Paulie Rainbow 

Living Values  

I made an important discovery in my car one day. 

I don’t really care about cars. As long as they go forward, backward, and stop as indicated, I’m fine with them. To the horror of car lovers in my life, I can barely tell one brand from another. 

I really enjoyed my little motorcycle, and I prefer to drive a stickshift, so I do like driving. I love driving. I just don’t care much about cars.

But I also have very strong feelings about our earth. I’ve known for a very long time that my enjoyment of driving was in contradiction with my concerns about our planet. 

So after careful consideration and a lot of mocking from my Dad, I got an old VW diesel that would run on biodiesel, essentially processed corn oil. 

I drove it for 10 years. It smelled like french fries. It made me very, very happy. Ridiculously happy. 

They don’t really make cars like that anymore. 

What I discovered was that I got an immense satisfaction by taking something I did all of the time and drawing it closer to my deeply held values. I can’t do that with everything, but with everything that I do, I change my experience of my living, sometimes in ways I don’t fully appreciate. 

This has been a discouraging couple of years for me. I always thought that my efforts would help change the world, not by themselves, but in concert with other people making similar choices. Paying extra to purchase organic food, or support small, ethical businesses seemed like a worthwhile investment. I was certain that I was a part of a growing movement toward a sane, balanced, healthy culture. 

I hoped I was also a persuasive example to the people closest to me. That doesn’t seem to have played out as I expected. 

Spending nearly two years stuck indoors, suddenly a fragile person due to an autoimmune disorder treated with a medication that had restored my freedom and function, but now puts me one infected breath of air away from certain death, I am overwhelmed by the seeming failure of everything that matters to me. Climate change driven fires and weather anomalies, fascism and violent racism, rebellions against public health measures, the failure of the voting rights acts accompanied by a seeming tsunami of state-level measures to restrict access to voting, all of these are alarming and depressing me. 

At 60, having given four decades of my life to activism, in the face of current events, I have wondered if I made the right choices, if my efforts mattered, or if my energy and choices were wasted. 

But that lumps together a lot of things that are better looked at individually. Isolation is coloring my perspective, when I understand that it is easier to dial it down. The outcomes of the world are not as I would like, there is reason for concern, but I am not responsible for the outcomes of the world, only for my individual actions. 

Were my choices, sometimes expensive or inconvenient, worth it? And why is the answer to that, yes? 

Very simply, I am happiest when I am living close to my values. They may not yield the world-changing outcomes I had hoped for, but that’s not the point. 

I was so happy in that biodiesel burning car. 

I worry about the bees. I worry about migrant farmworkers and their exposure to chemicals. I feel discouraged when I am stuck with conventionally grown vegetables. It’s like a little tax on my state of mind. That tax goes away when I eat food that I believe supported wholistic agriculture. Am I right? I have no idea. Am I happier? Yes, I am. 

I called my Senators all through 2021 to urge them to kill the filibuster and save democracy. Did it help? Doesn’t seem to have, but that’s hard to say. Am I wondering if I did anything to protect democracy? Nope. I’m discouraged by the state of the world, but I’m not weighed down by regret for inaction. I do wish I could have joined any of the protests in the last two years, but that’s not possible for me now. I did what I could do.

The company that makes my favorite toothpaste was bought by a conglomerate I stopped buying from years ago. So I switched brands. 

I have little impact on the state of the world, but this is my limited human lifespan and I get to spend it the way that satisfies me the most. If I confuse world outcomes with my limited personal power, I drain the satisfaction from choices carefully made, and for no good reason. 

There are different kinds of satisfaction, like there are different kinds of food. For my personality, at least some of my satisfaction needs to come from a sense that I am living according to my values, regardless of the larger events. 

These are living values. Living my values. If you are making similar choices I hope that you see that that matters. Maybe it changes the world, or maybe it keeps you going in a changing world. 

Peace of the mountains to you, 

Paulie Rainbow