It occurred to me today that quality information has a hefty price tag attached.
I’m an English teacher, and I have been for almost two full decades. During that period of time, to an ever increasing extent, a disparity has been growing between cheap information and expensive information. Cheap information is information that is easy to get and is readily available. Expensive information is harder to find, is of a greater quality, and is more rare. The disparity between cheap and expensive information has played itself out in my classes in the realm of research writing.
I’ve always taught my students, as we’ve studied research writing, the difference between a primary source and a secondary source. The idea that some reference information might be cited by someone else, and that my student’s decision to cite the person citing the information, rather than going to find the original information at its source, is 1) lazy, and 2) a decision to use a secondary source. And I’ve always warned my students about using secondary sources and how it can be dangerous, because we are, in effect, trusting the secondary source and the manner in which they are citing the information from the primary source.
Initially, back in the early 00s, this wasn’t a big deal because the internet back then had yet to become so diluted. But, I’ve had to be more and more diligent in teaching my students about intelligent internet use, especially when it comes to quality research information. At the end of the day, I get the message across to my students, and they understand, and then they (hopefully) carry the understanding into how they consume other parts of the internet.
We must be responsible as we get information from the internet.
But, the philosophical lesson here might be harder for some people, especially those members of our society who used to have trust and faith in the national media machine.
I remember, back in the day, when people watched the nightly news. And, the news that you watched was the result of which of the nightly news anchors you trusted. Did you used to watch the CBS Evening News because Dan Rather was the guy that you trusted? Or, did you prefer the NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw? Perhaps Brinkley? Or Cronkite?
I’m not sure that any level of trust in any particular news anchor, or in any particular news organization, is warranted anymore. I look at most organized news as propagandist. If you don’t –if you have a certain news organization or journalist that you give your allegiance to– you’ve got more trust than I have.
In fact, I’ve become more and more convinced that there are fewer and fewer places these days where you can go to get quality information. Rather, there are plenty of places to go if you want information that has a particular slant to it. And, if you pair this understanding with the knowledge that people tend to be 1) oppositional, 2) naive, and 3) lazy, then you get a situation where “my sources are the only good sources” and “those other sources (especially those that oppose my sources) are bad sources, used by ‘them’ with ‘their slant'”.
Don’t talk with my father-in-law about CNN, and don’t talk to my best friend at work about Fox News.
The other problem with this is that these organizations have become aware of the fact that the public is aware of the fact that they are slanted. And so, faced with the choice to either 1) do something about their slanted peddling of information, 2) deny their reputation, or 3) embrace their reputation, the choice seems obvious, right?!
They’ve drawn the battle lines.
The conservatives don’t watch CNN and the liberals don’t watch Fox News and the rest of us (the most of us) don’t watch either (which is fairly easy), or we watch them both, fully understanding the slant with which each of them do their jobs (which is much more work).
* * *
Take my coffee, for example. I don’t really like the taste of coffee, per se. Rather, I just need something to put my creamer in every morning.
I would estimate that I put two-to-three tablespoons of creamer in the bottom of my coffee mug every morning when I put that mug into the Keurig. It ends up perfect, IMO.
But, would that same amount of creamer work for half a cup of coffee? Would that same amount of creamer work for a gallon of coffee? What about fifty gallons?
This phenomenon is referred to, in psychology, as the just noticeable difference. Could someone with a refined palate detect two tablespoons of creamer dispersed in fifty gallons of coffee?
Because I’m starting to feel like the presence of unbiased information in the world is like two tablespoons of creamer in an ocean of coffee.
* * *
So then, in an attempt to get information without a slant, where’s a person to go to get information that doesn’t come from the radical right or the equally radical left?
Why, we’ll go to social media, of course!
SMH.
Because the quality of the information that you get on social media may not be as slanted (unless your contacts on social media do nothing but pull in video footage from Fox News or CNN or –even worse– Yahoo News), but I wouldn’t call it quality information, either.
And, I swear, people are going to social media to get their news. What do they actually get?
You end up getting the opinions of pop stars or sports heroes or your old friends from high school or your fellow church goers or the other women in your kid’s PTO –> none of these people are experts. They might be opinionated (read: slanted/biased), but they aren’t experts.
So, then, if we can’t trust the media outlets to give us reliable information on whether our government is doing a good job, and we can’t count on our high school football teammates to understand how viruses spread, we are left with only one option –> work.
Remember what I said earlier about people being lazy?
How much work are you going to do to get to the information that has no slant and that comes from experts?
Will you do more work to get to that information than it takes for you to get to the information that A) confirms your previously-held beliefs, and B) makes you feel better?
