and open. You don’t have to get frozen in an identity
of any kind.
A Gary Larson cartoon shows two Martians who
are hiding behind a rock. They’ve set up a mirror on
one side of the path in front of the rock, down which
are walking a man and a woman. One Martian says to
the other: “Let’s see if it attacks its own image.”
It seems that we do attack our own image continu-
ally, and usually that image appears to be be “out
there.” We want to blame men or we want to blame
women or we want to blame white people or black
people, or we want to blame politicians or the police;
we want to blame somebody. There’s some tendency
to always put it out there, even if “out there” is our
own body. Instead of working with, there is the ten-
dency to struggle against. As a result, we become
alienated. Then we take the wrong medicine for our
illness by armoring ourselves in all these different
ways, somehow not getting back to the soft spot.
So today’s slogans present the great exposé. The first
one is “Don’t talk about injured limbs.” In other
words, don’t talk about other people’s defects. We all
get the same kind of satisfaction when we are all sit-
ting around the table discussing Mortimer’s bad
breath. Not only that, he has dandruff, and not only
that, he laughs funny; not only that, he’s stupid.
There is this peculiar security we get out of talking
Taking Responsibility for Your Own Actions 157