Saturday, December 29, 2012
New book review
New review for Justin Robinson's book, Dollmaker. Short version: Disturbing, but I liked it.
Saturday, December 22, 2012
Nothing is Ever Simple
I guess I need to process a few more thoughts on Newtown and guns.
What do you do with a country where gun sales spike immediately after the election of a democratic president? And then again upon his re-election? After little to no commentary on his part, in either campaign, regarding guns? His sole accomplishment in his first term being a slight increase in the amount of places gun-owners can conceal carry guns? They've been told over and over by Trusted Sources that Obama, and the U.N. and whoever else is coming for their guns, lack of evidence stronger than hearsay not withstanding. What do you do with a subset of your population furiously stocking guns like it's the end of the world? And then occasionally going nutso and going on a shooting spree when the drumbeat of fear grows too big to handle? What do you do with that?
I'm not sure. I absolutely reject the NRA's assertion that we must simply throw more guns at the problem. It's the classic problem where, if you only have a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. The gun is a tool. It's good at killing animals and humans. That's all it does. It's too simple to declare the gun is the only solution to our discontent, because it assumes we have no other tools in our toolbox. Also, we really have become a nation of such gullible marks that we can't see the obvious scam in gun salesmen, and the lobby representing them, selling guns to both sides of a conflict? They sell them to the disturbed and then turning to the rest of us and saying, "Hey, you really need a gun to protect yourself from those crazies." Their goal is not your safety. Their goal is to make a ridiculous amount of money playing on your fears to sell you tools most of us don't need. You should listen to them with all the credibility you give a car salesman telling you this Porche is just what you need to improve your sex life.
Having said that, I'm not remotely convinced it's ethical, moral or remotely pragmatic to try and get rid of the 40 million guns in this country. For one, availability of guns is clearly not the only issue involved in our gun violence. Places like Idaho have fairly lenient gun cultures and open-carry laws, and don't have a lot of violent shootings. But there's a wide range of options in between "giving everyone a firearm and hoping no one's feeling like picking a gunfight today" and "taking away all guns forever and throwing them into the sun." What frustrates me about this, and most other debates today is we are told by extremists over and over that there is no room to maneuver in between the polar opposites of every issue. That every action we take will inevitably ride the slippery slope to the furthest extreme. And it isn't true. It's obviously not true. We should stop listening to the people who try to make us afraid enough to forget ourselves and believe it's true.
Yes, the 2nd amendment exists. But constitutional literalism has roughly the same problem as biblical literalism, in that if you insist on reading a document devoid of context and without interest in the principle behind the rule you're reading, you run the severe risk of missing the whole damn point. In a time of inaccurate, slow-loading firearms the constitution allowed for a well-regulated local militia and the right to keep firearms in your home. At the time, this was a pretty good way to ensure the federal government would face an armed and angry populace should it ever become as tyrannical as good old King George. The last and only time a portion of our populace tried this, we killed each other in staggering numbers. In my opinion, our option to effectively rise up as a populace ended roughly around the time the federal government developed tanks, airplanes, laser-guided drones, biological and chemical weapons, atomic bombs, space-based spy satellites, counter-insurgency tactics, armored SWAT and the ability to eavesdrop on your cell phones and emails. So embrace the existential suck of that notion, because like your inevitable death you can't get around it. And not to embrace worship of the founding fathers, but I'm guessing they were counting on us being capable of reconsidering the 2nd amendment in a prudent and intelligent manner, in light of a world with vastly more apocalyptic weaponry and tactical realities. And if you're interested in retaining the principle of the 2nd amendment, then a regulated and well-armed militia will also need to include weapons more advanced than a semi-automatic rifles. Because your collection of pop guns is not going to take down the federal government. If you have any further questions on that score, please ask any members of the Branch Davidian cult that might have survived Waco.
Regarding the right to defend yourself and your family via firearms, I think the arguments are stronger. I think people probably have the right to some kind of gun to defend their homes, although I don't think those need to be anywhere near military quality. I don't have a problem with people shooting at gun ranges. I don't have a problem with people hunting. I do have a problem with paranoid and unstable people stockpiling weapons like the world is about to end, or like they have absolutely NO confidence in our police or military to protect us. As far as I'm aware, that was, in fact, the point of creating a standing army and a citizen police force, yes? And if shootings are so rare that they don't need to be legislated for, then they certainly don't necessitate every citizen acquiring a defensive arsenal. I'm not sure what the best method is to re-persuade the citizenry to trust in law an order again, but it seems there are, again, a wide range of options to try well before we get to "fuck it, civilization failed. Buy a gun and jump at shadows for the rest of your life." Maybe, before sending the entire population running for body armor, hollow-point bullets and A-team seminars on how to build your own tank, we could try, I don't know, something rational like modifying existing police practice and organization to better meet civilian needs.
But to some, it IS a jungle out there. There are bad men with guns, and, so the saying goes, only a gun can stop a gun. Right? Well, except for Jared Loughner, who was tackled by unarmed citizens while he was reloading. And about 20 other stories I found from googling "tackled gunman." Not to mention the British Police force, who overwhelmingly prefer to remain unarmed even though one of their officers is occasionally shot. If only a gun can stop a gun, why would an entire country's police force refuse to carry them, even when confronted with the possibility of armed criminals? Why does the military prefer to keep soldiers unarmed when they're not on active duty and assign military police to keeping the peace? Shouldn't having them tote their guns around off-duty fix it? Is it possible there are more and potentially better solutions than the ones we limit ourselves to? I'm not saying we don't want our police to carry guns over here, and I acknowledge the U.S. faces different problems in it's criminals. But I do want to point out, there are other options in policing gun violence than simply arming everyone involved. In Chicago, the CeaseFire group uses ex-gang members or families of gang members to talk to gangs, and defuse potentially violent situations. Notably, they do this without arming rival gangs, intimidating them with weaponry or making them more afraid. Again, we need to reject people who try to narrow our options to solutions convenient for their bottom line or that soothe their fears with false security.
One thing I didn't see in Newtown was a bunch of civilians running around with guns drawn looking for the shooter. Why would we want that in any case? Would it have made the police's job any easier to arrive on the scene and have to figure out which of twenty people with guns drawn is the bad guy? Isn't there a reason we give cops a badge and a uniform? Isn't it to distinguish "the people we have paid to train in the use of guns, negotiation and crisis management to protect us" from "some crazy asshole with a gun?" If you want to be a hero in this society, doesn't it take a bit more than just owning a gun and bragging about how you'd use it to shoot a bad guy if you saw one? Don't we aspire to have the men in our society embody values more nuanced than that of Ralphie from "A Christmas Story?" Shouldn't it be understood that being a hero in this society embodies something more than just holding a gun self-importantly? Isn't Ralphie eventually supposed to learn that more important than a willingness to kill if necessary, is preserving the peace, even if that requires considerably more bravery and risk than firing a gun? Don't we value the risk of peace more than the certainty of violence? Aren't we aspiring to a society somewhat more stable than "might makes right?" Did NO ONE fucking read To Kill a Mockingbird and notice the example of Atticus Finch?
I honestly don't think we want a society where every argument ends in a spoken or unspoken, "watch what you say, I've got a gun." And I think gang violence and police shooting teach us that knowing the other person has a gun is not the deciding factor in whether they get shot at. And that having a gun is not the same thing as being safe. In fact, there is evidence to the contrary. Nor is there any evidence that the problem is TV and video games. But since I don't think being surrounded by lethally armed citizens is an environment in which people feel free to speak their minds, and since it seems demonstrably foolish to try and pretend the violence that's been in our fiction for thousands of years is suddenly the cause people killing each other, I don't think we need to abridge freedoms granted in the first amendment simply because some paranoid people interpret the 2nd amendment as a right to carry any kind of gun for any reason, a position Justice Scalia happens to agree with.
But I do think we have a problem. One that is steadily getting better over time, but still worse in areas where there are more guns than not. I don't think the level of violence requires panic or fear or a complete abandonment of the idea of a civil society, policed by men we train for that job. Nor do I think it requires we try to remove every kind of gun from civilian society. But I think we can do more than the nothing we currently accomplish on gun violence. I think we can stop listening to the people who are telling us it's the end of the world, that our death is just around the corner, that we can't talk to people who scare or offend us, that security is as simple as holding a gun, or making a prohibition law and that we have no more than two extreme options at any given time. I think we can ask more of our leaders than a lust for retaining power. I think we can ask for more of our heroes than just a willingness to kill. I think we can read and rewrite and re-interpret our constitution in ways that reflect modern realities better, while remaining true to the principles behind them. I think we can try, assess and effectively manage the solutions to our problems regardless of who is in charge. And I'm pretty sure we can come to a more interesting and effective solution than "more guns." I don't know about you, but I'm willing to bet the second amendment shouldn't be read as a suicide pact.
What do you do with a country where gun sales spike immediately after the election of a democratic president? And then again upon his re-election? After little to no commentary on his part, in either campaign, regarding guns? His sole accomplishment in his first term being a slight increase in the amount of places gun-owners can conceal carry guns? They've been told over and over by Trusted Sources that Obama, and the U.N. and whoever else is coming for their guns, lack of evidence stronger than hearsay not withstanding. What do you do with a subset of your population furiously stocking guns like it's the end of the world? And then occasionally going nutso and going on a shooting spree when the drumbeat of fear grows too big to handle? What do you do with that?
I'm not sure. I absolutely reject the NRA's assertion that we must simply throw more guns at the problem. It's the classic problem where, if you only have a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. The gun is a tool. It's good at killing animals and humans. That's all it does. It's too simple to declare the gun is the only solution to our discontent, because it assumes we have no other tools in our toolbox. Also, we really have become a nation of such gullible marks that we can't see the obvious scam in gun salesmen, and the lobby representing them, selling guns to both sides of a conflict? They sell them to the disturbed and then turning to the rest of us and saying, "Hey, you really need a gun to protect yourself from those crazies." Their goal is not your safety. Their goal is to make a ridiculous amount of money playing on your fears to sell you tools most of us don't need. You should listen to them with all the credibility you give a car salesman telling you this Porche is just what you need to improve your sex life.
Having said that, I'm not remotely convinced it's ethical, moral or remotely pragmatic to try and get rid of the 40 million guns in this country. For one, availability of guns is clearly not the only issue involved in our gun violence. Places like Idaho have fairly lenient gun cultures and open-carry laws, and don't have a lot of violent shootings. But there's a wide range of options in between "giving everyone a firearm and hoping no one's feeling like picking a gunfight today" and "taking away all guns forever and throwing them into the sun." What frustrates me about this, and most other debates today is we are told by extremists over and over that there is no room to maneuver in between the polar opposites of every issue. That every action we take will inevitably ride the slippery slope to the furthest extreme. And it isn't true. It's obviously not true. We should stop listening to the people who try to make us afraid enough to forget ourselves and believe it's true.
Yes, the 2nd amendment exists. But constitutional literalism has roughly the same problem as biblical literalism, in that if you insist on reading a document devoid of context and without interest in the principle behind the rule you're reading, you run the severe risk of missing the whole damn point. In a time of inaccurate, slow-loading firearms the constitution allowed for a well-regulated local militia and the right to keep firearms in your home. At the time, this was a pretty good way to ensure the federal government would face an armed and angry populace should it ever become as tyrannical as good old King George. The last and only time a portion of our populace tried this, we killed each other in staggering numbers. In my opinion, our option to effectively rise up as a populace ended roughly around the time the federal government developed tanks, airplanes, laser-guided drones, biological and chemical weapons, atomic bombs, space-based spy satellites, counter-insurgency tactics, armored SWAT and the ability to eavesdrop on your cell phones and emails. So embrace the existential suck of that notion, because like your inevitable death you can't get around it. And not to embrace worship of the founding fathers, but I'm guessing they were counting on us being capable of reconsidering the 2nd amendment in a prudent and intelligent manner, in light of a world with vastly more apocalyptic weaponry and tactical realities. And if you're interested in retaining the principle of the 2nd amendment, then a regulated and well-armed militia will also need to include weapons more advanced than a semi-automatic rifles. Because your collection of pop guns is not going to take down the federal government. If you have any further questions on that score, please ask any members of the Branch Davidian cult that might have survived Waco.
Regarding the right to defend yourself and your family via firearms, I think the arguments are stronger. I think people probably have the right to some kind of gun to defend their homes, although I don't think those need to be anywhere near military quality. I don't have a problem with people shooting at gun ranges. I don't have a problem with people hunting. I do have a problem with paranoid and unstable people stockpiling weapons like the world is about to end, or like they have absolutely NO confidence in our police or military to protect us. As far as I'm aware, that was, in fact, the point of creating a standing army and a citizen police force, yes? And if shootings are so rare that they don't need to be legislated for, then they certainly don't necessitate every citizen acquiring a defensive arsenal. I'm not sure what the best method is to re-persuade the citizenry to trust in law an order again, but it seems there are, again, a wide range of options to try well before we get to "fuck it, civilization failed. Buy a gun and jump at shadows for the rest of your life." Maybe, before sending the entire population running for body armor, hollow-point bullets and A-team seminars on how to build your own tank, we could try, I don't know, something rational like modifying existing police practice and organization to better meet civilian needs.
But to some, it IS a jungle out there. There are bad men with guns, and, so the saying goes, only a gun can stop a gun. Right? Well, except for Jared Loughner, who was tackled by unarmed citizens while he was reloading. And about 20 other stories I found from googling "tackled gunman." Not to mention the British Police force, who overwhelmingly prefer to remain unarmed even though one of their officers is occasionally shot. If only a gun can stop a gun, why would an entire country's police force refuse to carry them, even when confronted with the possibility of armed criminals? Why does the military prefer to keep soldiers unarmed when they're not on active duty and assign military police to keeping the peace? Shouldn't having them tote their guns around off-duty fix it? Is it possible there are more and potentially better solutions than the ones we limit ourselves to? I'm not saying we don't want our police to carry guns over here, and I acknowledge the U.S. faces different problems in it's criminals. But I do want to point out, there are other options in policing gun violence than simply arming everyone involved. In Chicago, the CeaseFire group uses ex-gang members or families of gang members to talk to gangs, and defuse potentially violent situations. Notably, they do this without arming rival gangs, intimidating them with weaponry or making them more afraid. Again, we need to reject people who try to narrow our options to solutions convenient for their bottom line or that soothe their fears with false security.
