passive idealism

While listening to an Ella Fitzgerald song, I realized how much I wish I was born in a different century. Imagine the 40's music scene, the birth of jazz, the big band music that makes you feel as extravagant as the music you listen to, the first stirrings of feminism... the utter simplicity of everything.

1940s was the brink of the Second World War. But then, you know who your enemy is, you know what you are wasting your life to fight for. it may come in grand but gray terms of equality or democracy or freedom, in figure heads of evil like Hitler or the suffocating restraints of being called inferior just because of your sex or race but its better than now where we know we need to fight because we feel there is something wrong but we don't know what evil we're facing. What do we shout on the streets? Who do we condemn? What evil do we need to fight? Who’s on our side? Maybe I only feel this way because I wasn't really there.

From whence came this amazing ephiphany...? I don't really know but it has been an echoing thought in my mind longer than I could remember. I think we have the shorter end of the stick. Everything is much more complicated now. Every battle is fought internally. There are no more black or white just varying shades of gray. Everything is in context, depends on conditions sometimes as flimsy as weather changes. Every outcome is weighed, every manipulation of the clueless masses perfectly strategized. Take the last presidential elections, you vote for someone not because you totally believe what they stand for but because it is the lesser evil and they don't even try to hide that fact.

Everything could be used to control the populace. Every motive should be treated with deep scrutiny. Nothing is as innocent as it seems. Everyone who cares not to be just another mindless drone should always be on-guard; on the defensive... even terrorism is a fight against imperialism. Anarchy is a fight against iron fisted dictatorship. Every rebellion is a noble fight against the sugar coated flaws of the state.

Internal battle... where would you stand? Who would you believe? Which side is more 'right' or just or more noble? When you get tired of answering all the questions and uncovering all the justifications and endless possibilities, you stop caring. sit in a corner watching the news allowing the world go by with its madness feeling frustrated at your incapacity to fight for what you personally believe without being another soldier to be dragged behind someone else's stands. It would be easier not to care but the callousness of sitting back while everything else goes wrong is hard on the idealist inside of you that you've never managed to fully shut up. But what can one do aside from pointing your fingers on what is wrong and blaming everything on everyone else? Even passing blame could get tiring.

I’m a blabbering idiot…