Nobody beats a dead horse better than a Russian. Pick up any Russian novel and you’ll find references to peasants and horses. In particular, reading Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, you’ll grasp in horrific detail the vicious whipping of horses. In one famous scene you’ll find a peasant unleashing on his horse right in the middle of the town square. He hurls epithets, whips, lashes, and spit. As if to take out all of the world’s anger and wrath on this poor forsaken soul. With saliva spewing from his mouth, he yells at the overladen horse to get up. To move. To do it’s job: To carry the weight of the world. And yet there he lay. Hopeless, wretched and confused.
The absurdity of the scene stands in great contrast to the fact that we’ve seen it happen before. We know how absurd it is to keep doing the same thing over and over again trying to get this horse to move. We repeat the same patterns and expect our community to progress. We hurl the same elected officials at it hoping things will change. We vote for the same party for centuries because maybe this time things will be different. We see our community in pain and we keep lashing.
This need to repeat what is familiar stems from a psychological response. One that assures us that what is most familiar to us is more important than the unknown. Even if the familiar is killing us. It’s a form of addiction. One that fools us into thinking we will be happier or safer doing what we know. Many of us have a difficult time adjusting to change, but probably not for the reasons you think. It’s not because we are afraid to lose our identity—that stays with us through our culture, tradition and language. It is because we are afraid to imagine the possibility of what could be without the safety net of what we know.
As creatures of habit we are taught at an early age the skills necessary to survive. In politics many of those skills are the same. Hunt, kill, devour. But in a modernist society, we ask ourselves which habits remain necessary, and which can we do without? Favors have always been helpful, and boy we know they are important in politics. They show kindness and thoughtfulness on the giver’s side. And they show a need being fulfilled on the receiving side. Seems harmless enough. But the giver of favors accumulates power along the way as they accumulate resources (why is it only they know how to take care of your water or electric bill—that’s a resource everyone should have). The meek, however, those asking for favors, continue to go about their business unaware that those resources belong to everyone, and in turn grow weaker. The politics of favors creates an imbalance of power. One that politicos fight to maintain at all costs.
Talk about beating a dead horse. We need a better guide to determine which habits to keep and which to break. For such wisdom, I turn to our faithful customers at our restaurant, La Cocina. On Sundays I tend to ask, “What did you learn in church today?” I asked Ms. Montoya who will turn 96 this year that very question and without skipping a beat she answered: To share. The Lord wants us to share, she said. I’ve had 6 children, buried a few, and lived a lifetime. The best thing we can do is share everything we have. There’s never an empty seat at her dining room table and there is always more than enough food and love to go around.
Life throws us fastballs, curve balls and wild pitches. A lot of the times, we end up missing. But if we hold on to the advice Ms. Montoya gave us, maybe we can help distinguish the habits worth keeping. Share. Share the love that you have. Share what you own, what you have, your talents. Share the light that is in you because if not, it will extinguish into oblivion.
Beat the dead horse with laughter and giving, not power and politics.
Javier Sánchez is the former mayor of the City of Española, NM, and the co-owner of La Cocina New Mexican Restaurant.