The Power of the Post

Tags

political discourse, stupid people

Yeah, you’ve heard it all before. So have I, since I actually preach this message rather consistently. But alas, I forget. So, I figure you might as well.

REFRESHER COURSE ALERT!!!

Recently I got a friend request from a dude I recognized immediately as a nut. His Facebook icon was “Ted Cruz in 2016.” As I said, a nut.

Now, I should know better, but I could hardly turn down the chance to tell him he was an idiot before he unceremoniously “defriended” me could I? So I hit, the friend button and began a rather torturous journey into  lala land or the land of the not-quite-right-in-the-head folks.

I picked up a good half dozen to eight “defenders of the stupid” and proceeded to get into a number of fights immediately. As one would expect, all the trite Fox/crazy right memes came to the fore. Since most of the arguments were on gun rights, I got the usual, “guns don’t kill people”, and criminals aren’t gonna obey the laws, and variations on those themes.

After lengthy logical argument and citing of actual facts, I was confronted with the usual right wing nothingness. One guy just posted funny pictures and called me Sherry McMoron and quote, “liberish”, as if that sealed the deal on my inconsequentialism.

And the point is, that when people are “out there in the ether” there is no point in argument. They aren’t capable of arguing, except for a “you stupid troll” between burps from the beer guzzling.

When you see somebody who is absolutely clueless, beware. You think you can patiently start at A and proceed slowly and deliberately to Z and when you are finished they will smile, and say, “I get it now. Thank you, I’m going to read more carefully from now on.”

But they don’t. They say, “you stupid troll,” and scratch their nether regions, smile and the mini thrill and reach for another Budweiser.

This will always happen no matter your level of debate and logic skills. And the reason is simple, if not understood by most. It’s not you. It’s not your argument. It’s their brain.

Study after study shows that the conservative brain is a brain that lives in fear of the bad world it is surrounded by. It cannot make sense of it all, and it feels threatened. Simple answers that package their fear and put it away is what they yearn for and gravitate toward. The are frightened and they are insecure in this big world. Small and simple answers that assure them that all will be right, captures them faster than any fact or logical deduction ever could.

They will cling to what is familiar, reassuring, and safe every time over logical argumentation that leaves them feeling insecure and unsure. It is not how they want to think, it’s how their brains function. It’s called compartmentalization. It allows the victim to ignore all contrary information and when necessary isolate contradictory beliefs behind walls that keep the conflict at a minimum. (I believe in creationism, while at the same time encourage my niece to get gene therapy for her cancer diagnosis, never bringing to the fore that gene therapy is a result of evolutionary biological research.)

Eventually we all come to realize that “there is no point” in arguing with such types, but we continue, at each new juncture, and with a different right wing nut case in the cross hairs, we fall victim to trying again. And we get the same result.

Lest we be declared insane for trying to get a different result from the same activity, we have to finally admit that such is a waste of time.

EXCEPT THAT. . . .

Facebook is a unique forum. We all have friends on Facebook, and they exist in a variety of forms–relatives, old old friends we have moved far from, new friends, eternal friends, coworkers, associates, church friends, organization friends, and the list goes on to infinity. These myriads of “friends” bring forth a variety of individual talents.

I am graced with some great Facebook friends and I owe them a debt of gratitude. They have taught me so very much. Their passion, while not necessarily mine, has served to inform me on many a subject I would be unaware of without them.

I would never know how cruel and awful housing small whales and dolphins  in small tanks is, alone and without their families. I would never know about the issues regarding Monsanto, and Tyson and other vile corporate entities that endanger our health in the chase for the almighty dollar. I’ve had my theological foundation firmed, and loosened by a couple of theologians I know.

I could go on for a couple of pages. You see, I know all sorts of people in the Facebook way, and by and large, I’m enriched from the experience. The people I disagree with, remain small, but more importantly they are vehicles for dissemination.

What?

Here’s where I tie this all together. . . .

While it is unprofitable in general to get into discussions with right wing crazies en mass, isolated encounters in otherwise  friendly terrain, does serve a purpose. And that purpose is, they give one the excuse to lay out all the arguments that you can muster on an issue.

Why?

Rather than be the usual waste of time that we have encountered in large groups, in small ones, you don’t get overwhelmed. Much like big corporations make it hard to be sued by “papering” the opposing counsel with so many requests, demands, depositions, discovery, endless motions and so forth, when six or eight people are all ganging up on you, well, most people don’t have TIME to respond properly.

Responding improperly does more harm than good.

Why does this matter?

Because in every group, there are outsiders, people who live on the fringe, reading but almost never uttering a word. They are not crazies, but they aren’t politically aware either. They are busy living their lives, and barely bump into most of the political and social issues of our day. They do however, at leisure, read posts and comments, blogs and so forth.

They are not ideologically motivated. They are bright people, normal in every sense of the world except they aren’t much interested in the body politic or how it functions. Until it waylays them personally (and many it never will), they don’t get involved.