One thing I didn't see in Newtown was a bunch of civilians running around with guns drawn looking for the shooter. Why would we want that in any case? Would it have made the police's job any easier to arrive on the scene and have to figure out which of twenty people with guns drawn is the bad guy? Isn't there a reason we give cops a badge and a uniform? Isn't it to distinguish "the people we have paid to train in the use of guns, negotiation and crisis management to protect us" from "some crazy asshole with a gun?" If you want to be a hero in this society, doesn't it take a bit more than just owning a gun and bragging about how you'd use it to shoot a bad guy if you saw one? Don't we aspire to have the men in our society embody values more nuanced than that of Ralphie from "A Christmas Story?" Shouldn't it be understood that being a hero in this society embodies something more than just holding a gun self-importantly? Isn't Ralphie eventually supposed to learn that more important than a willingness to kill if necessary, is preserving the peace, even if that requires considerably more bravery and risk than firing a gun? Don't we value the risk of peace more than the certainty of violence? Aren't we aspiring to a society somewhat more stable than "might makes right?" Did NO ONE fucking read To Kill a Mockingbird and notice the example of Atticus Finch?
I honestly don't think we want a society where every argument ends in a spoken or unspoken, "watch what you say, I've got a gun." And I think gang violence and police shooting teach us that knowing the other person has a gun is not the deciding factor in whether they get shot at. And that having a gun is not the same thing as being safe. In fact, there is evidence to the contrary. Nor is there any evidence that the problem is TV and video games. But since I don't think being surrounded by lethally armed citizens is an environment in which people feel free to speak their minds, and since it seems demonstrably foolish to try and pretend the violence that's been in our fiction for thousands of years is suddenly the cause people killing each other, I don't think we need to abridge freedoms granted in the first amendment simply because some paranoid people interpret the 2nd amendment as a right to carry any kind of gun for any reason, a position Justice Scalia happens to agree with.
But I do think we have a problem. One that is steadily getting better over time, but still worse in areas where there are more guns than not. I don't think the level of violence requires panic or fear or a complete abandonment of the idea of a civil society, policed by men we train for that job. Nor do I think it requires we try to remove every kind of gun from civilian society. But I think we can do more than the nothing we currently accomplish on gun violence. I think we can stop listening to the people who are telling us it's the end of the world, that our death is just around the corner, that we can't talk to people who scare or offend us, that security is as simple as holding a gun, or making a prohibition law and that we have no more than two extreme options at any given time. I think we can ask more of our leaders than a lust for retaining power. I think we can ask for more of our heroes than just a willingness to kill. I think we can read and rewrite and re-interpret our constitution in ways that reflect modern realities better, while remaining true to the principles behind them. I think we can try, assess and effectively manage the solutions to our problems regardless of who is in charge. And I'm pretty sure we can come to a more interesting and effective solution than "more guns." I don't know about you, but I'm willing to bet the second amendment shouldn't be read as a suicide pact.
Tuesday, December 18, 2012
What I really saw last Friday
I didn't react very well to the shooting last Friday, like most people. Initially, I was overwhelmed both by the idea that there are a lot of disturbed, angry men in our society with little perceived space to process their shit in a healthy manner, access to a wide variety of easily available guns, and nothing to stop them, really, from shooting up a mall or a school or a park or whatever. And when they inevitably do, we're faced with a chorus of gun-stroking fetishists, who insist that the best way to deal with this kind of tragedy, is to abandon the idea of a civil, civic society, and instead arm each individual and to train them to view every social encounter as a potential shooting situation. I don't like that idea. I find the lack of faith in the idea of a civil society disturbing. It's depressing that the gun strokers and an army of lawyers have locked down the debate to such a degree that it's considered out of form to even contemplate any sort of reasonable gun restriction. The fact that "sell more guns to everyone" is an extremely convenient position coming from the lobbyists of gun sellers and gun lovers seems to float right on by the outside of the debate.
But that's not what I really want to talk about today. Yes, we saw one disturbed maniac take the lives of innocent kids Friday. We also saw two women charge a man holding an assault rifle, because of their love for their kids, their professionalism, their sense of duty and a willingness to sacrifice anything for the kids in their care. We saw a woman hide her class in closets and lie convincingly to a maniac with a gun in her face to protect her children before being shot herself. We saw teachers hiding with their children in closets and bathrooms, telling them they loved them, that it was going to be okay just in case those were the last words they ever heard. Even trying to keep them distracted and protected from even the psychological damage of the situation though they were terrified themselves. We saw an entire community rushing to the scene to help and protect their loved ones, even if they didn't know how, even though it made the scene chaotic. There was one maniac at that school Friday. And he was outnumbered, by a wide margin, by a community that ran towards danger, that chose bravery, self-sacrifice and love over their own selves. That's who we are. Not one angry, bloodthirsty maniac. Not gun-toting psychos. When you feel like despairing, in bemoaning what the world is coming to, remember the people who gave everything, and the rest of the community that would have done the same, not the one bastard who couldn't manage his shit.
Yes, we saw the worst in human nature in one man last Friday. We also saw the best in human nature, in far greater measure, from everyone else around him. I think that's what we should remember. Mourn those poor kids. Debate sensible gun legislation and security at schools. But don't let one paranoid gun nut turn us from people who choose, love, kindness, compassion, self-sacrifice and community into paranoid gun nuts who have such a dim view of human nature that we view every social interaction as a potential massacre and bring a gun to every argument. We get to decide what kind of society we want to fight for. Let's make it the one embodied by those six women, not the one embodied by that poor, paranoid coward.
But that's not what I really want to talk about today. Yes, we saw one disturbed maniac take the lives of innocent kids Friday. We also saw two women charge a man holding an assault rifle, because of their love for their kids, their professionalism, their sense of duty and a willingness to sacrifice anything for the kids in their care. We saw a woman hide her class in closets and lie convincingly to a maniac with a gun in her face to protect her children before being shot herself. We saw teachers hiding with their children in closets and bathrooms, telling them they loved them, that it was going to be okay just in case those were the last words they ever heard. Even trying to keep them distracted and protected from even the psychological damage of the situation though they were terrified themselves. We saw an entire community rushing to the scene to help and protect their loved ones, even if they didn't know how, even though it made the scene chaotic. There was one maniac at that school Friday. And he was outnumbered, by a wide margin, by a community that ran towards danger, that chose bravery, self-sacrifice and love over their own selves. That's who we are. Not one angry, bloodthirsty maniac. Not gun-toting psychos. When you feel like despairing, in bemoaning what the world is coming to, remember the people who gave everything, and the rest of the community that would have done the same, not the one bastard who couldn't manage his shit.
Yes, we saw the worst in human nature in one man last Friday. We also saw the best in human nature, in far greater measure, from everyone else around him. I think that's what we should remember. Mourn those poor kids. Debate sensible gun legislation and security at schools. But don't let one paranoid gun nut turn us from people who choose, love, kindness, compassion, self-sacrifice and community into paranoid gun nuts who have such a dim view of human nature that we view every social interaction as a potential massacre and bring a gun to every argument. We get to decide what kind of society we want to fight for. Let's make it the one embodied by those six women, not the one embodied by that poor, paranoid coward.
Friday, December 14, 2012
caveat
The below is just me processing the bullshit that went on today. I'm not sure it amounts to much. I can posture all I want, but I'm not sure how to actually change anything. I wish I could do more.
Are you safe?
We are not ultimately safe. And there's only so safe we can make things for us and for our kids. And a day like today is a sad and uncomfortable reminder of that fact.
Some of us will want things to be "more safe" forever and cling to whatever we think will get us there. Be it a fierce ban on guns forever, regardless of how practical that is. And some will claim true future safety relies on all guns for everyone forever. And neither is completely right, of course, because both answers seem more or less unacceptable or impractical. There are 300 million guns floating around this country, and we can't unsummon them, unmake or unpurchase them or outright confiscate them without risking an all-out civil war. Gun ownership is too deeply ingrained into certain sub-cultures in this country for that to fly. Not to mention the obvious ineffectiveness of prohibition regarding drugs and guns. Similarly, gun owners can't insist everyone be armed at all times, because that violates the liberty of everyone else to not add "gun accidents" to the list of dangers they want to manage in their homes. Nor have they really shown that adding a firearm to every argument will naturally lead an overall decrease in gun deaths. Trucks full of men with large guns roaming city streets is not usually a sign of a peaceful and harmonious society as far as I can tell.
Which leads naturally, if we are inclined to talk to each other at all, about what we CAN do. I don't know. I'm not sure anyone has a sure solution, but there are a wide range of options that amount to "doing SOMETHING" in between those two viewpoints. I think there's a good argument for regulating guns better. For making them more difficult to access. For requiring a somewhat expensive license. I don't really think there's a great argument for guns in the form of "it keeps the government scared of the populace," because that defense kind of went out the window when the government, now including your local police force, started stocking tanks. Neither you, nor your militia, can stop the U.S. government if it comes for you. Not since tanks, not since Waco, not since forever. You will lose versus the U.S. government if it comes for you, and lose big, and your 5 rifles won't change that. We know this because people keep trying and failing badly. When the SWAT team storms your house, rightly or wrongly, and you're holding a gun, they just kill you. And your dog. And maybe, accidentally but with no real repercussions, your family. You have no way to defend yourself by force from the U.S. government and that is the reality we all live with in 2012. And stocking guns and pretending otherwise is just delusional. So I kind of want to hear what you need your guns so much for that we need to prioritize your false sense of security over making it harder for the mentally ill to massacre children. Or why any private citizen in this country requires assault weapons for any reason.
But honestly, I do want to hear it. While I clearly have an opinion about restricting gun ownership, I really don't believe in taking them all away. Just making it harder for any idiot to get any kind of gun. And I think the real problem in all this is we've all gotten so, so bad at coming to a reasonable compromise position that nothing really gets done anymore. So more than I want my opinions above to be enacted, I want a balanced, evidence-based discussion about the pros and cons of various approaches of making middle schools "temporarily more safe" from gun nuts. And I don't think that happens until we actually start talking to each other, taking each other's arguments seriously, demanding supporting evidence and, AND, be willing to admit when our own ideas don't have enough evidence to support them. If only we had some deliberative, authoritative body that was capable of doing just that, and creating effective public policy in the process. Seriously, we should get one of those. And maybe become a populace capable of allowing them to do that without freaking out in the meantime.
We don't get to make the world safer for everyone, forever. We do get to decide what kind of society we want to be. Wouldn't it be nice if it were one where we were all just barely humble enough to talk instead of posture? I kind of wish we could at least talk about issues like gun control, mass violence and mental health like a group of reasonable adults. And I'm glad today to see more people calling for less absolutism, and more talking. And if the slaughter of some innocent kids who never got to see the end of their first decade isn't enough to start that conversation productively, then I'm not sure what will.
Some of us will want things to be "more safe" forever and cling to whatever we think will get us there. Be it a fierce ban on guns forever, regardless of how practical that is. And some will claim true future safety relies on all guns for everyone forever. And neither is completely right, of course, because both answers seem more or less unacceptable or impractical. There are 300 million guns floating around this country, and we can't unsummon them, unmake or unpurchase them or outright confiscate them without risking an all-out civil war. Gun ownership is too deeply ingrained into certain sub-cultures in this country for that to fly. Not to mention the obvious ineffectiveness of prohibition regarding drugs and guns. Similarly, gun owners can't insist everyone be armed at all times, because that violates the liberty of everyone else to not add "gun accidents" to the list of dangers they want to manage in their homes. Nor have they really shown that adding a firearm to every argument will naturally lead an overall decrease in gun deaths. Trucks full of men with large guns roaming city streets is not usually a sign of a peaceful and harmonious society as far as I can tell.
Which leads naturally, if we are inclined to talk to each other at all, about what we CAN do. I don't know. I'm not sure anyone has a sure solution, but there are a wide range of options that amount to "doing SOMETHING" in between those two viewpoints. I think there's a good argument for regulating guns better. For making them more difficult to access. For requiring a somewhat expensive license. I don't really think there's a great argument for guns in the form of "it keeps the government scared of the populace," because that defense kind of went out the window when the government, now including your local police force, started stocking tanks. Neither you, nor your militia, can stop the U.S. government if it comes for you. Not since tanks, not since Waco, not since forever. You will lose versus the U.S. government if it comes for you, and lose big, and your 5 rifles won't change that. We know this because people keep trying and failing badly. When the SWAT team storms your house, rightly or wrongly, and you're holding a gun, they just kill you. And your dog. And maybe, accidentally but with no real repercussions, your family. You have no way to defend yourself by force from the U.S. government and that is the reality we all live with in 2012. And stocking guns and pretending otherwise is just delusional. So I kind of want to hear what you need your guns so much for that we need to prioritize your false sense of security over making it harder for the mentally ill to massacre children. Or why any private citizen in this country requires assault weapons for any reason.
But honestly, I do want to hear it. While I clearly have an opinion about restricting gun ownership, I really don't believe in taking them all away. Just making it harder for any idiot to get any kind of gun. And I think the real problem in all this is we've all gotten so, so bad at coming to a reasonable compromise position that nothing really gets done anymore. So more than I want my opinions above to be enacted, I want a balanced, evidence-based discussion about the pros and cons of various approaches of making middle schools "temporarily more safe" from gun nuts. And I don't think that happens until we actually start talking to each other, taking each other's arguments seriously, demanding supporting evidence and, AND, be willing to admit when our own ideas don't have enough evidence to support them. If only we had some deliberative, authoritative body that was capable of doing just that, and creating effective public policy in the process. Seriously, we should get one of those. And maybe become a populace capable of allowing them to do that without freaking out in the meantime.