In a world where Minute Rice seems like a lot of work for a lot of people…
It occurred to me today that our leaders are reflections of us.
If that makes you uncomfortable, let me qualify the statement a little bit to put you at ease.
Every leader, in every situation where you find yourself either 1) being lead, or 2) working as a leader alongside other leaders, reflects the character of either 1) someone being lead, or 2) some other leader in the organization.
Did that help?
What should be occurring to you at this moment is that the above, semi-bold statements are both 1) inflammatory, and 2) absolutely true.
Is it that hard for us to come to terms with the fact that our leaders are more like us than they are different than us? It might be, especially in situations where we don’t like those leaders for what they are, or for how they lead (or maybe for what they require us to do).
Additionally, any person that you’ve ever disliked for whatever reason, is more like you than they are different. 99.9% of your DNA is exactly the same as the DNA of anyone that you’ve ever identified as ‘other’ or ‘them’.
Maybe, you’re just uncomfortable with my opening statement about leaders because you want to be able to disassociate yourself from ‘them’.
But, putting aside for a moment the argument of sameness, the fact remains that leaders come up out of the body of us all, as all leaders do. As such, they are similar to the body of us all, having once been a part of that body. Whether or not they are like us as individuals –like you as a person or like me as a person– they certainly do represent a sameness to some part of the whole of us.
I can prove it to you. I happen to be thinking of a leader right now, one that I don’t particularly like much at all, and I know people, among the group of us being lead by this leader, who are very similar to the person that this leader is. And, interestingly enough, I like these people as people; I just don’t like the certain things about them that make them similar to this leader.
Did you hear what I just did? It’s called the benefit of the doubt. I gave it, in the last paragraph, to people that I know, because that’s what you do. When you get to know someone –their qualities and their faults– it’s easier to give them the benefit of the doubt, because you have grounds for believing that they ought to receive some leeway.
How about a challenge? I’ll wait here while you go find an example of a leader, living or dead, famous or not, who wasn’t representative of the group that they lead, in some way.
Any argument that our leaders don’t represent us as followers breaks down when you concur that we are all more the same than we are different.
* * *
Let’s talk about societal leaders, for a moment.
The quality of leadership in a society reflects the quality of the citizens in that society, in the sense that it is not reasonable for anyone to expect that a corrupt society is going to be able to generate, from some “magical leader machine” somewhere, anybody to lead the citizenry who doesn’t have the taint of the corruption of that society. As civilizations have risen and fallen throughout the history of humanity, those societies have been corrupted through different means. In many of those examples, corrupt leaders are also easily identifiable.
If I pull a spoonful of soup out of a bowl of soup, and I taste it, and it is awful, it is not likely that I am going to continue to sample spoonful after spoonful, operating under some assumption that those spoonfuls, each one as awful as the last, are just misrepresenting what remains in the bowl.
When I was a kid, I was in Cub Scouts, and then Boy Scouts, for a period of about two-and-a-half years. I eventually left Boy Scouts because the man who lead the troop, that I was a part of, was an inconsolable jerk. He was mean to the boys in the troop, he was mean to their parents, he was mean to the other leaders who volunteered alongside him in leading the troop. He cursed to no end, he had zero patience for the boys he was to be mentoring. And so, I left the troop with the permission (and blessing) of my parents.
Or, consider the story that my wife has told me on a number of occasions, about a church leader from her past who ended up divorcing their spouse when that spouse got sick and required more care than the church leader was willing to give.
Or, consider any national leader who might represent themselves in a certain light to get the support of the people, during their rise to power, only to pull off the mask after that power has been grasped, to reveal themselves as truly deplorable people.
Maybe it’s the case that certain leadership positions include a responsibility to which the people in those positions must rise. It’s not okay for those positions to be occupied by people who are unwilling or incapable of being worthy of the office. It’s not okay that they shed the burden of being a proper leader while at the same time taking the privilege that often comes with leadership. It’s not okay that those who are lead by such leaders are subject to the inabilities of people who shouldn’t even be in leadership.
Maybe it’s the case that EVERY leadership position includes a responsibility that good leaders embrace and bad leaders avoid.
That Boy Scout troop leader and that church leader and those national leaders; they are despicable. They are reprehensible, disreputable, and dishonorable.
And they are us.
Because, in big ways and in small ways, we are all leaders. We all have people who are watching us with the intent to follow us, and with that position of power –as inconsequential as it might seem– we all have a responsibility to lead well. The parent must lead well. The office manager must lead well. The site foreman must lead well. The Sunday School teacher must lead well.
Our leaders are reflections of us. If you don’t like my opening statement, don’t look to them to change who they are. As Gandhi once said, “If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change.”