But, they do read. They do comprehend. They do get logic, and they do check out links. They will listen to a cogent argument and if not offset by superior information going in the other direction, they will agree with you.

They won’t deliver fliers in their neighborhoods or make phone calls for a candidate, but they will vote (if not too inconvenient) and they will vote consistent with the facts as they have come to understand them.

They are your audience always.

You have to trust that they are there. They are, I assure you. Every once in a while  I get a message or email from one of them, telling me they have “lurked” for some time, and agree or have been led to agree to this idea or that.

Those are the people you are writing and talking to. They don’t have time to do the research you do, but they appreciate it. They can tell the difference between your citation to reputable sources and the other sides reliance on “common sense”.

They recognize that common sense to the right wing is akin to “what I want to believe is true because it makes me feel better.”

Your efforts are thus not offered in vain. Remember that you talk not only to who is directly before you, but all those who are within eye or earshot.

What it means for me personally, is to try to remember, (no matter how angry I often become at intransigent thinking), that calm, factual offerings are much more successful that bombast and snappy retorts that serve to explain only how loathsome the right wing fanatic can be.

So I thank all those who have taught me so much on Facebook. And I am thankful for Facebook which provides that unique platform allowing me a cornucopia  of “friends” that insure a range of opinions, talents, passions, and hard facts.

The post is powerful, more powerful than you think. So do be mindful of the audience out there, ephemeral as it may appear. This is your job. They depend on you for accurate information on an unimaginably wide source of things. Surely you can offer your services on a few of them?

Make a difference!

It Was a Hell of a Ride, But, Dude, It’s Over

Tags

paternalism, power, racism, sexism, white privilege

I don’t recall as a pubescent girl, ever much thinking that I’d have rather been a boy. All that stuff in their pants looked rather homely to me as a child. As I grew older and wiser, I figured worrying that my boobs wouldn’t be “perky” enough was small potatoes versus worrying that my pecker wouldn’t pass muster either in the locker room or in a ladies vagina.

And then there was hair loss later in life, and well, I don’t pretend to know whether men obsess over chest hair or not, but it just seemed that their burdens were not worth the exchange.

I suppose it all goes back to caves, or whatever suitable accommodations were “home” to our ancestors on the plains of Africa. Men are for the most part stronger which makes them quite useful for things that require brute strength. Ironically men who work with their hands and use their bodies as their machines are fairly looked down upon by their Madison Avenue brothers as having not “made it” in the wicked world of power and wealth today. But it was the originator most likely of men’s superior classification.

In an event, men ruled, and that is pretty much everywhere you look across the blue marble we call home. In the only parts that counted (by those same men), white men ruled all others, including men of color. And it was all seen as good and well, as evidenced even by major religious scriptures, who took it for granted that men pretty much ruled naturally and with God’s imprimatur.

Somehow, even allegedly smart white men failed to see that Jesus rather turned that cart upside down when he suggested that women were, *gasp* capable of preaching the “good news” of the coming Kingdom.

Things have gone on in that vein for some time. Well, to be honest, it has gone on through most of recorded time. I’d hazard a guess that even where women ruled it had more to do with “blood lines” than competence, and many sturdy men were gathered around such a lady to “guide” her to correct decisions.

It continues today, but the battle is now fully engaged, and white men are getting a bit nervous.

Women have always been angry, but anger needs direction and some sort of power base to be effective. Only in the 20th century do we begin to see real movement to question the paternalism that has been the history of women’s life in America and the world.

Another aspect is now apparent as well. While white men were busy running the world and making obscene amounts of money to feel “successful”, the rest of the planet was busy reproducing like rabbits. Left with so much extra time on their hands, they played in the garden of rare delights also known as ladies private parts. And the birth rate has skyrocketed and well, do the math.

Ms. Lindsey is correct. If you look around white dude, well, I can understand why you are shakin’ in your boots and clingin’ to your guns. Your days are numbered and no amount of prancing around neighborhoods with your semi-automatic penises strapped across your chest is gonna make any difference to that.

You are a not dying, but certainly about to become wheelchair ridden, mere shadows of yourselves.

Now, I don’t say this with glee necessarily. After all, I’m married to one of y’all.  I rather like him too, so I have no ill-will in general to white men, just everything mostly that they stand for.

We can all pretty much agree that you have done a lousy job of runnin’ things. I mean yeah, you build a lot of stuff, but it seems for the only purpose of blowin’ it all up eventually. You guys can’t stop arguing about whose penis is bigger and if you ever bothered to ask us, you’d know that has nothin’ much to do with it.

Yet you persist.

And our sons and daughters and well, all of us suffer for your insatiable desire for bloodshed. There just ain’t enough hills for all of ya to be kings on.

So I can get why you are so angry. And like petulant children who can’t have ice cream for breakfast, you take it out on everyone you come across.

