"No, I'm not for sainthood. I'm going to be a boulder-pusher.
-
- There's a great black mountain. It's human stupidity.
There are a group of people who push a boulder up the mountain. When they've
got a few feet up, there's a war, or the wrong sort of revolution, and
the boulder rolls down - not to the bottom, it always manages to end a
few inches higher than when it started. So the group of people put their
shoulders to the boulder and start pushing again. Meanwhile, at the top
of the mountain stand a few great men. Sometimes they look down and nod
and say: Good, the boulder-pushers are still on duty. But meanwhile they
are meditating about the nature of space, or what it will be like when
the world is full of people who don't hate and fear and murder."
These words, spoken by a character in a Doris Lessing novel, are wonderfully
evocative of the lives of so many of us. After all, our little planet contains
extensive networks of entirely different varieties of human motives, both
far worse and far better than we can easily imagine. And one of the more
useful ones is the realm of the quietly trudging boulder-pushers. This
relatively unglamorous yet immensely worthwhile zone is composed of all
of us who quietly and actively push against the grain of the ruling stupidities
in our poor suffering world.
We have rejected the lure of involvement in worldly greed, lies, and crookedness
as best we can, despite the fact that this is far more easily wished for
than accomplished. We have no such grandiose ambitions as sainthood. But
we can relate very well to being members of the brotherhood and sisterhood
of slogging away, shoving that moldy old boulder uphill. And when the news
is very bad, and getting worse, and that huge rock teeters and starts to
rush back down once more, we are the ones who most sharply feel the grief
of failure.
Boulder-pushers can be discovered rising to the occasion in every color,
race, creed and nationality, and in every kind of work. Everywhere and
in everything, official accepted insanity is methodically geared to grinding
the sane humanity out of human beings. Everywhere and in everything, those
who fight this are here also, pushing back against the enormous dreary
boulder of entrenched stupidity. We cannot be distinguished by mere appearances
or social roles, yet invariably we recognize one another through our standard
operating equipment: the dedicated boulder-pusher's inner radar detector.
Day after week after month after year after decade, we keep on struggling,
together-at-a-distance, to shove that dangerous ancient rock back up the
same old precipitous mountain.
Boulder-pushers are known by persistence, and almost always by an excellent,
and occasionally very strange, sense of humor. (We can often be spotted
by a finely-tuned taste in sarcastic political cartoons.) We
are sociable, festive, solitary, melancholy, good-humored, depressed, manic,
peaceable and volatile. We are every type and no special type at all.
We are bursting with energy and health, and so sick we are barely hanging
on. We are talkative and taciturn, extraordinary lonely, and open to the
deep joys of companionship. Mostly we just work very hard, at whatever
it is we are being and doing about that boulder. We are seldom to be found
lying around vacationing at its foot, though occasionally we do that too.
Mostly we just heave ho and heave to. We get so tired we can
sometimes be found draped across our portion of the boulder, sound asleep
in broad daylight. We know too well that this rock is real, and made up
of all the ignorance of all the people who will never even understand it
is there. We understand that this heavy stone, as long as it exists at
all, will be hanging around- and hanging around all our necks. And that
it is continually threatening to roll back down too far and crush us, boulder-pushers
and boulder-builders alike, once and for all. Our endless jokes about this
absurdly terrible predicament are one of the great wonders of the human
race.
Look around. We are ordinary people, doing extraordinary things. We are
resolutely transmitting light in the darkness, however modest our wattage.
We teach, rant, cajole, hector, lecture, and employ sweet reasonableness
to its maximum capacity. We write and talk and listen and learn all we
can. We pray and meditate and stay connected one way or another to the
source of all goodness and truth in life. We keep our minds open,
even when that means we sometimes have to take a crowbar to our own prejudices.
We do our own thinking, and don't take anything from any authority at face
value. We prod and poke and pester the powers that be, because they so richly
deserve and require it. We investigate and castigate abundant abuses, large
and small, local and global. At our own expense, we do crucial research
in the context of endless illegal governmental, military and corporate
secrecy. In a system built on denial, we deny the power of denial itself. We
find, finesse, and force truth to emerge from world-size institutional
lies.
We have not been devoured alive by stupidity's hypnotic media machine.
We use our own perceptions, and fully engage our own heads, hearts, and
hands in daily life. We are not passivists, but activists. We create, nourish,
tend, and shore up all that is beautiful and healthy and loving. We
will die to keep the spirit of freedom alive in the human race if we have
to- but we would rather live by it and for it. We share knowledge, materials,
and insights. We pay attention: we keep watch and we keep honest records.
We keep the unfortunately necessary running commentaries going on the differences
between wisdom and stark raving lunacy. We keep websites going under impossible
conditions. We take the time to keep critical information flowing at a
time when time goes so fast it barely exists. We are good to our families,
to our friends, and to strangers when we can be. We care about the bodies
and souls of other human beings as well as our own. We know what to forgive
and forget, and what to keep after.
Mostly we never think about any of this. We're far too busy or too tired
or too grubby or too concentrated on the next step to look around and reflect
on what we are doing. It is just who we are and what we do. This is what
we did yesterday, and today, and what we will do tomorrow. We know that
that giant stone of stupidity is going to be there, requiring our daily
push, for a very long time to come. We are, naturally, occasionally
flattened by the very thought.
We are the boulder-pushers of the present, the spiritual sons and daughters
of all previous generations of boulder-pushers, and the spiritual fathers
and mothers of the boulder-pushers to come. Some of us don't even believe
that efforts to destroy human ignorance will ever have an end. We think
that boulder pushing is the natural activity of all those who care about
the human species, and that it is more or less eternal. We do it anyway,
without fear and without much hope, just because it is the right thing
to do. Others of us believe that some day, some day much too far away even
to imagine very well, this particular boulder really will finally arrive
at the top of the mountain. We refused to be permanently depressed by the
spectacle of the dangerous, degenerate and collapsing form of yet one more
temporary contemporary civilization. The thought of centuries of hard
labor does not prevent us from getting up in the morning and lending a
hand to the day's push. Some eon or other, we believe that boulder really
will stop falling backward. We believe that a distant generation of boulder-pushers
will at last succeed in heaving that boulder over the final hump. It will
finally just rock back and forth a little, shiver slightly, and become
still. And then it will begin slowly to crumble to dust.
It's only a matter of time.
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