I have been accused of anthropomorphizing pets, trees, dolls, toys, wild animals, stuffed animals and food sources. It is always stated as if I am silly and ridiculous but sweet, and probably crazy.
The way I understand this fine word, is that we silly folk are giving animals, etc,etc, human traits, feelings, beliefs, needs, thoughts and behaviors that they can't possibly have because they are not human. (Circular, isn't it)
I get what they are saying. I understand that I can't read the mind of a goat. But I do know that those naturalists (not the naked ones) that watch a species for a long time, frequently find behaviors that seem both caring and meaningful. There seem to be attachments to other individuals. There seems to be education of their young, and protection of their young and...playing.
But I'm probably just anthropomorphizing.
The real question is, did we anthropomorphize ourselves?
Have we been separating ourselves from other species based on facts, or wishful thinking, or did we just make it up from whole cloth to explain why our destructiveness, selfishness and greed is not a problem--we deserve to act like that---because we aren't animals, we are human. At one time, we even argued about whether women were human vs just anthropomorphized, or the actual possibility that other races were human--and too many argued against on that one also.
We use language to separate ourselves from others, but we don't all speak one language or even all speak with our mouths and tongues. And some of our language skills are pretty rudimentary. So perhaps what we do is communicate--only every species communicates, even plants.
We use our problem-solving abilities as proof of our humanness, while calling beaver dams and chimp tools and wasp nests instinct. (are we also using instinct, but too arrogant to admit the possibility?)
We say only we can remember the past-but recent internet videos document animals reuniting after years and obviously recognizing each other and seeming excited, even joyful to see each other.
We can empathize, (use that seldom enough) but every depressed person with a pet knows the comfort of their furry or feathered friend becoming more emotionally demonstrative at that time.
We claim we are heroic, self-sacrificing, altruistic, but truly, has anyone NOT heard of an animal giving its life to save another?
And Mourning? Mourning seems universal, though they seem better at moving on unless their loss was the last one in their family--no matter what species. Nothing sadder than a spouse dying within the year their mate dies, if not, perhaps the dog or cat or swan that suddenly is alone and can't move on--at least not on this plane, is at least as significant a sign of mourning a terrible loss.
Perhaps we need to quit trying so hard to separate the human species from the rest of life. Wouldn't we all be better off if we found a new word to describe those traits that make us all better--make all life better, make all species better?
So many words to describe our best selves; loving, kind, compassionate, caring, open, honest, thoughtful, capable, joyful, purposeful, meaningful, curious, empathetic, determined, energetic, excited, happy, sad, mournful, comforting, comfortable, demonstrative, heroic, self-sacrificing, relaxed, sleepy, beautiful, soulful, and on and on and on.
And all of those words we feel---and all of them describe other forms of life.
So do we need to lose the word "anthropomorphize".
Should we maybe just accept we are alive and full of meaning and purpose because we are alive.
Is life what makes us special?
Is that the only word we need?
Sunday, August 28, 2016
Sunday, August 21, 2016
Stereotypical Thinking.
If you consider yourself to be smart or thoughtful or a free-thinker, you might have noticed the canned responses that occur frequently in some situations.
Take--the burqa or burka or--spell it how you will--the western response is usually a put-down of the women wearing it because they are "being controlled by men", "giving away their power as women" "not liberated" etc, etc,.
If those same women were walking down the same street in bikini's, they would be called "sluts", "exhibitionists" " only interested in the attention of men" and "superficial".
The problem is not the women, whether veiled from head to toe or naked as a jaybird in time square.
The problem is the way we humans like to judge each other based on as few facts as possible.
Judgement, while necessary to survival can be overused.
Not every situation, person, idea or thought requires us to make a judgement--and as night follows day--pronounce sentence.
For one thing, if personal choice is actually considered a good thing, what anyone else thinks about that choice is totally unconcerning.
Blue hair, sleeve tattoos, primer-only cars, wild prairie lawns, tomatoes in the rose garden--choice--if you don't care for it, don't do it. And shut-up about how unnatural, gaudy, low-class, undignified, or unsophisticated they are.
There really is more than one way to skin a cat (don't even look at my cats with this in mind)
We were all raised to learn the difference between right and wrong. My mother was the first to tell you there is a right way and a wrong way to do everything. How to boil an egg, how to sew a hem, how to frost a cake, how to plant corn---and fashion? No white shoes after labor day. No cowboy boots with dresses. No jeans at church. No bra straps showing---ever, ever, ever. Always wear socks or if over 12, always wear hose. Never put black and brown together. Red and pink clash. Match the color of metal of your jewelry. Match the color of your shoes and purse.
My father was more of a no rules man. He solved the fashion dilemma by just wearing nothing but work uniforms--to everything. In the world of right way and wrong way, that was wrong. And he was ok with that. But if something was broken--he could fix it, though often not in my mother's "right" way.
I think, maybe the right and wrong we need to worry about is whether our action actually took something away from someone else. Taking from another--whether their life or their time or their belonging or their opportunity is harm. No harming for personal gain. (That covers my right and wrong rather well.)
Most of the judgements we make about things come from stereotypical thinking. That is easy thinking--dependent, not on actual reasons but upon truth by popular vote.
This type of thinking, with no objective research as given us such gems of knowledge as:
Take--the burqa or burka or--spell it how you will--the western response is usually a put-down of the women wearing it because they are "being controlled by men", "giving away their power as women" "not liberated" etc, etc,.
If those same women were walking down the same street in bikini's, they would be called "sluts", "exhibitionists" " only interested in the attention of men" and "superficial".
The problem is not the women, whether veiled from head to toe or naked as a jaybird in time square.
The problem is the way we humans like to judge each other based on as few facts as possible.
Judgement, while necessary to survival can be overused.
Not every situation, person, idea or thought requires us to make a judgement--and as night follows day--pronounce sentence.
For one thing, if personal choice is actually considered a good thing, what anyone else thinks about that choice is totally unconcerning.
Blue hair, sleeve tattoos, primer-only cars, wild prairie lawns, tomatoes in the rose garden--choice--if you don't care for it, don't do it. And shut-up about how unnatural, gaudy, low-class, undignified, or unsophisticated they are.
There really is more than one way to skin a cat (don't even look at my cats with this in mind)
We were all raised to learn the difference between right and wrong. My mother was the first to tell you there is a right way and a wrong way to do everything. How to boil an egg, how to sew a hem, how to frost a cake, how to plant corn---and fashion? No white shoes after labor day. No cowboy boots with dresses. No jeans at church. No bra straps showing---ever, ever, ever. Always wear socks or if over 12, always wear hose. Never put black and brown together. Red and pink clash. Match the color of metal of your jewelry. Match the color of your shoes and purse.
My father was more of a no rules man. He solved the fashion dilemma by just wearing nothing but work uniforms--to everything. In the world of right way and wrong way, that was wrong. And he was ok with that. But if something was broken--he could fix it, though often not in my mother's "right" way.
