Beyond those twisted, sneering smiles
there must be miles of higher ground;
why can’t we rise above the slime,
insist upon a change of venue?
Why, with this crop of sour limes
must we add sugar to the drink?
Refuse the Kool-Aid; it is poison.
Once you drink it, it’s all over.
15 APR 2025
© 2025, John Litzenberg. All rights reserved.
Leave a CommentAlbert Camus in his book-length essay, The Rebel, suggests that there is a fundamental difference between revolution and rebellion. It’s not, as some say, that a revolution is simply a rebellion you win, and a rebellion is a failed revolution. That’s far too simplistic, I think.
No, Camus said that revolution is the mechanism for ultimately replacing one system of government – or control, power brokering, or hierarchy, with another one of your choosing. One that will eventually, because of the very nature of hierarchies, become just as heinous and unjust and trifling as the regime it displaced. As such, revolution has a finite, measurable, and in that sense, limited, goal and outcome.
Rebellion, on the other hand, is much more nebulous. It is concerned with a certain level of disobedience – whether civil or otherwise – designed to disrupt the wheels of power altogether, to throw that locomotive steaming full-speed ahead toward a bigger, brighter, and more “prosperous” future, off the rails, or at least slow down its evitable inching toward selective oblivion. When you revolt, you overthrow. When you rebel, you resist. Revolution is never at its core even the least bit anarchic. Rebellion by contrast has some anarchy in it. You want to tear at the power structure, but not quite pull it down. Because leveling the current government requires installing another one in its place. As the parable goes, when you sweep clean your house of demons, you make it terribly inviting for another set to move in. And who knows how much worse that new lot will be, even if they look cherubic at first glance?
Resistance is the starting point for both activities. The only difference is the end game. Do you really want to take control? If you do, how will you determine the distribution of power? it takes a lot of level heads to map out a system of checks and balances, and as the founding “fathers” of the United States found out, a great deal of compromise. To some, of course, compromise is a dirty word. It implies if not selling your soul, then at least renting, leasing, or sharecropping it. But like the Buddha discovered in his spiritual quest, the answer lies in neither extreme. Both asceticism and excess have their limitations. Until they meet as equals, conservatives and liberals will broker no truce, find no peace, build no coalitions. The secret to successful negotiations is not winner-take-all. it’s not win-lose; it’s win-win. Because in the long run, there are no sides. There is only the whole, of which each diverse, contrasting, diametrically opposed, and seemingly absolute dissimilar is an important, integral, and essential part. it’s not a question of being dependent or independent. Those are the viewpoints of childhood and adolescence. Adulting is about recognizing, honoring, accepting, and exalting interdependence. As Thich Nhat Hanh put it, acknowledging our true state of “Inter-Being.”
So ultimately, both revolution and rebellion are against the self, right? And how, as Shakespeare’s Hamlet wondered, do we traverse that landscape, given that the Almighty canon is raised against self-slaughter? When we hurt others, we hurt ourselves. As a result, being kind and compassionate and warm and loving and giving and forgiving toward others is the ultimate in selfish action. So why is it so hard? Particularly in those nations where self-reliance, independence, and personal pride are so all-fired important? Is there really such a thing as a self-made man? No. No matter how tall we may seem, all of us are “standing on the shoulders of giants.”
So who is our rebellion, our resistance, really against? To be honest, it’s mostly against that nagging sense of personal responsibility that haunts us even as we try to shift the blame, pass the buck, or avoid recognizing our own presence and participation in every bad decision we’ve ever made. We justify our lack of courage, our selfish hoarding, the me-o-centric world view that results in the score of me, one, everyone, zero. There is no length to which we will not go to find a cause or reason larger than ourselves that explains why we are the success or failure we imagine ourselves to be. Who is to blame? Anyone but me. What needs to change? The world. When will things improve? When a savior takes the reins and leads us home.