We don't get to make the world safer for everyone, forever. We do get to decide what kind of society we want to be. Wouldn't it be nice if it were one where we were all just barely humble enough to talk instead of posture? I kind of wish we could at least talk about issues like gun control, mass violence and mental health like a group of reasonable adults. And I'm glad today to see more people calling for less absolutism, and more talking. And if the slaughter of some innocent kids who never got to see the end of their first decade isn't enough to start that conversation productively, then I'm not sure what will.
Friday, December 07, 2012
Basic Consideration is a Thing to Aspire to
I just realized the other day, that I had been incorrectly reading the phrase "business ethics" for most of my life. I believe it's intended to be defined as "the subset of ethics relating to business." I have always taken it to mean how it's actually practiced as "a shittier set of ethics that enables businesses to rationalizing unethical behavior in the pursuit of profit." I as getting it wrong, but I still think, as practiced today, it's the more accurate definition. It is, of course, bullshit.
I had a brief dust-up with a friend today on twitter about reasons to be moral in a business environment, about a post I had misread. Because I misread it, there's less to get into than I thought, but I do want to say a couple things. The article frames a reputation for ethical/honest behavior as a "exploiting societal weakness." To which my objection was, "Why not just be timely, reliable and present because that's the kind of person you want to be, in corporate or private life?" It's pedantic, I know, but I think it's important to pick good core motivations for our ethical frameworks and to consciously understand why we choose to behave the way we do. If we choose to be honest, reliable and timely only because that gets us more money, it implies we'd happily abandon being honest, timely and reliable if we thought it would make us more money to do so. Which, in my view, is incredibly problematic. I don't want to know or do business with individuals whose core philosophy is "make money at any cost," because I wouldn't trust them not to throw me under a bus if there was some money in it. And if someone else got a whiff of the idea that your core motivation was worship of money, they would likely think twice as well.
Don't be timely, reliable and present because you think it will make you more money, or because you think it "grows your personal brand," because those are poor moral foundations for good behavior. Those motivations are inherently selfish. They neglect the possibility that you are open to behaving in a way that works for everyone, not just yourself. Be timely, reliable and present because that's the kind of person you want to be, and you understand it leads to better results, not just for what you get, but for how you feel about yourself, and how you affect the people around you. When you have that framework, it doesn't matter if you get MORE, MORE, MORE, because that takes care of itself. It IS generally true that trustworthy people get better results. But that's not the point of being trustworthy, it's just one of the many perks. The point, is to behave in a manner that conforms to your values, because that's the only way you'll be happy with yourself. If all you value is money, pushing your brand and exploiting the weaknesses of those around you? Well, good luck with that. I hear they need a new James Bond villain every couple of years.
Worrying about what your behavior gets you, will get you a ways. Worrying about what your behavior gets you and the people around you, will get you farther. In my view, it's as simple as that. And in this day and age, I don't take it as a given that everyone in the corporate world understands that.
I had a brief dust-up with a friend today on twitter about reasons to be moral in a business environment, about a post I had misread. Because I misread it, there's less to get into than I thought, but I do want to say a couple things. The article frames a reputation for ethical/honest behavior as a "exploiting societal weakness." To which my objection was, "Why not just be timely, reliable and present because that's the kind of person you want to be, in corporate or private life?" It's pedantic, I know, but I think it's important to pick good core motivations for our ethical frameworks and to consciously understand why we choose to behave the way we do. If we choose to be honest, reliable and timely only because that gets us more money, it implies we'd happily abandon being honest, timely and reliable if we thought it would make us more money to do so. Which, in my view, is incredibly problematic. I don't want to know or do business with individuals whose core philosophy is "make money at any cost," because I wouldn't trust them not to throw me under a bus if there was some money in it. And if someone else got a whiff of the idea that your core motivation was worship of money, they would likely think twice as well.
Don't be timely, reliable and present because you think it will make you more money, or because you think it "grows your personal brand," because those are poor moral foundations for good behavior. Those motivations are inherently selfish. They neglect the possibility that you are open to behaving in a way that works for everyone, not just yourself. Be timely, reliable and present because that's the kind of person you want to be, and you understand it leads to better results, not just for what you get, but for how you feel about yourself, and how you affect the people around you. When you have that framework, it doesn't matter if you get MORE, MORE, MORE, because that takes care of itself. It IS generally true that trustworthy people get better results. But that's not the point of being trustworthy, it's just one of the many perks. The point, is to behave in a manner that conforms to your values, because that's the only way you'll be happy with yourself. If all you value is money, pushing your brand and exploiting the weaknesses of those around you? Well, good luck with that. I hear they need a new James Bond villain every couple of years.
Worrying about what your behavior gets you, will get you a ways. Worrying about what your behavior gets you and the people around you, will get you farther. In my view, it's as simple as that. And in this day and age, I don't take it as a given that everyone in the corporate world understands that.
Monday, December 03, 2012
To write:
Looper review
Science and the Afterlife Review
Essay on existential philosophy in the modern world
Comprehensive multi-part series on the origins of existential ideas that appear in multiple religions.
My complete thesis of life, religion and humanity, which will definitively answer all of it.
Incarnate (my crazy ass super gay, super nerdy mythology trilogy that I want to write)
Revenant (teleportation gone wrong SF story)
Star Seed (disturbing theory on the origin of life disguised as a story)
Engines of Entropy (story about a new soul, freshly deceased, snatched from the bliss of the afterlife to power chaos engines on a distant planet and turns the tables. Moral: Don't give a pissed off ghost control of power armor. Your failsafes will be insufficient.)
And this is all before I've even decided if I can actually write stories worth reading (either in content or style). The word "grandiose" flits through my mind several times a day. And my reading list is steadily becoming "books I need to read so I can write intelligently on some topics." Hey, at least I finally have ambitions. I'll deal with the wild impracticality later.
Science and the Afterlife Review
Essay on existential philosophy in the modern world
Comprehensive multi-part series on the origins of existential ideas that appear in multiple religions.
My complete thesis of life, religion and humanity, which will definitively answer all of it.
Incarnate (my crazy ass super gay, super nerdy mythology trilogy that I want to write)
Revenant (teleportation gone wrong SF story)
Star Seed (disturbing theory on the origin of life disguised as a story)
Engines of Entropy (story about a new soul, freshly deceased, snatched from the bliss of the afterlife to power chaos engines on a distant planet and turns the tables. Moral: Don't give a pissed off ghost control of power armor. Your failsafes will be insufficient.)
And this is all before I've even decided if I can actually write stories worth reading (either in content or style). The word "grandiose" flits through my mind several times a day. And my reading list is steadily becoming "books I need to read so I can write intelligently on some topics." Hey, at least I finally have ambitions. I'll deal with the wild impracticality later.
Friday, November 30, 2012
Anonymous
I am having a hard time deciding if I want or need to start writing online using my real name. The argument, which is strong, is that I am less likely to be pointlessly offensive or hyperbolic when I attach my real name to something, and writing is more interesting and carries more weight when someone cares about it enough to sign it with their actual identity. I honestly find these compelling arguments, but I still have my reservations, which I will not go into right now.
I think a lot of my pseudonymity during my 20s was due to approaching my life almost entirely from the perspective of, "no one has to know who I really am." And I'm not sure that's true anymore. I am increasingly ready to shed my old identity, including the one associated with this blog, and I'm increasingly ready to just be who I am without any attempt to hide it, regardless of the impacts to family and work relationships. And if I'm not attacking people or being insensitive, I can't be responsible for their reactions to who I really am. So at this point, I guess it's not so much a matter of "will I?" but "when will I?"
I doubt I'd link my real name blog to this one, because obviously, but if I do switch I should probably make it my main blog, if there's going to be any point to it. I promise to leave some kind of note here should I ever go public with a new blog. I guess we'll see.
I think a lot of my pseudonymity during my 20s was due to approaching my life almost entirely from the perspective of, "no one has to know who I really am." And I'm not sure that's true anymore. I am increasingly ready to shed my old identity, including the one associated with this blog, and I'm increasingly ready to just be who I am without any attempt to hide it, regardless of the impacts to family and work relationships. And if I'm not attacking people or being insensitive, I can't be responsible for their reactions to who I really am. So at this point, I guess it's not so much a matter of "will I?" but "when will I?"
I doubt I'd link my real name blog to this one, because obviously, but if I do switch I should probably make it my main blog, if there's going to be any point to it. I promise to leave some kind of note here should I ever go public with a new blog. I guess we'll see.
Tuesday, November 27, 2012
sigh
I really should have slept on that last post. That's what results from not writing on a regular enough basis and trying to cram it all in to one post while half asleep. Save as draft is a thing.
For my own sanity, I will try to focus future posts on grappling with specific topics, although I can't promise there won't be navel-gazing. Hey, it's my process blog and this is my process.
Still, I should probably write about things relevant to people other than me. What a crazy thought.
For my own sanity, I will try to focus future posts on grappling with specific topics, although I can't promise there won't be navel-gazing. Hey, it's my process blog and this is my process.
Still, I should probably write about things relevant to people other than me. What a crazy thought.
Status Update - Late to the Party
My favorite quote from Madmen recently occurred after Roger went on an LSD trip which sparked a lot of mini-epiphanies and personal growth in the character. A large part of Roger's entertainment value lies in his lack of a personal filter or introspection. So it's entertaining to see him walking around the office, smiling, happy, sharing the new ideas that erupted from a crack and shift in his perspective, until he gets to Don.
I think I thought after I came out to my parents, that that was more or less the end of massive changes in my life, which now makes me laugh. Because it has of course dawned on me that personal growth is a life-long process, and also because that was only one of the big messes I'd been ignoring in my life for over a decade. And while I'm glad it's more or less sorted, I have reluctantly recognized I still have a few messes to clean up before I can march forward with confidence and ease. One is work, which is just this whole other thing. Another is the stuff I have accreted in my time here.
I spent the weekend, paring down my comic book collection from 13 boxes or so to 4.5, and it was kind of a relief. I had terrible taste in many things in my 20s, and it was good to recognize that, identify books that no longer reflected my tastes and just trash them. No, they were not worth anything. It was interesting to note, as I assessed stack after stack of comics for basic quality and goodness of fit, just how many old memories were tied up in those things. So in a completely bizarre and unexpected way, I ended up letting go of some personal baggage along with the physical junk. I'm just not that guy anymore, I want different things, and I don't need to fill every second of my conscious hours escaping into nostalgic minutia, even if I still find some of it fun, beautiful and worthwhile. I am surprised at how often I relearn the idea that getting rid of unwanted stuff also gets rid of unwanted psychic baggage.
It takes a surprising amount of energy to try to change from the person I have been, to the person I want to be, and I struggle with that quite a bit. I brim, I froth, I overflow with music and writing ideas that I almost salivate at the thought of pursuing, but I'm still too dysfunctional to let myself proceed on those fronts except in fits and starts. I still can't quite imagine who I am if I'm not who I was, but my impatience with myself has been growing steadily and it's becoming clear I need to prioritize cleaning up the stuff in my way now so I can take care of it in a more thoughtful way, rather than just waiting for my impatience to turn into impulsive, reckless decisions. I am trying to create an environment that fits who i want to be, rather than who I have been. And I'm still kind of embarrassed how long it's taken me to figure some of this stuff out.
I am, in some ways, late to the party. I am getting there as fast as I can.
Roger: You know, it's very interesting, but a lot of times you think people are looking at you but they're not. Their mind's elsewhere.I'll be honest, I've had more of these moments than I'd like to admit in the last couple of years, so I empathized strongly with Roger for this particular episode. The thing is, even if I, or Roger, are late to the party on some important ideas concerning basic human interaction, those moments where you realize the story you've built up about who you are and how the world works is malleable and open to revision are genuinely amazing. And while some drug use (like pot for instance, he said randomly) can lead the user to believe they have descended a bit deeper philosophically than the sober observer would agree, it can also lead the user to question life assumptions, that are, in all likelihood, long over due for re-assessment. So, fresh off my own and ongoing series of mini-epiphanies, while I still feel late to the party on some basic realizations about human interaction ("Oh, I DON'T have be the person other random people want me to be."), I continue to be excited about the process.
Don: Lots of people who haven't taken LSD already know that Roger.
I think I thought after I came out to my parents, that that was more or less the end of massive changes in my life, which now makes me laugh. Because it has of course dawned on me that personal growth is a life-long process, and also because that was only one of the big messes I'd been ignoring in my life for over a decade. And while I'm glad it's more or less sorted, I have reluctantly recognized I still have a few messes to clean up before I can march forward with confidence and ease. One is work, which is just this whole other thing. Another is the stuff I have accreted in my time here.
I spent the weekend, paring down my comic book collection from 13 boxes or so to 4.5, and it was kind of a relief. I had terrible taste in many things in my 20s, and it was good to recognize that, identify books that no longer reflected my tastes and just trash them. No, they were not worth anything. It was interesting to note, as I assessed stack after stack of comics for basic quality and goodness of fit, just how many old memories were tied up in those things. So in a completely bizarre and unexpected way, I ended up letting go of some personal baggage along with the physical junk. I'm just not that guy anymore, I want different things, and I don't need to fill every second of my conscious hours escaping into nostalgic minutia, even if I still find some of it fun, beautiful and worthwhile. I am surprised at how often I relearn the idea that getting rid of unwanted stuff also gets rid of unwanted psychic baggage.
It takes a surprising amount of energy to try to change from the person I have been, to the person I want to be, and I struggle with that quite a bit. I brim, I froth, I overflow with music and writing ideas that I almost salivate at the thought of pursuing, but I'm still too dysfunctional to let myself proceed on those fronts except in fits and starts. I still can't quite imagine who I am if I'm not who I was, but my impatience with myself has been growing steadily and it's becoming clear I need to prioritize cleaning up the stuff in my way now so I can take care of it in a more thoughtful way, rather than just waiting for my impatience to turn into impulsive, reckless decisions. I am trying to create an environment that fits who i want to be, rather than who I have been. And I'm still kind of embarrassed how long it's taken me to figure some of this stuff out.
