Charity as Cure All

I met someone during my first trip to Buenos Aires whose world view was, at the time, exactly opposite mine. Without exaggerating, she felt almost no responsibility to anyone or anything. She believed her mission in life was to pursue her own happiness.

Her beliefs both enraged and intrigued me and she effectively shook my worldview to the core. Her analytical mind tore down my somewhat shallow and cliched beliefs and made me feel stupid for caring.

Allow me to elaborate on who I was when I met her...At the time, I was heavily involved in volunteering for progressive political causes. I co-directed a campaign for Ohio Representative, made door-to-door pleas, annoyed more independents via phone than I can remember, gave financial contributions, wrote letters to the editor of Ohio newspapers, blogged, and even refused to buy anything from companies that financially supported the Bush administration.

I felt that fighting the Bush Administration and its supporters was my obligation as a citizen and I took it way seriously. Since the start of graduate school, I remember having a seething anger towards Bush and his chronies. I saw clearly that we had been lied into invading Iraq. He used our need for vengence after 911 to carry out a neoconservative agenda (pre 911) of invading Iraq and turning the Middle East into a Capitalist/Democratic dream in the desert. For anyone who was paying attention, there was never a substantial connection between Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. Neither was there any reliable evidence of weapons of mass destruction.

The Bush administration seemed to be against everything I held dear. Bush slashed EPA funding, weakened every environmental regulation he could get his hands on, gave the rich gigantic tax cut after tax cut, and thoughtlessly and carelessly signed No Child Left Behind into law.

To me, Bush was the classic rich grinning villain and before I knew it, I was attributing any and all anger, unhappiness, depression, or negative thought to him. It was all his fault.

Granted, if anyone deserved it, it was Bush. In 8 years, he and his buddies trashed our country as if it were his college frat house on a Saturday night. His actions affected me personally, my family, my job, not to mention my country.

However, as I look back on it, Bush was only part of it. Sure, he upset me directly and made my day to day life unhappier than it would have been otherwise. But there was more to it. I had allowed myself to scapegoat all of my negativity to the Bush administration. Dare I say it, it wasn't all their fault.

During graduate school up until my trip to Argentina (7 or so years), I incurred a number of physical stress related maladies. Most of these maladies I attributed to stress caused from my frustration with living in Bush's world. It started with heart palpitations then turned into serious heartburn then gastritis then other more serious digestive disorders. As I look back on this history of stress related issues, it's obvious that the physical manifestion of my opposition to the Bush Administration was anything but normal. I had good reason to be upset, but to the extent that it affected my health and resulted in doctors visits and prescription medication?

I have come to realize that I was either extremely passionate and idealistic about my beliefs or there was something else going on with me. I was outletting my negative emotions on Bush, letting hidden and unrelated issues feed on and combine with anger towards him.

I don't want to completely absolve Bush. His actions were a big part of it. I'm sure of it because I felt much more at peace once the Democrats took back the Senate and House in 2006. And now that Obama is President, it's like Soma for me, dreamy bliss, a warm bath with a New Yorker magazine for me to read as I soak.

But part of it too was something else. Physical manifestations and the angry responses I had toward Bush were simply not normal. The ways I responded and the amount of vitriol I had were I think the products of something else that I wasn't dealing with. I know it because while I now feel pacified by Obama and the direction of our country, many of the same feelings I had during the reign of Bush still exist. Only now I've had to look for different scapegoats. That is, kicking Bush and his bums out didn't fully cure me as I had thought it would. Many of my responses and intensity and negativity still remain and I think that I outlet them now on anyone by whom I feel rejected.

So I guess the lesson is that scapegoating my feelings on a worthy evil, while not the worst practice, does not cure or address the root of my problems.

I recently had a conversation with a friend who provided an eloquent and illuminating example, suggeting that some doctors spend years in Africa treating AIDS patients and doing great work and yet in that time never address their own suffering.

That is, some people engage in charity or worthy causes as a means of curing their own suffering. In the end, they may receive some therapeutic benefit, but never really address the root of their unhappiness or guilt or whatever's eating them. Their choice in charity is a stab in the dark, a drastic step in an attempt to cure a suffering soul. Often these charitable acts-however worthy- don't match up with the true needs of the individual.

