Meant to Live?

Today I’m writing from a mindset that springs from being sandwiched between Rebecca Solnit’s powerfully luminescent intro/extrospection and the calamities of the world, such as the fact that the Senate just passed Fast Track for the TPP. After the House tied its own hands in the same way, I was too deep in the clutches of a kind of nihilistic depression to write anything coherent about it. If I could find people to take this to the streets with me, I would like to launch some kind of protest--maybe a United States version of the Zapatistas, using this new trade deal as our catalyst, but recruits are scarce in the highly gentrified, highly privilege-bubbled town I live in. I could always have a solo protest, walk around with signs or some such, I suppose. But for today I am coping through music, which instead prompted this piece of my thoughts.

With Anti-Flag a little too intense and Jackson Browne a little too mellow, I gravitated towards a middle ground--Switchfoot, specifically the song “Meant to Live.” I thought it mournful and political enough to match my bitter mood, and while it didn’t really soothe me, it did get me thinking, especially the following line:

                We want more than this world's got to offer…

The thing about that sentiment is that it’s perfectly logical--from a certain perspective. It implies, firstly, that the events and experiences you will have in your life are on offer from the world--as if you are a passive receiver and the world is simply an omnipotent force doling out what you get or don’t.

For much of the world, that is the story of their lives--the banks and barriers of the paths they can travel were determined by distant forces beyond their control. But for the members of Switchfoot, I doubt many paths have ever been expressly or inherently blocked. So in this case, in this melancholy anthem, “we want more than this world’s got to offer” seems to come from a place of defeatist apathy--criticizing the world at large for not supplying a less difficult and tragedy-stricken planet on which to live out our lives. The problem with this sentiment coming from Switchfoot--and take note: I don’t intend this as a specific critique of the band, merely the sentiment that this line may convey, and that I see all too often--is that projecting this feeling, being trapped and resentful that you can’t achieve all you were meant for, allows the idea that we in the US, in the privileged snow globes of the first world, are unable to fight the misfortunes this cold distant world is meting out to us.

However, the world is not an entity that has in it for you. The world is not offering anything except nature, and it is humans who have taken and ruined and corrupted and claimed that gift. The world has much to offer us, both the land and the resistance and lives of people everywhere who are struggling with trials far greater than those that the members of Switchfoot have likely faced. To assert that you want more than what you’ve been given implies that you are in a place of static underprivilege, that the odds are stacked against you and you have no agency. This sentiment, in an age of endemic apathy among those who still retain the means to do so much with what the world has already given them (if that’s how you want to phrase it) is toxic.

Some of it may be simply an expression of exhaustion with activism and struggling, which I certainly feel. The frustration of finding power structures resistant to our efforts to shake them, the demoralizing sorrow of losing yet another battle in this precarious fight for a precarious future… But the world is not to blame. We were not “meant to live for so much more” than this (I suppose it is arguable that some of this mentality, specifically in the song, hearkens back to Switchfoot being a Christian band, and perhaps the sense of defeat could be interpreted as a wish for God to step in and finish the job we’re sick of?). I wish to hell and back that the fallout of this unstable world were not my generation’s inheritance, and I do feel a sense of loss, that we have lost the chances for an easier life, chances we never had. But the human race has run out of chances for a blithe and easy future, and we can’t spend our time wishing for a different way, feeling entitled in a way that has not even been possible for much of the world.

I am reminded of something I once read in an interview with Noam Chomsky: that when he gives talks in the US, people ask him afterwards “What can we do?” Whereas when he speaks to peasants in Colombia or Kurds in Turkey, they don’t ask what they can do, they tell him what they are already doing. This missing link, this step between awareness or outrage and action, is something the armchair-bound Western world has a serious problem with. We are waiting for someone to tell us what we can do--as if it is we who have expended our capacity for change and now wring our hands at the ends of our ropes.

We may have run out of space for that preferred type of action in the US (I am speaking generally of the middle and upper classes when I reference the US and the West)--that civilized and clean and tidy type. The mentality of activism that so many share here--that we can make a few efforts, sign a few petitions or meet with our legislators or attend a colorful protest, and then go home--is from what springs the sense of frustration that we have done all we can and now blame the world for our failure to see much earthshaking change for the better.

But we have not run out of capacity for meaningful action. We are not nearly at the end of our reservoirs of power for change. Especially in recent years, when it has grown ever more critical, we have only caused ripples on the surface.

We with power cannot sigh and sit back, consigning our rights and our agency to inertia. The destructive power of that inertia--the gathering storm of climate change, the slide towards ever more radical and hateful right-wing ideologies, the perpetuation of the disastrous economic systems that will march us off the plank--will destroy this planet and our species, along with countless thousands of others. I too want more than the dark future we are facing, and more than the wars of our fathers, as Switchfoot mentions a line later. But we in the Western world have not exhausted our struggling capacity and our power, and we cannot bemoan the choices this world offers as painfully limited--yet. Other Switchfoot songs, like “This is Your Life,” carry a far better message--one that demands action. But keep bemoaning, keep feeling that we have had the idyllic life we were “meant to live” precluded, and we may yet end up in that hollow place, as trapped as our apathy already suggests we are, defeated before most of us have even begun the real fight.

We were not necessarily meant to live for anything at all, but if we mean to live, we cannot live like this.