I think, maybe the right and wrong we need to worry about is whether our action actually took something away from someone else. Taking from another--whether their life or their time or their belonging or their opportunity is harm. No harming for personal gain. (That covers my right and wrong rather well.)
Most of the judgements we make about things come from stereotypical thinking. That is easy thinking--dependent, not on actual reasons but upon truth by popular vote.
This type of thinking, with no objective research as given us such gems of knowledge as:
- Red heads have hot tempers.
- All blonde women are dumb.
- All red heads are sluts.
- Christians are homophobic. They are blinded by God and will recruit you if you go near them.
- All politicians are philanders and think only of personal gain and benefit.
- If I wear Goth clothing I'm a part of a rock band, depressed, or do drugs-but probably all three.
- Girls are only concerned about physical appearance.
- Guys are messy and unclean.
- Men who spend too much time on the computer or read are geeks.
- Men who are not into sports are 'gay.
- All librarians are women who are old, wear glasses, tie a high bun, and have a perpetual frown on their face.
- Girls are not good at sports.
- All teenagers are rebels.
- All children don't enjoy healthy food.
- Only anorexic women can become models.
- Women who smoke and drink do not have morals.
- Men who like pink are effeminate.
- All Blacks are great basketball players.
- All Asians are geniuses.
- All Indians are deeply spiritual.
- All Latinos dance well.
- All Whites are successful.
- Asians have high IQs. They are smarter than most in Math and Science. These people are more likely to succeed in school.
- African Americans can dance.
- All Canadians are exceptionally polite.
- French are romantic.
- All Asians know kung fu.
- All African American men are well endowed.
- Italians are good lovers.
- All Muslims are terrorists.
- All white people don't have rhythm.
- All Blacks are lazy.
- All Asians are sneaky.
- All Hispanics don't speak English very well or not at all.
- All Jewish people are greedy, selfish money hungry people.
- Caucasians can't dance.
- Russians are violent.
- All Americans are cowboys.
- All Italians are stylish and sophisticated. They are usually painters, sculptors or fashion designers.
- Germans are Nazis or fascists.
- All Asians are Chinese.
- All Asians speak Pidgin English.
- All Native Americans love to gamble.
- All Middle easterners hate America.
- All Italians are good cooks.
- The people of Netherlands are all promiscuous and drug addicts.
- All Italians are mobsters or have links to the mob.
- All white people are racist.
- Chinese will eat anything.
- All Asians are Communists.
- All Australians are bullies, racists, drinkers and constantly uses swear words. They are also portrayed as lazy and stupid morons.
- People from the Indian subcontinent are generally portrayed as shopkeepers and motel owners.
- All Egyptian women are belly dancers.
- The Japanese are engineering geniuses.
- All South Koreans are gaming nerds.
- Irish are alcoholics.
- All Hispanics are illegal aliens.
- All Indians and Chinese are cheap and live a frugal life.
- All Latinos are on welfare.
- In the US all South Koreans are stereotyped as dry cleaners.
- All Mexicans as gardeners.
- Women always smell good.
- Women take forever to do anything.
- Women are more brilliant than men.
- Women are always moody.
- Women try to work out problems while men take immediate action.
- All women like the color pink.
- All women like dolls.
- Women become cheerleaders.
- Women take 2 hours to shower.
- Women hog the bathroom.
- Women love mirrors.
- Women like make-up.
- Women are fussy about their hair.
- Women work in department stores.
- Women like fashion magazines.
- Women are discrete about intimacy.
- Women do not drive well.
- Women never take chances.
- Women always talk too much on the phone.
- Women actually use only 5% of what's in their purse. Everything else is junk.
- Only women can be nurses.
- Only men can be doctors.
- Men are stronger and more aggressive.
- Men are better at sports.
- Men hate reading.
- Men always have an "I don't care" attitude.
- Men don't get grossed out by scrapes and bruises.
- Men are tough.
- Men are thickheaded.
- Men like cars.
- Men become jocks in high school.
- Men take 2 seconds to shower.
- Men like hats.
- Men could care less if they become bald.
- Men wear whatever is clean.
- Men usually work in messy places.
- Men like car or porn magazines.
- Men brag about intimacy.
- Men take too many chances.
- Men always lose all arguments against girls.
If none of those offended you--I'm amazed. If you have never heard any of them--these days most of us know "all" or "none" statements are usually false, but if you eliminate all or add most, well, I've heard many of statements used like the speaker had just pronounced truth.
Stereotypes are used most by those that think least. Not people with actual neurological problems, but by those individuals who have spent a lifetime relying on their physical attractiveness, class standing or personal opinions spoken loudly with conviction to give them an audience of listeners if not followers.
None of the above statements accurately describe any group of people-and any of those statements might describe individuals from any group.
Stereotyping--some may call it profiling in the name of legitimizing what they do, has only one purpose--to categorize and label people. The cultures of the world have a long history of this to identify us and them, "our tribe" and "other". It was to protect ourselves and our children from people that might eat us or wear us or enslave us.
These days--its more about hierarchy and class-placement and keeping the underdog under.
The problem with using stereotypes is that is stops both the stereotyper and the stereotypee from actually having a meaningful relationship or even communicating.
Once you turn someone into a label--they stop being a person.
They are no longer an individual with their own past full of memories both happy and sad.
They are no longer an individual with hopes and dreams for their future or their family's future.
They become 2-dimensional--flat, cookie-cutters of their group members.
They become "them".
They become "other".
If this country is to survive, If this world of humans is to survive--we have to all become "US".
Namaste to all of us!
http://www.simplypsychology.org/katz-braly.html
Sunday, August 14, 2016
How do we compare.
In the USA, with a population of 321,368,864 people (including men, women and children) we produce $55,854 per person.
In Russia, with 142,423,773 people, they produce $22,105 per person.
In China, with 1,367,485,388 people, they produce $14,179 per person.
In Finland with 5,476,922 people, they produce $41,081 per person.
For 2016, the Federal poverty guideline is an annual income of $24,300 for a family of four. That is four people living at under 1/2 of the GDP per person--per ONE person. (Yes, I get that kids don't produce, but they are part of the population, they eat, they wear clothes, and they get sick, so they don't live free---AND I included them in the $55,854 per person)
The 2013 poverty rate (most recent data available) was 14.5%, down from 15% in 2012, and the first decline since 2006. However, it was still higher than the 12.5% living in poverty in 2007, before the recession. Nearly 1 in 5 children live in poverty (19.9%), while nearly 1 in 10 seniors do (9.5%) and that is WITH social security. (Source:U.S. Census, Highlights, Poverty Thresholds. The next report will be released in September 2016.)
That is at least 46 million people that are not sharing in the wealth of this countries production.
Russia has 16% of its population living below poverty level.