I am, in some ways, late to the party. I am getting there as fast as I can.
Wednesday, November 21, 2012
New Overdue Review
Posted my completely unnecessary but fun-to-do review of total recall at Contents May Settle last night, neglected to mention it here. Consider it mentioned.
Tuesday, November 20, 2012
But I repeat myself
I know we're all tired of politics, and I have much more to write about in future posts, but I want to say something that I don't see said enough, for all the good it will do on my tiny blog.
Near the beginning of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, King Arthur stops to talk to one of his "subjects", only to get increasingly agitated when the peasant refuses to recognize his authority in any way. He eventually snaps and starts shouting at him and grabbing his arm, which incites the peasant to start shouting about how he's being oppressed. In the movie, King Arthur rides off non-plussed at the over-reaction. But what if he, while beating his peasant, had starting shouting about how his civil liberties are under attack because peasants won't recognize his authority and won't let him beat them? This is a little bit what the christian conservative reaction to the push for gay marriage is like.
I keep hearing from evangelicals, from churches, from family members, that gay marriage is a religious liberty issue. This is, of course, asserted but not justified. And honestly, I'm not sure what justification one could give. As far as civil liberties go, the LGBT are simply asking that their marriages be recognized by the government and given the same legal rights as straight married couples. No one is arguing that churches would be forced to perform religious gay marriage ceremonies in their churches (which would be a civil liberties issue), or that straight people must celebrate gay sexuality and find it wonderful, or that churches must now preach tolerance about gay people. The only thing we're asking churches not to do, is push for civil and legal restrictions on people who haven't opted in to their belief system. Especially, ESPECIALLY, since they have yet to provide a moral, logical, reasonable argument that holds up under any scrutiny as to what harm would occur to anyone if two people of the same gender chose to settle down and start a life together. It continues to boggle my mind that the religious community in this country seems to regard two men smiling at each other and holding hands as one of the great evils of this country in the year 2012. I would think a more steadfast commitment to marriage would include NOT blowing up wedding parties by drone overseas.
Yes, there are pushes from within their own churches to be less dickish about LGBT issues, as there indeed ample support from their holy books for tolerance and compassion for the less-than-perfect and the non-believer. Yes, many conservatives feel social pressure and discomfort because they don't love gay stuff. But no one in this country has, constitutionally or otherwise, promised any of us that we only get to see people who agree with us, or interact only with people with social arrangements that we approve of, or decide which consenting adults do and do not get to love each other. And it's strange that christians ever thought they had a right to not encounter anything that displeased them or disagreed with them or offended them. And absent demonstrable harm to society or individuals, an argument the christian right has yet to make with evidence that hasn't been thoroughly debunked by scientific studies and actual experience with gay individuals, they can't just demand civil laws conform to their religious beliefs just because. I mean, that seems obvious to me, but there seems to be some confusion on the matter.
The fact is, no one group gets a free pass as a moral authority to dictate to the rest of this country. If you think there is harm in a public policy, or the public good is served by restricting the rights of a minority, you have to show specifically how. And you have to be able to explain your moral reasoning in a way that makes sense to people who don't regard the bible as moral authority by default. And if you can't explain the moral basis for your proposed law in a way that makes sense to people outside your religion, and you can't explain the moral principle a biblical injunction is based upon, then you aren't much of a moral authority are you? And if you think the non-religious are incapable of being moral, or that the lot of us putting our heads together can't agree on simple moral principles like "don't restrict the rights and arrangements of others unless you can show the harm" regardless of religious affiliation, then we have a deeper problem and maybe THAT's the conversation we really need to be having.
Near the beginning of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, King Arthur stops to talk to one of his "subjects", only to get increasingly agitated when the peasant refuses to recognize his authority in any way. He eventually snaps and starts shouting at him and grabbing his arm, which incites the peasant to start shouting about how he's being oppressed. In the movie, King Arthur rides off non-plussed at the over-reaction. But what if he, while beating his peasant, had starting shouting about how his civil liberties are under attack because peasants won't recognize his authority and won't let him beat them? This is a little bit what the christian conservative reaction to the push for gay marriage is like.
I keep hearing from evangelicals, from churches, from family members, that gay marriage is a religious liberty issue. This is, of course, asserted but not justified. And honestly, I'm not sure what justification one could give. As far as civil liberties go, the LGBT are simply asking that their marriages be recognized by the government and given the same legal rights as straight married couples. No one is arguing that churches would be forced to perform religious gay marriage ceremonies in their churches (which would be a civil liberties issue), or that straight people must celebrate gay sexuality and find it wonderful, or that churches must now preach tolerance about gay people. The only thing we're asking churches not to do, is push for civil and legal restrictions on people who haven't opted in to their belief system. Especially, ESPECIALLY, since they have yet to provide a moral, logical, reasonable argument that holds up under any scrutiny as to what harm would occur to anyone if two people of the same gender chose to settle down and start a life together. It continues to boggle my mind that the religious community in this country seems to regard two men smiling at each other and holding hands as one of the great evils of this country in the year 2012. I would think a more steadfast commitment to marriage would include NOT blowing up wedding parties by drone overseas.
Yes, there are pushes from within their own churches to be less dickish about LGBT issues, as there indeed ample support from their holy books for tolerance and compassion for the less-than-perfect and the non-believer. Yes, many conservatives feel social pressure and discomfort because they don't love gay stuff. But no one in this country has, constitutionally or otherwise, promised any of us that we only get to see people who agree with us, or interact only with people with social arrangements that we approve of, or decide which consenting adults do and do not get to love each other. And it's strange that christians ever thought they had a right to not encounter anything that displeased them or disagreed with them or offended them. And absent demonstrable harm to society or individuals, an argument the christian right has yet to make with evidence that hasn't been thoroughly debunked by scientific studies and actual experience with gay individuals, they can't just demand civil laws conform to their religious beliefs just because. I mean, that seems obvious to me, but there seems to be some confusion on the matter.
The fact is, no one group gets a free pass as a moral authority to dictate to the rest of this country. If you think there is harm in a public policy, or the public good is served by restricting the rights of a minority, you have to show specifically how. And you have to be able to explain your moral reasoning in a way that makes sense to people who don't regard the bible as moral authority by default. And if you can't explain the moral basis for your proposed law in a way that makes sense to people outside your religion, and you can't explain the moral principle a biblical injunction is based upon, then you aren't much of a moral authority are you? And if you think the non-religious are incapable of being moral, or that the lot of us putting our heads together can't agree on simple moral principles like "don't restrict the rights and arrangements of others unless you can show the harm" regardless of religious affiliation, then we have a deeper problem and maybe THAT's the conversation we really need to be having.
Wednesday, November 07, 2012
Conceding Authority, Part 1
Romney's concession speech last night was pretty classy, especially as compared to the rest of his campaign. I don't like the man much, and I certainly don't have much use for high muckity-muck religious elders that just seem to expect subservience as the natural order of things. My feelings about him personally aside, what stood out to me as he spoke was this bit:
While I note at least 3 problematic elements, notice what the thrust is of the entire paragraph: a big, sloppy kiss to authoritarianism in all it's civic forms. Which is interesting, but not the focus of what I want to talk about today, other than to say it's fascinating that he assumes the strength in our future lies not with us and our choices individually, but in the mid-level authority figures (pastors, priests, teachers, parents and bosses) between us and God making the rest of us better. The job creators line is also spectacularly amusing, but again not my focus today, except to say it's really amusing to frame this topic entirely in terms of the benevolent authority of job creators, and never mention other vital elements to job creation like, oh say, demand from middle class consumers.
The part I marked in bold is the bit that jumped out at me. Initially, I thought he was ceding morality entirely to religion, but noticed later he had thrown in "counselors of all kinds" as a sort of catch-all. But, as this is one of my pet topics, the language still kind of bothered me. In my experience, at least in the Adventist church, churches do indeed believe that all moral authority stems directly from God him(her/it)self. That all of us, as beings, are naturally fallen, and require divine intervention to be good. It naturally follows that the elders, pastors and ministers of a church having presumably studied God's words closely, are best suited to guide you, the lowly individual, in learning how to connect with God more completely and let the goodness flow. This is why they consider it imperative to convert the non-believers to the fold. You can't be good without God, you see, therefore you cannot be good without THEM to tell you how to be good. In some cases, they will graciously concede that the elders of other religions (the imams, the buddhist monks, the popes), all have some connection to God, however imperfect their particular conception of God may be. Therefore other religious elders can assumed to still be guzzling the good from the gourd of God to one degree or another. I'm aware that not all Christians think this way, but in Adventism at least, it's a core belief.
I view this entire philosophy as highly problematic for a variety of reasons I have discussed and will discuss another time, but the specific problem with relation to civic authority leaders, is there are many millions of people (19.6% of the country as of 2012) that identify as non-religious. This seems problematic for a religious community intent on involving itself in politics. How do you come together and find common ground with people you think are unwitting agents of satan, or morally unguided at best? Granted, they won't always say this to your face, and guys like Romney dance around it from a political point of view, but having sat in church pews for many years and listening two years of evangelical political rhetoric, I can guarantee that there are a lot of christians out there who think just that. So the question of "how do Christians relate to 'the fallen', when converting them outright is off the table?" seems interesting to me, but is also not really what I want to focus on. I have no vested interest in how Christians reconcile this, except to hope that they would follow some of their humbler, quieter, wiser congregations in remembering that if, according to their theology, everyone is sinning and falling short of perfection, including themselves!, then they don't have much justification for a high horse built out of church pews.
The question that DOES interest me, is how is the secular community going to respond to this assertion of de facto moral authority by the religious types? I honestly don't know, because while I've completely abandoned the idea that I need to submit to religious authority or beg a god for goodness, I haven't considered myself part of the secular community very long, and I'm not sure what particular handy book I would point someone to to assure them that I do indeed have a moral compass. I am clearly a secular humanist at this point, which was not something I chose, just something I discovered describes my moral views nearly exactly. But even among the 20% of the non-religious, I'm not sure even a majority of them would describe themselves as secular humanist, whether they fit the definition or not. My point being, as a Christian, you can point to the Bible as the source of your morality, a book that has been invested with authority, if not by God, then by tradition and endless affirmation of millions and billions of people for 2000 years that it is, indeed, authoritative. Which is to say, independent of its actual authority, a thing can be seen to be authoritative if enough people assert it is so, for a long enough period of time. And the secular, humanist or otherwise, don't have a similarly revered book to point to. Indeed, the point of secular humanism is that having a moral compass does not require an authority of any sort to compel their goodness.
So what, then, is the secular answer to "why am I good?" What can they say that would reassure a christian of any sort, that just because they don't believe in God, it does not mean they are 5 seconds away from stabbing the god-fearing at any given moment? It seems obvious to me that one doesn't need to fear the gods to see the benefits of being good, to value it as a philosophy, to have a set of principles and then follow them. But this is a lengthy conversation to have with every single believer I come across. In the same way it becomes exhausting to re-assure every old friend that I am still an okay person, even though I'm gay, it's exhausting to explain to a whole bunch of people that I'm still good, even though I don't claim religion anymore. For me, for now, I think the answer is going to simply be, "I'm a secular humanist" and leave it to them to look up exactly what that means. Of course, I have heard secular humanists defined as some of the modern, deceptive agents of Satan in my time at church, so I'm not sure if that isn't just the start of a whole new exhausting conversation, but at least it's a start.
So, while I clearly don't know what the exact answer his, I do have a couple of assertions I draw from all of this. It's vital that certain massive segments of christianity learn to accept that the non-religious have a moral compass and values that have elements in common with Christianity. More importantly, it's vital that the non-religious refuse to cede moral authority to the churches. How specifically they go about doing this and how much work it might take, I'm not sure, but we HAVE to stop letting religions get away with saying they are the gatekeepers of morality, when we know that isn't true. I think we have the edge philosophically, but this does us no good when they have such a huge edge organizationally. I think as more and more people identify as non-religious, this will happen anyway, someone will eventually write an accessible humanist "bible" or start a non-religious community that people find appealing. But I wish we'd get started sooner, rather than later. I think we'll all be a little saner if we can agree that, religious or not, we have a lot in common in terms of moral philosophy.
We look to our teachers and professors, we count on you not just to teach, but to inspire our children with a passion for learning and discovery. We look to our pastors and priests and rabbis and counselors of all kinds to testify of the enduring principles upon which our society is built: honesty, charity, integrity and family. We look to our parents, for in the final analysis everything depends on the success of our homes. We look to job creators of all kinds. We’re counting on you to invest, to hire, to step forward. And we look to Democrats and Republicans in government at all levels to put the people before the politics.
While I note at least 3 problematic elements, notice what the thrust is of the entire paragraph: a big, sloppy kiss to authoritarianism in all it's civic forms. Which is interesting, but not the focus of what I want to talk about today, other than to say it's fascinating that he assumes the strength in our future lies not with us and our choices individually, but in the mid-level authority figures (pastors, priests, teachers, parents and bosses) between us and God making the rest of us better. The job creators line is also spectacularly amusing, but again not my focus today, except to say it's really amusing to frame this topic entirely in terms of the benevolent authority of job creators, and never mention other vital elements to job creation like, oh say, demand from middle class consumers.
The part I marked in bold is the bit that jumped out at me. Initially, I thought he was ceding morality entirely to religion, but noticed later he had thrown in "counselors of all kinds" as a sort of catch-all. But, as this is one of my pet topics, the language still kind of bothered me. In my experience, at least in the Adventist church, churches do indeed believe that all moral authority stems directly from God him(her/it)self. That all of us, as beings, are naturally fallen, and require divine intervention to be good. It naturally follows that the elders, pastors and ministers of a church having presumably studied God's words closely, are best suited to guide you, the lowly individual, in learning how to connect with God more completely and let the goodness flow. This is why they consider it imperative to convert the non-believers to the fold. You can't be good without God, you see, therefore you cannot be good without THEM to tell you how to be good. In some cases, they will graciously concede that the elders of other religions (the imams, the buddhist monks, the popes), all have some connection to God, however imperfect their particular conception of God may be. Therefore other religious elders can assumed to still be guzzling the good from the gourd of God to one degree or another. I'm aware that not all Christians think this way, but in Adventism at least, it's a core belief.
