Life as an Art Form
a column about the complexities of life in the Twenty-First Century
John Wingspread Howell, M.Div., LCPC
Next Election, Vote for Yourself
As
a therapist, I frequently encountered people—especially women—in the
Emergency Room after either threatening or attempting suicide. More
often than not, their decision to end their lives was rooted in what
they considered an impossible situation, one of those double damned
rock and hard place situations in which they betray themselves or
betray a significant other. Rather than betray the significant other,
they shrink back from following their own dreams. Rather than betray
themselves, they chose suicide over life in emotional jail.
That
sounds like twisted thinking, and it is in many ways, but in one sense
it isn’t. They didn’t want to live in the chains the person who claimed
to love them “so much” wanted to wrap them in. They didn’t want to live
through disappointing the other person either, partially because from
past experience they realized it would be more than disappointment. It
would be emotionally unbearable to see the other person’s
over-reaction. What am I talking about?
I’m talking about
passive aggressive questions like these: “Why are you doing this to
me?” “Have I failed you this much?” “If you loved me you would…” When’s
the last time someone you loved, someone who claimed to love you,
played this game?
People often attempt to manipulate the people
closest to them by holding them emotionally hostage, by saying things
like this, and more. One unwittingly elicits such a response by doing
something for oneself, making a choice that makes sense for them. They
aren’t even thinking about the loved one at the time of the decision.
But this type of independent action gets thrown back at them as if it
was done to hurt someone close.
For instance, my parents were
very strict, rigid, fundamentalist Christian evangelicals. All the
things that I considered beautiful and life giving and “spiritual food”
for myself (such as secular music, art, drama) they considered “of the
flesh” and evil. I grew up unconsciously learning that what’s wrong is
right and what’s right is wrong. When I tried to break free from their
strict constraints in order to breathe, in order to spread my wings and
let my spirit fly free, they whined and cried and asked why I was doing
this to THEM?
In my mind it wasn’t about them at all. I was
about my own individuation, actualization, and empowerment. This may be
more blatant than most situations but my point is that when people feel
they are being held emotionally hostage to the people they “love” or
who “love” them, they feel as if they have to choose between their own
happiness and freedom and that of the person they care about. That sets
up an impossible quandary that can either lead a person to being
suicidal or simply inert.
Now back to my double damned patients
in the emergency room who had contemplated or attempted suicide because
it made more sense just to die so everyone would lose, rather than let
someone else win and hold their spirit hostage. In other words, these
people could only see themselves exercising power by taking their own
lives. It was the only way they could understand how to get free of the
tyrannical relationship that was preventing them from their own
happiness.
The key to personal empowerment is learning how to
say yes to oneself and to the universe rather than focusing on who we
are saying no to, in the process. It is also important to realize that
those who truly love us would not put us in that situation in the first
place. The cliché about loving someone, setting them free, and seeing
if they come back to you, is true to the point of being almost
scriptural.
Another way of describing the predicament and the
opportunity of my typical double damned suicidal patient is especially
timely right now. I could say that the suicide attempt was the decision
not to vote. The person says I know how I want to vote, but that has
its own inherent problems, so I’ll non-vote by dying, by withdrawing,
and by laying the blame on the one I am too afraid to stand up to.
So
the key to healthy living, to self-empowerment, and so much more, is
voting! It is voting for oneself, for life, for liberty. It is not
ironic that Patrick Henry said, “Give me liberty or give me death,” and
that the State of New Hampshire has a version of that quote on their
license plates: “Live Free or Die.” It’s an eighteenth century way of
saying, “Set me free or kill me—or let me kill myself. It’s a way of
saying, “I’d rather fight you and risk death, than be safe in your
chains.”
Yes, this is the politics of mental and spiritual
health, and national liberty. There is a direct correlation. The
healthiest most empowering way to live is to be fully free, completely
at liberty, in every sense of the word. And freedom is not something we
wait to be given. It is something we declare for ourselves. I remember
an episode of the old prime-time soap opera “Dallas.” There was a very
poignant scene in which the good son, Bobby, appealed to his father
that he needed more “power” to keep his corrupt brother J.R. in check.
Jock, the patriarch, became enraged. “Power isn’t something you’re
given! Power is something you take!”
The state of personal
liberty is the result of having taken power over our own lives,
declaring our own independence. Normally, as in our national history,
such declarations result in the need to fight, even risk death. Better
to fight for liberty and risk death, than to surrender to tyranny and
kill ourselves, or endure a living death. The truly healthy,
successful, happy, person is one who has a deep sense of empowerment,
an internal sense of authority from which one’s own power flows and
emanates. Political, governmental, national liberty comes from the very
same place. People who are healthy enough to have their own personal
liberty, refuse to tolerate anything less in the civic arena.
