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From: edhall@rand-unix.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.women,net.singles
Subject: Re: Never stop fighting
Message-ID: <1819@rand-unix.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 18-Jun-84 14:21:05 EDT
Article-I.D.: rand-uni.1819
Posted: Mon Jun 18 14:21:05 1984
Date-Received: Thu, 21-Jun-84 05:53:53 EDT
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|    To be nobody but yourself in a world   |
|    which is doing its best night and day  |
|    to make you like everybody else        |
|    means to fight the hardest battle      |
|    any human being can fight and          |
|    never stop fighting.                   |
|                                           |
|                          E. E. Cummings   |
[submitted by Farzin Mokhtarian]

As much as I like e.e. cummings' poetry, and as fascinating as I find the
New England Transcendentalist tradition of which he is a part, I find
myself in disagreement with this quotation, as I find it proposes both
an obsession with self and an attitude of individual-vs-society.

A lot of the alienation, loneliness, and unhappiness that many people
experience in our culture comes from our cultural obsession with our
selves.  We deny the deep emotional need for knowing where we fit in,
and instead approach life in terms of what we can obtain to enhance
our self-image.  Peer pressure, fads, and such all work in terms of
our inflamed desire for enhancing our self-concept, and *not*, as is
commonly asserted, because of any desire for conformity.  Conformity
is merely the statistical result of a collection of self-obsessed
individuals.

I think this trend became starkly apparant in the `me decade' of the
1970's, though I think that it has continued into the 1980's almost
unabated.  The result of the denial of our innately social natures
(where we have made connections between people a matter of self-willed
``relationships'' rather than social manifestations of our inter-
dependence) often shows as feelings of purposelessness or alienation.
The fabric of society seems thin and increasingly hostile.  All
sorts of ill-fitting attempts are made to establish a feeling of
connection, though achieving true intimacy seems more and more
difficult on an individual-to-individual basis, while striving
for the feeling of belonging to a group is frustrated by the sense
that the group itself is isolated and powerless.

It's easy to attack the idea of roles when the evils of current roles
have been so well illuminated.  But the need isn't to abolish roles,
it is to reshape them.  Roles are not incompatible with freedom;
at least they don't need to be.  The anxiety and lack of trust produced
by social anarchy are as limiting as any role.  But a role of any kind
is a prison when coupled with our cultural tendency towards self-
obsession, as it becomes a standard of self-measure.  I believe that
is is such a concern with self-image, and not social role, that forms
the prison that e.e. cummings sought to escape.

		-Ed Hall
		decvax!randvax!edhall

P.S. Obviously, this is all opinion and is brimming with generalizations.
Sprinkling my words with caveats to that effect would have weakened them
and made this long submission much longer--so no flames pointing out
what I already know, please.