Thoughts that shook my world

Thoughts that shook my world:

Love:

When I was younger and that means not too long ago, I had this stupid narcissistic thought that I didn’t have to make myself lovable for you to love me since if I had to do that, then your love was too cheap, too conditional. I was naively expecting you to be a Jesus or a Buddha or a man with a big heart. I forgot that you were only a common, ordinary, pedestrian, nasty, short, little man. Now I recognized the error of my infantile mode of thinking. Although love is not a business deal, it is still an arrangement. Every arrangement has its own terms and its own kind of currency. And in love the currency is virtue. You love people not for what you do for them or what they do for you. You love them for their values and their virtues, which they have achieved in their own character. You don’t love causelessly. You don’t love everybody indiscriminately. You love only those who deserve it. The man who loves everybody is the man who loves nobody. He is a liar or a saint.

So, if a man is nasty, stingy, and not loveable, he certainly does not deserve love. Perhaps he deserves our pity or scorn, even contempt. But wait a minute, he certainly does have free will. And if he wants love bad enough, he should correct his flaws, and then he may deserve our love. But he cannot expect the unearned---neither in love nor in money, neither in spirit nor in matter. Love is like respect, we have to earn it the hard way and that means we have to keep making ourselves loveable 24/7.

History:

A man who does not know history would not understand the present and is ill-prepared for the future. History is a valuable subject, but Aristotle said that fiction is more important then history, because while history presents things as they are, fiction presents them as they might be and ought to be. History is unfolding right in front of our eyes. All we have to do is to open our eyes, and not to willfully keep them closed: the decline of the U.S., the relentless rise of China, the tragic and comic and banal drama of the domination of the Palestinians by the Jews while the world turns their back on the drama, the radicalization of Islam, the increasing irrelevance of European powers, the emergence of India and Brazil, and the slow but inexorable disappearance of Vietnam as a sovereign state because of the apathy and indifference and silence and fear of its actual and potential leaders, and because of the orgy of the masses in sensuality and materialism which results from the breakdown of morality. Certainly there are some individuals in society who exhibit concern and care for the impending collapse of Vietnam, but these individuals are few and their voices are weak and not coordinated. More ominously, if they raise their voices loud enough, they will be thrown into jail by the ruling authorities who are selfish and rotten to the core, who are only concerned with their own selfish interests

Music:

In Rachmaninoff, there is an enormous, heroic sense of life. He projects that life is a difficult struggle, but that man will ultimately win. Man is not defeated, as in Beethoven’s music.

Humor and incongruity and absurdity:

Every instance of humor involves the denial of a certain view of reality, and implies that there is correct view. You laugh at a certain man or event, because it represents something contradictory and therefore incorrect. But when moderns begin to laugh at the universe as such, the absurdity in their position is that they are laughing without any point of reference. You can laugh at certain things within the universe. You cannot laugh at the universe as a whole, because if everything is incongruous, there can be no such thing as incongruity itself---and there is no ground for humor. Everything cannot be absurd. It is only by reference to something non-absurd that we can judge certain actions, people or events as absurd.

“What is the purpose of life?”

Everybody is dropping dead, left and right. You get up in the morning, go to the computer, and there it is: In your email inbox is another announcement that somebody has kicked the bucket. You can’t help thinking “What is the purpose/meaning of life?” But the question itself is improper. It smuggles in the wrong answer. The question should be: “What is the purpose of my life, of any particular individual’s life?” To ask: “What is the purpose of life?” implies that somebody outside of ourselves---some supernatural being---has to prescribe that purpose, and that we should spend our lives trying to discover it and live up to it. There is no such thing as “the purpose of life,” because life is an end in itself. Life is the purpose of life. And nature has given us a very good way of knowing whether we are spending our lives properly or not---namely, whether we are happy or not.
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You wrote and copied the above and were tempted to disseminate to the world, but you controlled yourself. After a good night’s sleep, you don’t give a fuck about the world. You don’t give a shit about the world. So, you confined this piece to that museum called blog. Your alienation is getting worse, but you are getting stronger.

Ayn Rand

All philosophers cum novelists of some renown are seldom plagued with self-doubt. The Russian emigre came across supremely confident of her views which were built on her premise that self-interest was the best philosophy for mankind.

