If a dog bites you, don't bite it back
Some simple advice for not being miserable + news and tee shirts!
Good evening! Tonight I wanted to share with you a piece I wrote for Valentine’s Day the other week. It was definitely….one of those days…where I was struggling to be the best version of myself for a myriad of reasons, and the message I received in church on February 13th was just right. It all had to do with love, contempt, cleaning the slate, and rethinking what love really means. So I wrote this for publication that very day.
First, housekeeping! Politicize Me is now called This Is The Way…for some reason this URL was now available, and it wasn’t just two weeks ago. So we will chalk that off to the will of the Force.
Second, if you’ve enjoyed my musing on Star Wars and self-improvement or my book, How The Force Can Fix The World, well I’ve got some brand spankin’ tee shirts with your name on it for sale now.
And for all you Paid Subscribers, you’ll be getting yours FREE as a thank you from yours truly. I’m working on some more perks to Subscription including video hangouts and Discord chat. Details TBD.
There are THREE designs:
Think: A shirt about collectivism and free-thought
Not Today: A reminder to yourself that fear, hate and anger are not welcome in your headspace
The Limits of Tyrants: A fusion of the words of the great Frederick Douglass with Star Wars iconography.
To break the doom loop, “Love Despite”
Originally published on Feb 14, 2022 in Civic Renaissance, a delightful Substack by my friend Alexandra Hudson who is working on building a movement in support of restoring communitarian values. Something I highly endorse.
Returning the kick to the mule
We have an open wound in our political culture today, a disturbance in the Force if you will. It’s not a tidal wave of social change, populism, or wealth inequality. No. It’s that despite being a nation founded on the idea of mutual cooperation, compromise and deference, there’s not an awful lot of it going around. Instead, we have drifted toward a politics of contempt, coercion, and vengeance. Two political parties and their followers are locked in an increasingly winner-takes-all brand of politics, justified by each faction with the diligent logging of receipts for the other side’s sins.
Supreme Court vacancies should ring a particularly raw bell. How did we drift from being a country where nominated justices received almost universal support across the aisle for confirmation, to our current predicament of all-out political warfare over seats? Was it Obergerfell and conservatives being reminded of the consequences of the judiciary? Or perhaps it was the blockade of Judge Merrick Garland by Mitch McConnell or the disgraceful character assassination of now-Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
Tit for tat. Score settling. Outright vengeance. In the end, the country itself loses as each side notches wins they can tally as payback.
What did Seneca say of this approach to living? “How much better to heal than seek revenge from injury. Vengeance wastes a lot of time and exposes you to many more injuries than the first that sparked it. Anger always outlasts hurt. Best to take the opposite course. Would anyone think it normal to return a kick to a mule or a bite to a dog?”
There’s a lot of mule kicking going on by our leaders. Imagine if you did that regularly in your own personal life?
Today is Valentine’s Day, a perfectly fun celebration of love, goodwill, fondness, and affection. There is going to be a lot of gift-giving and money spent. Sadly, however, there will also be a great deal of hurt. And you know why.
“I wrote him a loving Valentine’s card and bought him a pricey bottle of his favorite wine…and that man only made me Eggo Waffles and said ‘I love you’ on the way out the door to work”
Are you keeping score? I have. I never mean to, but then you realize too late when you’re doing it. Because it eats at you, keeps you up at night, and steals your peace. Our willful interpretation of the actions of others defines how we relate to the world.
Epictetus once said, “It is not events that disturb people, it is their judgments concerning them.”
Decoded, this sentiment from Epictetus is a dotted line to what St. Thomas Aquinas said of Godly love, which is to “will the good of the other.”
I learned this concept first, not from the Bible (though my Mom tried), not from ancient Greek philosophers or poets… but from Luke Skywalker and Star Wars. In fact, this collection of films and TV shows is how millions of young people have unwittingly begun their journey toward the good life. Watching those movies is where I learned to trust in what I could not see, to stop “trying” to succeed at tasks and instead commit to seeing them through, and to see beyond the frightening exteriors of my enemies.
So let’s talk about Star Wars and love. Cause it can help fix our world.
An impossible choice
Last week, Star Wars fans who subscribed to Disney+ got to see a truly magnificent scene. Luke Skywalker of 1983 (Return of the Jedi era) was brought back to life once again, following his initial debut in the second season of The Mandalorian, where de-aging technology and a whole host of movie magic were combined to make the now 70-year old Mark Hamill as good as new. Truly shocking! But what happened in the story was even better.
Luke Skywalker is training a young creature named Grogu (or as you may know him, Baby Yoda) in the ways of the Force. However, the young Grogu is distracted and shows himself to be not fully committed to the way of the Jedi. He wants to be with his old caretaker, the Mandalorian known as Din Djarin, to whom he has become deeply attached. The Jedi have a rule though: love is forbidden, or more so, attachment is forbidden.
