(Many thanks to Diane Harvey
merak@sedona.net)
“No, I’m not for sainthood. I’m going to be a boulder-pusher…
There’s a great black mountain. It’s human stupidity. There are a group
of people who push a boulder up the mountain. When they’ve got a few
feet up, there’s a war, or the wrong sort of revolution, and the
boulder rolls down- not to the bottom, it always manages to end a few
inches higher than when it started. So the group of people put their
shoulders to the boulder and start pushing again. Meanwhile, at the top
of the mountain stand a few great men. Sometimes they look down and nod
and say: Good, the boulder-pushers are still on duty. But meanwhile
they are meditating about the nature of space, or what it will be like
when the world is full of people who don’t hate and fear and murder.”
These words, spoken by a character in a Doris Lessing novel, are
wonderfully evocative of the lives of so many of us. After all, our
little planet contains extensive networks of entirely different
varieties of human motives, both far worse and far better than we can
easily imagine. And one of the more useful ones is the realm of the
quietly trudging boulder-pushers. This relatively unglamorous yet
immensely worthwhile zone is composed of all of us who quietly and
actively push against the grain of the ruling stupidities in our poor
suffering world.
We have rejected the lure of involvement in worldly greed, lies, and
crookedness as best we can, despite the fact that this is far more
easily wished for than accomplished. We have no such grandiose
ambitions as sainthood. But we can relate very well to being members of
the brotherhood and sisterhood of slogging away, shoving that moldy old
boulder uphill. And when the news is very bad, and getting worse, and
that huge rock teeters and starts to rush back down once more, we are
the ones who most sharply feel the grief of failure.
Boulder-pushers can be discovered rising to the occasion in every
color, race, creed and nationality, and in every kind of work.
Everywhere and in everything, official accepted insanity is
methodically geared to grinding the sane humanity out of human beings.
Everywhere and in everything, those who fight this are here also,
pushing back against the enormous dreary boulder of entrenched
stupidity. We cannot be distinguished by mere appearances or social
roles, yet invariably we recognize one another through our standard
operating equipment: the dedicated boulder-pusher’s inner radar
detector. Day after week after month after year after decade, we keep
on struggling, together-at-a-distance, to shove that dangerous ancient
rock back up the same old precipitous mountain.
Boulder-pushers are known by persistence, and almost always by an
excellent, and occasionally very strange, sense of humor. (We can often
be spotted by a finely tuned taste in sarcastic political cartoons.) We
are sociable, festive, solitary, melancholy, good-humored, depressed,
manic, peaceable and volatile. We are every type and no special type at
all. We are bursting with energy and health, and so sick we are barely
hanging on. We are talkative and taciturn, extraordinary lonely, and
open to the deep joys of companionship. Mostly we just work very hard,
at whatever it is we are being and doing about that boulder. We are
seldom to be found lying around vacationing at its foot, though
occasionally we do that too. Mostly we just heave ho and heave to. We
get so tired we can sometimes be found draped across our portion of the
boulder, sound asleep in broad daylight. We know too well that this
rock is real, and made up of all the ignorance of all the people who
will never even understand it is there. We understand that this heavy
stone, as long as it exists at all, will be hanging around- and hanging
around all our necks. And that it is continually threatening to roll
back down too far and crush us, boulder-pushers and boulder-builders
alike, once and for all. Our endless jokes about this absurdly terrible
predicament are one of the great wonders of the human race.
Look around. We are ordinary people, doing extraordinary things. We are
resolutely transmitting light in the darkness, however modest our
wattage. We take the time to share the best information at a time when
no one has any time. We teach, rant, cajole, hector, lecture, and
employ sweet reasonableness to its maximum capacity. We write and talk
and listen and learn all we can. We pray and meditate and stay
connected one way or another to the source of all goodness and truth in
life. We keep our minds open, even when that means we sometimes have to
take a crowbar to our own prejudices. We do our own thinking, and don’t
take anything from any authority at face value. We prod and poke and
pester the powers that be, because they so richly deserve and require
it. We investigate and castigate abundant abuses, large and small,
local and global. At our own expense, we do crucial research in the
context of endless illegal governmental, military and corporate
secrecy. In a system built on denial, we deny the power of denial
itself. We find, finesse, and force truth to emerge from world-size
institutional lies.
We have not been devoured alive by stupidity’s hypnotic media machine.
We use our own perceptions, and fully engage our own heads, hearts, and
hands in daily life. We are not passivists, but activists. We create,
nourish, tend, and shore up all that is beautiful and healthy and
loving. We will die to keep the spirit of freedom alive in the human
race if we have to- but we would rather live by it and for it. We share
knowledge, materials, and insights. We pay attention: we keep watch and
we keep honest records. We keep the unfortunately necessary running
commentaries going on the differences between wisdom and stark raving
lunacy. We keep websites going under impossible conditions. We take the
time to keep critical information flowing at a time when time goes so
fast it barely exists. We are good to our families, to our friends, and
to strangers when we can be. We care about the bodies and souls of
other human beings as well as our own. We know what to forgive and
forget, and what to keep after.
Mostly we never think about any of this. We’re far too busy or too
tired or too grubby or too concentrated on the next step to look around
and reflect on what we are doing. It is just who we are and what we do.
This is what we did yesterday, and today, and what we will do tomorrow.
We know that that giant stone of stupidity is going to be there,
requiring our daily push, for a very long time to come. We are,
naturally, occasionally flattened by the very thought.
We are the boulder-pushers of the present, the spiritual sons and
daughters of all previous generations of boulder-pushers, and the
spiritual fathers and mothers of the boulder-pushers to come. Some of
us don’t even believe that efforts to destroy human ignorance will ever
have an end. We think that boulder pushing is the natural activity of
all those who care about the human species, and that it is more or less
eternal. We do it anyway, without fear and without much hope, just
because it is the right thing to do. Others of us believe that some
day, some day much too far away even to imagine very well, this
particular boulder really will finally arrive at the top of the
mountain. We refused to be permanently depressed by the spectacle of
the dangerous, degenerate and collapsing form of yet one more temporary
contemporary civilization. The long thought of centuries of hard labor
does not prevent us from getting up in the morning and lending a hand
to the day’s push. Some eon or other, we believe that boulder really
will stop falling backward. We believe that a distant generation of
boulder-pushers will at last succeed in heaving that boulder over the
final hump. It will finally just rock back and forth a little, shiver
slightly, and become still. And then it will begin slowly to crumble to
dust.
It’s only a matter of time.