happened between Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman when the camera cut away to the watchtower’s revolving beam of light; what had failed to happen when Spencer Tracy quietly slipped out of Katharine Hepburn’s apartment, neglecting to take his hate with him; what it was that Katharine Hepburn was both relieved and offended to discover had not happened when, on the previous evening, her inebriation had required Jimmy Stewart to carry her to her bed; what Bogart and Bacall were really discussing under the veil of their equestrian metaphors; why Glenn Ford was treating Rita Hayworth with at once such tenderness and such malice; and what (and I fear one needs to be something of a Preston Sturges aficionado to catch this reference) Barbara Stanwyck was implying when she wrapped her arms around Fred MacMurray’s neck and murmured, “But, darling, we are at Niagra Falls.”

Well, nostalgia can be a particularly dangerous opiate. Obviously many extraordinary films have been produced since the Hayes Office vanished [. . .] and among them have been many that could never have appeared under the old code. Even now, one is occasionally astonished by a gleam of gold amid the dross. Nevertheless, the current state of cinema seems to suggest that where good or at least clever writing is not a commercial necessity, and where there are no artificially imposed limits within which writers must work, the general intellectual quality of the medium cannot help but decline, and do considerable cultural damage as it descends. It would certainly be hard, if nothing else, to argue credibly that artistic expression has been well served by the revolution in standards that has made script=writing an occupation dominated by sadistic adolescents, or that the art has exactly flourished in an era in which it has been proved that immense profits can be generated from minimal dialogue but plenteous bloodshed, and in which practically nothing is considered too degraded or degrading for popular tastes.”

Hart, David Bentley, “Freedom and Decency” In the Aftermath: Provocations and Laments, p.75-6

“As it happens, by far the worst argument against censorship is the one likely to carry most weight with persons on both sides of the cultural divide: that, were certain cultural products legally proscribed, we would be denying people things they want, denying them the right to choose for themselves, putting limits upon expressive freedom, refusing to trust in the law of supply and demand—all of which is of course quite true. But to find this a compelling argument, obviously, one must already be convinced of the inalienable sanctity of choice, over against every other social good, and convinced moreover that freedom and choice are more or less synonymous. It is indeed true that many of us manifestly do want unimpeded access to explicit depictions of sex and violence, and to mindlessly brutal forms of entertainment, and to artifacts born solely from the basest impulses of the imagination; but surely, in point of fact, no society that simply concedes the prior right of its citizens to have whatever they want can ever really be free.

This is the crucial issue, I think: not what we understand decency to be, but what we mean when we speak of freedom. [. . . ] We have come to believe—more or less unreflectively—that the will necessarily becomes more free the more it is emancipated from whatever constraints it suffers.”

Hart, David Bentley, “Freedom and Decency” In the Aftermath: Provocations and Laments, p.77

“[. . .] freedom is possible only through constraints [. . .] True freedom, at least according to one venerable definition, is the realization of a complex nature in its proper good (that is, in both its natural and supernatural ends); it is the freedom of a thing to flourish, to become ever more fully what it is. An absolutely ‘negative liberty’—the absence of any religious, cultural, or social restrictions upon the exercise of the will—may often seem desirable (at least for oneself) but ultimately offers only the ‘freedom’ of chaos, of formless potential.

[. . . .] For instance, if one wishes to become honorable (a word so quaint and antique as now to have the power to charm but not to compel), one must accede to any number of elaborate restrictions upon one’s actions and even thoughts; and these restrictions unquestionably confine and inhibit desire and volition, and are themselves often more a matter of ritual comity and factitious grace and painful reserve than of practical necessity. And yet, as one learns to consent to a common and demanding set of conventions and duties, one also progressively acquires an ever greater purity of character, a stability and hence identity, a unified ‘self’; one emerges from the inchoate turmoil of mere emotion, and is liberated from the momentary impulses and vain promptings of the will, and arrives at what can truly be called one’s essence. The form, as Michelangelo liked to say, is liberated from the marble.”

