Peux ce que veux

I am one disgusted individual and I know it.

Throughout most of my life I had been an incurable pessimist. I don’t know if I can say that I had that childhood sense of fantasy and imagination that many adults so intensely envy. I can say that as an adult, I’m glad that I didn’t have it, because while I’m willing to pick up the slack, I don’t like creating that slack for everyone else to pick up.

Parents say things that they don’t want their kids to hear and they know it. Fights happen, and while many kids would have ignored what’s happening and go back to their plush toys and action figures, I guess I’ve heard everyone argue, least of whom parents.

And therein lies my origin. I’ve been surrounded by more reasonable-sounding pessimists than logical optimists. And in weighing those two options, I joined the pessimists’ side in an attempt to follow reason.

Despite my pessimism, I’ve always had a positive outlook on my life personally. I grew up in a good neighborhood, always attended good schools (and still do), got to experience my share of extracurricular activities, and was given the opportunity to find my imagined niche.

My parents had always said to learn from their mistakes and learn from them the easy way rather than go and make the same mistakes and learn the hard way. I believed them, though the hard way seems to have a more everlasting impact than the easy way.

I had always been told by friends that moved away with family or for college that the world outside of East Ventura County is a different place. I believed them, and for that I prepared myself for an outside world of despair.

I’ve always complained about my hometown. I found drivers abnoxious and dangerous. People too snobby and pretentious, and kids to drowned in their alternative realities of perpetually green grass that cuts itself for $300 a week. The thing is though that I’ve stopped complaining about my hometown because I’ve begun to realize how trivial that is.

Basically, we’ve got bigger problems on our hands. (Well duh, James, you must be thinking.) The thing is that everyone says that. But who actually does anything?

Certainly but a few in the case of Rwanda. The reason I bring this up, first of all, is that we discussed the Rwandan Genocide in my Humanity in Globalization (political science) class. The second is that this topic serves as a catalyst to bring up this aspect of my personality not yet quite mentioned, and worth mentioning now in case circumstances change.

The title of this post comes from Romeo Dallaire, the Canadian general heading the peacekeeping force in Rwanda for the United Nations during this conflict, who ended his letter requesting to use force to prevent major loss of life with “peux ce que veux,” translating idomatically to “when there’s a will, there’s a way.”

This has been something of an upswing to me. Though there were other factors in my upturn from a pessimist to an optimist, namely religion, “peux ce que veux” has become something of a motto for me.

And those of you who know the specifics, this sentence did nothing for Dallaire’s efforts. Up to a million people were killed for immoral reasons and no state saw a reason to intervene because of a lack of state interests.

In short, maybe I’m too idealistic. I understand that I’m still young in my years, but some things I hope don’t change; some things I know won’t change.

I feel that money is only worth as much as the people without it, and to live a life past what could be called comfortable is not a goal for me. To spend money on lavish curtains rather than give to those in need is a simple moral dilemma in my view. I study political science and aspire to be a leading academic someday. I wish to attain a law degree to help advance and guarantee human rights, but where would I start?

Not caring so much about money is a start. With all the garbage that I had been fed by people like Bill O’Reilly, I had to re-evaluate my opinions. Yeah, lower taxes would be nice, but if we get see the social services we get in return (which we often look past) would accepting that some things are better than wealth be all that bad? If all illegal immigrants are trying to do is live and feed their families, would it be so bad to view them as fellow humans than non-Americans and see about helping them out as well?

I am an optimist, but not in the current framework. And within my optimism I remain a pessimist. I feel that in our current state system, with the artificial concept of nationality and citizenship now being so engrained in our lives, we have lost our common humanity. This is not a system that is coming apart any time soon in our realist world created my neoconservatives and the like.

I have made the little efforts that I can right now. Of the 44% Asian American population of UCSD, I do not belong. I always check “Other” or “Decline to State.” I don’t care about race and ethnicity statistics. We’re all human, and until we all thoroughly understand that, we as a people are going head-first into a glass wall comprised of seas, fences, and demilitarized zones.

But hey. Peux ce que veux. Y cuando la gente pueda y quiera hacer lo que nosotros, los serhumanos, tenemos que hacer, quizás la Tierra pueda entrar la nueva época.

你们要不要哏我去?

Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
This work may not be reproduced by any means without express permission of the author.