China has a 14.7% poverty rate.
Finland, on the other-hand, while its per person product is less than the USA, has fewer than 5.6% of its population living below the poverty level.
In Norway--that number is even smaller.
We can no longer remind our children to eat their food because there "are starving children in china". These days, we can merely threaten to move them to Detroit--with a 58% child poverty rate, or Tampa--with 32% of its children living below the poverty threshold.
Shoot, with 20% of our children living in poverty--there is a 1 in 5 chance they are already living there and wishing they had more food, not griping about their peanut butter sandwiches.
Of course we can always threaten them with worse conditions like Somalia or Syria, but the condition across town or over the state border may also scare them into compliance.
If you are one of the lucky 4/5th of US children, there are worse places to be a child.
Half the world lives below the poverty level. About 45% of children in the world live in poverty. Thousands die day daily from starvation.
(That might include our 20%--but that only makes the news when they are found in a dog kennel in the garage).
Ok, if you only compare those amazing countries we like to consider ourselves #1 amongst, we were number 2 for child poverty rates. Only Romania beat us with 23% child poverty. Iceland was at the bottom with only slightly over 4%.
http://www.communitychange.org/page/study-ranks-us-second-highest-in-child-poverty-among-35-developed-countries/
So----you can threaten those ungrateful kids with Somalia. (You can threaten me with Somalia--a country down in the horn of Africa that is slightly smaller than Texas. It is a country with drought, civil war, anarchy, terrorist splinter groups and pirates). It has human trafficking, forced child labor, child soldiers, no birth control, no condoms so that HIV is endemic, it has no free education system--and few schools outside of urban areas. And girls don't go to school.
And it's only the sixth poorest country in the world.
http://www.therichest.com/rich-list/world/poorest-countries-in-the-world/
What do most poor countries have in common?
They have something a rich country wanted--and it isn't their residents as neighbors.
Seventeen of the 20 poorest countries are in Africa. There but for the grace of God go the America's and Australia. The other three--Afghanistan, Comoros and Haiti have similar issues.
But we in the USA have done an unfortunately great job of keeping the English Class system alive and well.
I've been reading
Those African nations that were held in thrall by European countries until the last half of the 20th century were left without education to function in the current world and little memory of how they functioned successfully 500 years before that. And now, they are floundering, trying to survive in a time that is both complex and unforgiving. And there are still people out there trying to use them for their natural resources and living resources--working with those people native to those places that have lost their souls in their search for power and riches. AND there are rich and powerful people in each of those countries.
But what about the USA? Why do we have the one of the highest per person GDP AND one of the highest rates of poverty without putting "third world" in front of our nation?
Because we were settled by the same nations that created those third world nations. We revolted and have had over 200 years to decide who we would be when we grew up.
Apparently, we decided to follow in the footsteps of the motherland--feudal all the way.
Too bad we didn't learn from the people that were already here.
Too bad we didn't assimilate more than food from all those immigrants that brought their knowledge.
Too bad we didn't make a new and better government in which the words implied by the constitution were meant to reach everyone--everyone--all races, all religions, genders, ethnicities---the real meaning of "everyone".
Maybe it would be easier if we could convince all those delusional folks that are afraid we are going to fix the inequality right before they got theirs that they weren't ever going to get theirs until everyone could do better.
After all, how many kids and their parents encourage their children to focus completely on sports, getting into an Ivy league college, compete in gymnastics, dance, sing, play an instrument, become a Doctor or Lawyer or Politician because they want them "rich". Most children pushed hard in those directions don't make it to the top 1% or even above the position of their parents.
Maybe we could work on narrowing the wealth divide; make it possible to be a successful plumber, kindergarten teacher, artist, office worker, food service worker, retail clerk and have time and money to enjoy our avocations like softball and piano or volunteering.
Maybe we could all enjoy our lives like we are rich with opportunity and options, a little free time and a financial pad beyond food and rent.
It's not 1500 anymore---we can reshape the future so we all have a good life.
In Russia, with 142,423,773 people, they produce $22,105 per person.
In China, with 1,367,485,388 people, they produce $14,179 per person.
In Finland with 5,476,922 people, they produce $41,081 per person.
For 2016, the Federal poverty guideline is an annual income of $24,300 for a family of four. That is four people living at under 1/2 of the GDP per person--per ONE person. (Yes, I get that kids don't produce, but they are part of the population, they eat, they wear clothes, and they get sick, so they don't live free---AND I included them in the $55,854 per person)
The 2013 poverty rate (most recent data available) was 14.5%, down from 15% in 2012, and the first decline since 2006. However, it was still higher than the 12.5% living in poverty in 2007, before the recession. Nearly 1 in 5 children live in poverty (19.9%), while nearly 1 in 10 seniors do (9.5%) and that is WITH social security. (Source:U.S. Census, Highlights, Poverty Thresholds. The next report will be released in September 2016.)
That is at least 46 million people that are not sharing in the wealth of this countries production.
Russia has 16% of its population living below poverty level.
China has a 14.7% poverty rate.
Finland, on the other-hand, while its per person product is less than the USA, has fewer than 5.6% of its population living below the poverty level.
In Norway--that number is even smaller.
We can no longer remind our children to eat their food because there "are starving children in china". These days, we can merely threaten to move them to Detroit--with a 58% child poverty rate, or Tampa--with 32% of its children living below the poverty threshold.
Shoot, with 20% of our children living in poverty--there is a 1 in 5 chance they are already living there and wishing they had more food, not griping about their peanut butter sandwiches.
Of course we can always threaten them with worse conditions like Somalia or Syria, but the condition across town or over the state border may also scare them into compliance.
If you are one of the lucky 4/5th of US children, there are worse places to be a child.
Half the world lives below the poverty level. About 45% of children in the world live in poverty. Thousands die day daily from starvation.
(That might include our 20%--but that only makes the news when they are found in a dog kennel in the garage).
Ok, if you only compare those amazing countries we like to consider ourselves #1 amongst, we were number 2 for child poverty rates. Only Romania beat us with 23% child poverty. Iceland was at the bottom with only slightly over 4%.
http://www.communitychange.org/page/study-ranks-us-second-highest-in-child-poverty-among-35-developed-countries/
So----you can threaten those ungrateful kids with Somalia. (You can threaten me with Somalia--a country down in the horn of Africa that is slightly smaller than Texas. It is a country with drought, civil war, anarchy, terrorist splinter groups and pirates). It has human trafficking, forced child labor, child soldiers, no birth control, no condoms so that HIV is endemic, it has no free education system--and few schools outside of urban areas. And girls don't go to school.
And it's only the sixth poorest country in the world.
http://www.therichest.com/rich-list/world/poorest-countries-in-the-world/
What do most poor countries have in common?
They have something a rich country wanted--and it isn't their residents as neighbors.
