"What's the Point?"

Wednesday, 9:50 PM

Last week I was lazy and sent to you a 2008 re-run, “The Fortune Cookie.” It got mixed reviews. In ‘08 the US financial system was collapsing. It’s still getting mixed reviews. I feel affirmed. A new beginning, a new direction, or at least a stiff drink was needed. I looked for my direction in a fortune cookie.

My pal, Sam, a brilliant lawyer, responded. Three words framed the terse interrogatory: “What’s the point?” He puts me on the witness stand, having to defend my thesis. Lawyers do this…entrap you with questions. My knee-jerk rebuttal was, “What’s the point of anything?” Let him chew on that for a while.

But, his comment gnawed by brain like a dog on a bone. The comment resurfaced as the news reported on the OWE crowds---Occupy Wall Street---hordes of leftist anarchists protesting for redistribution of wealth. The process was peaceful, the platform perplexing. It looked like an urban Woodstock, sans cannabis, while they blasted Obama’s Wall Street “fat cats.” Meanwhile, inside the granite citadels of finance, life went on as usual. Nobody was asking, “What’s the point.” They knew. Shoppers gawked, business boomed.

Life is full of pointless things. Like the recent monetary stimulus plans that were designed to solve unemployment, but found ways into the greased pockets of union bosses. Talk about redistribution of wealth! Government is good at creating jobs by bureaucracy, wars and meddling into the affairs and the pockets of citizens. It’s cannibalistic, consuming its own children. OWS should be picketing in DC.

To ask, “What’s the point?” is often like taking a journey down a dark, dead-end alley. Circumspect should be used before entering. Answers are illusionary. They lead down murky corridors into Job’s basement, where walls are plastered with placards of protests past, and where restless spirits wail, and echoes of vanity of vanities resonate throughout. Where’s the exit from this hell-hole of horror?

While in Venice we visited the Peggy Guggenheim Museum. On its walls were strange canvasses by the artist Jackson Pollock, the genius of “there’s-no-point-to-it” art. You’ve seen his work. The colored paint is slathered, scattered and slung incoherently with no seeming order. It’s chaos-on-a-canvas that clings to the walls. I doubt if he ever asked, “What’s the point.” He was too busy with the business of amusing himself, confusing his audience, smoozing benefactors, getting rich and dying early.

Americans are a demanding breed. We expect explanations. Things must have an answer, someone to blame, something responsible, understandable, something plausible, scientific. Lately we’ve been asking a lot of questions of our leaders (leaders...really?). Questions of Why, of Where, of When. We get no answers. So, what’s the point of asking? We know the answer.

Thursday, 11:26 AM.

I’m now sitting in the waiting room of my cardiologist, finishing this vignette. I have survived yet again another nuclear stress test, looking for answers. I glance around, shocked at my waiting-room companions. Bet they’re not asking, “What’s the point?” They, like me, are willing to endure four hours of nuclear injections to hopefully hear good news. I’m sure some will be disappointed. I hope I’m not one of them.

Oswald Chambers, the great Christian mystic, probably gave serious thought to the question of “what’s the point?” He penned, “We may not be given overcoming life, but we are given life as we overcome.” I believe he touched the edge of the answer to this conundrum.

For whatever else it may mean, “What’s the point” is about life…vibrant, passionate, creative, and grab-it-while-you-can overcoming life, the kind of life that’s found in the smallest of everyday things and shared with love and in community.

What’s your answer to this question, and how’s it working out for you? Just asking…..

Bud Hearn
October 20, 2011