|
TRIUMPH AND TRAGEDY |
|
|
|
Written by Dr. Joel Wade
|
|
Friday, 19 January 2007 |
How you weave the events of your life together into your
personal story makes a huge difference in how you live your life, how you feel
about your life, and in the overall quality of your life. Today I want to talk
about two very different ways of seeing your life story, each with very
different consequences for your well being.
There are also political consequences to these viewpoints
that may hold grave consequences both for the future of this country, and for the
world.
As I talked about in Suffering and
Redemption, Americans - particularly those who are effective in the world
and engaged in helping the next generation - tend to see themselves as living a
life story built around redemption. A
redemptive life story is one where the difficulties and hardships of life are
seen as catalysts to growth, enabling a person to earn a better life through
persevering through such ordeals.
This is a very good thing. It is a way of approaching the
challenges of your life that is optimistic, grateful, forgiving, and heroic.
People who see their lives from a perspective of redemption tend to be more
generative (adding to the good of the world and future generations), happier,
less depressed and less anxious.
In contrast, you can view the hard times of life in such a
way that you see your life as having been contaminated
by bad events. (Dan McAdams, The
Redemptive Self: Stories Americans Live By). Like the fall of Adam and
Eve in Genesis, things were once good, but then something happened to ruin it
all, and you can't ever seem to find your way back to the good time.
From this perspective, if only you could go back and change
those bad events then everything would be alright again. But since you cannot
actually go back in time and re-do the bad events, the desire to do so keeps a
person stuck in a loop, stagnant and self-absorbed in the futile attempt to
correct an unreachable past event.
A contamination story is a helpless story, a pessimistic
story, and a hopeless story.
People who see their lives as this kind of contaminated
story tend to be more depressed, more anxious, less generative, and more
self-centered. The course of their lives tends to be more random, at the mercy
of events, and focused on a more short-term "live for today" philosophy, as
opposed to an active, purposeful, and upward growth over time - as is the case
for those living a story of redemption.
But whether you see your life as a story of redemption or of
contamination may be less a function of actual events than of how you interpret
those events - it is possible to see the same story from either a redemptive or
a contaminated perspective.
It is worth taking some time to think about how you see your
life story, and to do what you can to understand your own struggles in terms of
redemption. Many of the strategies that I talk about in these columns will help
you to move in this direction. The difference in how you view the same events
in your life can make the difference between your own personal sense of triumph
or tragedy.
This drama of these two visions is also being played out
right now in the political arena. There are very loud arguments calling for a
contamination view of the Iraq war, and I think this started with the trauma of
Vietnam.
For the anti-war left, Vietnam was The War to End All Wars. It
became popular to believe that war is outdated, an evil expression of ignorance
and power lust propagated by the United States. Our defeat in Vietnam proved to
such people that the US was wrong and that what they consider our military
adventurism is and has been a source of the greatest destruction in the world.
And yet they take joy in thinking that we are really not
that strong, and that there are counter forces in the world that can thwart our
aggression. Even if those forces are Communists or Radical Islamic fascists.
After our negotiated departure from Vietnam, our Democrat Congress
failed to fund our promised support for the South Vietnamese government in
response to the predictable invasion from the North. The resulting slaughter that we allowed showed ourselves and the
world that we were not capable of overcoming the threat of communism.
We weakened ourselves, let down our allies, and in our passivity
we made the world into a more dangerous place. In the words of Donald Rumsfeld,
"Weakness is provocative."
The Soviet colonization of a half-dozen countries like
Angola and Nicaragua, the Red Army's invasion of Afghanistan, and the overthrow
of the Shah and kidnapping of Americans in Iran followed shortly afterward.
We had succumbed to a national story of contamination, where
everything was fine before Vietnam, but now the good times - the good victory
of WWII, the expansive feeling of our newfound central role in world affairs
and growing economy - were ruined, leaving us with a diagnosis of "Malaise" from
President Jimmy Carter, our Therapist in Chief,. The best thing to do was to
avoid any further contamination, by avoiding any possibility of war.
Ronald Reagan brought us back from this defeatist stance,
and led us back to a story of redemption in overcoming the Soviet Union. But
the seeds of our present war were sown in the fall of Iran to the radical Islamists,
the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban, and the reluctance to finish the war in
Iraq that had begun with Desert Storm.
Most people still see Vietnam as a contamination story, not
as the complex necessity that it was (see Vietnam:
the Necessary War by Michael Lind). By failing to persevere to victory at
least to the extent that we did in Korea, we failed to continue our national
story of pushing through hardship into redemption. By continuing to concede
that Vietnam was a bad war, we continue to undermine our national character.
People like John Kerry have standing among the population
because they can claim to have been right about Vietnam. This lends credibility
to others in the Anti-War Left that they should not enjoy; it emboldens our
media to tear down those - like Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush - with a
redemptive view of America. And it serves to weaken our resolve to endure the
harshness and horror of war.
Now we have Democrats and some Republicans calling for the
same defeat, and in the same manner - cutting off funding - as was done in Vietnam.
The contamination scenario is being asserted once again, and our President and
a few others are thankfully persevering to hold us to a course of redemption
through our struggle.
President Bush is looking to make a redemption story out of
our current situation: The war in Iraq is difficult and challenging, there are
setbacks and problems, but we must overcome those setbacks and problems to
create in the heart of the Middle East a democratic republic who is an ally in
the broader war. Hopefully that will now include more support for regime change
within Iran and Syria.
The redemption here is an American redemption. The whole
country will benefit from our victory, and the world benefits by becoming more
free, prosperous, and peaceful. If we succeed, the Republican Party will likely
also benefit from the victory for awhile, but this is not the primary concern.
The Democrats on the other hand, are banking on a
contamination story from this war that will defeat the Republicans, in order to
create their own redemption story as a party. They don't understand - or don't
care about - the effect this would have for our country as a whole, and for the
world,
From their perspective, any war is like their view of
Vietnam. It is a bad thing that messes up their good time, and it is always the
same. The lesson of Vietnam to them is that we should avoid war at all cost. To
support the troops is not to rally the country behind them to victory, but to
protect them from entering into the mistake of war and the cycle of
contamination.
That is why the left saw Ronald Reagan as stupid - he didn't
get it that war is always unnecessary, always un-winnable, and always America's
fault. To conceive of actually defeating the Soviet Union seemed idiotic to
them. They still do not grasp the strength of resolve that comes of a
redemptive vision.
It is the same with President Bush. As the left sees it, President
Bush and the Republicans have done wrong, they have created a bad situation, contaminated
the good life provided by the Democrats and the anti-war left, and we are all
suffering for it.
For them, the idea that we might be threatened by an enemy
who seeks our destruction is an abstraction - even after 9-11. The idea that we
might engage that enemy and defeat them so that we are no longer threatened by
them is naïve to them, since nothing good ever comes of war, period.
The Democrats, the media, and the anti-war left now assume
that Iraq is a lost cause. They are certain that we cannot possibly win in
Iraq, because wars are not struggles to fight through to victory, but
contamination ruining their good time, to be avoided at all costs.
They can benefit by using this situation as a redemption
story for their own party, but for them to win, the country must lose. That is
the bind they are in. It worked for them for awhile with Vietnam. The country
and the world suffered greatly for it. I don't think we can afford to let that
happen again.
As Victor Davis Hanson has said, war is never about good and
bad choices, it is about bad and worse choices. We are engaged in a war where
triumph is necessary. The worse choice, defeat in this war, would be an
unthinkable tragedy.
|
Discuss this item on the forums. (0 posts)
|
|
