“ Do or do not. There is no try.”
The Buddha
This quotation,
ostensibly from the Buddha, is on my current favorite t-shirt. This is my
favorite shirt since it has a long tail and easily covers my big belly. The
belly fat is due in large part to two things: my major sweet tooth that seems
to primarily kick in between seven and nine PM every night and my HIV meds that
rapidly accelerate the metabolic syndrome that leads to abdominal fat
deposition. My protruding belly is in stark contrast to my gaunt, wasted
looking face that makes even Keith Richards look good on his worst days. I
won’t even address the current sorry state of my ass.
The above quote may
remind some of you of a line from Star Wars spoken by Yoda. The Yoda version also
goes something like this just with more dramatic punctuation: “Do. Or do not.
There is no try.” (The Empire Strikes Back).
Supposedly
Yoda lived to be 900 years old but the Buddha still has him beat by living at
least several millennia prior, so I am going with Buddha as the originator of
this famous line. This I suppose could be a phrase comparable to the infamous “shit
or get off the pot”. No hanging out on the throne reading the paper. For
god-sakes focus and commit to the task at hand or not.
At first
blush with this topic I thought I want to be a ‘doer’ rather than responding to
the often-harsh command: don’t! Then it quickly occurred to me that there have
been many “don’t-directives” in my life that I have to say have proved helpful.
A few that come to mind are: don’t play in traffic, don’t own a gun, and don’t
eat lead paint chips, don’t pick-up that snake or don’t sashay into a straight
bar on Bronco Sunday afternoon and ask, what ya watchin’ fellas? And the one that I saw recently on Facebook, “don’t
come out of the bathroom smelling your fingers no matter how fragrant the hand
soap was you just used.”
Perhaps I
was overly primed to see the following based on today’s topic but in reading a
nice long article on Larry Kramer in the NYT’s from last week I was
particularly drawn to several quotes by Kramer using the word “don’t”.
I’ll get to
the quotes in a bit but for those of you perhaps not familiar with Larry Kramer
he first came on the national gay scene in a significant way with the
publication of his prescient 1978 novel Faggots.
The novel was a rather unflattering though brutally honest look at the wild sexual
abandon of gay male life in the later half of the 1970’s. Kramer as a result was persona non grata in
the gay world but with the onset of the AIDS nightmare a few years later Faggots took on an air of prophecy.
Kramer also
has significant accomplishment’s in the worlds of film, theatre and literature
but perhaps in some ways most impacting were his successful efforts around AIDS
activism. He was a seminal founder of both the New York based Gay Men’s Health Crisis and a few years
later of the iconic and change creating movement called Act Up. I have included a link to this NYT piece on Kramer and
highly recommend it as an important historical snapshot of this great gay man
and his many accomplishments. He is a consummate example of the real life
advice contained in the phrase “don’t be afraid” or to again shamelessly
exploit an old Buddhist bromide “leap and a net shall appear”.
Quoting Kramer
from the NYT’s article: “I don’t
basically have fences to mend anymore. The people I had fights with down the
line, some are dead. But even when we fought, I think we were always — I love
gay people, and I think that’s the overriding thing in any relationship that I
have with anyone else who’s gay. Never enough to throw them out of my life.
I’ve never had huge fights with anybody. Much as I hate things about the system
and this country, in terms of the people I deal with, I don’t have any.”
I have been
keenly aware of Larry Kramer and his many bold and often at times very
controversial proclamations and actions since 1978. He has pricked my conscience on numerous
occasions shaming me actually to do more than I would have without his kick in
the ass but still never achieving his level of fearless integrity. I still
today in many ways lamely persist with my own at times crippled activism.
It is 2017,
almost 40 years since the publication of Faggots,
and as Larry reminds us, at age 81, in his last quote in the article the
struggle continues: “I don’t think that
things are better generally,” he said. “We
have people running this government who hate us, and have said they hate us.
The fight’s never over.”
© 21 May 2017
About the Author
I was born in La Porte Indiana in 1949, raised
on a farm and schooled by Holy Cross nuns. The bulk of my adult life, some 40
plus years, was spent in Denver, Colorado as a nurse, gardener and gay/AIDS
activist. I have currently
returned to Denver after an extended sabbatical in San Francisco, California.
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