Which
leads us to the voting booth. I am not a Republican or a Democrat. I am
a Libertarian. I use a capital L because I am not only libertarian by
philosophy, but Libertarian by party affiliation. I am Libertarian
because the Libertarian Party is to our political franchise what
therapy or a Twelve Step group is to our personal franchise, and what
the Church, Temple or Mosque is to our spiritual liberty. This year the
Libertarian ticket is on the ballot in 49 states, but at press time
will not be on the fiftieth. Our place on the ballot is never
automatic. We have to fight and scrap and raise tens of thousands of
dollars to get and stay on the ballot in a state by state struggle.
Why? Because those who claim to have our (the nation’s) best interest
in mind make us jump through more and more difficult hoops than the two
headed monopoly parties and their candidates must do. The playing field
is anything but level. The obstacles and interference is blatant though
most would agree extremely undemocratic and un-American.
One
could call the Big Two (Republicans and Democrats) the parents, lovers,
spouses—the love-leeches I earlier, who want us to think they always
have our best interests at heart but somehow keep throwing up obstacles
in the name of our best interest to prevent us from exercising our
choices.
In my humble opinion, Republicans and Democrats don’t
really represent our best interests. They represent their own. Like
your significant other who prefers to keep you cowering and submissive,
but frames this dependence as their love for you and desire to “take
care of you” when it is really a desire to keep you in a place that
keeps all the power in the relationship in their pocket. The same
personal dynamic I have cited can certainly apply to party politics as
well.
Is it a little curious to you that while the Republicans
claim to be the party of lower taxes and small government (advocating
on your behalf to keep government in check), once they get to
Washington the arguments aren’t over the size of government or the
Federal Budget, but over how the big bucks will be spent on which
earmarks, who they will benefit and who ends up with the most power?
It’s a bait and swap operation. On the other hand the Democrats want us
to think they are the party of the “middle class,” the working man and
woman, the party that opposes war and champions rights to privacy and
civil liberties, but once they arrive in Washington they are quick to
compromise those principles to hold on to their own seats. Both parties
will tell us what they want us to think they are doing, as if we can’t
see with our own eyes that this is Orwellian doublespeak. And the
circle comes back to the personal again.
To vote for oneself
is to acknowledge that we cannot trust anyone else with our hearts, our
livelihood or our liberty. To vote for oneself is to refuse to be
dependent or held emotionally hostage. It is to refuse to be
emotionally blackmailed on the personal level and to refuse to be
convinced to believe what our senses tell us is not the truth on the
political level. It also correlates to the religious level. If your
faith tradition, faith community, and/or spiritual leader tells you to
believe that which does not have the ring of truth in your ears or the
gentle sway of truth in your gut, run very fast from them. Vote with
your feet.
I make no apologies for being partisan
about my Libertarian politics. The beauty of libertarianism is that it,
as I’ve said, has a personal application as well. The Libertarian party
and the libertarian movement takes personal power to societal and
political dimensions, but without leaving the personal dimension. It’s
not necessary to focus more on one or the other. On the personal level
the very same principles and dynamics are in force. Libertarianism is a
more evolved level of political policy and governmental style.
The
act of voting for our governmental leaders is not unlike the act of
taking the Eucharist at church, or the Seder at Passover. It is the
re-enactment of the act of deliverance, of liberation. By voting we
reaffirm and re-create the Declaration of Independence and concurrently
our own personal liberty and independence. Failure to vote in an
election is the same thing as failure to show up for Eucharist or the
Seder, and it is the same thing as the failure to speak up for oneself.
It is a political and personal act of self-betrayal. Political action
or inaction mirrors and symbolizes the personal. The statement “Give me
liberty or give me death” is true on various levels. Failure to choose,
to punch the hole, to touch the screen and take a stand is a betrayal
of one’s country, the first of a million paper cuts that may eventually
kill a nation. And failure to exercise free choice in our personal
lives has the same effect on our psyche if not on our physical
survival. Liberty or death. Those are the choices. Personal. Political.
Individual. Collective. We are free or we are dead or dying. We fight
for the liberty we have already claimed, at the risk of death, for the
prospect of life, or we surrender to death, symbolic or real—or both.
Whether personal or political, liberty is worth more than life.
Without liberty there is no life worth living. People who recognize
this either fight—or cave. The fighters vote in various forms and
formats. A vote is nothing more or less than a declaration. A
declaration of independence. A declaration of choice, of the active
“election” of one alternative over all others. It is not just the
literal act of voting but can also include demonstrations, protests,
letters to our surrogates in Washington, volunteer or paid work for
candidates, or becoming a candidate. The cavers give up, assume they
can’t win, assume liberty is an elusive pipedream that can’t be had or
if had, can’t be preserved.
I began by discussing how stifling
and potentially deadly it can be when we feel we are being denied
liberty by those who claim to be there for us whether on the personal
or political level. The other side of that coin is if we have our
liberty, we are on our own for solving our problems. The opposite of
being micromanaged by others is having full autonomy and responsibility
for our fate. It requires that everyone grow up and be responsible for
himself or herself without a nanny state to back them up or tell them
what to do. It requires everyone to create his or her own safety net
rather than assuming Mother State will catch them when they fall if
they are irresponsible or careless. It requires everyone to be vigilant
for those who would defraud or otherwise exploit them rather than
expecting the playground monitor to be there to intervene. On the
personal level there is the expectation that we understand and accept
the fact that by winning our liberty, we are on our own to make the
most of it, to make our lives the best they can be.