But one can rarely come without the other, absent extreme discipline or divine assistance.
Luke Skywalker gives Grogu (Baby Yoda) a choice. He can choose a gift that has been sent to him by the Mandalorian (Din Djarin), or take the Jedi weapon…a Lightsaber that once belonged to Master Yoda. But he cannot have both. To choose the chainmail (on the left) would be an open refusal to let go of the past. The lightsaber, represents a no-going back point in Grogu’s journey. He must go forward, as a Jedi student. No baggage.
Star Wars has been here before.
The Jedi Order was all but destroyed in the prequel trilogy, Episodes I, II, and III, when Anakin Skywalker (Luke’s father) fell in love with Padme Amidala and secretly married her…defying the Jedi Order’s rules around attachment. Anakin’s love turned toxic, controlling, and violent, and in the end, he destroyed himself, his love, and the galaxy. This is why Darth Vader wears that frightening black armor. It’s the iron maiden of his sins and catastrophic inability to love without envy, impatience, and anger.
Fans of Star Wars have endlessly bickered amongst themselves about whether the problem was Anakin, or if the problem was in fact the strict rules that led to his cloak & dagger romance. What I always wanted to know though was….did Star Wars have a compelling message for what love is supposed to be?
This is something I sought to answer in my book, How The Force Can Fix The World, and I’ll share my takeaway. Buckle up for Star Wars lore.
Star Wars for the uninitiated is basically this big ongoing struggle between the cosmic forces of Darkness and Light. The Dark is embodied in the faction known as the Sith (Darth Vader, Emperor Palpatine, Darth Maul, etc). The Light is upheld by the Jedi (Yoda, Luke Skywalker, Obi-Wan Kenobi, etc). The Jedi tell their adherents that love is central to the life of the Jedi Knight, in the sense that compassion for others is important. They of course do not teach their members how to deal with feelings of attachment or want. They simply expect members to shed those things, leave them at the door, and not speak of them.
The Sith are all about passion and marinading in emotion as a source of strength. A Sith also cannot truly love because their way is that of hedonism, self-gratification, and pleasure. Love, as anyone who has ever been in a happy marriage or relationship knows, requires sacrifice and attention to the needs of another.
Did you catch that? The needs of another.
Passion is not love. Pleasure is not love. Attraction is not love.
Love is sacrifice.
You may have noticed that the image for this post is Han and Leia, the obvious best romantic couple Star Wars ever produced. It is worth noting, their eventual marriage ended in divorce, which we learn in Episode VII: The Force Awakens. The little that we know of the dissolution of their relationship is all about sacrifice, and the lack of it in their marriage. It’s sad. And all too common. Contempt, born out of perceived gaps in sacrifice is the number one predictor of divorce that counselors can point to for their unhappiest clients.
It Keeps No Record of Wrongs
Recall Corinthians 13: Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Bearing this in mind, wrongs will be done to us. Wrongs have been done to ME (your humble author) just this weekend that brought me to tears, by loved ones. It happens. We are then presented with a choice.
Recall that Saint Thomas Aquinas defined love as “willing the good of the other,” or to basically assume the best of people….or, to dispense with the laundry list of reasons someone may have given you to not love them.
In the original Star Wars films, you’ve heard Luke Skywalker say to Darth Vader (Anakin) in Return of the Jedi, “I feel the good in you,” while handcuffed in Vader’s captivity and awaiting his own death. It is a fine example of this “willing” action. It takes effort. You have to defy other emotions competing for control of your mind and actions, such as fear or anger….which breed contempt. Luke Skywalker lived in the truest definition of love when he refused to kill Darth Vader in Episode VI: Return of the Jedi.
The recipient didn’t deserve it, but it was available nevertheless. Contempt was absent.
I can’t capture the problem of contempt better than public speaker and author of Love Your Enemies, Arthur Brooks…so here is Brooks explaining how contempt rips through our lives and spills out into society writ large.
To love, you can’t be keeping score. And if you’ve turned on the news lately, or scrolled political Twitter…that is what drives our world today. Grievance and scorekeeping. We’re going to have to rise above it. I’m not calling on your to be a doormat or relinquish being a warrior for what is good and righteous. But a time will come in your relationships or in the public square where politics & power is litigated, to will the good of others and relinquish your sword, or hold it tightly with suspicion and fear.
If you saw Disney’s Raya & The Last Dragon, that film tackles exactly this. A world torn apart by perpetual sectarian conflict because common sense would dictate to each side that their opponents haven’t changed…so why should they ever let their guard down. Makes sense. But to the detriment of the world.
We can’t let that happen to us, our marriages, our friendships, or our country.
It’s time to love despite. Odd as it may be, Star Wars taught me that.
For more on this, check out my book….How The Force Can Fix The World, on sale wherever you get books.