Resist Psychic Death

This is a short, quick, and easy read. Anecdotes are retold in my own words to avoid plagiarism. Most of these anecdotes are meant to be funny, but some are meant to be thought-provoking. • In Bikini Kill’s early songs, vocalist Kathleen Hanna tends to repeat lines many times. She had a reason for doing this. The sound equipment Bikini Kill played live with was very bad, and she worried that no one would understand the words, and so she repeated them over and over so that the audience would hear them. Some of the lyrics deserve to be heard over and over - for example, she repeated these lines from the song 'Resist Psychic Death' over and over: 'I resist with every inch and every breath / I resist this psychic death.' By the way, near the end of his life, the heart of Mexican artist José Clemente Orozco grew weaker, and his cardiologist, Dr. Ignacio Chávez, recommended that he stop the strenuous work of painting huge murals and instead concentrate on the less strenuous work of creating easel paintings. However, Mr. Orozco refused to take this advice. Instead, he remarked to his wife, 'I’m not going to do as the doctor says and abandon mural painting. I prefer physical death to the moral death that would be the equivalent of giving up mural painting.' So how does one resist psychic death? Some ways include practicing an art, doing good deeds, paying attention to your soul as well as your body, staying angry at the things that should anger us, and being aware of the fabulous realities that surround us despite the presence of evil in the world. • In 2007, while standing in line in Victoria station in London, a man named Gareth Edwards, who describes himself as a 'big, stocky bloke with a shaven head,' noticed a well-dressed businessman cutting in line behind him. (Apparently, Mr. Edwards is so big that the businessman did not want to cut in line ahead of him.) Some people politely remonstrated with the businessman, but the businessman ignored the protests. So Mr. Edwards asked the elderly woman who was behind the businessman line-cutter-in, 'Do you want to go in front of me?' She did, and Mr. Edwards then asked the new person standing behind the businessman line-cutter-in, 'Do you want to go in front of me?' Mr. Edwards did this 60 or 70 times, so he and the businessman kept moving further back in line. Finally, just as the bus pulled up, the elderly woman whom he had first allowed to go ahead in line, yelled back to him, 'Young man! Do you want to go in front of me?'