Guilty Liberals
(Page 2 of 2)
Mar.-Apr. 2008
by Joseph Hart
Sound familiar? If you’ve ever been involved in movement politics, it should. If not, surf over to True GreenConfessions.com. Ostensibly, this is a website for greenies to assuage their guilt with public confessions of private sins. But you can’t hear the rending of garments for the drum of the browbeating. A typical example: “It’s so easy to be green. . . . People who think it’s too hard are just lazy.”
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Perhaps it’s not fair to judge an entire movement on the strength of a few anonymous web postings. Still, it’s at least worth considering whether the green movement’s reputation of being smug and humorless is not, in fact, a vast right-wing conspiracy, but simply the accurate description of a group of people with a lousy relationship to their own guilt.
What’s really lacking in public discourse is a very real notion of forgiveness and humility. Merely by being born, the greenest among us consume resources and exhale carbon dioxide. We also have to work, eat, and sleep, which, depending on our individual circumstances, take various tolls on the world around us. And then there’s what we do or want to do for fun, to make life joyful—to some, the ultimate sin.
None of these realities should cause us to wallow in shame or shrug fatalistically. Instead, as in all things, we must be humble and firm in our resolve to do what we can. As Ma’anit concludes, quoting child development specialist Penelope Leach, “Guilt is the most destructive of all emotions. It mourns what has been while playing no part in what may be, now or in the future.”
Only by acknowledging our guilt, exonerating ourselves and others, and then stepping calmly into the future with the best of intentions can we hope to make an honest difference in the world.
Now, if you’ll forgive me, I have a gymnastics lesson to walk to.
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