I view this entire philosophy as highly problematic for a variety of reasons I have discussed and will discuss another time, but the specific problem with relation to civic authority leaders, is there are many millions of people (19.6% of the country as of 2012) that identify as non-religious. This seems problematic for a religious community intent on involving itself in politics. How do you come together and find common ground with people you think are unwitting agents of satan, or morally unguided at best? Granted, they won't always say this to your face, and guys like Romney dance around it from a political point of view, but having sat in church pews for many years and listening two years of evangelical political rhetoric, I can guarantee that there are a lot of christians out there who think just that. So the question of "how do Christians relate to 'the fallen', when converting them outright is off the table?" seems interesting to me, but is also not really what I want to focus on. I have no vested interest in how Christians reconcile this, except to hope that they would follow some of their humbler, quieter, wiser congregations in remembering that if, according to their theology, everyone is sinning and falling short of perfection, including themselves!, then they don't have much justification for a high horse built out of church pews.
The question that DOES interest me, is how is the secular community going to respond to this assertion of de facto moral authority by the religious types? I honestly don't know, because while I've completely abandoned the idea that I need to submit to religious authority or beg a god for goodness, I haven't considered myself part of the secular community very long, and I'm not sure what particular handy book I would point someone to to assure them that I do indeed have a moral compass. I am clearly a secular humanist at this point, which was not something I chose, just something I discovered describes my moral views nearly exactly. But even among the 20% of the non-religious, I'm not sure even a majority of them would describe themselves as secular humanist, whether they fit the definition or not. My point being, as a Christian, you can point to the Bible as the source of your morality, a book that has been invested with authority, if not by God, then by tradition and endless affirmation of millions and billions of people for 2000 years that it is, indeed, authoritative. Which is to say, independent of its actual authority, a thing can be seen to be authoritative if enough people assert it is so, for a long enough period of time. And the secular, humanist or otherwise, don't have a similarly revered book to point to. Indeed, the point of secular humanism is that having a moral compass does not require an authority of any sort to compel their goodness.
So what, then, is the secular answer to "why am I good?" What can they say that would reassure a christian of any sort, that just because they don't believe in God, it does not mean they are 5 seconds away from stabbing the god-fearing at any given moment? It seems obvious to me that one doesn't need to fear the gods to see the benefits of being good, to value it as a philosophy, to have a set of principles and then follow them. But this is a lengthy conversation to have with every single believer I come across. In the same way it becomes exhausting to re-assure every old friend that I am still an okay person, even though I'm gay, it's exhausting to explain to a whole bunch of people that I'm still good, even though I don't claim religion anymore. For me, for now, I think the answer is going to simply be, "I'm a secular humanist" and leave it to them to look up exactly what that means. Of course, I have heard secular humanists defined as some of the modern, deceptive agents of Satan in my time at church, so I'm not sure if that isn't just the start of a whole new exhausting conversation, but at least it's a start.
So, while I clearly don't know what the exact answer his, I do have a couple of assertions I draw from all of this. It's vital that certain massive segments of christianity learn to accept that the non-religious have a moral compass and values that have elements in common with Christianity. More importantly, it's vital that the non-religious refuse to cede moral authority to the churches. How specifically they go about doing this and how much work it might take, I'm not sure, but we HAVE to stop letting religions get away with saying they are the gatekeepers of morality, when we know that isn't true. I think we have the edge philosophically, but this does us no good when they have such a huge edge organizationally. I think as more and more people identify as non-religious, this will happen anyway, someone will eventually write an accessible humanist "bible" or start a non-religious community that people find appealing. But I wish we'd get started sooner, rather than later. I think we'll all be a little saner if we can agree that, religious or not, we have a lot in common in terms of moral philosophy.
Tuesday, November 06, 2012
Counties are for Counting
Thank god election day is here. I'm so tired of politics and the election right now. Specifically the massive stupidity with which we conduct most of it. Leaving, for now, the inherent stupidity of a 3-year election cycle, which leaves our politicians somewhat less time to focus on actually governing than I think most people are willing to admit, for the best, greatest, most compelling, handsome and intelligent democracy that has ever, or will ever exist, we are curiously poor at the thing central to all of it: counting the damn votes. David Frum, of George W. Bush speech-writng fame agrees, we do not proceed with our elections in a robust or trust-worthy manner. And as nostalgic as it can be to wistfully deify our messy, chaotic, glorious democracy we may want to consider whether it's actually necessary that the act of voting and counting votes be the subject of too much messiness and chaos. In fact, there's no reason at all, that it can't be extremely easy, transparent, fair and tamper-proof for every county in this country.
I don't know why we wouldn't want every county, both rich and poor, to have access to safe, expedient, reliable voting. I know we're allergic to taking ideas from other countries (we're the best! we have nothing to learn from anyone!), but other modern countries have managed to bring reliable, trusted voting systems to their citizens and we, at the very least, could start there. But the way we're currently doing things, is actively fueling our partisan woes, and it flat out doesn't need to. We have officials in some counties trying to extend voting hours in republican districts, and limit them in "urban" ones. We have absentee ballot shenanigans. And widespread distrust on both sides that voting is being handled fairly and accurately. There's no reason to leave vote counting to highly partisan elected officials, and every reason to think that's a terrible idea (in that highly partisan officials are increasingly showing themselves unable to put partisanship aside in the performance of what should be non-partisan duties).
Look, voting is something that should be simple, and that fact that it isn't implies that we are dangerously close to being so disfunctionally partisan that we can't agree that one plus one equals 2 anymore. That's a problem. Here's the simple, for the love of god, solution to all of this. If we can agree that all citizens should have the right to vote, and that we should minimize any roadblock that keeps voting from being free and easy, and that partisan elected officials should not be able to use their power to corrupt the vote counting in their party's favor, then we HAVE to do the following to make sure that's true:
1. No poll taxes. Voter ID of some sort is a fine anti-fraud device, but ONLY if a legal voter ID is absolutely free and relatively quick to obtain. Yes, people should be able to verify they are who they say they are, NO this should not be an expensive or multi-week process. Not if we're making it the basis of tamper-proof voting.
2. Standardized election counting machines/systems. There's no reason people in poor counties should risk not being able to vote because the county is too poor to afford voting machines that work, or the voting machines are so broken that votes are hard to even read. There's also no reason to leave the specific methods of vote counting to the whims of local officials, who may or may not be capable of putting their partisanship aside and count the votes accurately. Either give the counties guidelines, and the funding to meet them (and the oversight to make sure it's followed), or just federalize the whole damn thing.
3. Provide a transparent system of checks and balances (this would be extremely necessary if we federalized the system). All parties should be able to inspect the voting machinery, and the process of voting from start to finish should be entirely transparent. If people insist on using electronic voting machines, THEY must have a paper trail, and publicly available computer code to meet this standard. Any code-literate citizen should be able to read voting machine code to make sure it's fair, and parties should be able to check that the code on each machine matches the code example for each machine that has been released by the manufacturer. There's no national security reason any part of the voting process, except for the identity behind each individual vote of course, should be secret, and anyone wanting to keep any part of the process secret, should be viewed with immediate and deep suspicion. Your vote should be secret, the counting of it should not be.
4. Make voting day a holiday. No one should be unable to vote because of a work shift. Or a double-work shift. Or even to leave a voting line because they have to get to work. Everyone gets to vote. And election day, the day most fundamental to our democracy, has ample reason to be a holiday anyway. Celebrate the vote by making it easy for everyone to vote.
These things aren't hard to do. The fact that we haven't done them yet indicates that the people in charge either don't think there's a problem or don't think confidence in the voting system is a high priority. We should disabuse them of that notion. And if we're really at the point where we can't agree that 1 + 1 = 2 when counting votes, then the greatest, best most heavenly-scented democracy that God has ever put on this earth is kind of in trouble, don't you think? We seem to have a great deal of trouble agreeing on objective reality at all any more in this country. I humbly submit that voting reform that generates confidence in objective reality and our ability to count would be a great start to turning that around.
I don't know why we wouldn't want every county, both rich and poor, to have access to safe, expedient, reliable voting. I know we're allergic to taking ideas from other countries (we're the best! we have nothing to learn from anyone!), but other modern countries have managed to bring reliable, trusted voting systems to their citizens and we, at the very least, could start there. But the way we're currently doing things, is actively fueling our partisan woes, and it flat out doesn't need to. We have officials in some counties trying to extend voting hours in republican districts, and limit them in "urban" ones. We have absentee ballot shenanigans. And widespread distrust on both sides that voting is being handled fairly and accurately. There's no reason to leave vote counting to highly partisan elected officials, and every reason to think that's a terrible idea (in that highly partisan officials are increasingly showing themselves unable to put partisanship aside in the performance of what should be non-partisan duties).
Look, voting is something that should be simple, and that fact that it isn't implies that we are dangerously close to being so disfunctionally partisan that we can't agree that one plus one equals 2 anymore. That's a problem. Here's the simple, for the love of god, solution to all of this. If we can agree that all citizens should have the right to vote, and that we should minimize any roadblock that keeps voting from being free and easy, and that partisan elected officials should not be able to use their power to corrupt the vote counting in their party's favor, then we HAVE to do the following to make sure that's true:
1. No poll taxes. Voter ID of some sort is a fine anti-fraud device, but ONLY if a legal voter ID is absolutely free and relatively quick to obtain. Yes, people should be able to verify they are who they say they are, NO this should not be an expensive or multi-week process. Not if we're making it the basis of tamper-proof voting.
2. Standardized election counting machines/systems. There's no reason people in poor counties should risk not being able to vote because the county is too poor to afford voting machines that work, or the voting machines are so broken that votes are hard to even read. There's also no reason to leave the specific methods of vote counting to the whims of local officials, who may or may not be capable of putting their partisanship aside and count the votes accurately. Either give the counties guidelines, and the funding to meet them (and the oversight to make sure it's followed), or just federalize the whole damn thing.
3. Provide a transparent system of checks and balances (this would be extremely necessary if we federalized the system). All parties should be able to inspect the voting machinery, and the process of voting from start to finish should be entirely transparent. If people insist on using electronic voting machines, THEY must have a paper trail, and publicly available computer code to meet this standard. Any code-literate citizen should be able to read voting machine code to make sure it's fair, and parties should be able to check that the code on each machine matches the code example for each machine that has been released by the manufacturer. There's no national security reason any part of the voting process, except for the identity behind each individual vote of course, should be secret, and anyone wanting to keep any part of the process secret, should be viewed with immediate and deep suspicion. Your vote should be secret, the counting of it should not be.
4. Make voting day a holiday. No one should be unable to vote because of a work shift. Or a double-work shift. Or even to leave a voting line because they have to get to work. Everyone gets to vote. And election day, the day most fundamental to our democracy, has ample reason to be a holiday anyway. Celebrate the vote by making it easy for everyone to vote.
These things aren't hard to do. The fact that we haven't done them yet indicates that the people in charge either don't think there's a problem or don't think confidence in the voting system is a high priority. We should disabuse them of that notion. And if we're really at the point where we can't agree that 1 + 1 = 2 when counting votes, then the greatest, best most heavenly-scented democracy that God has ever put on this earth is kind of in trouble, don't you think? We seem to have a great deal of trouble agreeing on objective reality at all any more in this country. I humbly submit that voting reform that generates confidence in objective reality and our ability to count would be a great start to turning that around.
Saturday, October 27, 2012
The Last Shall be First to Leave
Taking a few moments from their 30-year-old discussion on whether women are capable of being spiritual leaders (currently, women's ordination is viewed as a "mistake" by the General Conference, because people with penises are always pointing forward), the Seventh-Day Adventist church recently decided it was time to revise their position on homosexuality. They are very proud to announce that they have changed one adjective in describing the brokenness of homosexuals to be slightly less condescending and caustic. They have decided not to describe homosexuality as a "disorder" and instead label it a "disturbance" (like we're the dark side of the force). The statement now reads:
What could be more right than declaring that two men loving each other above all else has no historical or biblical precedent (*cough* *cough* David and Jonathan *cough*). But especially the line, "we understand the thought process," because no, they don't. They certainly think they do. In the Adventist world, not living according to the cherry-picked "rules" found in the bible means living "apart from God" and it is their contention that no one can live happily apart from God. And not just the gays, anyone living outside of Adventism is considered fallen, led astray by the devil, and doomed to a live of darkness and depression unless they submit to divine authority, by casting all notions of self aside, and instead living by their very poorly argued and maintained rule system. So, if you're gay, you're not playing by their rules, and are by default living outside of their rule-system, and therefore must be unhappy. Because only living by the rules makes you happy Ipso facto.
Except, they're so busy running gay people out of their congregations, they never let them stick around to see that that's not exactly true. Nor do they every seem to notice that there are a wide variety of people leading happy, moral lives outside of their church. And if they'd actually deign to talk to gay people, they might hear how happy dating the gender they're attracted to actually makes them. Even then, in my experience, they don't really hear gay people (or me) when they say that kind of thing. That there's nothing inherently unhappy about being gay. It's kind of great! It's just as great to find a fulfilling, exciting homosexual relationship, as it is to find a fulfilling heterosexual relationship. But, since that can't be true according to their belief system, the average Adventist is still likely to believe you are either deluding yourself at best, or led astray by Satan and soon the other shoe will drop or in the worst-case, that you are an agent of the devil, actively seeking to undermine God's Holy Authoritarian Bureaucracy. Knock, knock. Who's there? Gays out to destroy your marriage by being happy.
