Action over admiration

In many aspects of our culture we worship the maverick, the rebel the non conformist, weathered and weary from a life spent bucking the system. In surfing especially we tend to lionize these characters. Its no small wonder though, that many times the heroic struggles of these warriors involves drugs, alchohol and other self destructive vices.

While I empathize with the mysanthropic righteousness of the misfit savant it also occurs to me that we who have managed to etch out a viable existence in this joke we call society are a part of the malignant force that condemns the so called non conformist to a life of hardship. The fact that we glamourize just as the victim rationalizes is a coping mechanism. On the one hand for complicity, on the other for denial. What I’m saying is that non conformity implies choice, when really there never was one at all.

When moving through time and space we need to mind our basic laws of physics. One of which is that two bodies can not occupy the same space at the same time. So the social space that I inhabit, the job I work, the home I live in, the friends I make etc..will exclude another body from occupation, Which is fine assuming that there is room elsewhere. The assumption is that society being a construct of our imaginations as such can accomodate an infinite number of beings. This is false, society as we know it, the paradigm we have generated has a limited amount of space.

It does not have to be this way but that is the way it is. And here in lies the great crime of our complaceny and the sin of martyrdom. It is the idea that pure individualism can only exist on the outside. Alienation is not a choice it is an imposition. And admiration from a safe distance is simply putting a positive spin on the sentence.

I think if we could all make more of an effort to be our own heroes then we wouldn’t need someone else to live under a boardwalk, or in a tent on the beach as a symbol of what we wish we could have. If we all made more of an effort to go ahead and have it, then maybe there would be more energy and will to help out our brothers and sisters who suffer needlessly for a cause that really should be a burden shared by us all.