A crisis of faith

What the fuck am I doing?

When you spend five to ten hours a day in front of a computer screen, you sometimes lose focus on why the fuck you are there in the first place.

So, I was browsing facebook for the first time in weeks when I happened to glance at some new feature or whatever that lists recent posts or whatever that your friends have made. I recognized a good friend of mine in army fatigues in an album labeled "Iraq". I new she was headed out, but seeing her with a gun in her hand, smiling on Saddam's old throne and so on, was way more than I was expecting.

Facebook does this. It is like the New York Times, but all about your friends. You are looking for one thing, but meanwhile several other things catch your eye, and half of them have to do with the cruelty of man. It's like riding your bike too fast in a densely wooded area. You are focused on the path for fear of falling otherwise, but you want to focus on avoiding all of the branches that keep slapping you in the face.

Seeing her there, all purposeful and full of purpose and so on, really put into perspective all of my sitting and writing. What have you done in the past few months, Lis? Oh, just traveled to Iraq, led a squadron of men, and disarmed some IEDs. Probably saved a bunch of lives. You know. The usual. What have you done with your fucking life, Chris? Um, I wrote some papers.

I am nothing but potential. What the fuck is potential, anyway? It's a pretty amorphous thing. I could potentially contribute to the discourse about conflict resolution and peace making. I could potentially attempt to spearhead a local educational reform movement. I could potentially open a great local bookstore. I could potentially be the one who finally normalizes relations between the US and Cuba, or Iran, or whatever the fuck. But I haven't. And I probably won't. At least not any time coming soon to a theater near... and so on.

I don't know, man. I just feel disgusted sometimes. But what the hell else am I to do? Somewhere inside I do feel like these theses can contribute to making the world a better place. Sometimes I am really convinced that this bookstore is going to happen, and that it will be the stimulus for the community to rally around when I finally launch into local educational reform.

I just don't want to be locked into mindless academia, producing bodies of work that will be read by no one but those who grade it. Fuck that. The stakes are too bloody high. What will I say when some kid asks me, in ten years or so, what I did when I saw injustice? What I said when I saw a system that was broke beyond recognition? I feel like Lis will say, "I stood up for what I believed in, fought the fight I thought was right, and did my level goddamn best to make this world better for all who inhabit it." And I'll stand convinced. What the fuck will I say?