Biography Lends To Death A New Terror

Whenever I'm having moral or ideological conundrums I enjoy thinking of how they would be represented in my hypothetical biography. For example, when I'm feeling particularly depressed, I think it would say in my biography: "Having struggled with depression his whole life, Salsman finally threw himself to his death from the Park Street Bridge". I have no intention of flinging myself off a bridge, but it sounds so tidy, all wrapped up like that with active verbs and all. I then get distracted tinkering with the sentence structure and forget to be depressed. Hey, whatever works.

Today's moral and ideological conundrum for my future biography, where it will be stated like this: "Salsman, while possessed of revolutionary zeal and a predilection for oratory, came into conflict with the tenets and methods of queer activism, periodically becoming so frustrated by processes that seemed to him bureaucratic and ineffective that he foreswore activism altogether until compelled by some fresh injustice back into the fold". Today Kylie from the GSA Network, which organizes the peer education workshop, came to talk to us about how that went. We talked about sparking discussion, general experiences, and how to prevent gossip afterward. Here we hit a snag, because it is human nature to gossip, especially in high school, but the knowledge that people will gossip prevents people from fully sharing their experiences in ways that could be meaningful. I couldn't bring myself to expose myself like that, but it is empirically less effective to avoid the gut punch of personal experience in trying to educate people. Emotional impact works every time, and to choose not to use my own experience, which I can speak passionately about, as an educational tool seems like bad activism.

However, if the goal of activism is to improve the lives of the oppressed, playing into the hands of the culture of oppression by eviscerating my privacy and personal history before the eyes of an English class seems counterproductive. Thus is formed the conundrum: preserve my personal happiness and privacy, or gamble with my story to possibly change minds and hearts. It's a gamble I've taken before to a limited extent, and it wasn't fun. The most devastating outcome is laying your heart and soul out to be prodded and getting only indifference. The true enemy of change is apathy, not hatred. Hatred can be fought, can be dragged out into the streets, condemned, combatted, debated with, reasoned with, but apathy ends the discussion. "I don't care" blockades change.

In fact, "I don't care" blockades almost everything. It is lack of caring that creates aforementioned culture of oppression, and the feeling familiar to a great many Alphabet people of loneliness and abandonment. Compassion and feeling for each other should be the basis of activism, not cold, analytical political machination. Hence my problem: I long to reach out and touch someone's heart and mind, but I fear for my own heart and mind if I do. Maybe it's just selfishness, an unwillingness to make sacrifices for the greater good. Who knows. I suppose the way forward is to encourage myself and others to reach out and touch someone in other ways, or similar, non-soul-eating ways.

In other news, my production of No Exit was favorably reviewed in the school paper. They said good things about the character development and engrossing portrayals, so I was proud of the cast all over again. I feel it went quite well, especially considering it was the first time I've directed alone.

"Despite his multiple mental problems and undesirable personality traits, Salsman remained determined to change the world."