Tuesday, March 28, 2006

Dogma and Catalysts

I grew up during the Cold War, when we had nightmares about nukes at night and garbage like Red Dawn in the theatres. Back then France was where we looked to see what was beautiful, England was the cradle of Democracy while we thought ourselves Democracy's exemplars, Germany no longer deserved its divisive fate, and we all hoped Sting had it right with Russians. It was a time when Thatcher and Reagan worked. It was all so deceptively simple.

I turned 18 in time to cast my vote for Bush, Sr., and I did so without regret and with very little consideration. Democrats were failures like Carter while Reagan and Bush had carried us with more than middling success. Bush was a bomber pilot from World War 2, to boot. It was all so neat and tidy in a world I was sure could turn to ash with a single misstep.

In 1989 I joined the USAF. I watched the Wall come down and students die at Tienanmen Square, we invaded Panama and liberated (yes, liberated - suck on it) Kuwait and then watched things unfold in bloody time in the dusty streets of Mogadishu. Yugoslavia tore itself apart. Russia changed forever and suddenly the world wasn't as black and white as I'd always thought.

The world I was raised in was very polarized, divided along ideological and dogmatic lines. There was religion and there was the secular world; NATO and the Warsaw Pact; Republicans and Democrats; villains and heroes.

I was taught to identify with one segment and reject the other. Looking back, I can see this sort of exaggerated self-identification as a survival mechanism*. In the face of the missiles we all thought could end the world overnight, it was comforting to think of ourselves as the heroes, the ones with all the answers, the morally and ethically superior.

I left the military in 1993. The world was either crazier than it had been previously, or I was paying more attention. I'm fairly sure it was the latter. Regardless, my world had changed and I wasn't sure what to do with myself anymore. Russian states were undergoing their so-called Velvet Revolutions and if someone decided to end the United States, it wouldn't be them.

It wasn't just the Post-Cold War world that did it, though in some ways it was a catalyst. I suppose I started this process of self-evaluation before the wall fell, before I joined the military, before the world as I knew it had changed.

As a child, I was always taught that I was supposed to love God more than my family. I was supposed to have a sort of child-parent relationship with Him and know that He loved me implicitly because He was the God of Love. I was never able to do this. Even when I was little, I knew I didn't love God in any quantifiable way, but that to say so was tantamount to breaking my family's heart. I didn't even want to love Him because I could never pin down anything He did for me, and I knew that people who loved each other did things for each other.

Over the years, the Atonement of Christ and the gift of our physical bodies and the advancement of our souls were all trotted out as things God had done for us and why I should love Him. What I couldn't shake were all the times God ordered genocide or committed it Himself upon His own children (though the language used rarely indicates any affection for those He destroys). I couldn't escape the intolerance He displayed and the hate that was often preached in His name.

In the end, it never made any difference and rather than fostering love, it fostered resentment in me. More importantly, it paved the way for me to begin critical self-examination. Though I clung desperately to the appearance of piety, I have never really believed so much as I wanted to believe. After all, things are much easier when someone hands you all the answers and you never have to think too deeply about it. But what this process of trying to find God's love has done for me is illustrate how to find answers myself.

Growing up religious means you have a whole extra world of pressure to conform to. If you rebel against the religion it isn't about you deciding the religion isn't for you, it reflects directly on those who continue to believe. In dysfunctional fashion, they make the entire situation more about them than you. They get angry, aggressive, offended and self-conscious around you. In the end, there are social and familial pressures brought to bear as weapons to enforce conformity. You are not allowed to dissent because that then becomes a direct threat to the absolutism of religion.

Many of us, as a result, don't break away until we are adults. We fight our disbelief because we want peace or because it's all we've ever known and to just toss it away is like giving up a beloved stuffed animal. It is uncomfortable and distressing.

The thing is, we haven't really changed, we've just acknowledged what we've thought all along. Sometimes this acceptance of what we really are and what we really believe is the hardest part of all.

Politics and religion are the same in this way. Political ideology, like religion, provides easy answers if you let it. You don't have to think about anything and can go about comfortably in the knowledge that multitudes believe as you do and have done all the thinking and postulating for you and have worked out the best way. After all, all Republicans and Democrats think alike, right?

We can all see that statement as preposterous, yet few of us do anything about it.

As my world changed and I watched the altered political landscape unfold around the world, I realized I had supported the last 12 years of Republican control out of habit and expectation more than actual belief. I supported them out of a survival mechanism and the beliefs I held in connection with that. The US war machine, the Cold War, the church...none of it was quite what I'd believed it was and it was, in fact, sometimes very hypocritical.

I began to look at the world and consider the values I held personally and how it all fit in with the world. I came to the realization that I wasn't a card-carrying Republican any more than I was a pious Christian. I came to the realization that I wanted to think about the issues I saw killing and oppressing people the world over, that I was concerned with the ideals of democracy and human rights, and that I didn't want anyone to hand me an answer. The strongest realization was that these were things I'd always thought, that I hadn't changed so much as I woke up and acknowledged myself.

I'm still working out what I think. Right now I just need to get thoughts out of my head, to try and pin down what's there. Issues in this world are too complex for anyone to tell you what to think, feel, and believe. Certainly it's easy, and certainly it's comfortable, but in the end it isn't me and I'm willing to bet it isn't you.


*For a fantastic read on Identity, it's benefits and the dangers inherent in it see In the Name of Identity. It's less scholarly and more personally insightful, but I highly recommend it.

No comments: