IF I MAY BE SO BOLD TO ASK -- A CONVERSATION WITH A READER

IF I MAY BE SO BOLD TO ASK –

A CONVERSATION WITH A READER

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© August 7, 2014

REFERENCE:

When you write books, have a website and blog and fill that blog with missives that reflect what you are currently thinking, you are bound to get responses, perhaps not as many as you might expect, given some 10,000 per month read my blog, but a significant number nonetheless.

I’ve decided to periodically share one with my readers that might interest them.  This is an example in a Q&A format for easy reading.

Reader: I’m curious, why do you write so much?

Writer: I’ve asked myself that same question.  It might seem facetious but it is my way of connecting first with myself and then with others.

Reader: Don’t you think that is a bit narcissistic?

Writer: I suppose it is.

Reader: You don’t have a problem with that?

Writer: No, do you think I should?

Reader: Duh!  Yes, I do.

Writer:  Can I ask you a question?  Do you think it is wrong to first have a conversation with yourself before you have a conversation with others? 

Before you answer, I want you to think of something, something I write about all the time, and something that you have commented about before, and that is you feel self-conscious about being a friend first with yourself before you are with others.  

Well, I don’t.  I feel there is no way to relate to others sincerely if you are not first sincere with yourself, which means from my vantage point that l work out how I feel about a subject in a conversation with myself, and then it becomes projected as a missive, an insight, or, indeed, a book.

For example, I have been in constant conversation with myself since watching President Barak Obama’s News Conference yesterday.

Reader: I know how you feel.  Remember, I’ve been reading you for years.  

You can get boring repeating the same stuff over and over again, but I suppose that’s because you don’t think we’re listening.  We are but we don’t have your confidence.  

Please, no lecture on confidence!  But I do want to hear what you think about the president’s news conference.  I was working and didn’t have a chance to see it.  I hear he really dropped the ball, right?

Writer: Sad.  After hearing the president, I feel sad.  I admire him for standing there before pundits, critics, journalist, and of course the nation as well as the world, and not retreating into his cage.  That’s what most of us do when we are under great stress, and the president clearly is under such stress. 

He is between a rock and a hard place, damned if he makes an emphatic declaration about this or that, and damned if he doesn’t.  

He is, I believe, by temperament and inclination an intellectual if not a scholar.  He would have been much happier, I believe, as an academic or a novelist.  He write quite well. 

Reader: Don’t leave it at that.  If you want to know, that is something that infuriates me about you.  

You bring up these unsettling subjects, like the president’s new conference, then you walk away with some irrelevancy, leaving the poor reader in the lurch having to work it out for himself.  I don’t care about his temperament.  Why do you do this?

Writer: Why do I do it?  I do it because I don’t have answers for you nor does anyone else.  Life is all about working out what has meaning, has significance to us. 

We have to do the heavy lifting or what we have is a Presidential News Conference in which everyone expects “that man in charge,” “the most powerful man in the world” to distill the quagmire, solve the conundrum to everyone’s satisfaction when he is not capable of such a deed.  

No man is.  No man ever was.  But we have this myth in our head that this one man can do that for us.  He can’t.  The sad part of this dilemma is that he is trying to do just that to the pleasure of no one.

Reader: So, what would you have him do?  What would you have us do?

Writer: Simple.  Start taking charge of your own life.

Support the president in what you believe, give him credit when that is the case, and write him or your Congressman about how you feel in both instances, but do it politely, respectfully, and sincerely. 

Become an active participant in democracy, not a rotten egg thrower from the comfort of a crowd. 

Don’t buy into something because you think most other people buy into it, and therefore you are consistent with the pack.  Take a stand, have a point of view, share it if you like, but don’t be hesitant to communicate it to people who represent you, and are charged with carrying out your wishes in this democracy. 

Reader: Yeah, yeah, now you’re sounding like one of your missives.  I get all that.  You don’t have to club me to death with that – I was going to say with all that crap, but that would be disrespectful, wouldn’t it?