It occurred to me today that, sometimes, you have to persevere.
I have been, for about the past ten years, an avid reader. Of course, as an English teacher with nineteen years under his belt, you would’ve thought that I would’ve been an avid reader for much longer than that. For me, it was always a question of enjoyment.
Then, about ten years ago, I set it as my goal to read all of the works of Stephen King. At the time, King was among a half-dozen authors that I’d read whose works I’d ever actually enjoyed. That journey took me about eight years. I enjoyed every minute of reading all of those books.
During that time, the path was simple. What books have I still not read? Get a copy. Read it. What books have I still not read? Get a copy. Read it.
And then, one day, I was out of books.
And while King is still writing books, he certainly doesn’t write them as fast as I read them and I needed something else.
So, I tried some Pinterest lists like, “What To Read If You Love Stephen King”, or “Stephen King Recommends…” (whether or not he actually ever did), or “If You Love ‘Carrie’, You’ll Also Love…”.
That worked for a little while. But I wasn’t on a clear path. It was piecemeal work, and I often didn’t like what I was reading (even though someone on Pinterest swore that I would).
You see, I work with a guy, a fellow teacher in the English Department, who is a voracious reader. He’s read more books in the last two years than I’ve read in my life. He and I often talk about what we’re reading with each other, and I swear that he finishes a book every two or three days. I can’t keep up with that! I’m jealous of that kind of speed, since I happen to be very particular about my reading –> I will often read passages over two or three times just to fully understand them (no, I’m not a dunce) and I enjoy making sure that I’ve gotten everything off of the page before I turn that page.
The other thing about this fellow of mine that makes me jealous is that he can read anything and seem to enjoy it. He could seriously read about the lifetime development of a character’s skill in basket-weaving and find that to be ‘just riveting’. I’ve taken some of his reading recommendations before, and it’s a crapshoot for me, reading what he recommends.
For me, if it’s not enjoyable, it’s drudgery.
As any good English teacher knows, you do a student a terrible injustice by forcing them to read something that they don’t want to read –> especially when the student is supposedly to have the choice of their book. English teachers should encourage their students to abandon a book, twenty pages in, if it feels like a ‘no-go’, because it’s more important for students to establish a love of reading than it is for them to establish a commitment to the drudgery of finishing something that you’ve started.
Anyway, back to me (if you haven’t read many of my blog posts, it’s all about me).
At some point, probably during my childhood when I didn’t have the rights to keep it from being done to me, I was indoctrinated into this philosophy of ‘if you start a book, you must finish it’. It’s probably the primary reason why I spent so long –as an adult, when no one was forcing me to– not reading.
And, it’s the reason that, still to this day, I have to finish a book once I’ve started it.
It drives my wife nuts, when I start a book that is awful and I complain about it and she tells me to quit the book and get something else, but I don’t.
For, you see, I am on another path and I have to walk this road that I’m on.
About a year ago, I decided to commit to reading all of the Hugo Award winning books. In case you’re not familiar, the Hugo Award is given every year to the year’s best science fiction novel. There are seventy-some of these books, with a new one added every year, to make the task seem more Sisyphean.
Now, the way that this particular reading path is different than the one I was previously on should be obvious. With only a few exceptions, I am reading a different author every time. Heinlein is on there multiple times, and certain other authors have appeared multiple times, but most of these authors are only on the list once.
Right now, I’m stuck in the middle of a four-hundred-page novel that has not been very enjoyable at all. But, I’m on this path, and in my way it lies.
And I guess, here’s what I’m getting at.
Sometimes, life is a drudgery, a struggle, an amount of toil for which we hardly seemed equipped and through which we would never volunteer to go. But, we are –each of us– on a path. The path for me, through the glorious meadows of Stephen King township, was lovely and wonderful and I look back on it with a fondness. The path for me now, as I continue to try to make myself be interested in an interstellar war brewing between two different trading companies, is hard.
It occurred to me today that I’ve been in a bit of a rut, lately.
This will be my forty-second consecutive daily post, if I get it completed and posted on time.
I barely got yesterday’s post done at all.
It’s been hard lately, trying to think of things to write about. I think I’ve been in a rut.
* * *
A little more than two years ago –so, the Spring of 2018– my wife called me on a Sunday afternoon to tell me that she’d gotten our mini-van stuck in an open field. So, I got in my car and headed out to her location to inspect the situation.
Upon arrival, I jumped in the driver’s seat of the van to try my best to get the van unstuck. Living in Michigan, you know how vehicles tend to get stuck in snow and mud, and you get taught how you might be able to ‘rock’ them out, if you are strategic about moving the vehicle forward and then backward and then forward and then backward to the point where your momentum, either forward or backward, can be added to the force of the traction of the tires to just be enough to get you out of being stuck.
