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...by James Mason
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This will have very little to do with my politics or philosophy but it does signify a certain state I have arrived at in my twentieth year with the Movement. If everyone were to be able to stop and look back in reflection over the past the way I have done lately, it would be quite a good thing for most. I've often enough attacked indulging in wishful thinking but I believe, in this case, I may allow myself this luxury by way of measuring where I've come from and where I'm at.
First, I would wish that all of my enemies could be subjected to the same tests that I have had to undergo heretofore. I confess my share of anxiety and discomfiture but I managed to prevail in every case. I would like to watch them each crack and crumble when placed under the same trials and stresses that I had to cope with.
Second, I would wish that in each separate contest, every challenge and every struggle, the actual, physical circumstances could have been transposed to that of a battlefield. One of the greatest insults of the present day is the way, for the most part, any swine who seeks to offend or undo you can walk away– win or lose– with virtual impunity. I would want every hostile encounter to have been upon the field of honor where the defeated do not get back up to try again later, and where one lives or dies according to one's actions, not words.
Third, and most fondly of all, I would wish that I could time-travel back twenty years and be able to be a constant companion and guide to my former self as a youth those many long, uncertain years ago. To be able to compensate for the bitter moments, of which there were many, when, as a kid, I had only lonely determination to sustain me.
Twenty years into the future, especially to an adolescent, is "the future" indeed. Those intending for themselves normal and average lives might balk at knowing what such a comparatively distant span of time might hold in store for them, and increasingly so in these most uncertain times. But to have laid claim to such a fanciful, outrageous and impossible dream of what a life and career should be, to have burned– literally– all bridges behind, and to have achieved in reality what was but a personal dream at the start is something one might take an appreciable share of satisfaction from.
Not a bad personal roster of hopes and regrets.
[Vol. XV, #3– Mar., 1986]
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