By Matt Swartz

A while back, I ran into a friend of mine at a pre-Halloween house concert; a few people were wearing costumes, but most of us were not. He asked me if I had anything planned for the week’s festivities, and I inadvertently let a little of my actual personality slip out: I told him that even in something so unimportant as making a costume, I was paralyzed.

I had an idea that I loved, but I couldn’t reconcile the perfect, hilarious idea in my mind with my actual costume-making skill set, and I knew it. The real thing, once extant, would be only a shadow of the perfect thing in my mind, and I couldn’t move forward for fear of exposing exactly how wide the discrepancy would be. I may or may not have said aloud that this specific instance of inability more or less illustrated my entire life in microcosm.

“Oh,” he said, lowering his voice a half-step like he does, “that just means it’s time for you to kill Plato.”
I quickly scanned my (hazy!) mental police lineup of Greek philosophers in hopes of figuring out what he meant. It took too long, and he could see what I was doing, so he went on: “I mean the idea that every thing has an imaginary, perfect essence, that there is some hypothetical perfect costume, or joke, or chair, or whatever, that the thing you’re making has to conform to. Those things are made up. Kill that Plato, with his idealized essences, and just do what you can do.”

I reflected more on my friend later. By trade, he is a graphic designer. His day job then, as close as I can tell, consists of applying abstract concepts to specific visual situations in ways that do not offend the eye. This is done, I’m told, with computers, by people who have studied and tweaked and formed strong opinions about text, color, fonts, white space, and the philosophy behind what sort of things people like to look at. One week he might be flown to San Diego to make sure that a certain batch of ink, when applied, matches, to the nth degree, the shade he had selected when designing some product packaging or advertisement. And when he comes home, he scratches his cat on the head, tromps downstairs to the basement, and just hacks.
He makes furniture. He retools, overhauls, and customizes his menagerie of tiny bikes. He likes this lamp’s stand, but that lamp’s bulb housing, so he cobbles the two together, he has a new lamp that is both new and old, and by this point I suppose it goes without saying that he’s never had a moment’s worth of formal instruction in the electrician’s trade. It’s as if, after chasing Plato and his idealized forms all week, he rushes home for the weekend, rolls up his sleeves, and finishes the hoary old fellow off.

An idea, before it is implemented, lies outside the scope of credible, objective judgment. Every opinion about that idea is speculative, in much the same way that the idea itself is. Neither exists. We call ideas “creative,” but on their own they create nothing. In fact, ideas are a hindrance to creativity, because at their idealized bests, they seduce us away from action, and it’s easy to throw them aside for new, less obviously flawed ideas rather than following them to fruition, out into the risky, frustrating, bitter, complex real world. But to chuck away the practice of making them real is to cut off a part of the human experience; a person who doesn’t make things, who thinks things up, talks about what he’s thought of, and then moves on to the next thing, is missing out.

Cliché-mongers often say that illiteracy is a self-imposed prison of the mind, that ideas cannot form fully unless they’re communicable. Maybe they’re right, but if they are, how much more imprisoned are those who only think of things but never do them? They think up lots of good costumes and inventions and dishes and stories, but finish none, dragging nothing from the womb-like privacy and safety of the mind out into the tangible, visible world we hold in common.

That’s a remark that I’m afraid I must say I resemble, even while I resent it. But to the extent that I learn to kill my inner Plato, I’ll resemble it less. And may the same be true for all who are similarly afflicted!

By Andrew Sharp

We can all be thankful for one thing this November, and that is that the political season ended November 6. That means as a resident of Ohio, I will no longer be crushed under a mountain of campaign mail for several weeks at least.
We can all look back on a presidential campaign that dealt not with concrete and realistic proposals, but primarily with rancorous accusations and vague, brightly-colored promises that will never be fulfilled.

If only righting the world’s wrongs were so easy that all we had to do was elect the right leaders and let them do all the hard work.

No, if you want to change the world, don’t go into politics. Obama and Romney both suffered from an itch for power, which they scratched at the expense of dignified and brave leadership. Most politicians do this, dragging their feet until they see that everyone wants a certain social change, then rushing in to pompously announce that they’ve been in favor all along (see “American Civil Rights Movement”).

It’s instructive that when God wanted to change the world, he didn’t get into politics. Instead, he lived everyday life as a poor peasant, a peasant who stood up for what was right even as it earned him the hatred of the establishment. No power addict, he.

Other people who have brought about change did so at their great peril, willing to be front line troops rather than testing the political winds from back at headquarters. Martin Luther King, Jr. and his army of activists took arrest, beating, and some of them, bullets, to end the evil of segregation and institutional racism in the South. The presidents, safe in the oval office far behind the front lines, hunkered down until it was safe to come out.

A more modern example of courageous action is retired police investigator Zafar Ahmed Qureshi in Pakistan. Qureshi was featured in an National Public Radio story earlier this summer. In his four-decade career, he led corruption investigations that implicated people with powerful connections, leading to repeated suspensions. In one case, he was searching for contraband weapons and found a stash of weapons and 100 kilos of gold. Unfortunately, they were owned by a member of the National Assembly, so instead of a pat on the back he got a call from the interior minister, threatening him with banishment to a remote corner of the country. Not having learned his lesson, he went on to uncover a major real estate scandal involving government officials, and failed to keep that quiet either.

This kind of dangerous and career-dampening persistence is rare among human beings, who usually shrug and say something along the lines of “What can I do? I need this job.” (Or, “I spent a lot of money becoming president.”)

But as Qureshi demonstrates, changing things from the bottom up is hard and involves personal sacrifice. It’s not simply a matter of holding high personal standards. When I was in college, the popular T-shirt slogan for young idealists was a quote attributed to Gandhi: “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” That’s a little too easy to be true.

“Displayed brightly on the back of a Prius, it suggests that your responsibilities begin and end with your own behavior. It’s apolitical, and a little smug,” Brian Morton said in an insightful op-ed piece in the New York Times called “Falser Words Were Never Spoken.” He examined this and other popular sayings for authenticity. Turns out this little cliché never came out of Gandhi’s mouth. Morton wrote,

“Thoreau, Gandhi, Mandela — it’s easy to see why their words and ideas have been massaged into gauzy slogans. They were inspirational figures, dreamers of beautiful dreams. But what goes missing in the slogans is that they were also sober, steely men. Each of them knew that thoroughgoing change, whether personal or social, involves humility and sacrifice, and that the effort to change oneself or the world always exacts a price.”

A price our politicians, and most of us, usually aren’t willing to pay.