In this century history stopped paying attention to the old psychological orientation of reality. I mean, these days, character isn't destiny any more. Economics is destiny. Ideology is destiny. Bombs are destiny. What does a famine, a gas chamber, a grenade care about how you lived your life? Crisis comes, death comes, and your pathetic individual self doesn't have anything to do with it, only to suffer the effects. (447)
I remember having a class discussion in ninth grade about fate. The teacher surveyed the class and asked us to raise our hands if we believed in fate. A couple of hands went up. The rest of us, true children of the Enlightenment, believers in our abilities to forge our own futures, kept still, uncomfortable with the metaphysical nature of the question. Well, go to India, the teacher told us, walk the streets of Mumbai, look into the eyes of teenage mothers sitting alongside dirt-paved roads holding their infant children, look into the eyes of a leprous beggar, and you come back and tell me that there is no such thing as fate. Jeez, harsh message for a bunch of ninth graders. But well-deserved considering the mostly bratty, oblivious, affluent demographic.
When I hear Joe the Plummer talk about "American" values, and the rugged individualism that they embody, I remember that ninth grade class, and I remember that my station in life has more than anything else been determined by the geography of my birth. The movie, The Pursuit of Happyness, starring Will Smith, draws upon classic American ideals about hard work and equal opportunity. It is a beautiful, moving story of individual triumph in the face of adversity. The story is powerful because it certainly is always nice to believe that we are the masters of our own fate, the shapers of our own destiny, the writers of our own story. That, despite everything, if we just work hard enough, we can pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps.
There is no real way to live without this fundamental belief in our hearts. And yet, economics is destiny. Unemployment is at something like a twenty-year high right now, and all those newly unemployed folk are not suddenly unemployed because of their own failings. Sheer will and determination will only take them so far. So, if Joe the Plummer wants to call Barack Obama a socialist for wanting to redistribute wealth, well, that makes me a little bit angry. Because equal opportunity does not characterize the US economy, it will never characterize any economy if simply left to its own devices, and while it might be a utopian ideal, it is an ideal worthy of our striving, even if impossible.
The question of fate, for me, is one of the definitive differences between liberals and conservatives. The discussion in my ninth grade classroom has been the root of much of my political thinking. And, damn, I can't wait to leave behind the era of cowboy individualism that Bush champions.
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