One of my Facebook friends posted a piece called "Beyond Gay Marriage and Queer Separatists–The Call for a Working-Class Queer Movement"(thanks to gatheringforces.org, apparently Lefty/revolutionary action site).
Adam and I read it out loud and thought it over carefully. Adam, ever surprising me, was sympathetic to their cause, but suspicious and even fearful that what essentially amounts to Communism could benefit. I agree, though I point to revolutionary action as the most dangerous thing.
My mind on poetry, I felt mostly a reaction against the grating rhetoric of contemporary Leftism. Why not, I asked the Leftists, work harder on the intimate rhetoric of, say, Wordsworth in "The Old Cumberland Beggar:"
He travels on, a solitary Man,"We should help those in need as much as we can," is a proposition I think Leftists and Wordsworth can agree on. On the other hand, I thought of Kipling, having just read "If" in Stephen Fry's The Ode Less Traveled:
So helpless in appearance, that for him
The sauntering Horseman throws not with a slack
And careless hand his alms upon the ground,
But stops,--that he may safely lodge the coin
Within the old Man's hat; nor quits him so,
But still, when he has given his horse the rein,
Watches the aged Beggar with a look
Sidelong, and half-reverted.
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!
Real change is brought about by individuals looking inward, not mobilization of masses. I'm sure such a proposition is less amenable to Leftists; the truth must be somewhere in between, as it always is. Right?
I'd place Luzloca81's statement right at that in-between point. She is the old Cumberland beggar and Kipling's Man ("It doesn't get better. You get stronger") rolled into one. Admittedly, this is a quick thought, but that's what blogs are for, yes?
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