We all do philosophy, just as we all do politics, consciously or not---that's where the difference lies. A philosopher is merely a person who does philosophy consciously. Truths are often circumstancial and conditional. Very few truths are unitary and absolute although there's much validity in the saying that everything that rises will converge. Rand's views were a reaction of spending her formative years in Russia under communist totalitarianism where all values were subject to Marxist determinism and statism. She failed to see virtues in some form of governmental intervention to curb the excesses of unrestrained free enterprises. In spite of talking about free will, she failed to see that her thinking itself was a product of her environment. Very few humans are not affected by the enviroment where they grew up.

Because I was turned off by her philosophy of self-interest, I purposely avoided her writings. In these waning moments of my life on this planet, I am getting more open-minded. I recently checked out a book about the interviews she gave out during her life. I was struck by the incredible vigor of her thought process. The following is an excerpt with clear implications for theism and political activism. Sharing this excerpt is my indirect answer to those who challenged me intellectually and politically. It explained my earlier decision to post a clumsy poem written in French although I only had three years of French in high school. If I may add, I do philosophy consciously.

"Even though we all perceive the same reality, men still approach reality in antithetical ways---altruistically versus egoistically, as one example. This indicates that all men do not proceed from that initial perception of reality to the same conclusions. Yet you say that men must grasp the first principles of reality, proceed through an objective system of logic and arrive at the same conclusions.

AR: ...Men do not know everything, and the content of their consciousness is not always correct. All we can learn from the fact that human beings differ is what we can learn about ourselves introspectively---namely, that men do not know things automatically and they do not know them infallibly. Every human being has to acquire his knowledge by a volitional process of observing, thinking, reasoning, learning.

Very few men conscientiously go through that process. Most men act mainly according to their emotions, or they simply accept by osmosis whatever ideas are floating around in their culture. So there will be differences among men. Man has to pursue knowledge throughout his life if he wants to survive. The purpose of knowledge is to define, on a wider and wider scale, what is true about the world in which we live and how we should act in relation to it. You look at the facts and you ask yourself: "What is true?" Once you have discovered the truth, you may then be concerned with communicating it to others But to arrive at the truth you have to use a process of reason. That is all that should concern you---not the fact many of them may disagree."

Write me a poem

A woman who knew nothing about poetry
Once asked me coquettishly
That I should write her a poem
Just to prove to her in the name
Of affection and perhaps love
I could glide on the wings of dove.

I told her poetry was not simple;
It took more than just being nimble
With words and having an ear for music.
Feelings got to be deep and terrific.
Unfortunately, I had none of those for her.
My words had to come from my heart torn asunder.

She cried, saying it wasn't fair
Since her feelings for me were too strong for her to bear
Especially at night alone in bed in her flat
While outside her window the full moon sat
Up high and shone in all its solitary splendor,
Making her heart flutter, wonder, and wander
(cont.)

Literary Topics

War, Love, Family Discord, Emotional Growth, and Environment are standard topics for writers to mine. Recently I came across prize-winning books about a prosmicuous mother dying violently by hands of strangers and of an alcoholic, lying father living his last days as a homeless person. I, fortunately, didn't have parents like those. My parents were responsible, loving, though somewhat harsh in their words and physical punishment of me prior to my adolescent years. I was not that lucky in the department of love although I was married numerous times and had girlfriends galore. I had a traumatic experience with a girl I met in college and I've been quite messed up ever since. Thus, it is no surprise at all that love is all I write about since I know quite a bit about it. Today, I had a long chat with my daughter. I told her she had to learn to get along and love her parents because there is nothing sadder and more traumatic than family estrangement. She listened and finally agreed with me. I told her that her parents, in spite of their faults, always had her interests at heart.

Morning Explosions

1. Writing is a tension between a need for self-expression and a need for acceptance.
2. One does not really know who he is until he interacts with others.
3. The clash of wills. The imposition of one's will upon others versus respect for truth and reality.
4. The contempt one has for some who are clearly inferior in intellect and sentiments and whether such contempt should ever be expressed publicly at all. The abhorrence of arrogance.
5. Contrast of education/training in the humanities versus training in science: human reality versus physical reality.
6. War as a topic of literary production. The tragedy of Vietnam War. The impact it has on the mindset of the Vietnamese.
7. Last but not least. Ah, poetry, the slippery terrain. Everybody should attempt to write poetry just to see how hard it is to put words together in a suggestive, moving, memorable, and yet musical way. The role of language, especially in poetry, in expressing thoughts and feelings. The current resistance against the VCP and China needs more memorable poems.

