L'etranger

I remember reading the opening of Albert Camus' L'etranger,  in French IV as a senior in high school. It opens with something like, "My mother died, whatever."  I was rather more interested in finding out what the book had to do with The Cure's song Killing an Arab, but I remember being struck by the starkness of that opening.  It was really my first introduction to existentialism, and I was reading it in French, because my French teacher, Mrs. Beachy (aka Madame Plage) was awesome.
Looking back, I realize that the course my life took was rather shaped by reading things.  The books that shaped my thinking, and sometimes warped my thinking are important, but not always fun.  Reading Sartre's No Exit, actually lead me to re-evaluate what I believed about heaven and hell, and left me open to the more hopeful visions of C.S. Lewis.  Reading The Catcher in the Rye and The Sufferings of Young Werther, taught me that perhaps teenage angst isn't really that noble of an emotional state.  The existentialists, along with Dostoevsky, Emerson and Thoreau, led me to an understanding that people are fundamentally estranged from one another, and yet, we must struggle against that estrangement.  "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation," wrote the Walden hermit.
There is this little blurb in the NY Times this morning, which seems like just a data point in the ongoing saga of human estrangement. I'm not a great fan of statistics, nor a great believer in polls, but the upshot of that Upshot, is that a whole lot of people, on both sides of our current Left/Right divide feel like a stranger in a strange land.  47% of Republicans (who currently control all the major levers of power in the government) and 44% of Democrats, feel like the country is completely out of their control. How is that possible?  Well, objectively, it's not. Just like Holden Caufield's romantic self destruction, it doesn't make any sense.  By the time you get done reading Goethe, you realize that "young Werther" is a whiny punk, we need to get over ourselves.  We are not the underdog any more, none of us. We are the Roman Empire that Caesar himself could only dream about, we are also possibly a more entrenched dystopia than Orwell could have imagined, we are also Aldous Huxley's Brave New World on a level that few have fully apprehended.
We are a big humanity sized mess.  Old white men sitting in the seats of power deny the experiences of the young and the oppressed and the female.  Money rides roughshod over all of our systems.  The power-hungry and greedy take brutal advantage of anyone and everyone at some point or another.  As Emerson said, "Things are in the saddle and ride mankind."  But existential despair is not in order, because we have a situation here that has never existed in the history of the world, we have the capacity to change it, possibly without violence, because for all our flaws we still have a voice and it is a voice that far too many of us choose not to use.
In almost exactly a month we get to vote.  I daresay this is probably the most talked about, and maybe the most important "mid-term" election in the history of our country.  But the trends of voter turnout, especially in non-presidential years are pretty grim.  Roughly half of our eligible voters will not show up. Because I have read existentialists I know why; these people are convinced that nothing they do matters.  Maybe it's because they have been sated and sedated, maybe it's because they have been oppressed and depressed, maybe it's because they have abandoned all hope, but I know this, their estrangement is not an iron fact, it is a trap of their own mind, and it is one the world will suffer and the powerful will encourage and sustain.
I think what I may lamenting here is the dying value of Liberal Arts education, even if it doesn't lead to marketable skills, it does in fact lead to being able to understand the world as it really is outside the 24 hour news cycle. If you read enough, you will notice that none of our struggles and estrangement are new things, and when you realize they aren't just afflictions of the present historical conflagration, you have a valuable shred of hope to hang on to: this disease is not usually fatal.  Chronically depressed sociopaths, dissociated psychopaths and nihilists, are characters we should read about, not personalities we should emulate, and certainly not characters we should elect.  Read more, vote, watch less TV news, shalom.