Kirby Olson

Communism is the problem; Christ is the solution

The solution to Hegel and Marx is Kierkegaard.

Only the individual can laugh or cry.

Valerie Solanas didn’t care who she killed that day. Maurice Girodias or Andy Warhol. They were both merely symbols, not men whose mothers loved them. Hatred is collective. 

The face of an individual blowing out birthday candles. 

The modernists lost their footing in scapegoating abstractions. Some tended toward fascism, some toward communism. Those that kept their footing, like Marianne Moore, were grounded in a solid faith. She knew that God, like us, has an individual human face. It is the face of Jesus Christ, our Savior. To see the one true face of Our Lord is the beginning of all true prayer. To continue to reflect on the individual face of each of our loved ones is the end of our prayers. It is also the beginning of all poetry. One must not begin to pray until one can clearly see Christ’s face.

To let go of this emphasis on individual love is to fall into the arms of Satan, whose face is legion, and always changing, from one demonic abstraction to another, from one ism to another, endlessly alienating oneself from the One True God, falling into mass movements focused on eliminating those who don’t belong to some abstraction.

Kirby Olson is a philosophy professor at SUNY Delhi in the western Catskills.