- natural resources like gold/diamonds/silver/waterways/ivory/furs/coffee/chocolate/spices/
- cheap labor/slaves
- land to get rid of their own criminals and poor and undesireables.
Seventeen of the 20 poorest countries are in Africa. There but for the grace of God go the America's and Australia. The other three--Afghanistan, Comoros and Haiti have similar issues.
But we in the USA have done an unfortunately great job of keeping the English Class system alive and well.
I've been reading
"White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America "
It's interesting, and my dive into genealogy definitely hinted at this--I'm fairly sure that those elite societies like the DAR weren't seeking the descendants of those that arrived as bond-servants or on penal ships.
Those African nations that were held in thrall by European countries until the last half of the 20th century were left without education to function in the current world and little memory of how they functioned successfully 500 years before that. And now, they are floundering, trying to survive in a time that is both complex and unforgiving. And there are still people out there trying to use them for their natural resources and living resources--working with those people native to those places that have lost their souls in their search for power and riches. AND there are rich and powerful people in each of those countries.
But what about the USA? Why do we have the one of the highest per person GDP AND one of the highest rates of poverty without putting "third world" in front of our nation?
Because we were settled by the same nations that created those third world nations. We revolted and have had over 200 years to decide who we would be when we grew up.
Apparently, we decided to follow in the footsteps of the motherland--feudal all the way.
Too bad we didn't learn from the people that were already here.
Too bad we didn't assimilate more than food from all those immigrants that brought their knowledge.
Too bad we didn't make a new and better government in which the words implied by the constitution were meant to reach everyone--everyone--all races, all religions, genders, ethnicities---the real meaning of "everyone".
Maybe it would be easier if we could convince all those delusional folks that are afraid we are going to fix the inequality right before they got theirs that they weren't ever going to get theirs until everyone could do better.
After all, how many kids and their parents encourage their children to focus completely on sports, getting into an Ivy league college, compete in gymnastics, dance, sing, play an instrument, become a Doctor or Lawyer or Politician because they want them "rich". Most children pushed hard in those directions don't make it to the top 1% or even above the position of their parents.
Maybe we could work on narrowing the wealth divide; make it possible to be a successful plumber, kindergarten teacher, artist, office worker, food service worker, retail clerk and have time and money to enjoy our avocations like softball and piano or volunteering.
Maybe we could all enjoy our lives like we are rich with opportunity and options, a little free time and a financial pad beyond food and rent.
It's not 1500 anymore---we can reshape the future so we all have a good life.
Friday, August 5, 2016
Omens and portents.
I have this continuous feeling of expectation these days. Its not excitement so much as a lump in my throat just waiting to turn into mourning. I feel like something bad is about to happen.
When my parents were in their last year on earth, a huge owl flew almost into my windshield while I was driving to see them. Huge--like wings covering the entire windshield, at me, as in full frontal with me hitting the brakes just as it changed the pitch of its flight to miss hitting the car--missed colliding by less than 12 inches.
It was ominous. My brain returned to that moment many times after that. I don't know that I had ever seen an owl outside of a zoo until that night.
These days, that lump in the throat, mourning is coming, feeling is almost constant.
I feel it when another unarmed person is shot.
I feel it when a sniper is hunting police officers.
I feel it when our congress cares only for their party's concerns.
I feel it when the whole election process--from the rigging primaries to gerrymandering to voter ID laws make it obvious that most of us are not part of the political process--we have been systematically shut out.
I feel it when children are fed lead in their water via a crumbling infrastructure--while families (think fortune 400) possess more wealth than countries like Bangladesh or Somalia or even Russia, and they are getting tax-breaks.
I feel it when glacier ice that has been continuously frozen for at least 30,000 years, thaws and causes landslides and outbreaks of anthrax and loss of animal habitat.
I feel it when a person running for president of a country with a lot of nuclear weapons asks "why can't we just nuke 'em".
I feel it when 1000 acres of trees burn and the animals that lived in those trees burned because someone threw their lit cigarette butt out of their car window because they didn't want to dirty their ashtray.
I feel it when 400 year old cities are destroyed by weather--for the first time.
I feel it when people driving $30,000 cars complain about homeless people being given $30,000 houses to live in.
I feel it when young people go to prison for life for nonviolent crimes but wealthy people that hurt people are given community service and second and third chances.
Are all these things omens? Do they portend our future? Maybe.
A lot of people hope for the end of days. They want to go to heaven. They want peace and plenty.
How can people be so awful to each other, so greedy, so acquisitive at the expense of others--both human and nonhuman and then think that they want the world to end so they can live a better life.
Everyone needs to take their foot off the neck of whoever or whatever life form they see as less important than themselves and ask themselves "how are we alike".
I think that these people that hate everyone and everything that is not like them in appearance and belief are really delusional if think that hoping for the end so they can get their reward is ever going to take them to heaven.
If they want to live in a place of peace and plenty, they need to work toward that here.
Start with the golden rule--and consider the other species when you do.
Me--I'm already missing the bees.
When my parents were in their last year on earth, a huge owl flew almost into my windshield while I was driving to see them. Huge--like wings covering the entire windshield, at me, as in full frontal with me hitting the brakes just as it changed the pitch of its flight to miss hitting the car--missed colliding by less than 12 inches.
It was ominous. My brain returned to that moment many times after that. I don't know that I had ever seen an owl outside of a zoo until that night.
These days, that lump in the throat, mourning is coming, feeling is almost constant.
I feel it when another unarmed person is shot.
I feel it when a sniper is hunting police officers.
I feel it when our congress cares only for their party's concerns.
I feel it when the whole election process--from the rigging primaries to gerrymandering to voter ID laws make it obvious that most of us are not part of the political process--we have been systematically shut out.
I feel it when children are fed lead in their water via a crumbling infrastructure--while families (think fortune 400) possess more wealth than countries like Bangladesh or Somalia or even Russia, and they are getting tax-breaks.
I feel it when glacier ice that has been continuously frozen for at least 30,000 years, thaws and causes landslides and outbreaks of anthrax and loss of animal habitat.
I feel it when a person running for president of a country with a lot of nuclear weapons asks "why can't we just nuke 'em".
I feel it when 1000 acres of trees burn and the animals that lived in those trees burned because someone threw their lit cigarette butt out of their car window because they didn't want to dirty their ashtray.
I feel it when 400 year old cities are destroyed by weather--for the first time.
I feel it when people driving $30,000 cars complain about homeless people being given $30,000 houses to live in.
I feel it when young people go to prison for life for nonviolent crimes but wealthy people that hurt people are given community service and second and third chances.
Are all these things omens? Do they portend our future? Maybe.
A lot of people hope for the end of days. They want to go to heaven. They want peace and plenty.
How can people be so awful to each other, so greedy, so acquisitive at the expense of others--both human and nonhuman and then think that they want the world to end so they can live a better life.
