And that's the opinion I have about Deborah Marie Pulaski after reading this article. In her own words, she laments: "I've done all I could. I tried, even though most of what I did turned out to be misguided and ineffective." How sad to see a 53 year old woman with only one year to live living in a fantasy world. She talks incessantly about freedom, yet seems intent on wasting her final days lamenting the possible loss of freedom at some unknowable future date, instead of appreciating and taking advantage of the freedom she has to do what she wants and to be what she wants to be. She has divided the world into THEY and US. THEY are the invisible monsters working to enslave people on a daily basis. THEY are the ones who make so many rules that prevent her and her immature daughter from having a better job, a better house or a better life. Life is so miserable because of THEM.
She talks about freedom, but fails to understand that the one freedom she doesn't have is the freedom from her neuroses. All of us hold the ultimate key to freedom that people like Deb Pulaski cannot achieve. That is to say, the freedom from emotions, such as bitterness, fear, greed, resentment, jealousy, envy, anger, selfishness and negativity. These emotions are the chains that bind us to the wheel of slavery; they are the prisons we choose to live inside, in the words of Doris Lessing.
Deb Pulaski's world is a world of shadowy conspiracies in which THEY -- the faceless, nameless enemies of freedom -- live solely for the pleasure of taking away freedom from Deb, her wannabe Martian daughter and the rest of us poor souls for whom life isn't worth living. After all, we are being groomed for slavery, as she says: "And what's all this about? Is it really to help "welfare moms" or to keep illegal immigrants from taking other people's jobs? Oh, c'mon! This is about one thing. It's about slavery."
She looks down on politicians and "powerful" people who enjoy making and enforcing rules " . . . for the power. For the control. For their other powerful, controlling friends. So they can all feel important and be in charge." She equates power with the ability and desire to rob others of freedom, yet she laments her own lack of power: "God, I wish I were a writer like you or a great orator or a wizard about the law or something like that. I wish I could have done something big during my life. But you know me, I was never anything but a little precinct worker, a drone, a little deputy voter registrar, doorbeller, meeting attender, envelope licker."
Passages like these are quite revealing. She despises those who "feel important and in charge," yet thinks of herself as "little" because she didn't feel important and in charge. She congratulates herself for her altruistic and modest ambitions: "Just wanting to make the world freer - or at least keep a little bit of the world away from the people who want to make it less free." But she feels cheated because she didn't have the power to achieve even her small goals.
As I read her mournful account of her unfulfilled life in which she craves not for love but for freedom, I was struck by her superficial understanding of what it means to be truly free. "I wanted her to have the chance to try anything her wild little imagination could dream up. Maybe she'd fail. But maybe she'd succeed." For Deb and her daughter Edyie, freedom means the ability to do anything they want to do, including the ability to live on Mars. Last time I checked, the illusive THEY and THEIR rules weren't stopping them from going to Mars, unless she expects THEY are obligated to build the rocket ships and transform the Martian environment into a livable habitat . . . just because Edyie wants to live there. THEY "hate freedom"
For Deb, getting married, having children and a good job are shallow, mundane things that are not even worth talking about. Her daughter Pat wants these things and Deb has nothing but contempt for her and her dreams. She respects her daughter Edyie's dreams of going to Mars and presumably shares her resentment towards THEM who did nothing to make her dreams a reality. She is proud that "she [Edyie] won't bring a child into a country like this one is becoming." But Pat will have children… and oh my God! Let's hope they are at least like their aunt Edyie please Lord, don't let them be like their mother. ". . . I hope they'll be as stubborn and freethinking as their Aunt Edyie. Let their lives be worth something deep and true, not just the 'worth' of good livestock or laborers."
Yes, working for a living amounts to slavery. Such shallow life, how sad indeed!