Writer: It would be honest, honest I like.  And do you know why?  

It is not for me but for you.  If you can be honest with me, chances are you will be honest with yourself.  If I may, I am tired of people trying to say what they think I want to hear.  I am not running a popularity contest.  

In my last innings, I’m trying to experience life and people and events – not as they are framed on the media or by politicians or academics or pundits – as they are experienced by each of us on a personal basis.

Reader: Can I change the subject?  Actually, it is not so much changing the subject but bringing the subject back to what I planned to ask you, but as you do so well, getting me to go off on a tangent.  You say that 10,000 people a month respond to your blog, is that right?

Writer: Yes, so?

Reader: Is that mainly an American audience?

Writer: What do you think?

Reader: Come on, doc, don’t do that answering a question with a question.  I sincerely want to know.  Is that sincere enough?

Writer: My primary audience, it may surprise you, is the Ukraine, followed by the United States, then Great Britain, Western Europe, Russia and China. 

To my surprise, I have only a little audience from Canada, virtually no audience from Central and South America, or Australia.  

All my missives can be quickly and easily translated into the language of the country, which I think facilitates the interest in those mentioned.

Reader: Ukraine?  Ukraine is a bigger audience than the United States?  How do you explain that?

Writer: I can’t.  All I can tell you is that I have great affection for the Slavic peoples.  

I have had the opportunity to visit the Balkans: Serbia, Romania, Kosovo, Albania and Croatia. 

I have also had an opportunity to visit the Slavic nations of the Baltic Sea such as Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, as well as Russia. 

I’ve never been to the Ukraine, but as an American I try to put myself in their shoes.  They are a proud people under siege, a people with a proud tradition that has been constantly challenged over the centuries, and yet national pride persists and survives.

I have wondered, though, if Ukrainians have a Thomas Paine to capture the essence of their struggle as he did for the Minute Men of the American Revolution.  

King George III of Great Britain was a bully like Vladimir Putin, and yet he was defeated. 

The will of a people is greater than all the guns that may be menacingly camped on their border as is the case with Russian troops on the border of Eastern Ukraine. 

You cannot kill the soul of a people.  This is a lesson that tyrants never learn.  The more tyrants attempt to crush that spirit the greater that spirit grows in a vengeance.    

Writer: Please.  I don't need a sermon.  I get it.  But quite frankly, I don’t see it as our problem.  I’m for the president to stand down, period, as President Eisenhower did when the French and British bombed the Suez Canal.  We didn’t go to war, the canal was rebuilt, and life went on. 

CONCLUSION:

I thanked him for a stimulating conversation, but didn’t add – he’ll probably read this here – that I now understood the reason the president leads from behind. 

Americans are tired of wars, tired of the rhetoric of wars, tired of Americans dying in such places as Afghanistan and Iraq, and for what purpose, tired of being policeman to the world, tired of having the role of controlling the bullies of the world, tired of carrying the financial burden of the United Nations, tired of Europe including Great Britain playing both sides of the street, while letting the United States foot the bill, tired of all the diplomatic mistakes after WWI and WWII, playing landlord to the Middle East while countries and peoples were Gerrymandered to the satisfaction of the Allies, but not to the satisfaction of the indigenous peoples, just plain tired.

Several presidents – of both political parties – put the United States and the World into this cage, and now a President of the United States in the person of Barak Obama stands before an audience in a news conference yesterday, and he has to take the heat because he’s the only one in the kitchen.

My reader is not insensitive, I don’t believe, he is simply tired.  He has been employed, unemployed and re-employed, making less than he formerly made, and he is too tired to be bitter, too tired to worry about 

Ukrainians, Israelis, Palestinians, Syrians, Iraqis, Turks and Jordanians, much less the bloodshed in Africa.  

It is too much!

If he weren’t so tired, I would have liked to tell him that these people are tired, too, only being tired is not their greatest challenge, living for another day is.

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