But the truth is that we’re already home. There is no further, distant shore to which we need travel. We know this, of course. When you pack up your trunk and remove yourself to a different city, climate, country, or culture, your essential nature doesn’t change. Only the externals are different. The way most of us travel illustrates that in photo-realistic detail. As Americans, we want to stay in the English-speaking sectors. Interact with shopkeepers and locals who’ve bothered to learn our language. Eat at the McDonald’s restaurant down the well-lit, clean-swept, and germ-free boulevards of our foreign destinations.
We want to change the world, but so it looks more like us. Acts like us. Even though there really isn’t a “we” that exists in the safe, consistent, and ultimately predictable way we think it does.
Who was it that said the first step of any public revolution is the private revolution? Marx, I think, but it’s been a while.
Where does the personal revolution begin? And does it need to be a revolution, or a rebellion? And when it comes to that, like Marlon Brando’s Johnny in The Wild Ones, when asked what he was rebelling against, will you say, “What’ve you got?”
09 APR 2025
© 2025, John Litzenberg. All rights reserved.
Leave a CommentImagine the worst possible situation to be in. Really dig deep and put it in your mind, letting the feeling of the situation suck it right into your soul like holy weather, and breathe out the fire of absolute certainty. You’re hosed.
You can conjure this in your own mind, surely – everyone’s got their Waterloo, their Kryptonite, their Chappaquidick, their done ran out of road ain’t go no options. If you don’t know what yours is, chances are your ride or die buddies know. What was it Dirty Harry said (and I’ll say it the way it should have been said), “A person’s got to know their limitations.” We all have them, no matter how hard we try to make sure nobody else ever knows what they are. And that’s a lot to keep track of. I wonder which spiritual path really helps you let go of that?
So now you’re thinking about it, aren’t you? It’s become a serious topic of conversation; that defining moment of your life when you decide between what’s worth living for, and what’s worth dying for. In that precise moment of existence, that exquisite here and now that is the only time and space where anything actually happens, you have become your worst nightmare.
This, my friends, is a rock bottom beneath which there lies no further shore. Further down than this, it’s really Nothing.
Now: see yourself laughing lightly under your breath, a sense of something having gone absolutely right, and saying with a wry chuckle in an aside to the motion picture audience, “Well, at least we’re not living with Nazis.”
04 APR 2025
© 2025, John Litzenberg. All rights reserved.
Leave a CommentNo bright, bleeding edge technology
can by itself inspire us to see
beyond the limitations that bind
us to solutions posed by old minds,
gurus and mentors with rigid ways,
and coaches still running ancient plays.
The revolution cannot be fought
using hackneyed strategy still taught
in broken and ineffective schools,
who at best offer us simple tools.
We need to seek beyond the hammer;
relearn to speak using new grammar.
But in the end, no shortcut or device
grants understanding of work, or price,
nor strips away a rigid mindset;
artificial means are not there yet.
What must be done requires human acts
that integrate ideas and facts,
creating blueprints for the future, now,
out of something unknown, new, somehow.
To that creation, our tools and toys
may add flash, bells, whistles, and some noise
as mere ways for focusing the brain.
Our duty to thinking must remain
so that the choices we weigh and rank
leave in their outcomes, ourselves to thank.
And revolution, if it then comes,
some fresh distribution of stale crumbs
amongst the cannon fodder still here?
How it will change the world is unclear.
The only certainty is still death;
the randomness of life is what’s left.
16 FEB 2017
© 2017, John Litzenberg. All rights reserved.
Leave a CommentAre they still weapons, these mere words
we use to crystallize what thoughts
may form at random in our heads
or like to squeeze out for some end,
a worthy cause we would advance,
a blessing, curse or snare of love,
some cleverness sure to impress
or at least baffle for a time?
How everyone is armed these days!
It takes so little effort now
to build an arsenal behind
a screen of anonymity.
There are more poets, it would seem,
than there are fishes in the sea,
more than the stars out there in space,
more now than ever were before,
and each would wield a sacred sword
to cut away the rotted flesh
and free the suffocating soul
so it may somehow serve the world;
and everyone assumes their blade
will make the most important cut,
remove the cancer, scour the wound
and make the body pure again.
