Opinion: I prefer the profane
Jamie Garrett, Columnist
“In America, what do we consider to be ‘sacred’” asked my Spanish professor to our class. The answers were variable and all valuable, in some sense. Christmas, Thanksgiving, the Super Bowl, the American flag: a small sampling of the answers thrown out. My initial reaction was to say one of the conventional answers that I figured other people would agree with, more so to add my small contribution to a class in which voluntary contributions here and there save you from the awkward moment of being called on specifically to answer a question. But, of course, my mind doesn’t exactly work that way.
Weighing the “goodness” or even the necessity of holding things sacred in a culture is a terribly difficult task, especially for someone like me who does not prescribe to any particular system of religious or philosophical belief. In that context, I am, on one hand, a heathen who is able to walk about spitting on churches or burning flags with no necessary feelings of remorse or moral wrong-doing. On the other hand, I simply am not a part of a group that sanctifies any one day or place or object so how could I possibly understand what it means to consider something “sacred”? Given the dissonance between these two positions, I tried to find anything “sacred” in my life and I came up with some things that could maybe count as being something more to me than just what they are.
When someone is being loud and carrying on in a natural setting, in the placid setting of Nature, in the woods, I become infuriated. The woods are to me what a Buddhist temple is to some: a place of quiet reflection that reflects its quietude in the people who come inside. Being in the woods is cathartic and it makes everything else feel trivial in comparison. Sitting by the bank of a stream and watching the river flow reminds me of the constant turning of the world around me and that the bustle of human existence is, at best, an illusion. When someone or something attempts to break that tranquility, they are smashing something within me and my reaction is always harsh. But, is that sacred?
I love comedy, I love the mechanisms of comedy, and I love the feeling of laughing mixed with making other people laugh. Comedy is integral in my life and, honestly, without comedy I would probably be dead or worse: I might be a normal person. When someone tells a bad joke or I watch a person perform a sketch or stand-up or improv badly, I feel like they are messing with the entire fabric of comedy and it hurts my soul; it tears at an intrinsic part of me that can only scream out “dude, do that BETTER! You are literally ruining everything!” Like the noise of some awful person in the calm of the woods, bad comedy is nails on a chalkboard in my head: the performer is taking a beautiful thing, an important facet of human consciousness, and contorting it into an awful representation of our collective ability to make each other laugh. But, given all of that, do I still find it sacred?
I’m not going to bore you with another example because I want to get to the point of this article and that is the following: I hold things close to my heart and I certainly hope that no one finds ways to negatively impact those things, but I do not and will never hold things so close to my heart that I cannot make fun of them or otherwise deride them. To me, that is a mechanism of being a well-rounded human being, that ability to be critical of all facets of one’s life in order to glean the most positive aspects and lessons from every moment. More so than that, refusing to hold anything as entirely sacred in my life has led me to interesting conversations with others about their beliefs, perspectives and the things that they sanctify. I do not believe in God, but discussions about others’ beliefs in any form of a higher power or deity is fascinating to me because I simply don’t know what that kind of belief is like; I don’t know what it’s like to imbue anything with the true power and reverence of the word “sacred.” Is it wrong to imbue places, events or object with the power of the sacred? Probably not. If you were expecting a strong position at this point, I can’t give it to you. However, I can safely assert that when you dismiss societal progression and basic human decency in order to fall in line with dogmatic views and sacred traditions, you have effectively lost sight of what it means to be a critically-thinking, educated person. When the words in a book matter more than the lives and livelihoods of people, you’re probably f*cking up.