Everyone needs to take their foot off the neck of whoever or whatever life form they see as less important than themselves and ask themselves "how are we alike".
I think that these people that hate everyone and everything that is not like them in appearance and belief are really delusional if think that hoping for the end so they can get their reward is ever going to take them to heaven.
If they want to live in a place of peace and plenty, they need to work toward that here.
Start with the golden rule--and consider the other species when you do.
Me--I'm already missing the bees.
Sunday, July 24, 2016
WE'VE GOT THE CART BEFORE THE HORSE
We are all hearing about and worried about police. Worried about them being shot. Worried about them shooting us. Worried about criminals taking over the country because police are sick of being treated like the bad guy. Worried about our children being shot because they are mouthy and not particularly white. We were all raised with the current type of policing. We watch the cop shows with tough cops and despicable, low-brow criminals. We also watched Serpico and Training Day.
We also can watch a video on the internet.
Below are a couple of police history sites. There are many on the internet. The very best thing about the internet is the availability of a multitude of references about any subject. The worst thing is that a person that is lazy will not check enough of them to tell what kind of slant they are written from.
http://plsonline.eku.edu/insidelook/history-policing-united-states-part-1
http://www.realpolice.net/articles/police-history/history-of-law-enforcement.html
Myth #1--there has always been some form of policing system.
not really true. There has always been societal systems to hold people to the cultural norms. Sometimes that fell to the religious leaders and followed the tenets of that particular religion. Sometimes the government--usually a single authoritarian dictator used his military to enforce his will upon the people.
In ancient Greece, foreign slaves were often employed to police the cities . Greeks found it uncomfortable to have citizens policing their own fellow citizens. Often Greeks relied on citizens to report crimes. After reporting a crime, if an arrest was made, an informant would receive half of the fine charged to the criminal.
In Athens, criminals were tried before a jury of 200 or more citizens picked at random. Criminals were punished by fines, their right to vote taken away, exile, or death. Imprisonment was not typically used as a punishment.
In pre-USA-America, policing consisted of a night watch made of volunteers and then the city elders or leaders determined what would be done about those that were having differences about who owned what and who hurt who. That worked for a couple of hundred years.
Modern policing started out in Boston (shades of copper) to help manage the poor in the large cities. Amazingly, the rich have never been too bothered by Police or by the laws that regulate everyone else's behavior. (Some things don't change much)
Myth #2--the purpose of police is to keep people safe.
Correction--to protect the lives and property of the rich. Early on, there were those that acted like independent contractors, getting fees for capturing thieves and those that caused problems. In the south, this was closely tied to managing slaves and poor whites that might be interfering with the profits of the plantation owners. So its true--if you are white and respectable--read as at least merchant class, the police were to keep you safe.
Myth#3--someone has to enforce the law and hold people accountable. Maybe. Obviously we don't want to find that people are regularly being murdered, raped, trafficked, stolen from, and otherwise abused----but explain the traffic ticket quota and prison quotas and questionable activities with the designation of "no humans involved". We need to either hold all people equally accountable and make sure our laws are humane and sane and equitable or figure out new ways to manage our society's behavior.
Myth#4--all the laws are equally valuable and none are written to give one group advantage over another. Really, does anyone really think that is true? First we write our laws in language that you need 4 years of law school to understand, then we aim them carefully at who we want to torture with them. Picture life in prison for repeated very minor drug infractions, versus the hung jury over the rich man that killed his family while high, therefore not his fault. The whole system is targeted to allow those with money a way to buy out of their legal issues while stealing the life of those that have never had access to money.
So what do we need to do differently?
Community policing is a start, but its a bass-ackwards start.
A better start is to start fixing the income inequality issues that affect most people of color, and a good number of white folks that were brought to this country as the servants and workers for the upper class and merchants. (there is a book about it now, "White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America")
The problem is not about genetics or Darwinism or fate or destiny or God's will.
It's about equal opportunity. It's about starting life without malnutrition. It's about starting life without lead in the water and snacking on lead paint chips and no one to interact with because parents are out working and can only afford crappy daycare, or parents are home but were already so destroyed they could not possible enrich anyone's life--not even their own. It rapidly becomes generational. And the first ones blamed for that child's doomed childhood is the parents--for having a child--for having sex. Sex, a basic species imperative, just like reproduction is a basic species imperative. And while blaming them for basically following their instincts, they go to war with both the right to obtain an abortion and the availability to obtain birth control. And most of those doomed parents were raised by parents just like them, kids with a crappy start and never any opportunities.
It will take us several generations from the time we start eliminating poverty until we quit seeing the effects of the degradation of people that have been held down in poverty. But the sooner we start, the faster we will see the end of stupid crimes, full prisons, massive drug abuse and dependence, and wasted lives. Without poverty, many of the disenfranchised that have gone out and created their own mini-fiefdoms based on criminal enterprises will use those brains to create successful businesses and creative education systems and new types of entertainment. Without poverty, schools will be easier to manage, racism will be moot, trying to decide what you want to be when you grow up will only be impacted by what you like doing and what you are good at, not what you can afford and what you even know is possible.
Without poverty, life expectancy will go up--from decreasing stupid accidents and drug overdoses and stupid crimes to more people that can prevent and manage chronic illnesses before they are so severe they are deadly.
So, to fix the system--we need to figure out how to end poverty and then--we have to figure out what we want the police to do for society. Do we want law enforcement over the masses, or peace officers.
Until we end poverty, the police fix will not work. We currently have the worst income inequality since the 1800s-a pretty brutal time, but at least you could go west, get free land and live in relative peace.
Once have a country with no one homeless, or starving, unable to obtain basic healthcare and an education that allows every person to reach their full potential, we need to reexamine the role of policing. What do we expect of them?
And don't send robots to bomb suspects. If they are contained, keep them contained until something changes. Everyone sleeps sometime.
An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.
Fix the thing that is making people angry.
We also can watch a video on the internet.
Below are a couple of police history sites. There are many on the internet. The very best thing about the internet is the availability of a multitude of references about any subject. The worst thing is that a person that is lazy will not check enough of them to tell what kind of slant they are written from.
http://plsonline.eku.edu/insidelook/history-policing-united-states-part-1
http://www.realpolice.net/articles/police-history/history-of-law-enforcement.html
Myth #1--there has always been some form of policing system.
not really true. There has always been societal systems to hold people to the cultural norms. Sometimes that fell to the religious leaders and followed the tenets of that particular religion. Sometimes the government--usually a single authoritarian dictator used his military to enforce his will upon the people.
In ancient Greece, foreign slaves were often employed to police the cities . Greeks found it uncomfortable to have citizens policing their own fellow citizens. Often Greeks relied on citizens to report crimes. After reporting a crime, if an arrest was made, an informant would receive half of the fine charged to the criminal.
