EIGHTY-NINE
On p. 89 of GR, Sarah is wrapping up her discussion of her 2002 run for Lieutenant-Governor of Alaska. She writes, "Looking back, my lack of passion in even contemplating gunning for the job should have been a sign. My basketball coaches used to say, 'Practice how you play.' If I was going to run this kind of halfhearted campaign, was that some indication of how I would have performed in the job?
"Reading my journal entries from those days, I detect the note of apathy that I absolutely loathe in today's political culture. I'd made a mistake, but that's the way we learn life's most important lessons. I would not make the same mistake again."
I would like to focus this morning on one key term from this passage, the word "apathy." What is its etymology? It is derived from the Greek word "pathos," "suffering," "feeling," and from what is called alpha-privative, that is, "negating a." We see this "a" often in English in words like "apolitical" and "atheist." It may be translated by our word "without."
So, someone who is possessed by "apathy," who is apathetic, is "without suffering or feeling" … sort of like being numb. Now, sometimes it is good and necessary to be, literally, "without feelings"!! On the physical level, who would want to undergo a root canal or tooth extraction without an anesthetic!!
So too on the psychological level, when we have suffered a great loss, such as the death of a beloved one, we can go into a temporary state of emotional numbness. This is a wise and necessary defensive mechanism that is built into our nature. However, it is very important that such TEMPORARY expedients of nature not become permanent.
We have all experienced, I think, falling asleep on an arm or a leg, and waking up to find that it is numb from the cutting off of the blood flow. No permanent damage, but we certainly wouldn't want this condition to last!!!
I think that one of the greatest temptations men and women are confronted with is the desire to escape, to dull and obliterate the sharp pain and exquisite dolor of existence and of life. In one of his most famous passages, the ancient Greek dramatist, Aeschylus, juxtaposes two terms in his Greek, PATHOS, Suffering, and MATHOS, Learning.
Wisdom comes from suffering. A consequence of this ancient truth is that the attempt to flee from, to escape, suffering, can cause one to "flee" from wisdom and knowledge too. Remember, in Aldous Huxley's futuristic novel "Brave New World" how the people of this society would take a drug called SOMA to escape from reality?!? The result was a doped up, drugged up "society" of robots and slaves.
God save America from such a fate!!! NUMB IS DUMB!!! And herein, IMV, is one of the principal reasons that our dear Sarah shines as a brilliant and effulgent Northern Light to all of America!! It is a reason why she seems to be and IS so bright, so alive, so radiant. SHE HAS COURAGE AND GUTS AND COJONES!!!
She has had the courage to be alive; the courage to confront life head-on; the courage not to run and hide from suffering; the courage to feel pain; the courage to face losses; the courage to be human, to be Alaskan, to be American!!!!! Give us just 300 others like her, like Andrew Breitbart, like Leonidas' 300 Spartans of old, and we, like those valiant immortals of antiquity, will overcome all the myriad slave hordes that are seeking the ruination and the fall of America!!
Let me say a few more words on this theme and subject. On the physical plane, when the heart pumps and blood flows, we live. On the spiritual level, if we allow LIFE to flow freely in our "hearts," if we do not shy away from or shun the purgative and illuminative power of suffering, wisdom flows through the "veins" of our souls and of our spirits. But there is more.
Just as a creature that is physically healthy and mature in the fine flush and fortitude of the fullness of its time, and in the strong flow of its blood, can procreate, can generate young, so people who are alive and vibrant with the spiritual blood flow of courage and of wisdom can "generate" spiritual sons and daughters, and can inspire them, thousands and millions of them, to do and live and act in like manner!!
Such has been the victory and the achievement of our peerless and precious Sarah over these last three-and-a-half desperate and dangerous years for the Res Publica Americana!!! She has always fought and resisted the cowardice of anesthesia; the cowardice of apathy; the cowardice of spiritual death. She has inspired millions of others to imitate and follow her.
This is what has made her, in this HOUR of SUPREME CRISIS, a second Founder of America, THE MOTHER OF HER COUNTRY!!!
With the Fair Lady and Warrior of Wasilla and of the North Country, let us always reject the comfortable but ultimately death-dealing, low, miserable roads and anodyne paths of apathy; let us instead walk on the high road and majestic if thorny path that leads ever North, North with Sarah---North to the Great Land of our highest and loftiest aspirations, upward and onward to the North Star, to the True North (like Tolkien's True West), to our glorious and eternal destiny!!
WITH SARAH LET US FIGHT AND SUFFER AND FIGHT AND SUFFER AND FIGHT AND SUFFER UNTIL WE DRAW OUR LAST BREATH. DEO VOLENTE, SARAH 2012!!!
