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Thus it is better to oppose the forces that would drive me to self-murder than to endure them. Although I risk the likelihood of death, there is at least the possibility, if not the probability, of changing intolerable conditions.
The greater, more immediate problem is the survival of the entire world. If the world does not change, all its people will be threatened by the greed, exploitation, and violence of the power structure in the American empire. The handwriting is on the wall. The United States is jeopardizing its own existence and the existence of all humanity. If Americans knew the disasters that lay ahead, they would transform this society tomorrow for their own preservation.
Fighting has always been a big part of my life, as it is in the lives of most poor people. Some find this hard to understand. I was too young to realize that we were really trying to affirm our masculinity and dignity, and using force in reaction to the social pressures exerted against us. For a proud and dignified people fighting was one way to resist dehumanization. You learn a lot about yourself when you fight.
“Adonais,” too, had a special impact on me. The poem tells the story of a man whose friend dies or is killed. One of the best things in the poem is the sense that with the passing of years the poet’s feelings alter and he begins to see things differently. He tells how he feels, how his attitude toward his friend changes as time goes on. This was an experience I began to have near the end of high school as my friends drifted into the service, or got married, or tried to become part of the very system that had humiliated us all the way through school. As time passed, I began to see the futility
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I see now that in those years the idea took root in my mind that we were suffering such hardship through our own fault. I equated the idea of the family with being trapped and plagued by bills. At an early age I made up my mind never to have bills when I grew up. I could not know then that this determination would extend eventually to the point of not being married or having a family of my own.
Even so, I tell the comrades you can only die once, so do not die a thousand times worrying about it.
All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers too, though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory. I was naïve. I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer. It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone
else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself. RALPH ELLISON, The Invisible Man
Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man because he went through a similar experience. He felt great guilt when he first questioned Catholicism,
The struggle with religious faith is a difficult experience to describe because it involves many things that are either repressed earlier in life or not understood. In the process, the fears that are not related to religious beliefs are released. By then you no longer have any protection from your religion, and you have to start dealing with your dread. The real world closes in on you, cutting off traditional comforts like a simple prayer. Eventually, you, and you alone, have to deal with troubling questions. This always leads to anxiety. There is nothing, so you are free—and terrified.
Richard had a theory about intimate human relations. He saw nonpossessive love as pure love, the only love, and possessive love as a mockery of pure love. Nonpossessive love did not enslave or constrain the love object. Richard was critical of what he called “bourgeois love relationships,” of the marriage system and the requirements of the marriage partners to each other (i.e., sex with one partner, jealousy, limits upon mobility, well-defined roles based upon sex). He felt that people should not be like cars or houses. No man should own a wife, nor should a wife own a husband, because
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barriers, constraints, and psychological tyranny. Nonpossessive love is based upon shared experiences and friendship; it is the kind of love we have for our bodies, for our thumb or foot. We love ourselves, our bodies, but we do not want to enslave any part of ourselves.
A. J. Ayer’s logical positivism,
I saw so many of my friends on their way to becoming dropouts from the human family, I wanted to see something good happen to them. They were getting married and beginning to have babies. Ahead of them were the rounds of jobs and bills my father had gone through. It was almost like being on an urban plantation, a kind of modern-day sharecropping. You worked hard, brought in your crop, and you were always in debt to the landholder.
What is property? Property is theft. PIERRE-JOSEPH PROUDHON, 1840
When I was very young, I accepted the institution of marriage. As I grew older and saw my father struggling to take care of a wife and seven children, having to work at three jobs at once, I began to see that the bourgeois family can be an imprisoning, enslaving, and suffocating experience. Even though my mother and father loved each other deeply and were happy together,
As a result of thinking and reading, I decided to remain unmarried. This is a decision I do not regret, although it has caused me pain and conflict from time to time and brought unhappiness to me and some of the women whom I have loved.
By rejecting marriage and a family I held on to my “freedom,” but I lost the intimacy and companionship of a woman—an experience that is probably as great as, perhaps greater than, the freedom I wanted.
The pigeons of my conscience Make shadows on the wall. The cannibal that lives within my mind Leaves no room for the imagination.
I regret just this.
Bourgeois values define the family situation in America, give it certain goals. Oppressed and poor people who try to reach these goals fail because of the very conditions that the bourgeoisie has established. There is the dilemma. We need a family, because every man and woman deserves the kind of spiritual support and unity a family provides. Black people try to reach the goals set by the dominant culture and fail without knowing why.
How do you solve the situation? By staying outside the system, living alone? I found that to be an outsider is to be alienated and unhappy. In the Party we have formed a family, a fighting family that is a vital unit in itself. We have no romantic and fictional notions about getting married and living happily ever after behind a white picket fence. We choose to live together for a common purpose, and together we fight for our existence and our goals. Today we have the closeness, the harmony and freedom that we sought so long.