What you all are in need of is some basic psychoanalysis. I mean your ability to blame it on anybody but yourselves is shocking. It’s the black, brown, female, immigrant, wrong religion, youth, liberal, educated, government, et ceteras into oblivion’s fault for your troubles. A white man never looks in the mirror and sees the cause of his own disaster.

Anyway, you get all out there in your twisted but fact-less minds, and become conspiracists of one sort or another. We’ve visited the FEMA camps, and gun confiscations, the Muslim Brotherhood infiltration to death. We’ve been birthered to death and delved into the drug-induced supposed gayness of the black guy in the WHITE house.

We have tried to talk sense to your sense of impending loss, we really have, but past a certain point, crazy is too crazy to hear let alone understand. You are like the child who attempts to solve his unhappiness by making public scenes of displeasure at the world.

Unfortunately, you’re methodology includes the killin’ of plenty of innocents as you strike out in anger and frustration that you can’t always be first in line and get the best cupcake.

It’s over dude.

Do the math.

You are like the king who rules over a kingdom of “others”. Once his army became “others” too, it was only a matter of time, until they learned to count. Suddenly it was lookin’ a bit grim for the king.

Some of you have taken to claiming that you are the one’s being victimized now. Oh, if only that were true. We’d surely come to your aid if it were true. But it’s not.

Nothing is more pathetic than hearing a white dude proclaim that he is being discriminated against. Dude you were born with a white penis, what more could a person want? With it came all the entitlements and assumptions that have always attached to a new born white male. There is no “stretch” to thinking of you in a new more powerful way. It’s business as usual for you.

You can’t fathom how that is not what it is for the rest of us. We have to first convince somebody(s), that we can do the job, that we are smart enough, strong enough, carry the right emotional schema, are not unsuitably encumbered by family and obligation, and a host of other things. Women must explain that their menses won’t cause them to divulge the nuclear codes nor will “pillow talk”. Black and browns must assure that they have enough of the “cultural”requirements to govern. Remember, they weren’t “raised” the same as white dudes, which has become by their decree the cultural norm.

And since the numbers, (damn them) simple are what they are, white dudes are gonna lose no matter what. You can’t shoot it, marry it, enslave it, or stick it in a company town. It’s just gonna swallow you up.

So you lash out.

Do you realize that almost all crimes of mass murder are committed by white men? Dude, this endears you to no one. Let us know that your brains are falling out because you can’t be king any more, and we will help. If you don’t, well, the end is your demise one way or the other.

But please, stop trying to take us with you.

Is I Crazy? You Decide.

Tags

economics, evolution, humans, society

Oh, boy have I unleashed the dogs of war. Offering up such a juicy steak to those incredibly warped individuals who don’t think that I’m the greatest thing since sliced bread. Handing them an eviscerating tool of great power–is I crazy? Twice?

Trust me, letting them think they have me at their mercy is just my way of inviting them into my lab-bore-a-tory said the spider to the fly.

Is I?

As a child, I laid upon my bed and wondered was anyone in the world like me? I feared not, and in the era of peer-pressured sameness that we all strove to reach, I quivered. Was I normal?

Now, at the threshold of agedness ( I shall never be a “senior” or and old person I swear), I lay upon my bed and wonder if there is anyone in the world like me. I fear so, and in an era of eccentricism, I quiver. I don’t wanna be normal.

I think my prayers are answered. Were answered, or were ignored but I was just lucky that my prayers were actually the way things are? One of the above.

I’m a nut. I believe in all sorts of things that you no doubt think foolish.

For instance.

I wrote about this before so bear with me. In college I took a logic course and was asked to write a response to this statement: Would you be willing to pay for the support of an individual whose only requirement was to read? In other words can I fathom a world in which not everyone must work for a living?

Buckminster Fuller suggested an answer:

“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”

See,  I went to college. But not to think. I went to earn a living. And I did very well, thank you very much. I set myself up for a gentle life, not working too hard, in a reasonably decent setting. I had tons of friends and colleagues. I made good money and enjoyed the perks of professional work. I needed to make a living and by all standards, I succeeded rather well.

But that’s not what should be or could be. Too many good minds are wasted in menial work of all sorts, professional and otherwise. These minds might be better used if we just let them think.

I think it would all sort itself out over time. I mean if you aren’t a good thinker, then thinking would become both boring and well, mindless at some point. One would ache to get one’s hand on a piece of wood or a pie crust. And one would move to that. We would do what pleases us and revs up our juices. It would be sane.

Trouble is, most of us aren’t willing to pay for others to do what seems pointless to many. But thinkers think about things and thinking about things leads to ideas and ideas lead to schematics and drawings and experiments and prototypes, and, well you see where this goes.

New stuff is discovered and people who work with their hands for pleasure make this new stuff. And thinkers and paper pushers and bus drivers enjoy this new thing, which makes their lives a wisp easier or more pleasant. What’s not to like here?

