Imagine Me
Imagine a place where people have lived for over 2,000 years. Imagine the long history of explorers, conquers, and merchants from Arabia, Europe, South Asia, and Africa. Now imagine thousands of years later, now independent from their European colonizers the people try to create a modern nation. Imagine that the second president gets assassinated and the military takes over. Imagine a civil war breaks out and the government loses. Imagine they never stop fighting. Imagine an Islamist group establishes law and order. Imagine they are called terrorist and Al-Qaeda supporters. Imagine that warlords try to overthrow the Islamist. Imagine they were paid by the United States. Imagine Ethiopia invades. Imagine they were encouraged to do so by the United States. Imagine it was supported by the United Nations. Imagine the wars starts again, 17 years and counting.
Now stop imagining because it all happened. Believe or not that place I was talking about is what is today called Somalia.
You may ask yourself what does Somalia have to do with this guys? It has everything to do with it. Its not the place, it’s the reaction from the experience from that place. If you take a child that has lost almost everything and bring him to the United States and raise him as your own, what do you get. If you tell him the truth about his past and everyday he hears on the radio and reads in the paper how his people are killing each other, what do you get. What you get is person who has three choices, (1) forget all about the past; about Somalia, past families and friends, and start anew (2) go completely ballistic and rebel against everything (3) take that experience and create a better future.
You can imagine which one I chose. So what do you do with a world at war? What do you do with a disconnected, spiritless world? I am an idealist or as a I would put it a dreamer philosopher. What does it mean to be a dreamer philosopher? Well first of all the philosopher part is pretty simply; you must imagine and contemplate the problems and successes of the human system and compare that to the natural system. The dreamer part is more complicated because you have to imagine a perfect world and see things that you know will never come to being, but you believe in it non-the-less. The dreamer philosopher strives to be at peace with nature and eventually “one with the universe”. He believes that there is nothing more important than the truth. He questions reality. He questions authority. And he questions his own purpose. He believes politics to be a noble art and that the Wiseman knows that he is not wise. He combines humanitarianism with activism and calls it his duty. He believes in the revolution when everyone will see the truth. He knows what the world says he can’t do but decides to do it anyway. Because ultimately he believes that nobody knows what the hell is going on here. No scientist or theologian can prove that they are right. And so what we are left with is the choice of deciding what to do with the time we are given on this Earth. In the end, when the world comes crashing down around me (or I come crashing down on the world) I want to believe that I did everything I could the way I thought it should be done.
Leave a Reply