Used to be that I would spend twice the time ranting than raving. I got pretty good at spotting injustice, abuse, discrimination, mens rae and the trickle down effect of a political system skewed to the privileged classes. I developed a most sensitive BS detector.
Most of my rants were merely vocal expressions of awareness. As in "We know what you're up to, so stop this shallow (corrupt and greedy) attempt to control our minds, efforts, actions or savings accounts immediately". Sometimes it worked. We got out of Vietnam, we started to recycle, girls started to wear sensible shoes, movies got way better, we tightened our consumer belts for a while, we finally all agreed that the planet was heating up, a lot of us quit smoking and we elected a black president.
Still I ranted on. It's easy, anybody can do it. I ranted about pollution to our oceans, about chemicals in meat, about spending needless time worrying about the gender of others lovers, about Bush's connections to Big Oil, about that lying bastard Donald Rumsfeld spinning gibberish about democracy and freedom, war and oil, about SUVs, about malls, about NASCAR and about the Catholic Church and about fat.
To anybody that would listen.
Then one day a funny thing happened. I decided that unless I had a legitimate answer or solution to a given rant, I would henceforth, not voice it. I would then try to research a solution, find as much expert, credible and pertinent commentary as Google would allow with which to frame my arguments and hopefully create something worthy of additional consideration.
You have heard this next line before. The more I learned about the rant du jour, the more I understood how truly little I knew about it. Like trying to understand Henry Kissinger without first Googling Palestine, or taking your carbon footprint after a visit to the Henry Ford Wikipedia dealership. I really wanted to start raving instead of ranting.
So I started to rave, "Isn't it great that we have the opportunity to solve these complex and dynamic issues"? "Isn't it marvelous how technology has moved so far ahead of ecology, and must now save us from us"? Things like that.
Not wanting to come off as a complete cynic, I narrowed my rants to the things that I could control and my raves to everything else. I stopped eating meat, I recycled, I rode my bike whenever possible, I live in a house that is within my humble means, and most importantly I do what I love, and yes (rave on) I love what I do.
And at long last, today I can give a 100% accurate and a workable solution in answer to a major rant of mine. Here is the premise as presented by William Saletan in Slate magazine a few years back. http://www.slate.com/id/2148756/
And here is my solution: Exercise more.
Rave on.
1 comment:
Like my grandmother used to say 'better to keep your mouth shut so people won't discover how little you know'. And, then there was my father --- 'don't be afraid to ask questions; even if the question(s) seem simple or even dumb...'. I think ranting is good and likely even better while your exercising.
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