So, I rocked the van, forward then backward then forward then backward, but it was no use. I got out, and I asked my wife to get in, and she took over while I went to the front of the van to try to see what was going on.
That was when I discovered the problem. She was in a rut.
Which is to say that the wheels had dug themselves into the mud, through their spinning force, so deeply that the van was aground. The bottom of the van was resting on the ground because the tires were so deeply entrenched in their ruts. As my wife tried to do what I’d just tried to do and I stood in front of the van and watched the tires, spinning pretty freely in their self-made valleys in the muck, I realized that this was quite a mess.
So, we called a friend with a tow strap who came and latched on to the van and pulled us out of our predicament.
That was quite the experience with ruts.
* * *
My wife and I have been married for nineteen years, and together for twenty-six. During that time, we’ve been cautious about getting into ruts with our marriage; going through the motions, doing what needs to be done, day in and day out, following the expected pattern and meeting the needs of the family as they pop up, but not really making any progress. She’s usually the one who notices before I do, because I’m pretty thick sometimes, and she will draw my attention to the fact that things have gotten stale and that we might be in a rut.
So, that’s when we will try something new, to spice things up, but those flash-in-the-pan experiences don’t usually work and we end up in the same pattern of survival, which is no way to be in a marriage. A lot of times, the best way to get out of a rut in a marriage, and to stay out of the ruts in a marriage in general, is communication. When we find that we are in a rut, it’s usually because we’ve gotten away from communicating. I become involved in a project for work, or she becomes busy with her job, or we start consuming too much media, or some crisis with the kids pops up; these things will end us up in a rut.
Luckily, we’ve never been in a rut in our marriage that has required us to ‘call a friend with a tow strap’, which is to say that we’ve never been in a rut that we couldn’t ‘rock our way out’.
* * *
We’ve all been in ruts before. We keep doing what we’ve been doing, because it’s working and nothing’s going wrong and the status quo is okay for us for now, but we can’t stay in those places. Progress requires moving forward, and I’m starting to think that the status quo is just an illusion that keeps people from seeking change. Is it ever really possible to maintain a complex set of circumstances –a system– for any length of time before entropy and change tear it apart?
This is my forty-second consecutive post on my blog. I don’t think anyone is reading any of these anyway, so it wouldn’t be that big of a deal if I just stopped. But, at this point, it’s about the streak. I want to keep this streak going and I think that this mandatory writing has been good for me.
But, I need to get out of this rut. I need to change up my topics.
It occurred to me today that we’ve got some fixes that we need to make, and putting them off has been hurting us.
I have, at many points in my life, been witness to systems not working.
I’m a Notre Dame football fan, and have been for my whole life. During the first decade of the twenty-first century, Notre Dame football was a broken system. And, I remember hearing many times during those years, from different people discussing the subject,
“We need to get back to basics.”
I work in a school district that has struggled for significant stretches of time during my employment with the school district, in different ways. During those stretches, when people have been wondering what ought to be done to make things better, I’ve heard people say,
“We need to get back to basics.”
People say this when something is going wrong and we don’t know why, and normally people only say this when they’re talking about a complex system, since you don’t have to get back to the basics when things are already pretty basic. If my pen isn’t working, I’m not ever going to say that the solution to the problem is that my pen and I need to get back to the basics. After some basic troubleshooting, I’ll likely just throw the pen away and get a new one.
I think our society is at a point that it needs to get back to the basics.
The question then becomes, “What are the basics for a society?”
I can’t pretend to know or understand, but I think that something needs to be done and we can’t keep putting it off.
We need to get back to the basics, because we have a society that’s not working right and it’s time to fix it.
* * *
When you think of what “basic” means, and how to break something that’s complex down to its basic parts, it’s a pretty simple concept. Even the most complex of all systems can be understood and diagnosed by subdivision –> taking what is complex and looking at its subcomponents, and then looking at the subcomponents of each of the subcomponents, until you are able to understand the individual parts that comprise these complex systems. Our American society, as complex as it is in its many, many parts, has a basic foundation to which we must return our attention.
In fact, all societies have the same basic foundation. It’s pretty elementary, when you think about it…
PEOPLE.
For our society, and to a greater extent, our world, to be able to fix what’s wrong, we need to get back to the basics. We need to get back to people. As complex as American society has become, it is still, at its base, about people and their interactions with each other.
This is where America has become broken. We need to get back to being concerned about people.
And not just the people that we like, not just ‘our people’, we need to get back to caring about all people.