Still, tight asses will complain. They will suspiciously stare at the thinker and want proof that their money is being well spent. No lobster sir, be satisfied with bean soup you grifter! Yes, they will not trust the process, because they are all about making sure they ain’t bein’ ripped off.

Hey nothing is perfect. Somebody is always scammin’ the system. Hell people go to great lengths to set themselves up as pillars of the community when they are stealin’ ya blind. Humans are very human no matter the system.

But if you are of the mind that humans are in a process of evolving, then shouldn’t we pursue avenues that point to evolution in our THINKING as well as in our technology? Shouldn’t we be nobler and kinder in our systems of governing, pushing us mere mortals to be better than we think we can be?

Didn’t Jefferson and Adams and Madison and all the rest focus on the horizon and see a future better than any before them? Didn’t they offer us the messiness of democracy because we would screw it up surely as humans, but we would have something worth struggling for rather than languishing in the monarch-subject model?

Why do we keep beating up on the defenseless? Look, a cursory examination of physical types of human being proves rather clearly that genetics is a tricky and sometimes comical thing. I’ve seen people put together in what looked to be no more than random cutting and pasting of various limbs. Head too small, body growing outward as one descended, legs like stumps without the merest reference to ankles?

If some physical jokes pass as the range of genetic drift allowed within the species,why is it so hard to realize that not everyone has inside their cranium the makings of even a good basic biologist? Some people are dumb. Some are thoughtless. Some are unable to walk and chew gum, or see beyond their own nose.  Why must they be conformed to some job to which they are ill-suited in almost all respects?

Let them find their way, and then make up the slack. Don’t they have enough to contend with? What must it be like to realize that one got shortchanged in the brain functioning department? To think but not to reason well? Ah, that’s the rub.

Out of common decency let these people be! A decent home, nutritious food, medical care, education based on interests. Do this to our less fortunate and embrace them as providing a meaningful richness to the fabric of humanity and move on.

Stop the whine. Yes, uber conservative with your compartmentalized brain and your rigid sense of right and wrong, I’m talking to you. You have worked all your life. Nobody gave you a thing (I know you believe this although it’s far from true). You can’t retire because you don’t have enough of whatever it is you think essential.

But that is not the only model of living available. There is nothing to be ashamed of if for any reason you can’t hoe the row established by the not so bright but physically strong average human. There is a place for us all, and if we do it right, we will be doubly enriched by the offerings of all these oddball humans who contribute to the human family diversity.

Sometimes people just make damn bad decisions. Should they pay forever? Or can you cut them some slack and help them exist in what’s left of their lives? Can ya?

That damn Protestant work ethic and those bootstraps will be small comfort in the grave. It did not serve you especially well quite honestly. There are other ways.

It’s a little bit socialistic I guess. And a bit psychosis.

That is. . . .

We participate in SoCS.

The Gangs of Baltimore

Tags

Baltimore, police, racism

Watching the events play out in Baltimore is an education to some, to others, it’s a why question. Why didn’t this happen sooner? The fact is whether you like it or not, life in the inner city is purely shit for the average African-American citizen.

Every deck is stacked against the individual trying to survive. Poor schools, no jobs are just the beginning. We see nothing less than a systematic attempt to herd “unwelcomes” into small enclaves and then devote all our money and energies to “other interests.”

We not only condone racism in this country but we grow it.

We demean people even when we give them the pittances we do, by making them take drug tests, and defining what food stamps can be used for, and attaching so many rules and regulation to any sort of assistance that you end up in the “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” scenario.

And when people rise up out of anger and frustration and disgust at the injustices they endure, we blame it all back on them and their “fatherless” homes, where unfortunate black youths learn no morals or sense of obedience to authority. Above all that, they have no respect for their betters.

One young man fairly told Geraldo Rivera to take his white ass and get out of town. They recognize Fox for what it is, purveyors of hate upon their heads. Geraldo, the youth said, you are only interested in filming what you call “thugs” rioting. You and Fox haven’t been interested in coming here to report on the daily injustice that we face.

To those of us who have engaged in the criminal justice system in this country in large metropolitan cities, we know all too well of what the young man speaks. As Alan Dershowitz explained in his Rules of the Justice Game, “almost all police officers lie about whether they violated the constitution in order to convict guilty defendants”, (rule IV) and all prosecutors, judges and defense attorneys are aware of rule IV. Worse, they look the other way. Like it or not, it’s true.

The recent public exposure of these cases of police overreach, abuse and lying comes as no surprise to us. I recall a dear friend of mine, a street cop from Detroit, whom I had argued with good-naturedly about whether police could do their job and still tell the truth. He was called to testify on an arrest and to make his point to me, told the truth. The case was dismissed for lack of “probable cause”. He grinned at me, as he walked from the courtroom. “See what you get when you tell the truth?”

We understood it, and we accepted it as a the way life was. We knew that in most cases the officers were at least sure they had the right guy.

But there is a segment of police officers within each department who do not care. They figure one black body is as good as any other, and they have ambitions, and a host of emotionally based reasons for throwing their authority around and not caring who gets caught up in their game.

