Fitting In....

Fitting in requires of intelligent people that they eschew what they know in exchange for being liked, for politicians it's worse, it requires suborning principles. I have  many former political friends who are slow to reason and quick to anger where fitting in is concerned, because of the means not mattering to the ends in exchange for hurried personal deliverables at huge cost to destiny..

What do you say of the political activist who jumps bed after bed searching for a shortcut to power?  Or the ones who, having smelt and tasted power from up close only to be slapped away by the wickedness of the very ends brought on by shortcut politicking who go searching in the rubbish for the things they campaigned against, willing to smear the good/bad smell of belonging all over themselves if it would deliver the keys to inclusion and power?

I have no such problem because, even if I were to try to fit in whatever is fundamentally me sabotages my best attempts. My bullshit tolerance is too low to allow for me to hold my nose and justify my behavior. I could no more choose ends over means than taste over touch, but it has not been for a lack of trying. We live in desperate, desperate times, where the people's needs are continuously trumped by the politics of expediency, where concepts like 'New Politics' are invented and discarded with all the speed that greed requires. History needs to be unkind to those who suborn principle because it is embedded in us for a reason. It is what keeps us above the animals and what demands of our activism that we be fair and even handed, even as we are just and willing to sacrifice 'fitting in' for getting real and measurable results. I live in a world of costs, benefits and results, and have seen first hand the destruction wrought by those who choose naked self interest over the greater good, who have transformed their almost certain destiny into high end prostitution just to say I was here, I came, I saw and I supped. History does not work that way. It records the ebb and flow of the mechanics of the big and the small alike, and we could no more fool consequence than to plant today and reap tomorrow.

I have political friends who would argue their idea of the greater good even as their cost benefits analysis designed to deliver in their favor screams that they are lying to the world. At my age fitting in is not as important as what I write into history. I can never understand how men could be so petty as to ignore legacy in exchange for a few fleeting moments of personal glory, knowing that the smoke is temporary and the feeling an illusion.

Every single politician and political aspirant at work in our politics knows full well the problems that this nation faces and the root causes. We understand the impact of rampant poverty, illegal activities and runaway greed and all their concomitant ills, yet when we get to the front of the line, the space we have positioned ourselves to be the cure for, the reason for all the work, at that point for some reason we choose to become the problem instead. Why you ask? Fitting in. It's easier to run with the pack than to stand back or stand alone. It is far more rewarding in the short term to receive peer driven adulation than to bite down on any bullets, regardless of the trajectory we may have set for our own lives all that time ago.

The real difference between man and animal is imagination. To paraphrase Merlin who said to king Arthur, the entire banquet is in the first taste, all else is just so much chewing in search of a memory. We can think ourselves forward into scenarios and work to make them become reality.This works the same for the good and the bad but for choice. One day this nation will be saved from all that ails it by people bigger than themselves not interested in fitting in. Men and women who easily understand that racism and tribalism are no justification for a political divide, who could refuse dirty money, the illusion of personal gratification over substance and position in exchange for living up to potential and purpose. That time could well be now, there are enough of us that we could upset the proverbial apple cart and challenge if not change the status quo if we wanted to, all it requires is a willingness to stay true to what we believe to be right and forego the temporal illusion of fitting in.