There are more than 320 million people in the United States, and each one of them, on each and every day, is interacting with other people. If every one of those people started being about the business of making sure that everyone of those interactions was a kind, friendly, considerate, compassionate, and open-minded interaction, we would have a better society. Because, getting back to the basics for our country has to be about getting back to being about people.
And I’m not just talking about live interactions, either.
Imagine if every one of our interactions with each other, on the internet and on social media, was an attempt at being kind, friendly, considerate, compassionate, and open-minded. In fact, I would dare to say that this is where a lot of the problem is coming from these days. It takes a particularly bold person to be rude, inconsiderate, nasty, and inhumane to a person in a live situation, but any coward can be a jerk on the internet, with very little fear of reprisal.
We need to get back to the basics of being kind to people on-line.
And, unless you’ve been living under a rock lately, we have some problems being kind, friendly, considerate, compassionate, and open-minded in our politics these days. Rather than listening to each other and valuing the ideas that might come from this political group or that political group, we have become confrontational and bigoted against our fellow humans just because they have different political affiliations. Politicians, and their fans, who spew hatred and lies and nastiness at human targets should be shunned, and the politicians who would spew hatred at the politicians who are spewing hatred are just as bad.
We need to get back to the basics of being kind to people in our politics.
One of our biggest problems, both historically and currently, is a tendency to treat people differently than we would prefer to be treated, based on how different they are from us. I feel like this is probably one of the stupidest approaches to handling one’s interactions with the people around, because for every perceived difference that I might have with someone else, there is ALWAYS more that I have in common with them than what makes us different. We are not different –> we are the same. That should govern how we interact with each other. If I’m going to legitimize, in my mind, mistreating another human being because I think they’re different than me, I’M JUST WRONG.
We need to get back to the basics of being kind to people who are different than us.
* * *
Our world is hurting, and it’s broken, and the system is so complicated that it’s hard to figure out what is working well and what is not working at all. In situations when it’s hard to know what to do to fix the problems, we need to get back to the basics. In America, we need to get back to being kind, friendly, considerate, compassionate, and open-minded with each other.
It occurred to me today that we aren’t even sure what the real problem is.
I was on Facebook earlier today and I saw a coworker of mine in an argument with a former student of ours about the George Floyd tragedy.
As you no doubt are aware, the events of May 25th in Minneapolis, resulting in a man’s death while in police custody, have sparked, once again, the national debate about race relations and police brutality in the United States.
But, this argument that I noticed on Facebook had a bit of a different spin on it.
The student, an intelligent young man for as long as I’ve known him, was arguing that this case isn’t an issue about race at all, but rather, it’s an issue about the abuse of power.
Which got me to thinking.
What is power? Why do people want it so badly? Why does it tend to change people who have it? What is life like without it? How is power related to race relations?
Some of these questions might not have easy answers, but while I was thinking about how race relations and racism are related to power, it occurred to me, as I’m sure it has occurred to most people, that racism has an inherent connection with the the question of who holds power and who lacks power and who is abusing their power.
I’ve often heard rioting –like that which has been occurring in Minneapolis for the last four nights, like that which is now occurring, as I write this, in cities all over the country– is a psychological response to a feeling of powerlessness. The people who riot are without options to express their frustration and and hopelessness, and so they are attention-seeking in a way that works when their voices and opinions and concerns are left unanswered through other means.
Additionally, people who look at rioting as non-sensical or counter-productive tend to be people who have very rarely experienced powerlessness to the same extent that the underprivileged in our society experience it.
You never see rich middle-aged white guys rioting, do you?!?!
I can certainly imagine being without power for a prolonged period of time and then feeling like I wanted to lash out. What I can’t imagine is having to live like that. Over and over again.
All the time.
Powerlessness is a real problem in our society. The question is, “How do fix the feeling, that the underprivileged have, that they are without options, without power, without a voice?
People need to feel empowered. They need to feel like there is justice. They need to feel that they have some control over their lot in life and their course into the future. When people feel empowered, when they feel like they have a voice and that voice is heard, they participate in the societal processes that (we believe) will move us forward into progress.
You don’t see voter registration initiatives in the suburbs, do you? The people in the suburbs already feel empowered, so they register to vote and they take part in the other processes that continue to guarantee that their voices are heard. The citizens in the metropolitan neighbors, who are often ignored, don’t participate in the process and the self-fulfilling prophecy –whereby they are voiceless and powerless– continues.
That’s on a good day.
On a bad day, their voices are actively ignored by abusers of power.
What people want in this world, and what they seem to so often be denied, is justice. The idea that injustice, especially injustice that results from abuses of power, spark the deep feelings of powerlessness that lead to rioting.