In Athens, criminals were tried before a jury of 200 or more citizens picked at random. Criminals were punished by fines, their right to vote taken away, exile, or death. Imprisonment was not typically used as a punishment.
In pre-USA-America, policing consisted of a night watch made of volunteers and then the city elders or leaders determined what would be done about those that were having differences about who owned what and who hurt who. That worked for a couple of hundred years.
Modern policing started out in Boston (shades of copper) to help manage the poor in the large cities. Amazingly, the rich have never been too bothered by Police or by the laws that regulate everyone else's behavior. (Some things don't change much)
Correction--to protect the lives and property of the rich. Early on, there were those that acted like independent contractors, getting fees for capturing thieves and those that caused problems. In the south, this was closely tied to managing slaves and poor whites that might be interfering with the profits of the plantation owners. So its true--if you are white and respectable--read as at least merchant class, the police were to keep you safe.
Myth#3--someone has to enforce the law and hold people accountable. Maybe. Obviously we don't want to find that people are regularly being murdered, raped, trafficked, stolen from, and otherwise abused----but explain the traffic ticket quota and prison quotas and questionable activities with the designation of "no humans involved". We need to either hold all people equally accountable and make sure our laws are humane and sane and equitable or figure out new ways to manage our society's behavior.
Myth#4--all the laws are equally valuable and none are written to give one group advantage over another. Really, does anyone really think that is true? First we write our laws in language that you need 4 years of law school to understand, then we aim them carefully at who we want to torture with them. Picture life in prison for repeated very minor drug infractions, versus the hung jury over the rich man that killed his family while high, therefore not his fault. The whole system is targeted to allow those with money a way to buy out of their legal issues while stealing the life of those that have never had access to money.
So what do we need to do differently?
Community policing is a start, but its a bass-ackwards start.
A better start is to start fixing the income inequality issues that affect most people of color, and a good number of white folks that were brought to this country as the servants and workers for the upper class and merchants. (there is a book about it now, "White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America")
The problem is not about genetics or Darwinism or fate or destiny or God's will.
It's about equal opportunity. It's about starting life without malnutrition. It's about starting life without lead in the water and snacking on lead paint chips and no one to interact with because parents are out working and can only afford crappy daycare, or parents are home but were already so destroyed they could not possible enrich anyone's life--not even their own. It rapidly becomes generational. And the first ones blamed for that child's doomed childhood is the parents--for having a child--for having sex. Sex, a basic species imperative, just like reproduction is a basic species imperative. And while blaming them for basically following their instincts, they go to war with both the right to obtain an abortion and the availability to obtain birth control. And most of those doomed parents were raised by parents just like them, kids with a crappy start and never any opportunities.
It will take us several generations from the time we start eliminating poverty until we quit seeing the effects of the degradation of people that have been held down in poverty. But the sooner we start, the faster we will see the end of stupid crimes, full prisons, massive drug abuse and dependence, and wasted lives. Without poverty, many of the disenfranchised that have gone out and created their own mini-fiefdoms based on criminal enterprises will use those brains to create successful businesses and creative education systems and new types of entertainment. Without poverty, schools will be easier to manage, racism will be moot, trying to decide what you want to be when you grow up will only be impacted by what you like doing and what you are good at, not what you can afford and what you even know is possible.
Without poverty, life expectancy will go up--from decreasing stupid accidents and drug overdoses and stupid crimes to more people that can prevent and manage chronic illnesses before they are so severe they are deadly.
So, to fix the system--we need to figure out how to end poverty and then--we have to figure out what we want the police to do for society. Do we want law enforcement over the masses, or peace officers.
Until we end poverty, the police fix will not work. We currently have the worst income inequality since the 1800s-a pretty brutal time, but at least you could go west, get free land and live in relative peace.
Once have a country with no one homeless, or starving, unable to obtain basic healthcare and an education that allows every person to reach their full potential, we need to reexamine the role of policing. What do we expect of them?
- do we want them to keep us safe when their is an aberrant criminal outbreak
- do we want them to investigate criminal activities after-the-fact and assist with the prosecution's case?
- do we want them to provide a visual presence in our communities when we have activities with large crowds?
- do we want them to make sure traffic runs smoothly
And don't send robots to bomb suspects. If they are contained, keep them contained until something changes. Everyone sleeps sometime.
An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.
Fix the thing that is making people angry.
Sunday, July 17, 2016
Perspective
At work, I had 2 bosses that loved to lay an E on the table and have everybody notice how it didn't look like an E from every side---perspective.
It always looked like an E to me, a backward E, a sidewise E and unside-down E--but an E.
Understanding perspective is actually more difficult than that. Visual artists get it, everyone else not really.
Picture you are the teenage child of a family living on the moon. Your family has been on the moon for 6 generations, they don't require oxygen, they have lighter bones, they all look alike because they have all been closely related for 6 generations. They have no books or communication with the earth.
They live on the bright side of the moon and always see the blue/green/white planet their family came from. It is always the same temperature, the buildings they live in are the same ones they have always lived in, they eat the same things everyday--something that grows in one of the buildings and so forth and so forth.....
They are an homogeneous group living on an always light place and they are the only form of life.
If you asked them to use their empathy to imagine life on earth, they might make up stories about the blue and the green and the white or include bits of oral history passed down from that first generation, but they will imagine those earth people to be people that look like them, that eat like them, with the same level of education and health and life expectancy.
Their perspective is heavily influenced by what they know. The chance of them imagining anything that they have never heard of or seen is extremely small and as likely to be wholly erroneous as it is to be at all descriptive of the people on earth, and forget the other lifeforms.
If I lost you, my apologies.
Let me explain my point.
If you try to empathize with people you know almost nothing about, you also risk that your imagination will be wholly erroneous. If you consider them bad or evil or enemy, you are more likely to give them demonic or animalistic qualities than anthropomophize them. (something we do to pets and cartoons a lot if we care about them or they are cute).
You need to understand their, the others, perspective. To do that, you need to understand the filters and leanings your own perspective places on you.
Language has an impact on what we can and can't describe accurately. When our language becomes too precise, we loose the ability to accurately describe things we are unfamiliar with. Our language becomes part of our barrier to being truly empathetic with people that do not speak our language just as their language shapes them. It creates a type of perspective.
Our personal and/or cultural beliefs also impact our ability to empathize. Taboos will never be learning moments, breaking them is an instantaneous creation of "other". But even those things we teach to our little ones as always wrong--taboo-- become, because they are not always universal--stopping spots for our ability to empathize.
We say "terrorist", and know that they are bad people with bad intentions. They are evil. But the people living in those groups that are sending out those "terrorists" see themselves as heroes ridding the earth of evil. We are their "other".
Should we empathize with terrorists???
Maybe if we recognized when we were creating terrorists with our own lack of empathy, we would not be creating terrorists. Terrorists are always "other".