We are at
a crucial and frightening time in our nation’s history. The parallels
between the national dilemma and the personal predicament are obvious.
At a time when the consequences of the abuse of liberty threaten to
bring down the largest and most powerful economy in the history of the
world, the popular reaction is to crawl back into the womb rather than
stand up straight and take responsibility for fixing what the abuse of
liberty has broken. Personally, people tend to take the same tack. The
more trouble one finds oneself in, the more likely one is to retreat at
the very time that standing tall and taking responsibility for free but
destructive choices made is the only thing that will save us.
Giving
up freedom because freedom has been abused makes no more sense than
selling the family car because someone drove it carelessly and caused a
crash. It isn’t the car that is the problem it is the choices made in
the operation of the car. It isn’t our liberty, our free markets that
have caused the current crash. It is careless driving on the part of
many that have caused a crash. To walk away from the vehicle now, will
make it that much harder and longer to get to our original destination
since instead of having a car to drive, we will have to ride a slow bus
to get to the same place. Does this make sense?
To put it a
different way, I have frequently heard something similar to this
statement lately, in commentary about the bailouts. We are free markets
on the upside and socialists on the downside. As true as this is, it
does not and will not work. The most important part of liberty is that
the downside risk, the assumption that one will take the lumps that
come from bad choices is the price paid for the autonomy and freedom on
the upside. If we are free to determine our course when things go well,
we are free to bear the brunt of mistakes made when things go badly. It
is impossible to have one without the other. It’s called being an adult.
Only
in a climate of absolute liberty to live life, pursue happiness, and
seize opportunity with the best resources we have at our disposal can
an individual thrive. And what is a nation, a society, except an
aggregation of individuals, a corporate individual? You can make that
statement in a political, economic, familial or civic context and it is
equally true. That is why I’m a libertarian, and it is absolutely and
inextricably related to my experience and expertise as a therapist, a
theologian, a creative writer and in my current business as a financial
strategist.
Money is fuel on which the vehicle of liberty
runs. By exercising our liberty we are better equipped to earn more
money and save more money and use more money more creatively than in
any other system or setting. While it is possible to be happy, joyful,
successful, powerful—to be autonomous, free, without much money, it is
easier to do so with money, and one has many more options with money.
Whether you want money to make your material dreams come true, to set
you free from having to work every day at something mundane in order to
give your time to something more esoteric, or whether you want millions
of dollars—just have to have millions of dollars right away—so you can
give it away to good causes, it doesn’t matter. Selfless philanthropy
works better with money, just as selfish indulgence. Money is not the
root of all evil. It is the stuff of all possibilities in a capital
environment. If we did away with money today, we’d create a new
monetary currency within a week.
So I challenge you to vote for
yourself in every respect, not only on election day and in the voting
booth, but every day, in every situation. This is not to promote
selfishness, it is to promote freedom, autonomy, liberty and the
accompanying accountability. Perhaps the best work of art that captures
and summarizes what I have been writing here is the Wizard of Oz.
Dorothy and her motley entourage spend most of the story getting into
position to be dependent upon and rescued by the Wizard, who could be a
metaphor for the State, for the major political parties that would and
do run the State, and/or for the “wise advisors” of our lives who have
some veiled vested interest in keeping us dependent on them, or under
their spell in some way. In order for this to work, everyone has to
drink the Kool-Aid. So everyone tells Dorothy and the crew to “follow
the yellow brick road.” Everyone tells them to go see the Wizard, who
is all knowing and all powerful and will help each of them get what
they want and need but feel they do not have.
Before it is
over they have followed that advice several times at their great peril.
And even the great Wizard sends them into harm’s way, sends them
further from their goals rather than closer, for no obvious purpose
except blind obedience to prove worthiness? They survive the Forest of
Flying monkeys, penetrate the fortress around the castle of the wicked
witch and prevail in spite of themselves only to return to the Wizard
to claim their prize but discover instead a puny man turning knobs and
bellowing in a microphone. But even then, the Wizard has the audacity
to tell them to pay no attention to what they see, but believe what
they are told. Does that sound familiar? Are we getting similar
messages from our leaders today?
So the challenge is clear,
simple, but profound. It applies to our political choices, strategies,
and platforms. It applies to our economic philosophies. And it applies
to our relationships with those we choose to trust in our personal
lives. Will we be independent. Will we be free. Will we choose the
opportunities coupled with accountability that comes with liberty and
vote for ourselves this season and always, or will we allow ourselves
to be tricked or intimidated into paying no attention to the man behind
the curtain, and caving in.
Give me liberty, or give me death.
It isn’t a choice as much as it is a fact of life. Those who choose
liberty live, even in death for the cause. Those who are tricked into
surrendering liberty I order to preserve life, end up with neither. How
will you vote?