Manifesto? Manifesto!

What follows is a piece I actually wrote in Fall of 2003. In the days before the reelection of dubya. Oh, how young I was. How boldly naive. Sigh. It's part of my charm, no? I still think it'd be pretty great to write a manifesto, though, together with the smartest, most progressive, most interesting people I know. So what do you people think out there, huh?

We are the generation coming in. Coming in to power in our world(s) as the workers, thinkers, lovers, builders, developers, players, makers, shakers, revolutionizers of a tomorrow that is quickly becoming now. Every generation makes this transition and something amazingly weird happens when they do—coming in, they are full of energy and ideas, full of ideals and dreams, visions of what they will accomplish and how the world will be when they’re the ones in charge. Somewhere along the way, a big chunk of that gets misplaced. As the distance between our ordinary daily selves and our inspired idealistic dreaming selves grows wider with time and bills and families and relationship dramas and office politics and mortgages, we forget what it feels like to know in every cell of our beings why we set out to do the things we’re doing. We slow down, and, god forbid, many of us stop dreaming.

Age does not have to do this to us. The idea that the naïveté of youth is the only thing that makes idealism possible is utterly depressing. Age adds layers of complexity to the world—our understanding of societies and institutions and ethics and justice grows deeper and develops shades and hues we perhaps were not expecting. This complexity has the unfortunate tendency to put out our fires. Wisdom is something beyond merely age and knowledge, though, wisdom is learning the new shades of every issue that you find with time and age and perspective, and embracing them, and standing even more definitively for the kernel of truth at the center of the mess, which is what you set out looking for in the first place.

Faith is not the kind of term I’ve been taught to throw around much, perhaps because it’s unscientific, or perhaps because it rings of the irrational, oppressive systems of belief that lie on the ugly butt side of so many of the world’s religions. However, when secular humanistic idealistic people talk about the moral principles we hold most dear, when we feel ourselves tapped in to currents of what we know to be universal rights and truths, I think we are also talking about faith. It’s a kind of secular faith, a faith in what is good and right and important that tells us, and indeed seems to have told the people of many ages before us in many places in many forms, that humanity and the natural world are beautiful, that life is sacred, that things like greed, aggression, and injustice are to be avoided, and things like peace, kindness, and rationality are to be sought after.

So why is it that my faith is relegated to “gut instinct” when others are conversant in the languages of their faith, accustomed to discussing, evaluating, explaining things in the world around them in the terms of their faith? Me, I don’t talk about my faith very much. I mean, sure I’m a moral person with a commitment to good and true and just things and I try to live my life according to those things, but why can’t I say more than a few sentences about my beliefs without borrowing terms and making metaphors? I take refuge in the vague, left to feel my faith from afar, assume and feel the presence of something much like it in the people around me, but not address it too directly so as not to feel the pain of having no specific terms in which to speak of it.

The faithful pile into church every Sunday (at least in NC they do) to hear someone speak to them in the righteous language of their faith. In putting their faith to words, and giving people a place and time to discuss it, sing it, yell it, praise it, the reverends and preachers are inspiring their congregations to live their lives more actively and accurately according to their faith, and less and less as a default, an incidental activity.

What if I decided that I didn’t want the things I have faith in to just live in my gut anymore, working down there vague and alone in my belly? What if I decided to let it out, let it run through me all the time? What if I decided to put it on paper, to develop and build on its contents by writing about them, drawing them out until I had something more defined and fully formed than boiling roiling primordial moral soup…until I had a code to live by, not a rule but a foundation, something solid and well thought out and sturdy enough to really hang my hat on, rather than a roiling boiling amorphous glob of goodness? What, my dears, would that look like? Well, it would be a manifesto.

So, I propose that we write a bleepin’ manifesto.

If we write this, we’ll make it at least semi-permanent, a record of our thoughts. And you know what that means - not only can we read it later, maybe much later, maybe years later when we’re goddam senators or CEOs - but our friends can read it, they can know a piece of our minds, they can help us build on our thoughts or use them to fuel their own, they can remind us of them later, when we’re CEOs or grandparents, or shit even next week when we’re frustrated and have misplaced some kernel of wisdom we really already know.