Therein lies the problem.

And a solution comes from an unlikely source:

The gangs of Baltimore.

The major gangs have declared a truce, and apparently are devoting their time and efforts to helping their community respond in a politically helpful way to the recurrent injustice visited upon them in general and in the Freddie Gray case in particular.

It boggles the mind. Young men hell-bent on killing each other, and unfortunately any innocents that get in the way, have come together and agreed that for now at least, they will stop the violence against each other, and help organize their community to stop police violence against them all.

This is no small thing. Thinking, educated, above middle-class men and women only a few miles away, encased in a glorious white facade of sandstone and marble, are unable to agree upon even the most basic of things because screwing the black guy in the White House seems paramount.

Yet these young men have agreed to set aside their differences and work together for the common good of their community.

And the gang has a good deal to offer should it choose to actually follow through. Long the center of loyalty, and business acumen (albeit illegal) it mirrors many good traits that the young can well adopt. Strong Black men, helping their community? What’s not to like here. They teach loyalty, respect, and how purpose can bring about change. Somehow in their matriarchal upbringing, they have managed to become quite savvy at things they aren’t supposed to understand at all.

They in a real sense complement their environment, reflecting an honest if not legal response to the tremendous burdens and disadvantages heaped upon them since birth. They have the ability to encourage the younger kids coming up at least in the character requirements of making their way in a racist world while still standing firm for dignity.

No one argues that gangs are stellar examples to our youth. They have not been since the days of the Irish gangs, the Puerto Rican ones or any of the others. But all ethnic groups plagued with the criminal element within have always managed to take those good attributes and bettered themselves and their communities. And the Black community is no different. It too learns the right lessons along with the less savory.

Larry Wilmore, on his show The Nightly Show, did a most important thing on Thursday. He sat down with gang bangers in a diner and just talked. And they were articulate, and politically aware, and sincere. And that matters and should matter, and should make us hang our heads in shame when we cannot expect better from our paid politicians, and we cannot seem to expect more of ourselves in insisting on our own justice from the tyranny of big money and big K Street influence.

Perhaps it will be the gangs of Baltimore that will lead the way in helping us to see that we are not without recourse in our own struggles to retake command of our government. We need merely to stop focusing on our differences and agree that we are not being heard. None of us, for anything. And it’s time to change that. And if it takes a gang to explain that to us, well, more power to them.

And that’s a compliment in case you didn’t realize it.

We participate in SoCS.

 

Why The Dividin’ Works So Well

Tags

culture wars, the poor the poor and the inbetween

If you happened to catch Jon Stewart last week he did what has become classic for him–pointing out the heaping hypocrisy that the uber Right always seems to manage to live with. Entering the head of a right-wing expert is sorta like entering the minotaur’s labyrinth. A normal person gets lost in all the dead ends.

Anyway, Jon was talking about Kansas. Kansas just passed a law and gol’ darn it, Sammy “spittin’ Brownback signed it, removing all restrictions to concealed weapon carrying, including even having a permit. That’s cuz Kansans are so dang trustworthy and kin do the right thing. Kansas is also real big on the notion that poor people are not like regular Kansans. They are akin to kidlets and must be told what to eat and what to buy. If you get assistance from Kansas, you get a list of what you can use it for, cuz you aren’t grown. Jon pointed out that the inconsistency here is that Kansas receives $1.29 from the Federales, for every $1.00 it pays in. Which makes them welfare moochers ya know. So, um, if we wanna be consistent, I guess we ought to be tellin’ the Kansans what they spend their free monies on huh?

Kansas is not alone in this sort of thinking. Republican-led legislatures in many states seek and do impose lots of restrictions on the poor of all sorts, treating them like they are not fully grown, nor citizens. One wonders why Re-huh-ligans think this way. I mean plenty drug test anyone seeking assistance, even though the results of all those tests suggests it costs way way more to give them then it ever saves in “drug users don’t git no help” fails.

It’s all illogical, demeaning, and downright awful and one wonders why, as I said.

See, iffin’ you go back far enough, we were a very tribal species. Sorta like lion prides. New folks from other lands were not invited into the tribe, much as alpha males drove off traveling loners who sought to join the pride. (This all drives fundies quite mad, since they don’t believe we humans go back far enough for that, but fundies seldom can force themselves to take the giant step to actually read out of their comfort zone, so no matter.)

Anyway, we tend to be tribal still, some of us more so than others. The tribe is generally quite artificial these days, but it often relates to religion, or ethnic origin, gender, and stuff like that.

We live with a lot of folklore here as they do everywhere. We were raised on the Protestant Work ethic which should tell you a whole lot just by the name. It had to do with religion and salvation, but has become twisted into some sort of “this is how grownups behave” notion that hard work brings success economically.

Our start as a nation also caused people from time to time to strike out on their own, urged on by such things as primogeniture, to make a life in the wilderness. This became “pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps”, in other words, making it on your own.