Maybe, if instead of teachers referring to those individuals that go shoot people then die as "loner", "weirdo", "scary"--if those teachers had recognized poor coping skills, something going on at home, kid being bullied for looking, acting, seeming different; started recognizing pain, and "otherness" we could prevent these events. And not trying to dump on teachers, they have a hard job, they are underpaid and given ridiculously politicized assignments, but most kids have had teachers while most of us have not had a therapist, close counselor or priest.
We all need to recognize when we are creating "other" with our good intentioned expections of being like "everyone else. Whether we shove it onto our child or our students or our employees or our state or nation pushes it onto it citizens or "enemies", we need to recognize, up front, that in treating someone as "other" unless they conform; as less than, as enemy, we are preparing someone to treat us like an enemy. We are just reaping what we sow.
The same is true with poverty and racial anger and religious and political extremism; both in our country and globally. We, like Batman, were creating our next enemy with our short-sighted selfishness, intolerance and imperialism.
We know very well how to treat people that are different--as if they were inferior, less deserving, less capable of thinking, less likely to be a good person. But do we know how to empathize with them?
When was the last time someone looked at you like--"o--that one doesn't belong here, not one of ours, not one of us, they need to just leave". Imagine how hard it is to walk into a school or a job interview with dark skin or a scarf on your head or even in full emo dress or how about in drag. They are being who they are, and in so many places where that is NOT the norm. They are stared at; people back away and leave them in a little no-mans-land. They are shunned without anyone trying to know them.
We do things to people using empathy from our own perspective, that neither understands or fits with who they are or where they are coming from. We decide things about them, that they are poor because they are lazy and don't matter, that they are backward because they are stupid and don't matter, that they have stuff we want or want to use that they don't need or know how to use so they don't matter.
They are "other". We are "the people". Its very tribal.
Perspective will change that. But it requires learning about those other people FROM those other people.
Learning from them---not going over and teaching them to be like us--that is the epitome of rudeness, disrespect and arrogance.
Missionaries routinely make this mistake and use their own beliefs to explain why it is OK. Then we all cry when a mission is destroyed or missionaries murdered and blame it on the savages.
Soldiers make this mistake by command. They are given very stereotypical educations on the native peoples and are then allowed to treat them as less than human. It makes it easier to kill them.
Police make this mistake, by local tradition. They use no empathy and only have their police perspective. They want and demand their respect as representatives of the law, but do not have requirements about respecting the people they interact with. Police have become their own tribe just like soldiers in other countries become their own tribe. Sometimes those 2 tribes have a hard time returning to the larger tribe. The rules are very different as civilians.
A tribe creates its own taboos and mores.
Like tribes of extremists or a loner whose entire tribe lives only in his head, their taboos are about rules very specific to their own extreme views. Their taboos may allow the killing of innocents or the renaming of innocents so that their deaths are acceptable. Or they may make the killing of all that are not part of their tribe acceptable.
While most religions are anti-killing, it is obviously not a taboo in very many.
Taboos, those things we tend to think of as universal, are anything but.
We know it is taboo to rape children or eat human flesh.
But the Korowai are a tribe of about 4,000 individuals living in the jungle of New Guinea,that still practice cannibalism in ritual.
And adults having sex with children, while illegal, is common, and there are places known to be openly providing children for this to wealthy visitors.
There are taboos against eating with your left hand which seems ridiculous to most of us but pretty nausea-provoking to others.
There are taboos against reproduction with first degree relatives (incest), but that was OK and common among ancient Egyptian pharaohs.
There are places with taboos about eating beef and places with taboos about eating pork and places with taboos about eating insects.
What all this means is that we need to improve and enlarge our own perspective. We need to go for the 360 degree world view.
We all need to go to the figurative mountaintop and examine those issues we believe are only one way, from all sides.
We need to be fact-checkers.
We need to be seekers of truth in libraries not our own.
We need to question everything we have ever taken for granted as true because we have always known it was so.
We need to become the answer to the hate and anxiety and fearfulness that surrounds us.
Understanding the need for perspective makes us all better and makes us all part of the same tribe.
And no matter how many we are, no matter how rich some are or techno some are or poor some are--we have always been just one tribe.
We are all "the people".
It always looked like an E to me, a backward E, a sidewise E and unside-down E--but an E.
Understanding perspective is actually more difficult than that. Visual artists get it, everyone else not really.
Picture you are the teenage child of a family living on the moon. Your family has been on the moon for 6 generations, they don't require oxygen, they have lighter bones, they all look alike because they have all been closely related for 6 generations. They have no books or communication with the earth.
They live on the bright side of the moon and always see the blue/green/white planet their family came from. It is always the same temperature, the buildings they live in are the same ones they have always lived in, they eat the same things everyday--something that grows in one of the buildings and so forth and so forth.....
They are an homogeneous group living on an always light place and they are the only form of life.
If you asked them to use their empathy to imagine life on earth, they might make up stories about the blue and the green and the white or include bits of oral history passed down from that first generation, but they will imagine those earth people to be people that look like them, that eat like them, with the same level of education and health and life expectancy.
Their perspective is heavily influenced by what they know. The chance of them imagining anything that they have never heard of or seen is extremely small and as likely to be wholly erroneous as it is to be at all descriptive of the people on earth, and forget the other lifeforms.
If I lost you, my apologies.
Let me explain my point.
If you try to empathize with people you know almost nothing about, you also risk that your imagination will be wholly erroneous. If you consider them bad or evil or enemy, you are more likely to give them demonic or animalistic qualities than anthropomophize them. (something we do to pets and cartoons a lot if we care about them or they are cute).
You need to understand their, the others, perspective. To do that, you need to understand the filters and leanings your own perspective places on you.
Language has an impact on what we can and can't describe accurately. When our language becomes too precise, we loose the ability to accurately describe things we are unfamiliar with. Our language becomes part of our barrier to being truly empathetic with people that do not speak our language just as their language shapes them. It creates a type of perspective.
Our personal and/or cultural beliefs also impact our ability to empathize. Taboos will never be learning moments, breaking them is an instantaneous creation of "other". But even those things we teach to our little ones as always wrong--taboo-- become, because they are not always universal--stopping spots for our ability to empathize.
We say "terrorist", and know that they are bad people with bad intentions. They are evil. But the people living in those groups that are sending out those "terrorists" see themselves as heroes ridding the earth of evil. We are their "other".
Should we empathize with terrorists???
Maybe if we recognized when we were creating terrorists with our own lack of empathy, we would not be creating terrorists. Terrorists are always "other".
Maybe, if instead of teachers referring to those individuals that go shoot people then die as "loner", "weirdo", "scary"--if those teachers had recognized poor coping skills, something going on at home, kid being bullied for looking, acting, seeming different; started recognizing pain, and "otherness" we could prevent these events. And not trying to dump on teachers, they have a hard job, they are underpaid and given ridiculously politicized assignments, but most kids have had teachers while most of us have not had a therapist, close counselor or priest.