So no, they don't understand the thought process, otherwise they could not say it is not "right" that gays be in happy marriages of their own. For one thing, you'll notice they don't specifically state just HOW marriage is under attack by gay people. Will straight people leave the institution of marriage in disgust if gays do it too? Is marriage really a form of group think? Are most married people looking around to see how other marriages are doing it and modifying their own accordingly? Do polygamists ruin it for everybody? Why or why not? Are marriages more concerned with people outside the marriage or more concerned with the people within it? What does it mean to not be in the "right" marriage? What specific harm does two dudes hitching up cause your community? What great evil comes from two men declaring their life-long commitment to each other? They do not say. It is just "understood" that first gays marry, then ???, then the church and marriages everywhere are poisoned forever. Exactly how, is left as an exercise for the bigoted reader. How gay marriage hurts marriage more than divorce and infidelity is left as upper level Cognitive Dissonance Jujitsu, for the advanced irrationalist.
Look, I have no interest or investment anymore in the acceptance or approval of the Adventist community. Not only would they NOT have me, as a openly and unrepentant homosexual who will just not stop loving other men (and all the horrors increased tenderness brings), but I don't believe in any of the 28 fundamental beliefs anymore, and I have no interest in being part of an institution that insists you abandon the empirical evidence of your life experiences and your critical thinking when it conflicts with poorly interpreted, and cherry-picked biblical passages. And I don't see what hope their is for an institution that still thinks it's a mistake to have women as leaders (because they can't bring themselves to see them as equal). But as someone who's still deprogramming myself from a lot of the terrible ideas I was told as a kid, and has a large amount of friends and family who still consider themselves Adventist, this shit drives me crazy. The truth is, I've found substantially more acceptance and compassion outside of the church than within it. Ironically, I see Adventists chafing under a poorly maintained rule system as pretty unhappy people. My parents are currently having a very hard time because their religion insists I'm a bad person, even though that dramatically conflicts with their experience with me.
And what's especially frustrating about all of it, is it doesn't need to be this way, even from within their system. They allow every other open sinner among them. They allow people with anger problems, with gossip problems, with forgiveness problems, with compassion problems (clearly), with fidelity problems to sit among them every week in the pews without complaint. Even from the viewpoint of "homosexuality is a sin", what is the logic of excluding the gays, while allowing the meat-eating, jewelry-wearing, freely divorcing remnant to remain? They either believe in the power of Holy Spirit to change lives, to cure anger problems, eating problems, pride problems and "gay problems," or they don't. And they shouldn't believe in ex-gay therapy, of course, God continues to choose to not cure even those desperately trying to be straight, and even ex-gay organizations are admitting that now.
Personally, I think they exclude gays because having happy, committed homosexuals week after week in their congregations, would show the "gays are inherently depraved and unhappy" rhetoric to be a lie. They can't allow gays to exist among them, because they have no confidence that any of their rhetoric around homosexuality is even remotely true (quite rightly, considering they don't actually take the experience and knowledge of gay people into account). White people can't tell black people what their experience as black people is, men can't tell women what their experience as women is, the religious can't tell the non-religious what their experience is, and straight-people CERTAINLY can't tell people what their experience as gay people is. The only way any of those groups get to know what the other group's actual experience is is to interact with them and listen to them and BELIEVE them when they relate those things. And until the Adventist church is wiling to put their belief system where their mouth is, and let their rhetoric stand against actual contact and socialization with Adventist gay people, they don't know SHIT about homosexuality and should not claim to.
Or would socializing and making friends with people their community normally shuns and looks down upon be too un-Jesus-like? Ah, modern christianity: followers of Jesus, as is comfortable and convenient.
Homosexuality is a manifestation of the disturbance and brokenness in human inclinations and relations caused by the entrance of sin into the world.Yes, thank you for stating your prejudice in slightly less inflammatory terms. They also are now willing to refer to the homosexual as "loved by God" instead of just a "children of God", although there's only a hair's difference between those two statements and "homosexuals exist", because Adventists believe God loves everybody. They are now also excited to announce that they have taken the great risk of including compassion in the closing statement, which now reads:
As His disciples, Seventh-day Adventists endeavor to follow the Lord’s instruction and example, living a life of Christ-like compassion and faithfulness.Which is a funny cap to put on a public statement about how there's totally a splinter in that other guy's eye, because that's what Jesus would have done. Made sure you knew you were broken, and needed to grovel before him before he would allow you into his community. My favorite are the quotes from the committee members. First, the old inspirational hymn, "we are good, and are persecuted":
The institutions of marriage and family are under attack.Somehow, they are under attack. We'll get back to you on just exactly how straight christians are going to be prevented from marrying whomever they choose in their churches any day now. Followed by the response to a committee member suggesting they eliminate the "disturbance" line:
Though many of us have family members who are homosexual, we understand the thought process, we still embrace them, we still love them, we still care for them. However, as a church, we must take a stand for what is right.
What could be more right than declaring that two men loving each other above all else has no historical or biblical precedent (*cough* *cough* David and Jonathan *cough*). But especially the line, "we understand the thought process," because no, they don't. They certainly think they do. In the Adventist world, not living according to the cherry-picked "rules" found in the bible means living "apart from God" and it is their contention that no one can live happily apart from God. And not just the gays, anyone living outside of Adventism is considered fallen, led astray by the devil, and doomed to a live of darkness and depression unless they submit to divine authority, by casting all notions of self aside, and instead living by their very poorly argued and maintained rule system. So, if you're gay, you're not playing by their rules, and are by default living outside of their rule-system, and therefore must be unhappy. Because only living by the rules makes you happy Ipso facto.
Except, they're so busy running gay people out of their congregations, they never let them stick around to see that that's not exactly true. Nor do they every seem to notice that there are a wide variety of people leading happy, moral lives outside of their church. And if they'd actually deign to talk to gay people, they might hear how happy dating the gender they're attracted to actually makes them. Even then, in my experience, they don't really hear gay people (or me) when they say that kind of thing. That there's nothing inherently unhappy about being gay. It's kind of great! It's just as great to find a fulfilling, exciting homosexual relationship, as it is to find a fulfilling heterosexual relationship. But, since that can't be true according to their belief system, the average Adventist is still likely to believe you are either deluding yourself at best, or led astray by Satan and soon the other shoe will drop or in the worst-case, that you are an agent of the devil, actively seeking to undermine God's Holy Authoritarian Bureaucracy. Knock, knock. Who's there? Gays out to destroy your marriage by being happy.
So no, they don't understand the thought process, otherwise they could not say it is not "right" that gays be in happy marriages of their own. For one thing, you'll notice they don't specifically state just HOW marriage is under attack by gay people. Will straight people leave the institution of marriage in disgust if gays do it too? Is marriage really a form of group think? Are most married people looking around to see how other marriages are doing it and modifying their own accordingly? Do polygamists ruin it for everybody? Why or why not? Are marriages more concerned with people outside the marriage or more concerned with the people within it? What does it mean to not be in the "right" marriage? What specific harm does two dudes hitching up cause your community? What great evil comes from two men declaring their life-long commitment to each other? They do not say. It is just "understood" that first gays marry, then ???, then the church and marriages everywhere are poisoned forever. Exactly how, is left as an exercise for the bigoted reader. How gay marriage hurts marriage more than divorce and infidelity is left as upper level Cognitive Dissonance Jujitsu, for the advanced irrationalist.
Look, I have no interest or investment anymore in the acceptance or approval of the Adventist community. Not only would they NOT have me, as a openly and unrepentant homosexual who will just not stop loving other men (and all the horrors increased tenderness brings), but I don't believe in any of the 28 fundamental beliefs anymore, and I have no interest in being part of an institution that insists you abandon the empirical evidence of your life experiences and your critical thinking when it conflicts with poorly interpreted, and cherry-picked biblical passages. And I don't see what hope their is for an institution that still thinks it's a mistake to have women as leaders (because they can't bring themselves to see them as equal). But as someone who's still deprogramming myself from a lot of the terrible ideas I was told as a kid, and has a large amount of friends and family who still consider themselves Adventist, this shit drives me crazy. The truth is, I've found substantially more acceptance and compassion outside of the church than within it. Ironically, I see Adventists chafing under a poorly maintained rule system as pretty unhappy people. My parents are currently having a very hard time because their religion insists I'm a bad person, even though that dramatically conflicts with their experience with me.
And what's especially frustrating about all of it, is it doesn't need to be this way, even from within their system. They allow every other open sinner among them. They allow people with anger problems, with gossip problems, with forgiveness problems, with compassion problems (clearly), with fidelity problems to sit among them every week in the pews without complaint. Even from the viewpoint of "homosexuality is a sin", what is the logic of excluding the gays, while allowing the meat-eating, jewelry-wearing, freely divorcing remnant to remain? They either believe in the power of Holy Spirit to change lives, to cure anger problems, eating problems, pride problems and "gay problems," or they don't. And they shouldn't believe in ex-gay therapy, of course, God continues to choose to not cure even those desperately trying to be straight, and even ex-gay organizations are admitting that now.
Personally, I think they exclude gays because having happy, committed homosexuals week after week in their congregations, would show the "gays are inherently depraved and unhappy" rhetoric to be a lie. They can't allow gays to exist among them, because they have no confidence that any of their rhetoric around homosexuality is even remotely true (quite rightly, considering they don't actually take the experience and knowledge of gay people into account). White people can't tell black people what their experience as black people is, men can't tell women what their experience as women is, the religious can't tell the non-religious what their experience is, and straight-people CERTAINLY can't tell people what their experience as gay people is. The only way any of those groups get to know what the other group's actual experience is is to interact with them and listen to them and BELIEVE them when they relate those things. And until the Adventist church is wiling to put their belief system where their mouth is, and let their rhetoric stand against actual contact and socialization with Adventist gay people, they don't know SHIT about homosexuality and should not claim to.
Or would socializing and making friends with people their community normally shuns and looks down upon be too un-Jesus-like? Ah, modern christianity: followers of Jesus, as is comfortable and convenient.
Monday, October 22, 2012
New Blogs for Everyone!
Considering whether I should start a new blog for Adventist stuff, or just keep it here, and start labeling things. Should blogs be focused and topic-driven? Written with intent for a specific audience, or written in one place, hoping the multitudes within me don't overwhelm the casual reader? Am I even going for a readership? I am not sure I know.
I suspect I'll just write more about it here, and label accordingly, and y'all can skip my cranky rants about my childhood religion if you like. Still, there's an OCD part of me that wants blogs to more or less be focused by topic, so the reading experience is somewhat cohesive. However, I concede that it's annoying to try and keep up with "which blog I am updating now."
All of this is simply to say: incoming rant about the Adventist churches new position on "teh gay." soon. Finally got around to reading the actual news report, and: what the actual fuck. Nothing too surprising, but Jesus, do they not resemble Jesus.
I suspect I'll just write more about it here, and label accordingly, and y'all can skip my cranky rants about my childhood religion if you like. Still, there's an OCD part of me that wants blogs to more or less be focused by topic, so the reading experience is somewhat cohesive. However, I concede that it's annoying to try and keep up with "which blog I am updating now."
All of this is simply to say: incoming rant about the Adventist churches new position on "teh gay." soon. Finally got around to reading the actual news report, and: what the actual fuck. Nothing too surprising, but Jesus, do they not resemble Jesus.
Tuesday, October 16, 2012
Bull in a China Shop
Existentially and economically speaking, shit is fucked up and bullshit and I know that to be true.
Shit is not fucked up cataclysmically just yet, but naggingly so nonetheless. I was trained to be good, to be fair, to do no harm, to help the less fortunate, and conserve natural resources, but society has made being bad just so EASY. Not in a seductively evil way, of course, I'm not sold on being overtly evil, I'm sold on being sold. I'm encouraged to make the purchases right for ME, and not ask any pesky questions about what happens behind the scenes to make such bargains possible. For the most part, because I don't have the time to comprehensively research the business practices of every corporation I buy from (in other words, I am lazy), I choose not to know.
Except I do know, don't I? A bunch of earnest, persistent reporters have taken great pains to point out for many years that the phone I bought so cheaply was made possible by work conditions in another country that I would consider immoral in mine. Because when we told corporations that they couldn't treat workers as slave labor, they simply took production to a country where the slave labor would be done by people less like us, whose plight would be less immediate, using workers with less recourse and fewer champions to fight for them. And not just my phone, but all of my electronics. And not just my electronics but my clothes. And not just my clothes, but my coffee. And not just my coffee, but my chocolate. And not just my chocolate, but much of my food. All relying in part, somewhere down the line, on cheap labor, with unsafe business practices, with some form of human misery meted out on the assumption that the #1 priority in the world today is to make sure the citizens of the western world get their goods as cheaply as possible. And if that leaves foreign children or undocumented workers minus a few fingers due to unsafe-but-cheap working conditions, so be it.
I don't really like where that leaves me ethically. I know I am perfectly in my rights to continue, as I always have, politely ignoring the dubious business ethics of the modern age, and just take my cheap crap and go home. It's what most everyone else does, after all. Ideally, my culture's expression of common will and priorities in the form of self-government would have watchdogs to prevent against those kinds of abuses, but I know corporations have been busy for many years defanging government oversight and have been otherwise successful in defining profit as the ultimate good, no matter the human cost for far too many people. I know there is much good mixed in with the bad, and that combined with the size of the problem, learned helplessness and general apathy means it's fairly unlikely that we'll rise up en masse against the injustices of the age, in a way that would effectively change anything. For one thing, where would we start? Nobody seems to care anymore if 100,000 are out in the streets protesting something. Occupy only got people's attention once they made a nuisance of themselves on public land. But even though I know all these things, I find this state of affairs a little soul-crushing. It is hard to think of myself as a good person, when I enable bad things, however structurally built into my daily existence, and however little direct responsibility I hold for any of it.
And, on top of all that, no matter who is president next year, my vote enables someone to use drones to kill innocent people, and I have no real choice in the matter. The "adults" have decided innocent people need to die to feed combat terrorism, and that's that. The problems in our political system is a whole other ball of wax of course. So much corruption, stagnation and stupidity it's hard to know where to start. All of which I am unable to separate my vote from. Which is not to say I cannot do some good with my vote, just that I can't keep it pure. I enable some bad along with some good. Which does not make me feel great either.
