prosecuting gandhi

when i was younger i considered a career as a lawyer. my liberal family would have hoped that i would become a defense attorney, maybe not a public defender, but someone who would stand up for the accused and provide them with the best defense possible. the problem i had with this was the collection of friends i had as an early teen. they had provided me with the insight that most of those accused were guilty. rather than getting guilty people off, i wanted to help put them away, protecting society from the mayhem.

growing up with near-hippy parents, and wanting to be the protector of the conservative social order could sound strange. but having lived in a chaotic situation, you begin to understand why rules are put in place. as one of my college professors said, "there are lions and there are lambs, you need to decide which you want your children to be". i somehow grew up with the shaggy hair, and protective demeanor of a shepard dog. sitting on the hill, watching the flock and ready to intervene to keep the lambs from the lion.

but when i came time to go to college, i did not find a pre-law track, i went education. i believed it would be better to intervene earlier, to teach the lambs to think for themselves rather than needing to be led through life through fear of the shepards crook. none of this turned out as planned, i never taught, i found a path that allowed me to design and build automation rather than social systems. but as the years have passed my desire to tightly control has been replaced with the original freedoms of the liberal environment i developed within.

spending 4 years watching the cloistered monastic communities of my university years struggle against the modern realities of the post-enlightenment years, trying to reconcile a conservative framework with the the entitlements and opportunities of the educated futures they were building, convinced me that closed was not the way for me. the portraits of human greatness ended with mahatma gandhi, the father of modern india and creator of non-violent civil disobedience called ahimsa. reading the material, brought into sharp contrast how a conservative regime can be overcome by allowing them to attempt to strangle freedoms from their people.

the intervening years have allowed me to learn much more about myself and the the world than i ever could have known during college. i have resisted change myself and felt the irrationality of trying to hold back the tide. i am currently witnessing change similar to the 1960s collapse of the conservative order of post-WW2 america. a country pushing itself in two directions at once, and feeling the tension of straining against itself.

i am very glad i didn't become the protector of conservative order i thought i wanted to be in my youth. embracing the liberalism of modern-life has given me the opportunities i have so throughly enjoyed. i once said i was not a role model. at the time i was quoting charles barkley without thinking about the new role i was taking on. a life and a half later, i recognize that i am a role model, but maybe not the one my early conservative self would have expected.

there was a story in the journal a few months ago that discussed a new book on gandhi. the title of the book is great soul, the message is that gandhi was a complex man who lived in a time when the modern world was evolving. he is also a man who embraced a celibacy while married to a woman, wrote letters to a man describing him as the love of his life, and who lost close associates from his inner circle based on his "experiments" of sleeping naked with young girls. the book only focused on these points by publishing gandhi's own words, and never drew conclusions. the book, of course, caused strong reactions from those who have put the man on a pedestal and refuse to accept him as a man with personal demons.

the issue with taking a conservative view, and attempting to defend it, is that new details come to light, and you are forced to square them with an out of date set of believes; this can cause intense pain. conservatism comes from the latin conservare "to preserve", while liberalism comes from the latin liberalis "of freedom". as the world opens up, and conservative threads continue to unwind, those who give themselves the freedom to learn and experience life are in a better, less painful, position. they are not trying to hold back the tide that is coming no matter how hard they resist.

gandhi more than the symbol, he was a man and lived a much more complex life than we were led to believe. that does not diminish what he accomplished or change the freedom he brought to his country. there is no reason to prosecute him today for the life he lived then, but there is also no reason to shy away from understanding what that life was. understanding is always better than ignoring, it gives you the freedom to adjust to the new realities.

why preserve an out of date view? its like last weeks fish, the smell isn't going away no matter how much you try to cover it up and if you continue to feed on it, sooner or later you are going to wish you were a vegetarian.