Where is the justice when the powerless have no voice, and even when they do have a voice, it is ignored?
When power is abused, so that those in power can stay in power and so that those without power will remain powerless, justice is denied.
Do you happen to know of anyone in the United States right now, beholden with an immense amount of power, who also happens to be a racist? Anyone? Do you happen to know of anyone in the Unites States, maybe even the same person as you were just thinking of, who has a lot of power and misuses that power?
The examples of power abused seem to be so numerous as to stagger the mind. The problem with this is that those abuses of power don’t bother people with their own power in the same way that they bother the people without power.
Empowered people view abuses of power with (maybe) heightened levels of concern.
The disenfranchised in our society view abuses of power, especially abuses of power at the highest levels, as confirmation that the system is corrupt and that justice doesn’t actually exist for everyone.
The last three words of the Pledge of Allegiance are particularly stinging as I end this post, thinking about George Floyd. I doubt them in times like these.
It occurred to me today that you have to be careful what you wish for.
SECTION 1:
I just read a story on a local news website about a boy who set fire to a bucket with kittens inside of it.
Yesterday, I watched a video of a police officer with his knee on a man’s neck while the man called out for help. The man later died.
Last month, I watched a video where two men chased down a third man while he was jogging and shot him to death.
And the problem with this list is, I could keep adding to it without end. They never stop coming, these stories that I’ve heard about people who seem to be unhinged, lately. I’m sure that you’ve seen the videos and you’ve heard the stories and you’ve wondered WHAT THE HELL is the world coming to?
SECTION 2:
Video games where our children kill each other for sport.
Abortions performed in the name of convenience.
Our elderly thrown away like a used paper cup.
Middle-aged balding fat white guys shooting rare animals on foreign continents in the name of sport.
Human trafficking on a global scale, people being bought and sold.
Animals bred to be vicious killers so they can be forced to fight other animals.
And on, and on, and on.
But, here’s the deal: if you find yourself disturbed by anything in Section 1, but you would condone anything in Section 2, I’ve got some news for you…
We got what we wanted. We brought this on ourselves.
We should have been more careful with what we’ve been wishing for.
Our American society does not value life, and you might be part of the problem.
If we are to undervalue any life, then we undervalue all life. If you don’t like that stance, chances are you don’t like that stance because you have some particular type of life that you’ve decided to not value and I’ve offended you.
Too. damn. bad.
Here’s the bottom line: we should either decide that we are going to stop all of the fake outrage, when our society and its members do something to demonstrate their lack of value for life, or we need to start to walk the road that heads back to the place where we value life.
All life.
The irate new broadcaster who is angered by the school shooting, who put his elderly mother in a nursing home last month just so he wouldn’t have to deal with her any longer –> his outrage is fake.
The PETA activist with three abortions in her past –> her outrage is fake.
The pro-life demonstrator who bets on dog fights on Saturday nights –> his outrage is fake.
The father who plays video games with his kids where they team-up to shoot the enemy with sniper rifles, who then rails against human trafficking at church on Sundays –> his outrage is fake.
STOP THE HYPOCRISY!!
* * *
Of course, the outrage is easier than the change that will be necessary for us to get to the place that there doesn’t need to be any more outrage. Yes, all of that stuff in Section 1 is horrible stuff, and any human with a soul would be mortified by those stories, but that’s the easy thing to do.
Somehow, I’m thinking that this isn’t going to be one of those easy fixes.
So, how do we stop the devaluing of life? We are probably going to have to start out with some baby steps. Maybe those baby steps could lead us to bigger steps one day, but at this point, I’d take any progress.
Maybe the baby step should be to value all human life, or maybe the baby step could be to end all animal abuse, or maybe the baby step could be to stop the sale of people. We’ve got to start somewhere. Our failure to do anything, just because we are daunted by the enormity of the task, doesn’t excuse us.
No one travels a thousand miles without taking some small steps. When you are in a hole, step one is to stop digging.
* * *
Now, don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean to be an extremist. I’m not opposed to travel by car because of all of the air-born insects that are savagely slaughtered by automobiles every moment of every day. I am still going to smack that mosquito on my arm at the campfire even though that mosquito is just trying to feed her kids. I still set mouse traps in the opening between my kitchen cabinets and my stove because I can’t have that going on in the same place where I prepare my dinner.
And perhaps, that pegs me as just another hypocrite.
But, we have to start drawing some lines in the sand. We have to start by making some decisions about the behaviors that we aren’t going to tolerate any more. And, let’s not put this in the hands of the politicians, shall we? They seems to be mostly incapable these days and they haven’t been the source of real change in our society at any point anyway.