None of which is to say this registers very highly on a day-to-day basis. I am not constantly wracked with over-whelming guilt about the things I buy. But it's always there, and it always bothers me at least a little bit, and I wish I were smart enough to figure where one would even start to try and fix any of it. And it's not to say we're all monsters, or it's all hopeless, or we all should envision ourselves as constantly covered in the blood of a million small children. I know people taking advantage of other people is just a part of life and I can't be responsible for other people's bad behavior. I just wish going to the store didn't feel so much like enabling it. And I wish it didn't feel like I have to choose between fighting an endless war against unethical consumerism and living my life.
I will let you all know if I discover the magic bullet to the world's ethical problems and how to avoid the myriad systems that taint me by association. I am not optimistic about my chances of doing so. In the meantime, I may look here from time to time. It seems like a start.
Saturday, October 13, 2012
Your Vote is a Mess
I will now utter the words that make me hate the future: I got into a political debate on twitter a few times this week. Both because we don't know how to debate effectively in this country, and twitter fails so spectacularly as a debate venue for any meaningful thought. So I'm going to explain myself in this blog post and let the subject drop, because I know who I'm voting for and I know why, and I want to have some sort of rebuttal to the odd liberal slacktivism that always seems to crop up in the last month of an election. And I'm tired of getting into arguments on twitter about it. I will understand if some readers find this too tedious to wade through.
Am I being too harsh when I declare it slacktivism? Maybe. I just think real political change takes consistent, boring, hard grass roots work and you can't just throw a protest vote at the last minute for president and expect any sort of lasting change. It's like trying to catapult yourself to the top of the mountain and hoping to plant the flag as you fly by, instead of just building a solid, stable platform to get yourself there. I firmly believe that if you want the american public to seriously consider a green (or any 3rd) party candidate as an alternative to the existing two behemoths, you're going to need to show first that they are capable of working within the existing structure. This means they're going to need to see that party working for them at the city, state and congressional level before they even begin to trust that they can get things done at the presidential level. As much as I like Jill Stein's platform, the Green party has been a spectacular failure for 20 years at building a local ground game, gaining influence in local and state politics and building name recognition. And trying to bypass all of that with accumulating enough protest votes to sneak in a quick, bloodless decapitation just seems like slacktivism to me. It's a seductive idea because it's easy, not because it's effective. You can't start an effective 3rd party from the top down, you have to start at the bottom and do the work. Presidents are typically picked from people who've worked many years as an effective state or national politician of some sort. Until the green party has one who can claim the same credentials, and the same levels of support, they're just not going to get anywhere. There isn't a shortcut to the top. That idea is too good to be true.
I've also seen the, "the Democrats will never pull to the left unless we punish them by voting for a third party" argument. Bullshit. We did this dance in 2000. I'm not sure Nader voters can make the argument that George W. Bush ushered in a new liberal paradise or a more liberal democratic party. If anything, there's been a huge backlash in people willing to vote third party, if it means we get another Bush. I think both the Tea Party and Occupy have both proved that you CAN shift the existing monoliths to the left or the right, but they both did that from within the party, not by sabotaging the party more in favor of their policies than not in general elections. Occupy didn't push Obama far enough to the left for your tastes? Then you'll have to try harder in the next 4 years, eh? In the meantime, I fail to see what publicly shivving the only viable candidate closest to your goals a month before the election achieves. Sinking Obama from the left will really only give progressives the opportunity to smugly intone "And THAT'S what you get for not being progressive enough!" while they enjoy all the liberal freedoms Romney will undoubtedly rain down upon them for their progressive purity. "Cutting off your nose to spite your face" is a thing people actually do. It's a thing to watch out for in ourselves.
And then there's the old, "they're both the same, it's all fucked up, I'm above it." Again, bullshit. Politics is messy. Every time you vote, you vote for policies you want, and policies you don't want. Political groups, especially the Democrats, are built by building coalitions with people who agree on many things, but not everything. Your vote is never now, and will never be, for a candidate that reflects your political views 100% down the line. And especially in this country, you don't get to vote for either of the existing parties without voting for some pretty icky things. And I'm not sure why anyone would suddenly think that they deserve this privilege above anyone else. Ask gays, African-Americans and women how long it took them to get the changes they wanted and how many times it took voting for candidates that had other policies they weren't exactly in love with. Why do you think your fight for a better government should be any easier than theirs? And, as mentioned above, no one has built a viable 3rd party option yet nor has shown how they're using Jill Stein vote this election to launch one. But none of this means the two existing parties are the same.
For you, in particular, they might be relatively the same. If you're not gay, and don't need some basic human rights recognized, they're both the same. If you're not a woman, and don't need some basic protections on when you get to make your own health decisions and when you don't, they're both the same. If you don't really care about the state of the health care system, they're both the same. Because there's only one party talking about gay rights, about contraception rights, about abortion rights, about trying to make the health care system better, and it's not Republicans. It's not even on their agenda, and if it is, it's to tear down rights I feel are important. Their explicit policies with regards to health care was to change nothing. If Obama hadn't been elected, they wouldn't have even talked about it. They don't even recognize that there was a problem. And on the other issues, they're actively trying to time travel back to the 50s and demonize gay marriage, restrict abortion AND, mind-mindbogglingly, contraception and their science committee members think science is the work of Satan. And since I have some skin in the game on the gay rights issue, you're going to have to forgive me if I can't bring myself to vote against my best interests, by voting for anyone but Obama. Who is, again, the only pro-gay rights option that has any chance of affecting my life in a material way. Especially given that Romney is not exactly neutral on these topics. He will actively try and move things the other way. And really, the side that thinks science is satan's work or equal to your emotional instincts in terms of merit are JUST the same as Democrats? Please.
Economically, it's more of a mixed bag of course. Even so, the Republicans remain batshit insane on the idea that tax breaks for the wealthy lead magically to job creation. And only one party shits on the poor for being poor at every available opportunity, and has policies it would like to implement to punish them for their 'laziness'. Are they both substantially more corrupt than I'd like them to be? Absolutely. Wall Street has a strangle-hold on both. But one of them is enthusiastically planning on doubling down on the practices that nearly destroyed us and one seems like it maybe could be convinced to be less crazy economically if its base pushed them that way. I make no apology for voting for someone who at least might be convinced, cajoled or bullied by his base to see things my way. The two parties aren't great economically, but are still not "the same." Voting defensively is not the same things as being mind-controlled by the two-party system. Obama, at the beginning of his term, said, "if you want more liberal policies, you have to give me political cover in the base to do that." He's right. Maybe we should start doing that?
Foreign policy-wise? The only difference I can detect is Romney would really love to drop some bombs on Iran, and so would his base. Drone assassinations suck, but since they poll over 60% in terms of popularity, we're getting the assassinations we deserve. We're getting drones regardless, and that sucks, but I can't do anything about that. And we're backing israel mindlessly regardless, and that sucks, but I can't do anything about that. I DO think that invading Iran would be worse than not invading Iran and continuing sanctions. and I DO prefer someone relatively calm-headed like Obama, with a base that pushes for peace as commander-in-chief instead of a wish-wash like Romney in charge, with a base that will be chanting "push the button! push the button! Show them how strong we are!" at every hint of conflict. So again, I vote conservatively (by voting for Obama), because it seems flat out immoral to stack the immorality and carnage of war with Iran on top of the existing immorality and carnage of drone warfare. And we aren't getting a president who will stop all foreign aggression this year. So I vote for the less bad, because it seems so MUCH less bad.
Of course, this only matters in swing states. And if you would have normally voted for Obama, but are voting Green in protest, then you ARE helping Romney. But even there, I fail to see how spoiling the election for Obama from the left, gets the left further. "I enabled a Romney win, ???, Liberal Paradise!" is just not a winning argument to me, and I have yet to see a ??? that's anything but hand-waving and fairy dust. Your vote is a mess. It will be a mess morally so long as western culture is a mess morally. It will be frustratingly binary until the hippies in occupy or their supporters get to filling city councils, mayorships state legislatures and governorships with 3rd party politicians, so americans have a broader pool to pick from when picking experienced politicians for president. And in the meantime, the policy differences between my two choices DO matter. In the end, I choose to vote for a guy who will move it an inch in my direction, rather than 6 inches the other way OR has zero chance of moving it all in the next 4 years. I don't really lose sleep over that decision. My idealism and my pragmatism are NOT mutually exclusive.
And then there's the old, "they're both the same, it's all fucked up, I'm above it." Again, bullshit. Politics is messy. Every time you vote, you vote for policies you want, and policies you don't want. Political groups, especially the Democrats, are built by building coalitions with people who agree on many things, but not everything. Your vote is never now, and will never be, for a candidate that reflects your political views 100% down the line. And especially in this country, you don't get to vote for either of the existing parties without voting for some pretty icky things. And I'm not sure why anyone would suddenly think that they deserve this privilege above anyone else. Ask gays, African-Americans and women how long it took them to get the changes they wanted and how many times it took voting for candidates that had other policies they weren't exactly in love with. Why do you think your fight for a better government should be any easier than theirs? And, as mentioned above, no one has built a viable 3rd party option yet nor has shown how they're using Jill Stein vote this election to launch one. But none of this means the two existing parties are the same.
For you, in particular, they might be relatively the same. If you're not gay, and don't need some basic human rights recognized, they're both the same. If you're not a woman, and don't need some basic protections on when you get to make your own health decisions and when you don't, they're both the same. If you don't really care about the state of the health care system, they're both the same. Because there's only one party talking about gay rights, about contraception rights, about abortion rights, about trying to make the health care system better, and it's not Republicans. It's not even on their agenda, and if it is, it's to tear down rights I feel are important. Their explicit policies with regards to health care was to change nothing. If Obama hadn't been elected, they wouldn't have even talked about it. They don't even recognize that there was a problem. And on the other issues, they're actively trying to time travel back to the 50s and demonize gay marriage, restrict abortion AND, mind-mindbogglingly, contraception and their science committee members think science is the work of Satan. And since I have some skin in the game on the gay rights issue, you're going to have to forgive me if I can't bring myself to vote against my best interests, by voting for anyone but Obama. Who is, again, the only pro-gay rights option that has any chance of affecting my life in a material way. Especially given that Romney is not exactly neutral on these topics. He will actively try and move things the other way. And really, the side that thinks science is satan's work or equal to your emotional instincts in terms of merit are JUST the same as Democrats? Please.
Economically, it's more of a mixed bag of course. Even so, the Republicans remain batshit insane on the idea that tax breaks for the wealthy lead magically to job creation. And only one party shits on the poor for being poor at every available opportunity, and has policies it would like to implement to punish them for their 'laziness'. Are they both substantially more corrupt than I'd like them to be? Absolutely. Wall Street has a strangle-hold on both. But one of them is enthusiastically planning on doubling down on the practices that nearly destroyed us and one seems like it maybe could be convinced to be less crazy economically if its base pushed them that way. I make no apology for voting for someone who at least might be convinced, cajoled or bullied by his base to see things my way. The two parties aren't great economically, but are still not "the same." Voting defensively is not the same things as being mind-controlled by the two-party system. Obama, at the beginning of his term, said, "if you want more liberal policies, you have to give me political cover in the base to do that." He's right. Maybe we should start doing that?
Foreign policy-wise? The only difference I can detect is Romney would really love to drop some bombs on Iran, and so would his base. Drone assassinations suck, but since they poll over 60% in terms of popularity, we're getting the assassinations we deserve. We're getting drones regardless, and that sucks, but I can't do anything about that. And we're backing israel mindlessly regardless, and that sucks, but I can't do anything about that. I DO think that invading Iran would be worse than not invading Iran and continuing sanctions. and I DO prefer someone relatively calm-headed like Obama, with a base that pushes for peace as commander-in-chief instead of a wish-wash like Romney in charge, with a base that will be chanting "push the button! push the button! Show them how strong we are!" at every hint of conflict. So again, I vote conservatively (by voting for Obama), because it seems flat out immoral to stack the immorality and carnage of war with Iran on top of the existing immorality and carnage of drone warfare. And we aren't getting a president who will stop all foreign aggression this year. So I vote for the less bad, because it seems so MUCH less bad.
Of course, this only matters in swing states. And if you would have normally voted for Obama, but are voting Green in protest, then you ARE helping Romney. But even there, I fail to see how spoiling the election for Obama from the left, gets the left further. "I enabled a Romney win, ???, Liberal Paradise!" is just not a winning argument to me, and I have yet to see a ??? that's anything but hand-waving and fairy dust. Your vote is a mess. It will be a mess morally so long as western culture is a mess morally. It will be frustratingly binary until the hippies in occupy or their supporters get to filling city councils, mayorships state legislatures and governorships with 3rd party politicians, so americans have a broader pool to pick from when picking experienced politicians for president. And in the meantime, the policy differences between my two choices DO matter. In the end, I choose to vote for a guy who will move it an inch in my direction, rather than 6 inches the other way OR has zero chance of moving it all in the next 4 years. I don't really lose sleep over that decision. My idealism and my pragmatism are NOT mutually exclusive.
Tuesday, October 09, 2012
Signal Boosting
During many ages there were witches. The Bible said so. The Bible commanded that they should not be allowed to live. Therefore the Church, after doing its duty in but a lazy and indolent way for eight hundred years, gathered up its halters, thumbscrews, and firebrands, and set about its holy work in earnest. She worked hard at it night and day during nine centuries and imprisoned, tortured, hanged, and burned whole hordes and armies of witches, and washed the Christian world clean with their foul blood.
Then it was discovered that there was no such thing as witches, and never had been. One does not know whether to laugh or to cry. Who discovered that there was no such thing as a witch - the priest, the parson? No, these never discover anything. At Salem, the parson clung pathetically to his witch text after the laity had abandoned it in remorse and tears for the crimes and cruelties it has persuaded them to do. The parson wanted more blood, more shame, more brutalities; it was the unconsecrated laity that stayed his hand. In Scotland the parson killed the witch after the magistrate had pronounced her innocent; and when the merciful legislature proposed to sweep the hideous laws against witches from the statute book, it was the parson who came imploring, with tears and imprecations, that they be suffered to stand.