There is no end to such deceit:
that words alone can change the world,
that careless phrases in the void
transform some evil into good
by virtue of their worth alone,
or by some miracle subdue
the brute force that enslaves the world
and makes it blind and deaf;
while everyone pretends they hear,
that they are the sole conduit
by which the universe declares
itself, and by that act, survives.
They may be weapons, but what use
are words in such unthinking hands
that would destroy to somehow build
a world that values their intent.
Just how will some mere phrases turn
the tide of angry sentiment
that grows against the use of thought
and would devour diversity,
while everyone, in pantomime,
acts out some peaceful, loving role
without believing it themselves?
What good can such words do?
30 APR 2013
© 2013, John Litzenberg. All rights reserved.
Leave a CommentCanto I.
To educate for revolution’s sake
requires a willingness for martyrdom,
the sense to learn from every small mistake,
and fortitude enough to take what comes
when nay-saying begins; and start it will,
the moment you step from the comfort zone
where history and status quo lie still.
The one who makes the change, makes it alone.
To teach in such a way, one draws from life;
here, leading by example is a must.
Without at least some evidence of strife
you’ll never gain a single student’s trust.
Each lesson is a battle for the will,
to gain an inch of ground against a world
that teaches, at its core, how best to kill
the oyster, for the sake of some small pearl.
If you would learn from teachers such as these,
first empty out the vessel that you bear;
relinquish all desire or need to please,
and first and foremost, decide that you care.
Once that commitment’s made, the lesson starts:
no homework, no “pop” essays are required,
no slogans or mnemonics learned by heart,
except “to be inspiring, be inspired.”
Canto II.
The truth is never taught to us in schools;
what good is knowing why a thing is so?
Much better to accept the way it is,
than to upset the known, the status quo,
in vain attempts to try and understand
some purpose beyond doing what you’re told.
Shut up, keep to yourself, and mind your tongue:
the best way to survive and to grow old.
Beyond the simple texts we learn by rote,
the facts we’re told are sacred and pristine,
we fall and yet imagine that we float
above a ground far down below, unseen.
There is no golden parachute, my friends;
believe in what you will, to no avail:
no paradise lies up beyond the bend,
the gears will stop, the power will soon fail.
When learning stops, who still admits to teach?
Who, once they know it all, says “I don’t know”?
What good to grasp in space beyond your reach
if what is underfoot you can’t let go?
The time spent cultivating self-esteem,
instead of just performing worthy acts
can never be returned; you can’t reclaim
a pointless life by coloring the facts.
Canto III.
Break down the doors, release these fettered minds!
Let love of beauty rule each student’s heart.
Who knows what new advances they may find,
when nurtured with some kindness from the start?
For truth, though sometimes bitter, does not kill;
reality is harsh, but bears no ill.
Break down the walls of that familiar box
we reinforce with history and fear.
Let go of petty cowardice; unlock
the upper reaches of the atmosphere,
where muffled by a misspent sense of pride
the dreams of humankind are waiting still;
the future can be ours, if we decide
to say, not can’t or won’t, but shout, “I will!”
Break off these chains that bind us to the past,
to staid traditions of no further use;
in truth, they were not ever meant to last.
Let stale ideas suffer disabuse!
Commiato.
Disruption and upheaval cannot be
the means by which the world is made anew.
By violence, nothing ever is made free;
it simply tilts the scales, always askew,
toward a slightly different fulcrum point.
No measure of success is ever found
in wanton, mad destruction. We annoint
new martyrs when each century comes round,
and sacrifice to progress our ideals.
We spend long hours in pointless, wild debate,
believing that reform, a fresh appeal,
will somehow, save us from ourselves, our fate.
What would you teach, if you no longer learn?
What would you learn, if you know everything?
The tune that Nero played on, as Rome burned?
Together, or apart, we all will swing.
26 NOV 2010
© 2010 – 2017, John Litzenberg. All rights reserved.
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