{"id":5263,"date":"2013-04-01T00:00:08","date_gmt":"2013-04-01T04:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gadflyonline.com\/home\/?p=5263"},"modified":"2013-05-07T10:23:53","modified_gmt":"2013-05-07T14:23:53","slug":"living-according-to-tolstoy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/living-according-to-tolstoy\/","title":{"rendered":"Living According to Tolstoy"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Tolstoy_585x585\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I haven\u2019t read a hard book since high school, where they force fed me books such as The Catcher in the Rye<\/i>, Flowers for Algernon<\/i>, and Of Mice and Men<\/i>.\u00a0 I had my army of Stephen King books to get me through those tough times, and in college, I swam the rivers of Philosophy and discovered authors such as Dean Koontz, Anne Rice, James Redfield, John Grisham, Tom Clancy, and then later James Patterson, Nick Santora, and Deepak Chopra.\u00a0 Once college was said and done, I did nothing but write.\u00a0 Only recently, have I finally begun to march through the three bins of books that have waited years for me to find them, but it was not there that I found him.\u00a0 It was when the warning signs came crashing down that Borders was going far, far away, and I raced inside to claim whatever I could.\u00a0 And that\u2019s where I found Leo Tolstoy\u2019s Confession and Other Religious Writing.<\/i><\/p>\n

It was a hard read, but I finally sank in, ready for that last page.\u00a0 My mind chewed over his every word, and I had to grin at the possibility of a world not dominated by religion.\u00a0 But what kind of world would take its place?\u00a0 That\u2019s a possibility to toy with maybe in my next Science-Fiction piece, but it was toward the end that really got me.\u00a0 Could we as a civilization live in non-violence?<\/p>\n

Do onto others as you would have done onto yourself.\u00a0 Tolstoy stated that a lot.\u00a0 I wish it were true.\u00a0 I was only a child living on Long Island when I first encountered Anti-Semitism.\u00a0 At a birthday party for a friend, her mother pulled me aside before the cake was even served.\u00a0 She said that I couldn\u2019t be Alison\u2019s friend because I was a Jew, but what did an eight-year-old know about such things?\u00a0 All I knew was that my teacher smacked my left hand with a ruler whenever I tried to write with it, and then there was Paul.\u00a0 But The Same Man <\/i>has established that story.<\/p>\n

Do unto others as you would have done unto yourself.\u00a0 I\u2019m no saint.\u00a0 I know that.\u00a0 I have skeletons in the closet and regrets of moments in time that should never have been.\u00a0 Karma has kicked my ass so many times, but now she pets me on the head for being a good, little girl.\u00a0 Too bad, she couldn\u2019t save me from the Road Ragers I still tango with.\u00a0 Most recently was only a few days ago, where I was leaving work and driving on the Palisades Parkway, heading to Route 6.\u00a0 The guy in the left lane wanted to merge into the right lane, and before I knew it, our cars were literally side by side with his signal light flashing.\u00a0 I was ready to defend myself, if he dared push me off the road and into a ditch, but luckily, he realized that the battle was lost.\u00a0 I\u2019m sorry, but do unto others as you would have done unto yourself can\u2019t apply to a society succumbed to violence or individuals open to psychotic breaks or temper tantrums.<\/p>\n

All I digest is violence.\u00a0 I avoid the news.\u00a0 Nothing like depressing the hell out of yourself before bed.\u00a0 If I\u2019m bored, I sit with my father and watch his favorite Bill O\u2019Reilly rant and rave, and sometimes, he makes me laugh.\u00a0 I would rather watch television shows such as Arrow<\/i>, Supernatural<\/i>, Being Human<\/i>, Continuum<\/i>, Once Upon A Time<\/i>, Revenge<\/i>, Burn Notice<\/i>, or White Collar<\/i>.\u00a0 Okay, okay.\u00a0 They\u2019re not too violent, but I love movies such as Underworld<\/i>, Matrix<\/i>, Bourne, Bond, Wanted<\/i>, and Shoot \u2018Em Up<\/i>.\u00a0 Even if you\u2019re not watching people beat the crap out of each other or dodging bullets like in Ultraviolet<\/i>, you\u2019re still watching movies that have a seed of violence in it like with Reservation Road<\/i>, Personal Effects<\/i>, and Shrink<\/i>, where the violent act of suicide shatters the lives of those left behind and those struggling to pull themselves back from the brink.\u00a0 We are a society driven by violence.<\/p>\n

Recent events have shown that.\u00a0 The Mayans knew something.\u00a0 Maybe they knew that the \u201cCrazy Train\u201d was coming, and it\u2019s All Aboard from 2012 and on.\u00a0 The flood gates have opened, and horror stories that you do not want to know are playing out on the news.\u00a0 How do we become non-violent when we\u2019re surrounded by violence and violent people?\u00a0 We can\u2019t offer them a rose when they\u2019re holding a gun, and they\u2019ll find a way to get the gun.\u00a0 But even if they don\u2019t, we can\u2019t go back to the sixties, where it was peace, love, and happiness, or was it sex, drugs, and Rock \u2018n Roll?<\/p>\n

I\u2019m a violent person.\u00a0 I know that.\u00a0 I don\u2019t cry as much anymore.\u00a0 Maybe, I\u2019m already numb.\u00a0 When I deal with these people that can\u2019t drive or just go Road Rager on me, I don\u2019t run away.\u00a0 I deal with them.\u00a0 I move up to the car ahead of me, blocking them from cutting me off.\u00a0 It drives them crazy, and when they realize that I\u2019m not yielding to their manic ways, they go flying off to ruin some other poor person\u2019s life.\u00a0 And that person may panic.\u00a0 They may swerve and go off road and into a ditch because the other driver was bent on having their space, but hey, the same matter cannot occupy the same space.\u00a0 But that\u2019s just me.\u00a0 That\u2019s how I am, and when I look back at that eight-year-old girl, I see a victim, someone weak that was torn to shreds over and over again.\u00a0 I\u2019m not her anymore, and I don\u2019t want to do unto others as I would have done unto myself.\u00a0 I would rather be left alone, but that\u2019s not the way this world works.\u00a0 That philosophy has come and gone, so see ya later, Tolstoy.\u00a0 This is the way the world is.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I haven\u2019t read a hard book since high school, where they force fed me books such as The Catcher in the Rye, Flowers for Algernon, and Of Mice and Men. I had my army of Stephen King books to get me through those tough times, and in college, I swam the rivers of Philosophy and discovered authors such as Dean Koontz, Anne Rice, James Redfield, John Grisham, Tom Clancy, and then later James Patterson, Nick Santora, and Deepak Chopra. Once college was said and done, I did nothing but write. Only recently, have I finally begun to march through the three bins of books that have waited years for me to find them, but it was not there that I found him. It was when the warning signs came crashing down that Borders was going far, far away, and I raced inside to claim whatever I could. And that\u2019s where I found Leo Tolstoy\u2019s Confession and Other Religious Writing. READ MORE.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":52,"featured_media":5435,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,218,201,219],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5263"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/52"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5263"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5263\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5586,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5263\/revisions\/5586"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5435"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5263"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5263"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5263"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}