stone savage

“I sit here in my tastefully decorated office and watch you go about tilting at windmills, many times beating the windmill.

Well, my turn. It’s my turn to stand up and make a complete idiot of myself and do something that leaves this nation a slightly better place.” - Shirley Schmidt, Boston Legal

I heartily admit to being an avid fan of the show Boston Legal, and I don’t much even really like network television all that much - but this show just captured me in a way few things ever have in my life as much for the content and character of the concept as the passion with which the writers approach the dialogues. The above quote, in particular, I love because of the character who is speaking and the character at whom it is aimed.

It turns out I also love it because I realize that the truly decent people of this nation, and perhaps the world, feel very much like Shirley and Alan in that moment. One is the accomplished, reserved, and consummate ideal of a respectable and upright citizen - and the other is a passionate ideologue who oft finds himself advocating for no other reason than simply because someone needs advocation. To have the one, then, speak to the other in this way is a far deeper and meaningful thing than perhaps the show’s audience may have considered. In a way, don’t we all come to that realization that deep inside us is the person we always wished we had been and we face that moment of truth and have to decide… are we or are we not what we say we are?

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The truly romantic character, not just in this scene but in life, is that person who can stand up for, fight for, and sacrifice every ounce of life there is to give for all the virtues we, as a society, say we admire with all our hearts - but these romantic beings are seldom the same people we are honored to have as friends. Why is this? I’ve come to the conclusion that it is nothing more than the age-old disparity between the common and the rare. We find the commonplace people of the world - those so much like ourselves - to be far more comfortable to be around and to be those from whom we appreciate the pats on the back. We seek their approval because it is easy to achieve, and we bask in their adulations because their adoration carries no true meaning. We do this instead of seeking out those rare people we privately so deeply respect yet publically eschew as “unworthy” or “less than” - these rare people who bother us so much at the core of our being that we must demonize them rather than befriend them - because in so doing we find a normalcy that allows us to “fit in” and “be accepted".

It is only decades later, in the golden years of our lives that we finally realize all we ever were and all we ever stood for was truly nothing, and we regret those few chances we had to take courage from and to share our lives with those who are the reason the mediocre world needs movies, books, and fairy tales. The lives they live and challenge the rest of us to live are the world from which the sheer mind-numbing boredom and lack of worthiness just begs us to escape from so we can believe in something worth knowing rather than what we so cowardly choose for ourselves. Imagine… to finally throw away the masks we wear and be unafraid to commit to complete idiocy in the eyes of others so that something meaningful can come of our lives… imagine what freedom there is in never having had to wait a lifetime for such courage - imagine it and then live it.

I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned this before but hasn’t it ever occurred to anyone that the reason we admire and glorify the qualities we describe as virtues in others - those whom we hail, decorate, and admire as heroes is because it is so extremely uncommon to find those qualities in the average person? So when we find someone who is tilting at windmills, as they say (and if you don’t know the reference then shame on you for not knowing your literature), don’t we sort of feel sorry for them not only because they possess these admirable qualities but also because we know that these same admirable people are always at odds with the world around them?

Isn’t the reality that we know this about our heroes and yet we live our lives as if these qualities we say we admire are really the qualities we admire at all. We don’t - we simply admire the people who have the guts to stand up for and fight for those virtues, values, and beliefs we all supposedly share. But do we really share them if the extent of our admiration is a quiet repose or a polite applause during a decoration ceremony?

Can we even consider ourselves real people who contribute to the world, society, our local communities, or even our relationships with people who surround us in our daily lives if we ourselves cannot or will not possess and fight for those virtues which we say we value? If we are not willing to sacrifice our own reputations, our careers, the respect we think we have from others - then what is it we truly believe and how can we dare to pretend that we are anything other than the cowards we end up actually being?
Change is started, avoided, and even finished by people who take that first step toward being different than those around them. In some cases the outcome is a world visibly better than it was prior to that step, and in other cases it is not quite as visible… but always, when the average person is able to finally find the courage to take that risk and make themselves look “like a complete idiot” the world is left a better place.

Posterity remembers these risks and attempts for the betterment of society - and sometimes it even praises the idiots who made it happen. As far as I’m concerned, I think being this sort of complete idiot is something we should do on a regular basis. If anyone has a problem with that, just ask them what mark they’ll be leaving on the world and within themselves, or who will remember them for living a mediocre existence without risk, without reward, and full of self-serving platitudes. Come to think of it, maybe the better question to ask them is why do they burn inside to be average instead of exceptional?

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