These things, when done successfully give one a sense of accomplishment and capability. Such people like to look a bit down at others who for a whole list of reasons can’t succeed as they did.

Of course, this whole thing gets extended and twisted until it doesn’t really resemble what it started out as. We aren’t any longer a new country with a vast Western virgin expanse where one can strike off and create a new life. You can only invent the hula hoop once. It gets harder and harder to make it on your own, and hard work can end up bringing little more than basic survival.

But as long as one is surviving, albeit at the lowest level, one can still, and one is encouraged, to look down askance at those who have failed to even reach basic survival.

When we have priced education out of the range of most working class kids, it’s time to put down the idea that elite educations matter. All that matters is common sense after all.

The political hacks who do the work of big corporate interests have gotten very good at all this. They keep the barely differentiated in reality yapping at each other for all sorts of nonsensical things so that we fail to see what is really wrong in our country. We break into union/non-union, religious/not-religious, right-kind-of-religious/not-right-kind-of-religious, gay/straight, unregulated guns/regulated guns, and the divisions are infinitely divisible at this point. Somehow it all becomes liberty-loving patriots/commie-socialist-atheists. It all becomes prideful, and the alpha males snarl and gnash their teeth around the perimeter while the king of beasts patrols, defending.

The poor, become child-like, and lazy, because the working poor who are scraping by, must see themselves as successful. The liberals become elites who want to take what little the working poor  have and trade it for votes among the child-like and lazy. The conservatives want to encourage entrepreneurship in theory to “grow jobs” by reducing taxes and regulation, and the workers are encouraged to believe that they could be entrepreneurs if only they didn’t have to pay for the child-like and lazy.

It all is quite silly and wrong and indefensible by the actual facts, but that does not matter since the working poor and barely holding on middle-class wants to believe they are doing all they can, and it’s somebody’s fault. They are actually right. They are doing all they can, and it is somebody’s fault. Just not the folks they think. For the machine works tirelessly to make sure that their anger is directed away from them.

We have gone in this country for feeling pity for the poor to actually hating them. For they are us and deep down we know that. And we are desperate to keep that fact buried deep in our subconsciousness, so that we can go on feeling successful and proud of ourselves.

Not just hate, which we camouflage in “tough love” rhetoric, but bitterness as well. They remind us of not just of ourselves, but of the opportunities we have missed, abused, and let go by while we took the easier course of listening to our “betters” and their constant propaganda. “You could be just like us,” they whisper, “if it were not for them.” And we have listened and we have nodded in agreement, and we have gone back to our Archie Bunkers and laughed uproariously and told ourselves that we are not Archie, all the while we have been Archie and continue to be that caricature in all his bigotry and blaming.

And we feel self-righteous in our demands that you don’t get to buy steak or get your nails done if you are getting my tax dollars. And we claim we are just helping “them” act like us, which is what we have been told is the “right way to be”. And what we do is ugly and mean, and makes people feel bad about themselves and they hate right back.

And the corporate masters cheer and clink their glasses and laugh and discuss the latest results of the polo match and whose going to the Mediterranean this year, and who will be at the Met this season.

And the wars go on. And nothing changes. And we teach these stupid lies to our kids and life goes merrily along for the rich and powerful and we keep dancing.

Is that all there is?
Is that all there is?
If that’s all there is my friends
Then let’s keep dancing
Let’s break out the booze and have a ball
If that’s all there is

 

Women and Children First!

I heard that phrase in the context of the Paris shootings. The one at the store. Where hostages were taken. I was listening to Al Jazeera, and the commentator said, “among the hostages appear to be a number of women and children.”

A normal enough statement, one heard in many contexts. Fires for instance–first attend to the women and children the men are admonished by each other.

It sounds quaint.

It sounds sexist.

It sounds wrong.

Not that I don’t believe in taking advantage of every possible opportunity to get ahead in life, and being favored to survive is certainly one of those things. Can’t say I’d turn down the offer if it came to that. I’m a long way from being noble, so I probably would. Take advantage of the “women first” offer.

I’d no doubt try to lay it to something else. I’m old. I’m not agile like I used to be. I can’t swing from trees anymore. I deserve special treatment. Yeah, I can come up with a good excuse I figure, should I need to.

But it’s not right. I have to admit that. Like it or not, it’s not fair, not right, reeks of all sorts of bad things. It’s not stoic I know. Nor is it rational much.

It places a burden unfairly on one sex for no good reason. You can’t help being male, so why are you supposed to die first as some goofy sort of gallantry? Nobody believes that “fairer sex” crap any more.

Boy from the day you were born, know this–in case of emergency women and children have more right to live than you. Unless you’re disabled or feeble-minded. Or maybe not. If you aren’t healthy in mind or body, ain’t it better to cull the herd and save the fittest? Old ladies would not pass that test.

It’s harder to make an argument against not saving the children first. I can, sorta.