[. . . .] This understanding of freedom, however, requires not only a belief that we possess an actual nature, which much flourish to be free, but a belief in the transcendent Good towards which that nature is oriented. This Christians, Jews, and virtuous pagans have always understood: that which can endure in us is sustained by that which lies beyond us, in the eternity of its own plentitude. To be fully free is to be joined to that end for which our natures were originally framed, and for which—in the deepest reaches of our souls—we ceaselessly yearn. And whatever separates us from that end—even if it be our own power of choice within us—is a form of bondage. We are free not because we can choose, but only when we have chosen well [. . .] The consummation for which we should long, if we are wise, is that ultimately we shall, in St. Augustine’s language, achieve not only the liberty enjoyed by Adam and Eve—who were merely ‘able not to sin’—but the truest freedom of all, that of being entirely ‘unable to sin’, because God’s will works perfectly in ours.”

Hart, David Bentley, “Freedom and Decency” In the Aftermath: Provocations and Laments, p.78-9

“Democracy is not an intrinsic good, after all. Where the moral formation of a people is deficient, the general will malign, or historical circumstance unpropitious, is quite unambiguously wicked in its results [. . .] And a society that can no longer conceive of freedom as anything more than limitless choice and uninhibited self-expression must of necessity progressively conclude that all things should be permitted, that all values are relative, that desire fashions its own truth, that there is no such thing as ‘nature,’ that we are our own creatures. The ultimate consequence of a purely libertarian political ethos, if it could be taken to its logical end, would be a world in which we would no longer even remember that w should want to choose the good, as we would have learned to deem things good solely because they have been chosen. This would in truth be absolute slavery to the momentary, the final eclipse of rational dignity, the triumph within us of the bestial over the spiritual, and so of death over life.”

Hart, David Bentley, “Freedom and Decency” In the Aftermath: Provocations and Laments, p.80

“[. . .] I am not convinced that we are in any very meaningful sense in the midst of a ‘culture war’; I think it might at best be described as a fracas. I do not say that such a war would not be worth waging. At the moment, however, most of us have already unconsciously surrendered to the more insidious aspects of modernity long before we even contemplate drawing our swords from their scabbards and inspecting them for rust. This is not to say there are no practical measures for those who wish in earnest for the battle to be joined: home-schooling, perhaps, or private “trivium” academies; forbidding one’s children video games and attempting to instill a love of good music in them; Greek and Latin, great books; remote places; archaic enthusiasm. It is generally wise to seek to be separate, to be in the world but not of it, to be no more engaged with modernity than were the ancient Christians with the culture of pagan antiquity; and wise also to cultivate in our hearts a generous hatred towards the secular order, and a charitable contempt. Probably the most subversive and effective strategy traditionalists might undertake would be one of militant fecundity: abundant, relentless, exuberant, and defiant child-bearing. Given the reluctance of modern men and women to be fruitful and multiply, it would not be difficult, surely, for the devout to accomplish—in no more than a generation or two—a demographic revolution. Such a course is quite radical, admittedly, and contrary to the spirit of the age, but that is rather the point, after all. It would mean often forgoing certain material advantages, and forfeiting a great deal of our leisure; it would often prove difficult to sustain a two-career family or be certain of a lavish retirement. But if it is a war they want, they should not recoil from sacrifice.”

Hart, David Bentley, “Freedom and Decency” In the Aftermath: Provocations and Laments, p.81

“It is good to be reminded from time to time—good for Christians, that is—that their relations with the liberal democratic order can be cordial to a degree, but are at best provisional and fleeting, and can never constitute a firm alliance; that here they have no continuing city; that they belong to a kingdom not of this world; and that, while they are bound to love their country, they are forbidden to regard it as their true home.”
Hart, David Bentley, “The Pornography Culture” In the Aftermath: Provocations and Laments, p.91