Part 2: Also, do not keep only kind friends. Keep mad friends, drunks, scientists, killers. Humanity never has been black and white, and no bad guys are all Bad Guy. Keep friends that sharpen you out of the gray, and help define your own morality even if it is outside of it, maybe especially. You will pull them from their gray in your fine experiences. You will also be the mad friend to some. Man can only be pulled from madness by a steady love. That is not to say do not condemn the darkness, condemn it its fine context. But you are dark yourself, capable of violence. My father said to me in a philosophical discourse between Douglass and 8th street: "You have a violence in you, son. Do not deny that you have a child, and what would fall on her would fall on someone else in triple." He lived through my chaotic years, and has lived long enough to see me on this side of a complex heart. He has seen some of those years become poems, and some of those years become my empathy. Do not mistake a lack of opinion for the opposite of opinion. The opposite of opinion is empathy. Opinion is a weak coffee. Empathy takes on two forms: I have been there, and: I have never been there so I cannot formulate a strong opinion. I have lived long enough to hope for a paradigm shift. Where the modern philosophers help lead the best and worst of us towards becoming empathetic beings. Not weak in empathy, but rather fortified by it. I hope that my one life helps to begin that transition. Example: George Zimmerman. Opinionated about a kid who should not be here. Living in his own vacuum void of empathy, and too stupid to know it.
Posted on: Sat, 17 Aug 2013 19:46:44 +0000
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