The Source of Self-Regard - Toni Morrison Page 0,28
forty Germany’s national will? Hanging on to destructive theses simply because one developed them half a century ago? These are comic book solutions to biblical problems in nuclear times. We must do all we can to imagine the Other before we presume to solve the problems work and life demand of us.
Dream the world as it ought to be, imagine what it would feel like not to be living in a world loaded with zero-life weapons manned by people willing to loose them, develop them, or store them for money, or power, or data, but never for your life and never for mine. What would it be like to live in a world where the solution of serious, learned people to practically every big problem was not to kill somebody? Narcotics trade? Whom shall we kill—or lock up? Disease? Whom shall we let die—or lock up? Self-rule by a neighboring (or even distant) country? Whom shall we slaughter? Famine? What is an acceptable death rate? Unemployment? Homelessness? What is the tolerable starvation rate? Too many babies by all the wrong mothers? Too many people living too long? Even our goodwill is couched in killing. We are asked to give millions of dollars to “Feed the Children”—until they are fourteen, that is, at which point we are forced to pay billions to blow their brains out if they make demands in their own interests but not ours. Are their deaths not timely enough for us? They will all die anyway—as we will. All the babies, all the elderly, all the fettered and unenfranchised, the ill, the idle—just like us. Maybe after, before, or even because of us, but we will all be together by and by.
If that is the consequence of our sophisticated thinking, our expert problem-solving, then we need to step back and refine the process that precedes it: experimental, intimate, ranging daylight vision that is not ashamed to dream, to visualize the Other.
Imagine, envision what it would be like to know that your comfort, your fun, your safety are not based on the deprivation of another. It’s possible. But not if we are committed to outmoded paradigms, to moribund thinking that has not been preceded or dappled by dreaming. It is possible, and now it is necessary. Necessary because if you do not feed the hungry, they will eat you, and the manner of their eating is as varied as it is fierce. They will eat your houses, your neighborhoods, your cities; sleep in your lobbies, your lanes, your gardens, your intersections. They will eat your revenue because there will never be enough prisons, and wards, and hospitals, and welfare hotels to accommodate them. And in their search for your kind of happiness, they will eat your children, render them stunned and terrified, desperate for the sleeping life narcotics can offer. We may already have lost the creative intelligence of two-thirds of a new generation to this poisoned, violent sleep—a torpor so brutal they cannot wake from it for fear they will remember it; a sleep of such numbed recklessness it turns our own wakefulness to dread.
It is possible to live without defending property or surrendering it, but we will never live that way unless our thinking is shot through with dreams. And it is necessary now because if you don’t educate the unschooled with the very best you have, don’t give them the help, the courtesy, the respect you had in becoming educated, then they will educate themselves, and the things they will teach and the things they will learn will destabilize all that you know. And by education I do not mean hobbling the mind, but liberating it; by education I do not mean passing on monologues, but engaging in dialogues. Listening, assuming sometimes that I have a history, a language, a view, an idea, a specificity. Assuming that what I know may be useful, may enhance what you know, may extend or complete it. My memory is as necessary to yours as your memory is to mine. Before we look for a “usable past” we ought to know all of the past. Before we start “reclaiming a legacy” we ought to know exactly what that legacy is—all of it and where it came from. In the business of education there are no minorities, only minor thinking. For if education requires tuition but no meaning, if it is to be about nothing other than careers, if it is to be about nothing other than defining