Look, nobody is here by special dispensation. We all were born from the union of a sperm and egg. All are destined to die. Plenty of babies die, plenty of fetuses die. Plenty of old people die, and all in between. There is no way to judge why somebody is worse off by being cut off in the “flower” of life. Heck one could argue that some don’t face as much suffering as the old have had to endure. That’s a good thing. Given none of us knows what happens “after”, heck dying might be the best of all worlds.

So you see, it really makes no sense. We need to stop this women and children first nonsense. We aren’t God, and it’s not our job. Yes, I realize that a toddler isn’t going to be too adept at making his way to the life boat, but then again when there is only a little space left, the toddler will fit and I won’t. It’s just how shit happens.

Yeah shit happens.

Kay Hagan, newly elected from North Carolina in 2008, wanted to take a swim in the Capitol pool. She was told it was male only, cuz some of the senators preferred to swim with their junk free of a suit. Can you believe that? 2008?

Kay Bailey Hutchinson was interviewed about it on UP with Steve Kornacki. She didn’t see it as a big deal. She thought you have to make a lot of allowances for these older men who are going through “the transition”.  You know, the transition? From being troglodytes to human beings? And exactly how many decades need this transition take you might ask?

Did you know that women, as late as the late 90’s were warned about getting into an elevator alone with Strom Thurmond, that dead-man-walking-racist-piece-of-shit? Then there was Robert Packwood. Does this crap never end?

Somebody posted on our high school alumni page, “what would you do over again if you could?”

That’s always an interesting question I think.

There are lots of answers you can give that sound so, well, intellectual or spiritual or some combination of both.

“All the stuff that happened, even the stuff that wasn’t pleasant contributed to who I am today. Who knows who I’d be if not for everything.”

Yep, I agree. It’s pretty much unknowable.

Still.

Others say,

“I’d not change a thing! It’s been a hell of a ride.”

Yep, I agree.

Still.

See the error of the above, or so it seems to me an error, is that it means you really haven’t grown much, emotionally at least. Don’t you want to take back time wasted with people you now know to be idiots? And people that turned out to be deep and thoughtful and nice? Wouldn’t you have liked to have spent more time with them?

I would.

I’d like to not have participated in any form of bullying, or being mean to anybody just cuz they weren’t in my “group”. I’d like to have been more my own person and not so much of a follower of the crowd. I’d like to have argued with teachers more. I’d like to have been more principled.

These insights come from age and experience. I’d like to think I’d grown some in the intervening years. I was a racist as a kid, because everyone I knew was, though that is no excuse. I’m less of one now, though no doubt I can still be taught a thing or two about being not-white.

I accepted that as a female my life was defined in certain ways. I don’t now, and I’d like to think that matters.

I thought God was a bizarre notion as literally enunciated in the King James Version of the bible. I think quite differently now that I know what a fundamentalist is, and that that version of God is, yes, pretty warped, but there is a vision that makes a lot of sense to me and that  heartens me immensely.

If I had it to do over again, I’d not go to law school but I would go to grad school. I’d have been a theologian or a philosopher I think. Don’t know where that path would have led, but I know one thing. There is no better place to live than in a college town. Anywhere.

An old friend of mine once told me that she had listed in her teenaged years, all her goals in life. Some twenty-plus years later, she was proud to say that her goals were the same. She thought that was a badge of some sort of maturity. I thought it was sad. To be that much older and to have no better goals than the ones you jotted down as a sixteen-year-old?

Save me from people who have no curiosity or breadth of vision. Bring me the dreamers, the wonderers. On them are built the future that I wish to inhabit. The rest? Oh gosh, they are still in the cave, still thinking that the shadows are the reality.

We can’t know who will be the Plato nor the fool. So messing with who lives and who dies should not be our prerogative either. We’re all just doing the best we can, and trying to avoid the troglodytes ya know?

 

 

 

 

It’s All About What You Know

Tags

ignorance, knowledge, shit I learned, stupid

As a self-described political satirist and all-around commentator on the human condition, I confess to spending an inordinate amount of time talking about stupid people.
Now, let’s define our terms here.

Stupid stands alone as a condition not susceptible of being fixed. One is born stupid, lives stupid and dies stupid. Moreover as John Cleese explained, and actual real serious studies confirm, stupid people are so stupid they don’t know they are stupid. The set of skills needed to assess ones relative “smartness” are sadly lacking.

Ignorance is a quite different thing, though I think most people take offense at being called ignoramuses. They should not, since ignorance is something we all share as to many many things. Ignorance is merely lacking knowledge on a particular subject. Ignorance, therefore, can be cured as to any particular thing, merely by acquiring the necessary information.

But what kind of information?

Ahh, there is the rub, as Shakespeare would say.

Which leads to the focus of this essay–the propensity of us humans to become angry at those who express ideas and act in ways that denote lack of knowledge of a subject. I’m here to tell you that you should not. I should not. No one should.