Border Treaty

Those of us who were able to read the border treaty between Vietnam and China uniformly experienced dismay at the format it was done, leaving the content aside. The document looked like a xeroxed copy with blurred characters. The fonts were horrible. The document looked like a draft and yet it was presented as a final agreement, the date 30 of December 30, 1999 was handwritten, and most importantly as far as the Vietnamese people are concerned, the identity of the Vietnamese official was glossed over by a scribble in the signature area. The official didn't sign it legibly. He just scribbled some short ineligible name. There was no typewritten disclosure of his full name. His Chinese counterpart, au contraire, signed his name fully in Chinese. The document specifically spelled out on the very first page that the treaty took effect as of July 6, 2000.

There are several contemporary issues which are emotional to all concerned Vietnamese.They all concern China: the sovereignty of the Paracel Islands and Spratly Islands, the border with China, the 50-year lease of hundreds of thousands of acres to the Chinese, the presence of 100,000 Chinese workers on Viet soil, the construction of dams (4 already finished and opertional and at least 4 more are forthcoming) in the upper reaches of the Mekong River affecting adversely the Mekong Delta, and the selling of Viet women to Chinese.

All Vietnamese must realize that Vietnam does not belong to the Viet communists. It belongs to all of us. The VC government has no political legitimacy per se. It is not truly elected by the people. It cannot sell our land to our historical enemy so the leaders of the VCP can get obscenely rich. The people must take the matter into their own hands and defend themselves, otherwise they will be the ones who will suffer the most once China completely rules Vietnam. They have to ask themselves if they want to live in subjugation, torture, impending assimilation, and threats of death as the Tibetans and Uighurs are now living, or they want to live in freedom and be masters of their own land, the land their forefathers shed blood and tears in order to bequeath to them. They must realize China has harbored an ambition to digest Vietnam once and for all, so it can expand into Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar and Thailand. Of the countries (Vietnam, Korea, and Japan) which were influenced by Chinese culture, Vietnam is regarded the most sinicized and the most vulnerable. Korea and Japan were never ruled for one thousand years by China as Vietnam was. Korea and Japan don't have strategic location as Vietnam does. I laughed my head off when some ignoramus tried to analyze current political situation in light of history when he didn't have the full grasp of historical facts and intellectual acumen. In addition, he didn't see the severity of the existential crisis that Vietnam is facing.

This border issue is serious and merits attention from all Vietnamese. They all need to get involved.

Women and Societal Changes

In Xinjiang, the women got in the faces of the Chinese police, screaming at them and asking for the release of their male relatives. In past political protests and revolutions, when women got involved, they all succeeded. It was not easy for police and soldiers to shoot at unarmed women.

The famous painting of the French mob attacking the Bastille prison--- that brought on the French Revolution and shook to the foundation and eventually destroyed the concept of absolute monarchy--- had a woman carrying the French flag. There were many women in the painting also.

In all mammals, the females are very important in the preservation and the spread of the species. To assimilate a conquered people, the conquering kill off the males and have sex/marry the conquered females. To spread a new religion, the target is always the women because the women are easier to convert. Women are more practical and adaptable to new ideas. If the new religion brings them tangible benefits such as food and a chance to move up in society, they will follow it. Women are not as too hung up with ideologies and finer points of theology and arguments as men. However, men often adopt the religion their girlfriends or potential girlfriends in order to win their hearts, not usually vice versa. Chidlren tend to follow the religion of their mothers. We need to watch the animals programs on TV more often to remind ourselves of two things: one, there is a thin line in behavior between animals and humans; second, life is an endless struggle to survive as a group. To be weak is to invite attack. To survive as a group, as a species, altruism must take precedence over naked selfishness. Animals instinctively adopt the practice to fight/sacrifice themselves for the sake of the group. Only with humans, naked selfishness is practiced to the extreme in some cases, with unavoidable catastrophic results for the group/tribe/nation if such practice is prevalent. Vietnam, unfortunately, with the behavior of the ruling communists as an example, is such a society. Vietnam is in acute danger of disappearing as a sovereign country.

Women often don't do politics, but if they do, the situation must be very critical, a make or break point for a society, as it is happening in Vietnam. Vietnam is at the crossroads, either it will continue following the path to become a province of China or the people wake up in time and join the movement to keep Vietnam independent. The future is up to us. We influence the future. Those who are passive and scared and concerned only with saving their own skin will always regret later on. Look at what happened to those who failed to resist fascism and
communism fiercely in the years between WW I and WW II. Totalitarianism will never go down by itself. It only goes down when it meets resistance.

We all die someday. Let's live in a way that brings real meanings to our lives.