And so I've been thinking...About all the other people who outlet feelings and energy caused by hidden issues onto unrelated factors such as their jobs, family, spouses, sports teams, politics, traffic, children, pets... They've convinced themselves that the way they feel is justified by something imperfect in their environment. Some people choose charity and volunteering or exercise while others choose... more dangerously and blame the people closest to them. Put simply, when we feel a certain way, we look to an easy target to justify why we feel the way we do.

Sometimes easy targets are right on. Lack of sleep, changes in weather, allergies. All these factors can ruin a day and make us feel lousy. But if the problem is more chronic and spans through everyday environmental changes, we look to something more stable in our lives to justify our anger, our guilt, our fear etc.

I think in general, it's true that liberals tend to me more depressed, unhappy. They use all the problems in the world to justify their general and vague unhappiness. A liberal might think...Surely I feel terrible today because the polar ice caps are melting and the polar bears are drowning. Ok, I agree, that's terrible and for a sensitive person, the idea could cause some amount of emotional trauma. Regardless, it's still an abstract concept by which few people are directly affected. What's more likely is that someone attaches unhappiness they already have and exacerbates it with news like this.

On the other hand, I think, generally speaking, Republicans are angry, angrier and meaner sometimes than I was on the left. I think they use the 'Bleeding heart' mentality of liberals as justification for their anger and fears. One need only listen to Rush Limbaugh or Michael Savage and the people who call in to get a sense of the way in which they are justifying their anger with the mere existence of Hillary Clinton and gay marriage. I have no idea why or how you could justify your anger with Hillary Clinton. Ok, she's an ambitious woman and maybe part of her staying with Bill was to further her own political ambitions. I still don't think that's enough to justify any substantial amount of anger. And gay marriage. Really? I've never heard a reasonable argument against it, other than it's something different than what people are used to, and people are afraid of change. Does two people who love each other and want to get married really justify seething anger? Anyhow, my political leanings are clear enough.

I guess the point I'm trying to make is an extension of previous posts about self discovery. I think that only through learning about ourselves, facing our pasts, and getting to the core of issues are we able to begin to find peace and I suppose 'relieve our suffering'. I think people, including myself, who take wild thrusts into politics or other worthy causes are mostly picking charities at random, maybe ones that other people have told them that they should care about or that will change their lives and make them happier.

The world is probably a better place as a result of this behavior. In the end, however, people who engage in random charity as a means of dealing with their problems and feeling better could likely have better eased their suffering through Prozac.

I'm guessing that true therapeutic value and nourishment for the soul come instead from a deep knowledge of ourselves and our pasts, followed up by appropriate behavioral responses, whether that means some type of deliberate charitable act or simple lifestyle changes that benefit no one but ourselves.

So I find myself now not as angry with Bush and the Republicans. Don't get me wrong. I still get upset when they mindlessly oppose Obama in lock step, even though he has made genuine strides to compromise, reach across the aisle, and appoint Republicans into positions of power and prominence. But I'm beginning to realize that maybe some of the things that used to upset me aren't issues that I really truly care about. Instead, maybe I was justifying my anger and unhappiness with those issues.

The woman I met during my first trip to BA shook my moral etchasketch. I still don't agree with her way of thinking or behaving and I'm not sure if she knows herself enough to be convicted in this extremely egocentric forma de ser. But she did have the effect of shaking up my identity and getting me to realize that I didn't really care as much about some issues as I thought.

So for a good part of my over year long stay in Buenos Aires, I've felt a general apathy and malaise that I haven't experienced in a long time. To some degree, I have been rebuilding my moral framework, deciding what was truly important to me versus what I had decided to use as a scapegoat for my emotions. And in the meantime, there has existed a vacuum, an empty and kind of sad space where my activism and passion used to be.

These days, I'm happy to say, my passion for certain issues is returning as I begin to learn more about myself. But I think what's more important at the moment, before the step of action and advocacy, is to continue to explore why my physical and emotional responses in the past have been out of line with reality.