There are no witches. The witch text remains; only the practice has changed. Hell fire is gone, but the text remains. Infant damnation is gone, but the text remains. More than two hundred death penalties are gone from the law books, but the texts that authorized them remain.
-- Mark Twain, Bible Teaching and Religious Practice
Wow, this essay from Mark Twain was fucking beautiful. Where was I educated, that I'm only just now reading this? I'm tempted to assume my mostly-Adventist education neglected a few crucial tomes that are critical of the christian faith. In any case, it is becoming increasingly clear that I have a lot of educating myself to make up for both my upbringing (to some degree) and my last 15 years of intellectual laziness (to a much larger degree). I have a growing list of homework, and Mark Twain's essays have just now rocketed to the top of the list.
The more I learn, the humbler I get. Every big thought that I think can change the world has already been said by someone smarter than me, decades ago. It's astonishing to me how much good and reasonable thinking back in the day has either been ignored or forgotten. In any case, it doesn't matter if I said it first (he said to his inner 5-year-old), what matters is I use my very small megaphone to amplify good and important ideas as best I can. And the congregation said, "well duh."
Monday, October 01, 2012
Status report - Habit
*static, crackling*
*click, click*
- Habit, William James, 1887
The above is very insightful. I'm sure this is something many of you have known for a long time, but I am just starting to understand. I've been railing against habit my whole life like it's a kind of death, and it's made me miserable, frankly, for exactly the reasons expressed above. I routinely agonize over things like bed time, clothing choice, and food. In truth, I think I've been conflating habit in general with habits other people have tried to foist upon me. Interesting to think that if my habits are mine and intentional, it might actually free me up to do other things. As my dad would say, "Well, huh."
Saturday, September 29, 2012
Upon a Dark Horse
New movie review for Dark Horse at Contents May Settle. The reviews themselves are a work in progress, but I'm having fun with practicing them.
Tuesday, September 25, 2012
Mic Check
“The regular early morning yell of horror was the sound of Arthur Dent waking up and suddenly remembering where he was.
It wasn’t just that the cave was cold, it wasn’t just that it was damp and smelly. It was the fact that the cave was in the middle of Islington and there wasn’t a bus due for two million years.
Time is the worst place, so to speak, to get lost in, as Arthur Dent could testify, having been lost in both time and space a good deal. At least being lost in space kept you busy.
He was stranded in prehistoric Earth as the result of a complex sequence of events which had involved him being alternately blown up and insulted in more bizarre regions of the Galaxy than he ever dreamt existed, and though his life had now turned very, very, very quiet, he was still feeling jumpy.”
-- Life the Universe and Everything, Douglas Adams
Lately, it's been hard to explain what's going on in my head without sounding like I'm crazy. I've been through some serious changes in identity recently, and it feels in many ways like I'm still adjusting to it all. To paraphrase the quote above, even though my life has calmed down from some craziness, I'm still feeling pretty jumpy. As much I would love to be instantly adaptable, my brain and body suffer from the same limitations and programming defects as the rest of you mortals and it keeps wanting to return to old habits and resists new ways of thinking. But, as mentioned in my last post, it seems a little gross, or at least self-indulgent, to talk about it anymore. This becomes increasingly clear the more I read OTHER writers droning on and on and on about becoming who they are. Sometimes I think personal development is like that dream you had last night. Fascinating to you, less fascinating to someone who wasn't there to feel it all with you.
This was most recently brought home to me in a review mentioned in passing for the book How Should a Person Be. The work in question is an auto-biographical pseudo-novel about a young artist exploring the question written in the title. The reviews seem to indicate it's something you're going to love or you're going to hate, but the extreme antipathy in the negative reviews is interesting to me. I've been seeing a lot of grumbling about 20-somethings droning on about who they are, and what they're going to be, and to just shut up and pick something already. And to some degree, I get that. Who cares what you decide to be? All people really care about is if you're going to be a dick about it to the people around you in the process.
On the other hand, this is a pretty interesting topic. Haven't we been asking this question in one form or another since we gained sentience when we found that Monolith? Isn't the appeal of religion that it answers that question simply and lets you get on with life? Anyway, however tedious the individual stories of personal growth may seem from time to time, I am, in general, happy that people are at least self-aware enough to ask the question, even if they must drone on about it. And I feel that people asking it at a younger and younger age can only be a good thing. Because in general, I think most people are going to come back to, basically: I want to feel accomplished, and I want to feel like a good person who has friends. Not necessarily in that order.
Which is a long way of saying, one of the things I've been thinking about is who I want to be, and I understand if this question is really of no particular interest to anyone but me. And of course, for me it came back to: I want to feel accomplished and I want to be a good person, in my own definition of those things. What defines a good person we can leave for later, but "how do I feel accomplished?" has been weighing on me. What is the perfect intersection of my potential and my passion? I initially thought it was science (physics/astronomy), but have been seriously second-guessing that decision of late. That feels more like the career I was expected to take, than the career I was really passionate about. I regret nothing about the degree itself, and the critical thinking and problem-solving skills gained from it, but I can't believe I never noticed how little passion I actually have for the nuts and bolts of science until just recently.
So, if what I've done hasn't been working out for me as well as I'd like, what should I do instead? I feel like a teenager all over again trying to figure it out. And my thoughts return to the grandiose delusions I never completely left behind in my teenage years, just let slumber all those years I was in the closet. And now, waking them up and looking at them in the light of day, it astounds me how much of an artistic sensibility I seem to have. I am good with numbers, and occasionally employ logic to good use, but most of the things I seem to want to MAKE are artistic in nature. I want to write poems, and novels, write music to make men weep, draw faces, paint portals to other worlds, to share what I've learned about life, the universe and everything the best I know how. I want to make something beautiful and share it with you. Of course, I have no idea how to monetize any of that in a way that would enable me to live comfortably, although I assume it's unlikely, whatever grandiouse delusions may briefly cloud my view. I think it's enough, for now, to recognize that I want to do it, even if I never share it with more than a few people.
Neil Gaiman once said, more or less, that we owe it to each other to tell each other stories and I really agree with him. So, for the time being, I have contented myself, more or less, that I will continue to plug away at the day job, but will start trying to develop my artistic skills in my off-time. And while I have vague plans to take an acting class, a drawing class and possibly a dance class at sometime in the next year and see how they feel, what I REALLY want to do artistically right now is play piano and write. There are days when all I hear in my head is piano music. And mornings I wake up and sit on the couch reveling in ideas for a new or existing story. I have stories to write and songs to play that give me a rush of emotion just thinking about them. I feel, as I think about how they would go, what I would want the reader/listener to feel as they experience it and I have no idea if I can ever actually make that happen. But I badly want to try.
So, for the time being and as long as it suits me, I am going to work on developing the skills necessary to translate my feelings into a song or a story that might be worth sharing with someone else. It's going to be boring for a while while I work through the basics of the forms, and lord knows I'm going to have to keep the grandiose delusions and corresponding ego in check, but I think it will ultimately be rewarding if I keep at it. I am just really very curious to find out if I am capable of playing a song worth listening to or writing a story worth reading. And honestly, I think it's time I found out.
So, who do I want to be? Among some other things I hope to be a musician and a writer. And somewhere in there, a good person, with friends.
Monday, September 24, 2012
Status Update - input parameters
The altercation with the objectivist pick-up artist got me thinking about the purpose of this blog. Among my many grandiose delusions was an idea to build the readership of this blog somehow by relating bit of things I've learned since coming out of the closet, which, I think, is quite a lot. Which isn't to say I learned nothing in my depressed, closeted years, but the difference between what I think I know now, and what I thought I knew then still sometimes staggers me. And then, I am further staggered to realize just how much it is I don't know yet. So, you know, lots of staggering. But what I said to the opua applies to me as well, who am I to be telling anyone else how to live just yet? Wouldn't any advice from me be more compelling coming from a guy who's been awake and thriving for a decade, instead of just waking up? Probably, in fact. Which is probably why this blog has a readership of about 2 (hi handsome!). In any case, the taste the opua's blog and modus operandi has left in my mouth has left me wanting to make ANYTHING but that kind of blog. So I've ruled out one possibility: I am not here to be your guru or sell you my shit like it doesn't stink.
I am here, I guess, to share what I think I know, but you can take it or leave it. Because I am also partly here to process my thoughts by writing them out orderly. And believe me, I actually do most of this properly offline in my own notebooks. But I have, and will in the future, sometimes decide that I want to write it out here. It's not that I think my thoughts on anything will necessarily help you, or that you should do just what I write about doing, because that's not my decision to make. Some things I might just want said, and out in the world because I think they are important ideas. Mostly, I'll share these things because I want to be better understood by the friends who read this blog, or at least paint a picture of where I'm at. So if someone hasn't heard from me for a while, they can take a gander at one of my semi-coherent posts and go, "ah, I see. He hasn't called because he's been crazy."
I definitely have an opinion about Things, of course. And the more I wake up, and the more I use my critical thinking skills to process my life instead of passively letting it carry me along, the more I have to say about these Things. And while the ongoing midlife crisis that emerged from my coming out process hasn't yet rolled to a stop, I am still making progress and figuring things out. One of the important things I've figured out, for a variety of historical reasons, is that I have just about zero tolerance for manipulative bullshit from other people. I don't like it when people try to define myself or my purpose from the outside. I don't like it when people mislead others for their own benefit. I don't like it when people tell me up is down and then fall on their fainting couches when I call them on it. I don't like people who slap me in the face (verbally or otherwise) and then get huffy and condescending when I'm not nice about it. I especially don't like other people wildly projecting their issues onto me and everyone else instead of admitting that the problem they might be having is with themselves (something I am guilty of more often than I care to admit). And I will not hesitate to call bullshit on these things when I see them. And these things make me angry enough that I have a hard time sugar-coating them, even though that generally gets better results. I don't like getting called on any of this stuff either, but I'd rather get called on my own odious bullshit then have that stench stinking up my relationships indefinitely. So, occasionally, on this blog, I'm going to call some bullshit out. Even if it just amounts to screaming into the ether.
What I'm going to try and do less, not that you could tell from this post, is use this blog as an online diary. I have notebooks to whine into if I really need to. And increasingly, it has been occurring to me that I might process my stupid shit better by writing it into stories, and posting those on Contents May Settle. That way, I get my emotions processed and thoughts examined and at the end, I at least I have a story that may be worth sharing with someone, as opposed to self-indulgent complaints which, in my experience, don't go over so well as dinner conversation.
As for my delusions of grandeur, I will try to leave them a ways behind. I have ambitions still, yes, but I mostly just hope my friends read this blog and understand more about me. Beyond that, I'm not here to develop a following. And if I do, I hope it's because, after a couple or more years of hard work, I've written stories people want to read, music people want to hear, or programs/apps people want to use. Even then, that's just the potential aspirations for this blog. If it only ever acts as an echo to the real and meaningful life I am starting to build, which will hopefully be rich in other ways, if not in money and fame, then it will have served it's purpose.
I am here, I guess, to share what I think I know, but you can take it or leave it. Because I am also partly here to process my thoughts by writing them out orderly. And believe me, I actually do most of this properly offline in my own notebooks. But I have, and will in the future, sometimes decide that I want to write it out here. It's not that I think my thoughts on anything will necessarily help you, or that you should do just what I write about doing, because that's not my decision to make. Some things I might just want said, and out in the world because I think they are important ideas. Mostly, I'll share these things because I want to be better understood by the friends who read this blog, or at least paint a picture of where I'm at. So if someone hasn't heard from me for a while, they can take a gander at one of my semi-coherent posts and go, "ah, I see. He hasn't called because he's been crazy."
I definitely have an opinion about Things, of course. And the more I wake up, and the more I use my critical thinking skills to process my life instead of passively letting it carry me along, the more I have to say about these Things. And while the ongoing midlife crisis that emerged from my coming out process hasn't yet rolled to a stop, I am still making progress and figuring things out. One of the important things I've figured out, for a variety of historical reasons, is that I have just about zero tolerance for manipulative bullshit from other people. I don't like it when people try to define myself or my purpose from the outside. I don't like it when people mislead others for their own benefit. I don't like it when people tell me up is down and then fall on their fainting couches when I call them on it. I don't like people who slap me in the face (verbally or otherwise) and then get huffy and condescending when I'm not nice about it. I especially don't like other people wildly projecting their issues onto me and everyone else instead of admitting that the problem they might be having is with themselves (something I am guilty of more often than I care to admit). And I will not hesitate to call bullshit on these things when I see them. And these things make me angry enough that I have a hard time sugar-coating them, even though that generally gets better results. I don't like getting called on any of this stuff either, but I'd rather get called on my own odious bullshit then have that stench stinking up my relationships indefinitely. So, occasionally, on this blog, I'm going to call some bullshit out. Even if it just amounts to screaming into the ether.
What I'm going to try and do less, not that you could tell from this post, is use this blog as an online diary. I have notebooks to whine into if I really need to. And increasingly, it has been occurring to me that I might process my stupid shit better by writing it into stories, and posting those on Contents May Settle. That way, I get my emotions processed and thoughts examined and at the end, I at least I have a story that may be worth sharing with someone, as opposed to self-indulgent complaints which, in my experience, don't go over so well as dinner conversation.
As for my delusions of grandeur, I will try to leave them a ways behind. I have ambitions still, yes, but I mostly just hope my friends read this blog and understand more about me. Beyond that, I'm not here to develop a following. And if I do, I hope it's because, after a couple or more years of hard work, I've written stories people want to read, music people want to hear, or programs/apps people want to use. Even then, that's just the potential aspirations for this blog. If it only ever acts as an echo to the real and meaningful life I am starting to build, which will hopefully be rich in other ways, if not in money and fame, then it will have served it's purpose.
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