This is going to have to be something that each of us decides to stand against.
It occurred to me today that I might be a coward, and I didn’t know until now.
Call me crazy, but I don’t want to go out, as my state’s restrictions start to ease. I’m not interested in traveling all over tarnation just for the fun of it. I don’t want to get close to people if I haven’t been close to them for the past ten weeks.
I think I would rather stay inside and see what happens to those people who are running around like chickens with their heads cut off after what amounted to a pittance of time under quarantine. Am I wrong? Am I the only one thinking that it really wasn’t that bad, to have to be isolated from the world for a while?
To be honest, I kind of liked it (but don’t tell anyone).
Of course, my wife and I have both been working from home, and our children have been safely at home with us, and we haven’t been adversely affected by the pandemic in the same way that many people have. I can certainly understand people wanting to get out from under the quarantine so that they can do what’s necessary for them to survive.
But, something tells me that it’s not the case that all of these people are now running around, fighting for their survival.
Does anyone reading this know what a red shirt is? If you’re a Star Trek fan, you probably do (and if you are, check out THIS POST about Spock and Kirk). The red shirts, in the original Star Trek series, from the late 60s, were the no-name crew members of the Enterprise, wearing red shirts, who were bound to be dead by the end of the episode. They would get beamed down to the planet first, or they would end up reporting to an emergency somewhere on the Enterprise first, and BAM! Dead red shirts. You didn’t know about them as characters, so you really didn’t care.
Is it wrong of me to agree with George Takei (Lieutenant Sulu), thinking of the people running out into the post-quarantine world as ‘red shirts’? I think I’ll watch the numbers and the red shirts before I start making decisions about what my family’s going to be doing out in public in the near future.
Am I a coward? I think some people around me, watching me, so reserved in my return to the world, would say I am a coward. They talk about how contagious COVID-19 is and how low the mortality rate is and I think about the numbers that I’ve been focusing on: approximately 350,000 people dead worldwide, more than a quarter of those deaths occurring in my country. I think about the word “asymptomatic” and how dangerous it is that people are carriers of the virus and they don’t even know it.
I prefer to think of my approach as caution.
But, as I often say, extremes are to be avoided and “in medio stat virtus”. So, the other extreme, I suppose is the hermit who would stay inside until the coast is clear and the vaccine becomes available. I understand that this extreme is as unfortunate as the other.
So, we find a middle ground, I guess, by doing what we need to do, out in the world, while also taking precautions to protect ourselves and each other. My wife made masks, along with some of the other ladies in our church, and each of the five of us in our family has a couple of different masks to use and we’ve been washing our hands more often and we’ve been maintaining a social distance from other people when we do go out.
But here’s where I start to get a little nervous all over again –> I think at this point, I am more afraid of other people than I am afraid of the virus. The virus is going to do what the virus is going to do, but the people who carry that virus around and aren’t doing anything to keep others from being infected makes me start to question humanity. Stack on top of that the people I know who are making mask-wearing a political issue and who think that the virus is a hoax and who think that those of us who are concerned are sheep being controlled by some overarching conspiracy.
They scare me more than the virus does.
Maybe, we should all be more scared of humanity than we are of this virus? How’s that for being extremist?
I mean, how many people have died as victims of hate crimes in America? How many people have been murdered in America? How many senseless deaths have happened in America because of the conscious choices of humans who shouldn’t have gone so far?
It occurred to me today that I am not sure about America anymore.
There are a number of reasons why this is true, but one of them is the two-party system.
My children and I were having a conversation recently about the Constitution. We were cleaning and rearranging in our library (yes, we have a library) and we came across some copies of the Constitution that I’d purchased years ago, one for each of the kids to have at some point. So, we started talking about the Constitution and talking about the foundations of the country. Eventually, we got around to discussing politics. One of my children ended up asking, “Why are there only two choices for a president?”
So I explained to them that there are more than two choices, but that America has been a two-party system for a very long time and that the other candidates –like Darrell Castle, the candidate that I voted for in 2016– never end up getting enough votes to win.
So, then we started talking about options and what does one do when you don’t like either of the options and what would it be like if you only had two options in other situations. Imagine a restaurant with only two items on the menu or a clothing store with only two different blouses for sale.
Basically, discussions like these in our house always end up leading to a bunch of questions –many without answers.
So, I told my children that the things that exist in the world that no one understands, or even appreciates, many times exist because no one has thought of a better way to do it. Ideas, especially better ideas, lead to better ways of doing things. I was hoping to inspire them to start to look at the world as a place where progress is often possible, with better ideas and better approaches.