One can go back to Epictetus for the proposition. Perhaps it was known before him, I am ignorant of knowing before Epictetus.

Epictetus argued, (I would say successfully), that no human acts deliberately for the bad. The bad you say? What is that? Let us begin with the premise that there is good and there is bad. It is generally good to not harm people for instance. The devil is in the details as they say. As it any particular person we might disagree. It might be considered by some people to be “good” to kill a tyrant. Others might disagree. But we all agree that a norm is that people should not be harmed.

So, to a great degree, when we talk about specifics, what is good or bad is somewhat subjective.

Does that mean it is arbitrary?

No, of course not. The decision to define something as good or bad depends on the amount and the quality of information possessed. That’s where all the argument comes in. I say that you have made a poor decision about X because you have received either inaccurate or insufficient information. You might say the same of me.

When you include more and more people, a consensus is arrived at as to whether a particular thing is good or bad. It may not be correct, this consensus, however, since a minority might very well possess the better argument, the better data.

What else is at work?

All the panoply of “stuff” that make up the human condition. Our desires, our experiences, our fears, our goals. All impact how important that “good” is to us and thus how resistant it is to being overcome by newer and better data. The stupid person can probably never overcome his emotional lock on a particular belief as being good or bad, while an ignorant one can be brought to a point of discarding her belief in favor of one truer.

Deepak Chopra said the same thing in one of his books. I recall it as something like, “each person is doing the very best they can given their level of knowledge.” It is of course no different from Epictetus.

You may claim no, some people are born bad, and choose bad because it is their nature.

Are you sure of that? I believe that to be a convenient lie we tell ourselves. It allows us to hate whom we hate, and to kill whom we wish to kill or otherwise put them out of our way. American prisons are chock full of people we have “given up on”.

Let’s take a couple of examples.

A young man slips a gun into his waistband and leaves his home to head for the corner where he will sell drugs for the afternoon. If confronted in the wrong fashion, he may well shoot at someone to defend his “turf”. Is this youngster acting deliberately badly?

I would argue no.

He is making a decision that based on all he knows (limited as that might be), this is the best means to attain his goal–living his life in some acceptable manner. The funds he acquires from his trade of drugs for cash affords him money for food, lodging, clothing, and leisure activities. He acquires, among some subset of humans, “status”. He acquires some modicum of power over unarmed persons he comes upon should he choose to exercise it. He has concluded that either his school offers no real education, and even if it does, there are no jobs suitable that would give him the above in an equal measure. He has reasoned that his neighborhood is dangerous and if he is unarmed he faces the real possibility of death.

He has made all these assessments more unconsciously than not perhaps, but they are hardly unreasonable. Given more information, he might not make these choices, but others that we, who have not his experiences consider more “good.” But he is probably not stupid, just ignorant of a series of truths that can and would alter his calculus.

Let’s look at another example: Sean Hannity

Hannity is one of the more egregious cases of Fox News “journalism”, a form of journalism in which actual truth plays little part, but where a point of view is underpinned  with  weak facts, and assumptions to support one  political ideology over another.

Hannity has been caught selectively editing film to say exactly the opposite from what the taped statement actually said. He twists facts, ignores others, mis-states others, and berates anyone who attempts to introduce other facts that go against his desired meme.

Does he do this deliberately? Probably.

So he is actively pursuing the false? Don’t we agree that that would be a normative “bad?”

Yes, it would, but Hannity I am sure believes he serves a higher purpose. I suspect in his mind, he believes that the average viewer is incapable of understanding and is without the “insider” information he possesses. They must be appealed to viscerally rather than intellectually and led rather than informed. Hannity himself is part of that small cadre who “knows” what must be done, knows what is best for the country and world, and can’t take a chance that you, his viewer will be confused. For after all, you are tuning in for an hour, while he is living this “issue” all day, every day.

A Hannity can’t be convinced by better information, because of these hidden assumptions. He can only be “corrected” if his other assumptions about his own relative insider view of the world is changed. In other words, He would have to lose his arrogant assumptions about his relative worth vis-a-vis the “masses” in the world. Hannity is not a man to be hated, but rather one to be pitied. He lives and is content in his own delusions.

What does all this mean in the end? Not much, other than perhaps a lowering of one’s own blood pressure.

When confronted with the wrong-minded I can relax knowing that:

1. They might be purely stupid, in which case, there is nothing any mortal can do about it. Move on.
2. They are ignorant but happy in their ignorance because it satisfies their emotional needs as they view the world, in which case, they are to be pitied. Move on.
3. They are ignorant because no one has yet provided them with the additional information they need to change their opinion. Step in and offer them what you know and where they might obtain more.
4. Learn to discern which of the above is applicable. A few conversations should suffice.

There is only one caveat. Even if talking with a stupid person, if you are in a public forum, do continue. Many people are listening, and some of them, perhaps only one, is paying attention. You can change the world, one person at a time.