The Tao of The Little Rascals

Tao is a Chinese word meaning way or path.

Hal Roach's Our Gang, or The Little Rascals, was a series of short films made during America's 1930s depression era.

The films are about a diverse group of poor neighborhood children and their misadventures.

Most television-rapt children of the 60s like me, grew up watching The Little Rascals on morning television.

The Little Rascals did much to shape my political philosophy. Our Gang characters like Spanky, Buckwheat, Alfalfa, Darla and Waldo reminded me with humor how people solve problems (often of their own making), and ultimately, how people get along.

Ground Breaking

The Little Rascals was full of cultural stereotypes, but it broke ground in American film. Hal Roach's Our Gang series was ground-breaking, and culturally progressive because:

• It put boys, girls, whites and blacks in a group as equals;
• Its lead characters included African Americans and females when discrimination against both was commonplace; and
• Most of the characters were poor. Oft-times they were at odds with spoiled rich kids or meddlesome, small-minded adults

The child actors were filmed in a way that portrayed the unaffected and raw nuances of childhood, rather than a regurgitation of adult acting styles. The actors, some too young to read, rarely saw scripts before filming a scene. The scenes were explained to the actors, then they were encouraged to improvise.

Adversaries

The Little Rascals teach us that life is full of adversarial jerks.

Butch the bully and Waldo the rich kid represent the dastardly villains of conservatism, laissez-faire capitalism, and their closeted evil uncle, fascism.

Every Man

Spanky & Alfalfa were every man - humble schlubs who, while flawed, were street-wise and pragmatic.

I fancy myself having Alfalfa's sense of impending doom, combined with the pocket-fuzz of Spanky's street smarts. Spanky was a benevolent leader who treated his gang with democratic fairness and equanimity - like I have raised my children.

Tao

Tao is difficult to define or to express in words. Taoists say Tao can be discerned by observing nature -- and by extension, human nature.

If the Tao of The Little Rascals is discernible, it is woven from the constituent parts of

fairness, humor and humility.

Root of Dignity

Ergun Çoruh asks

What does it take
to live a dignified life?

I dunno. Do you?

I don’t know how to live life with dignity. I have imagined a dignified death.

I have thought of death as a culmination of a backpacking trip -- a trip where I have been packing the molecules my mind has convinced me is my body.

There's comfort in the notion that whatever was carried into the world by me and my antecedents would be recycled, or carried out, in a stubbornly efficient mass balance. Carried out not by me, rather carried out by co-dependent opportunistic species -- like carrion beetles.

I don’t know how to live life with dignity.

I wrote a poem called Kicking Horse that is ostensibly about a dignified death in the wilderness. My poem celebrates the great unknown -- where I treat the great unknown, perhaps naively, as something more than the stark finality of decomposition.

Kicking Horse
Saint Paul, 24 May 2005
Remembering Richard Hugo's poems

I rest my pikestaff
Against a granite colossus
In defiance, a toast
I tip a metal flask of Jack
To the wilderness

Now reclined
On the cobbled banks
Of the Kicking Horse Reservoir
Sun morsels desert my pupils
I cook until dusk

In the mackinaw of nightfall
Conferences of carrion beetles
Prepare their nurseries
Opening my eye sockets
To some star-lit destiny

Notes:
The title Kicking Horse is borrowed from poet Richard Hugo. Nominated for a National Book Award, The Lady in Kicking Horse Reservoir contains many of Richard Hugo's most loved and anthologized poems.

-.-

Learning to live a life with dignity would seem to require the experience of living. Learning to live a life with dignity also seems to require introspective thinking.

Introspective thinking is not idle navel gazing. Rather it is the requisite time to reconcile heady stuff like what is the nature of reality?

Becoming a witness to yourself gives you the lens of objectivity with which to test the comfort of your own reality.
~John Maeda

Part of living life with dignity is having a sense of what's fair.

I have come to think of fairness as a sort of social mass balance.

John Maeda says in his post Father as Leader

...what I believe is important in a leader -- being someone that consistently gives, instead of just takes...

I don’t know how to live life with dignity, but fairness seems to be at the root of dignity.