Then, even more recently, I was talking to my father-in-law about my disgust with the two-party system and how I wish it were different and he asked me about how it would work. I said, “I don’t know how it would work.” We never really got anywhere from there.
I wish I could have answered him with some intelligent ideas.
Now, my family can’t be the only family that’s asking questions about the way things are. We can’t be the only ones that wonder why there can’t be a better way.
John Adams once wrote that “a division of the republic into two great parties … is to be dreaded as the great political evil.”
George Washington, in his farewell address at the end of his final term as President, described two-party politics as “a frightful despotism”.
If polarized, two-party politics was NOT what the founding fathers had in mind, how did we end up here? And, what can we do to change the situation?
It occurred to me today that what we see going on around us, in a lot of ways, is a refinement process.
I’ve noticed many of the people, who I have for many years been associating with, who have, in the current circumstances of our world, changed in the way that they are dealing with things. Normally, positive and happy people turning vengeful and negative and dark over the last few months. I can’t even tell you how many people I’ve recently been snoozing or blocking on social media because all they seem to have to say these days is poisonous drivel.
It makes me wonder whether or not the vast majority of people are, most of the time, just pretending to be something they’re not. Most of the time, circumstances in America are fairly pleasant, and these ‘friends’ of mine are able to keep up the facade, as long as their level of discomfort is relatively low. But, when the heat is on, people fall away from the civil agreement –that we are all going to behave ourselves– pretty damn quickly.
Now that I’ve come to think of it, I don’t think you ever really get to see the true quality of a person if you don’t ever see that person under stress. I’ve noticed that people tend to be responding to the difficulties that we’ve been facing in either positive or negative ways. I have counted myself surprised on more than one occasion recently to have encountered people, who I normally would have considered pretty positive people, who are turning sour in the midst of our current hardships.
* * *
They say that you can’t ever really know how pure gold is until you melt it down; the temperature at which gold becomes liquid is about 1900 degrees Fahrenheit. So, my gold wedding ring isn’t going to melt on the hottest of days under normal circumstances while I’m wearing it around town. However, if you heat it up enough, it will melt.
When metal is subjected to extreme heat and is melted, what rises to the top of the molten metal is skimmed off the top as impurities, leaving a more refined metal product. Through this process, supposedly, gold is able to be purified to the point where it is 99.5% pure gold.
But, it doesn’t sound like much fun for the gold.
* * *
So, this hasn’t been anybody’s idea of a picture-perfect year thus far. You could even go so far as to describe this year as ‘extreme’, like ‘melting gold at 1900 degrees extreme’. Maybe, that’s what’s going on with the people around me that I see who seem to be losing their normal grip on reality. Something different rises to the top when they are put to the test.
And I’m in the same boat.
For me, my reaction to the circumstances we’re in right now has been a little different, although I have most certainly been tempted to jump on the negativity train just recently.
For me, I’ve started questioning things.
Psychologically, the term ‘cognitive dissonance’ comes to mind (check out Festinger’s Cognitive Dissonance Theory for more information). As soon as we are made to notice that our beliefs and opinions are out of whack with reality, we are motivated to do whatever is necessary to bring these back into alignment. People are not meant to live in a life where their beliefs don’t match up with reality. They will often go to great extremes to bring these into a balance.
So, how do people go about relieving the pressure of cognitive dissonance? Well, the three major approaches, according to the theory, are 1) change our behaviors to bring them into alignment with reality, 2) justify our behaviors so that the mismatch between them and reality is more tolerable, or 3) ignore or deny what we are being told about reality.
The situation is quite horrible, when you come to think about it: we’ve been running around, operating under a false sense of security, that has been shattered. So, what do we do with the idea that we are living in a world that can be significantly disrupted by a global viral infection event? To become comfortable with our circumstances once again, we need to change, justify, or ignore.
Changing our behaviors to bring them into alignment with reality, as an approach to relieving our cognitive dissonance, would include things like following the advice of medical experts, doing what is recommended to stay safe out in public, etc..
Of course, we can also justify our behaviors. I’ve heard plenty of justifications from plenty of people from a variety of different groups. Each of them has their own justification for explaining the difference between what they say and do and what reality looks like.
But, I think the most dangerous way to go about dealing with this particular situation is the third approach –> denial.
If I have to block one more person on social media who has posted something about the COVID hoax, I am going to LOSE MY MIND!!!!
* * *
I guess, when it’s all said and done, everybody is just trying to do the best they can with what’s happening. I just think some people are doing a better job of adapting to the situation than others. When the heat gets turned up, and we all reach our melting point, what impurities have bubbled to the surface in your life?
It Occurred To Me Today 