Redacted!!!!

Warning, possible less than appropriate joke coming. (but it's one of my favorites)

The Sadist and the Masochist meet in a bar.
The masochist says to the sadist "hurt me".
The sadist replies "No"

On a more serious note, how does one punish a malignant narcissist?
More importantly, how does one punish a rich, famous, powerful malignant narcissist?

Redact them from the history books.

right now

10 years from now

100 years from now.

That would be my new favorite joke.

living in every time

I was thinking about what technology has done to or for us,our ability to experience different times/cultures/etc due to technology allowing us to escape our own lives while learning more from the lives of others.  It should help us empathize.  It should help us understand all sides of a situation, both historical and epic and small and individual.

If I compare our current technological ability to illustrate events in full color to oral history and books and literature, I must admit that it is faster and capable of showing us more viewpoints than more traditional story-telling.  The oral histories were always stopped by the death of the losers--unless a child or two remembered a story and went on sharing it as bedtime stories instead of community tradition.  Books, which can remain less changing than oral tradition, are always from a specific perspective.  You can read dozens of books on one event and get a more realistic viewpoint, but that can take a very long time.

But our current movies, while fast, allowing us to watch everything on a subject in a matter of weeks if we are eagerly researching a subject, can bring a level of realism to the story that may not be well deserved. 

I remember loving Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The way the stuff became real even when it was nothing like what really happened was both shocking and sad.  I not only cried when they died bravely in the movie, but also when I read other versions and realized they were just more robbers from that time period and that no one knew if  or how they died.

We are currently living in strange times, very strange, because each of us is able to experience a variation of every time and all times, every culture and all cultures that have ever existed.  We have so much more ability to understand and empathize with people living with different circumstances than we are.  We can see the humanity of people by watching love stories and family stories and loss stories of anyone, from cave men to subtitled movies of ancient warriors in distant lands, to stories of regular ordinary people living in big cities in poverty, or wealth, small towns in middleclass heaven or deeply isolated poor people in places not even populated enough to call rural.

First radio allowed us to hear people sing and musicians play, stories read, plays inacted and conversations blasted out at us.  Instead of thousand's of people  hearing a live performance of  someone or something when radio was new, hundreds of thousands could be listening now.

Then we developed the ability to record it, and the number of individuals goes up, not just to thousands at that time but to potentially billions over hundreds of years.  One performance could become a cultural keystone for generations. (Don't believe it--think Wizard of OZ, I've never met anyone that hasn't seen it--it came out in 1938)

When we add movies, cartoons even for all of us very visual learners, what at one moment, the advent of dinosaurs through fossil finds was amazing to a few dozen archeologists became a major fascination by children and oldsters alike when a coin was deposited into a crankable machine with cartoon dinosaurs--being ridden by little cave boys.  (maybe the next introduction to such a major find should be more accurate, but I'm not at all sure that carbon dating was available with those first bone, and there are still people that don't believe they were that long ago--their own world view doesn't allow for such an old world.)

Now, a person doesn't have to be in a war to know what happened.  Movies, with sound and dramatic story lines tell us about brave heroes and their loving girlfriends, separated--temporarily or permanently--by the war effort.  It's loud.  It's deadly.  It was relatively bloodless till the filmmakers in the 1970s had their way with directing and special effects.

Many wish that the blood and guts were not added.

Indeed, I think that maybe we all wish the blood and guts could be removed from real war.

Or remove war, from movies, from books, from life.  That would certainly be something but apparently our brains like to see action.  We like the noise, we like the gore, and we like the stories.

But we don't all process them as if they were real.  Is that us protecting ourselves?  Is it denial?  Is it a character flaw that many of us are incapable of seeing the horror that is occurring to those that are not ourselves and our families?  In a war movie, we cry when the sidekick is killed, or worse, the hero, but we watch as they kill dozens or even hundreds without once thinking--oh, those poor young men, those poor families...  The actual soldiers are not so sheltered from those thoughts.

Technology like the internet, now allows us to not just see the latest movies, but to google things; things made by major journalistic providers and things made by individuals.  We can see the local version and the version from across the sea.  We can listen to the words of people that think like we do and listen to the words of people that we were raised to automatically think we are wrong.

If it isn't in our native tongue, we can find it subtitled, or hit the button for translate.

We now have the ability to live in every time-in every country, in every culture--vicariously.

I know that vicarious is not quite the same as live, but neither is memory.  Yet we value our memories and learn from them.  Sometimes we learn from our own saved memories decades after the original event occurred that was stored in our little organic brains.

I can remember things that meant little or nothing at the time, and find that suddenly I learned something--as if my brain stored that information until I was ready to grasp the implications.  I can't begin to tell you how many times I've pulled some trivial nugget from childhood out and turned it into the solution to a problem--then had to thank a long dead relative or long our of touch friend for having shared that nugget.

The secret to happiness is to remain present.  But I think few of us can pretend that we are only influenced by the present. We live in the present, and hopefully do so mindfully, but our memories have influence.  And books and movies and news articles and odd internet searches end up in our memories.

I have my memories when I am alone.  And I have access to all the knowledge and emotion and beauty and compassion the world has ever known--either as an already present memory or as a potential memory just waiting to be searched for, examined and stored.

Technology and memory gives me face of Martin Luther King as he made his "dream" speech.  And it gives me movies and newsreels if I want to try to understand war.  It gives me interviews of people that experienced things I never did and never could and in truth would never want to.

So why aren't we all more empathetic and compassionate?

Are we desensitized to the ugliness and the beauty equally?

Are we becoming like the spoiled children that are sick of unwrapping Christmas gifts and grab an empty box and play in it or start tearing up our new toys?

There is an uncertainty about who we are when we can experience so many stories, when we can see so many other stories that are nothing like our own.

There is something very safe and comfortable about certainty--call it faith if you prefer.  Faith that your religion is the only right one.  Faith that you morals are right and your world view is right and your family is the right kind of family.

All the available information out there places all that faith in our own rightness in a funny light.  Questions our "only us" beliefs.  Throws mud at our heroes and shows the one-way-cat-skinner a thousand other ways.

Leaders want to censor what children can see--not just smut and violence but comparative religion and multicultural exploration.  We want OUR children to carry forward OUR culture and OUR beliefs.  We aren't satisfied with them carrying forward our gene pool.  And they never ask themselves--did my parents want me to stay on the farm?  carry on the family business?  join the little church in the vale where generations had attended.

A little funny, really.  A nation full of technology, massive information available, filled with 324 million people, only 5 million of whom are indigenous, trying to maintain ties with thousands of places and times.  And 80 percent of those people's ancestors chose to come here.

They chose to change.

They decided that, for what ever reason, where they were born was NOT the right place and NOT the right way to live.

So here we are, living together but separately with promises of Rights.

Rights to live the way we think is right----as long as it doesn't interfere with anyone else's Right to live the way they think is right.

So, learn, empathize, imagine being one of those bit players in a movie or imagine being the parents or child of our newest supervillain criminal.  Imagine being an elephant in the Serengeti or a dinosaur born 62,999,999 years ago.  Imagine what they world will be like in 5 years or what it was like 10 years before you were born.

Make a meal without using any technology more modern than a Viking or a caveman.
Dress like a pirate or a Polynesian in 1402.
Teach yourself to read ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics or Sanskrit or modern Japanese.
Compare art from Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Europe and South America in 1200 CE.

And about being right---everyone thinks they are right.  No one (over the age of 20) tells themselves,  I'm going to choose the wrong way to live.

There really are an infinite number of ways to live, and as long as you don't steal anyone elses RIGHTS, they are all right.