We all need to recognize when we are creating "other" with our good intentioned expections of being like "everyone else. Whether we shove it onto our child or our students or our employees or our state or nation pushes it onto it citizens or "enemies", we need to recognize, up front, that in treating someone as "other" unless they conform; as less than, as enemy, we are preparing someone to treat us like an enemy. We are just reaping what we sow.
The same is true with poverty and racial anger and religious and political extremism; both in our country and globally. We, like Batman, were creating our next enemy with our short-sighted selfishness, intolerance and imperialism.
We know very well how to treat people that are different--as if they were inferior, less deserving, less capable of thinking, less likely to be a good person. But do we know how to empathize with them?
When was the last time someone looked at you like--"o--that one doesn't belong here, not one of ours, not one of us, they need to just leave". Imagine how hard it is to walk into a school or a job interview with dark skin or a scarf on your head or even in full emo dress or how about in drag. They are being who they are, and in so many places where that is NOT the norm. They are stared at; people back away and leave them in a little no-mans-land. They are shunned without anyone trying to know them.
We do things to people using empathy from our own perspective, that neither understands or fits with who they are or where they are coming from. We decide things about them, that they are poor because they are lazy and don't matter, that they are backward because they are stupid and don't matter, that they have stuff we want or want to use that they don't need or know how to use so they don't matter.
They are "other". We are "the people". Its very tribal.
Perspective will change that. But it requires learning about those other people FROM those other people.
Learning from them---not going over and teaching them to be like us--that is the epitome of rudeness, disrespect and arrogance.
Missionaries routinely make this mistake and use their own beliefs to explain why it is OK. Then we all cry when a mission is destroyed or missionaries murdered and blame it on the savages.
Soldiers make this mistake by command. They are given very stereotypical educations on the native peoples and are then allowed to treat them as less than human. It makes it easier to kill them.
Police make this mistake, by local tradition. They use no empathy and only have their police perspective. They want and demand their respect as representatives of the law, but do not have requirements about respecting the people they interact with. Police have become their own tribe just like soldiers in other countries become their own tribe. Sometimes those 2 tribes have a hard time returning to the larger tribe. The rules are very different as civilians.
A tribe creates its own taboos and mores.
Like tribes of extremists or a loner whose entire tribe lives only in his head, their taboos are about rules very specific to their own extreme views. Their taboos may allow the killing of innocents or the renaming of innocents so that their deaths are acceptable. Or they may make the killing of all that are not part of their tribe acceptable.
While most religions are anti-killing, it is obviously not a taboo in very many.
Taboos, those things we tend to think of as universal, are anything but.
We know it is taboo to rape children or eat human flesh.
But the Korowai are a tribe of about 4,000 individuals living in the jungle of New Guinea,that still practice cannibalism in ritual.
And adults having sex with children, while illegal, is common, and there are places known to be openly providing children for this to wealthy visitors.
There are taboos against eating with your left hand which seems ridiculous to most of us but pretty nausea-provoking to others.
There are taboos against reproduction with first degree relatives (incest), but that was OK and common among ancient Egyptian pharaohs.
There are places with taboos about eating beef and places with taboos about eating pork and places with taboos about eating insects.
What all this means is that we need to improve and enlarge our own perspective. We need to go for the 360 degree world view.
We all need to go to the figurative mountaintop and examine those issues we believe are only one way, from all sides.
We need to be fact-checkers.
We need to be seekers of truth in libraries not our own.
We need to question everything we have ever taken for granted as true because we have always known it was so.
We need to become the answer to the hate and anxiety and fearfulness that surrounds us.
Understanding the need for perspective makes us all better and makes us all part of the same tribe.
And no matter how many we are, no matter how rich some are or techno some are or poor some are--we have always been just one tribe.
We are all "the people".
Saturday, July 9, 2016
Loyalty
Loyalty.
I have loyal family members.
I have bosses and coworkers that see loyalty as a very valuable character trait.
I am not a fan of loyalty.
I am not loyal.
My ex- would have attested to that. He wanted loyalty no matter what. That was never going to be me.
I have a problem with anyone that places loyalty to a person, place, team, idea, race, religion or even country above truth, reality, righteousness and functionality.
I am currently blaming loyalty for our current presidential campaign, our policing problem, and our "asleep-at-the-wheel" problem (yep--wake up, while we can still fix our problems as a nation).
I was presented with a facebook post that told me that if I'm anti-police, unfriend them. A divisive, offensive, choose-a-side post. No doubt about it, its goal was made by a loyal person that can not look at a problem with blinders off for fear of offending those she is loyal to.
We have people willing to vote for candidates they can't say anything good about because they are loyal to their chosen political party.
We have people that say they know that racism is wrong, but refuse to support changing how things are because their family is openly supporters of white supremist groups.
We have bad Doctors that keep practicing because their peers refuse to police themselves and predator priests because they are fellow clerics. We hide our rapists and scammers and bigots and other violent, unethical, wrong people because they are part of our group--they are one of us, one of ours.
I once saw a movie where a parent turned in their child for a heinous crime. That stuck with me, not because it was wrong of them, but because I know people that would never do that. They would, in fact, try to hide the crime, protect the grown or mostly grown child even at extreme risk to other people.
They were loyal.
Loyalty is not the same as love. It is not the same as caring. It is not the same as forgiving.
It is mindless.
It is based on nothing more than "us" versus "them".
We need more mindfulness and less loyalty.
I'm all for changing the connotations of the word loyalty to mean something--well--less positive. Use it to replace ignorant or silly, perhaps unthinking.
If you must be loyal, be loyal to goodness. Be loyal to preserving life. Be loyal to preserving a healthy and diverse planet full of life. Be loyal to caring about everyone equally.
Or just use your ability to put yourself in the position of other people and don't make crazy but loyal statements just to gain the approval of your group.
Love--the love of all life--is good. Loyalty does not provide much value toward improving all our lives. Just an old by-product of a world where siding with a winner will keep you alive. Very feudal.
Don't sell your soul for your own profit and protection--give it away for the good of all.
I have loyal family members.
I have bosses and coworkers that see loyalty as a very valuable character trait.
I am not a fan of loyalty.
I am not loyal.
My ex- would have attested to that. He wanted loyalty no matter what. That was never going to be me.
I have a problem with anyone that places loyalty to a person, place, team, idea, race, religion or even country above truth, reality, righteousness and functionality.
I am currently blaming loyalty for our current presidential campaign, our policing problem, and our "asleep-at-the-wheel" problem (yep--wake up, while we can still fix our problems as a nation).
I was presented with a facebook post that told me that if I'm anti-police, unfriend them. A divisive, offensive, choose-a-side post. No doubt about it, its goal was made by a loyal person that can not look at a problem with blinders off for fear of offending those she is loyal to.
We have people willing to vote for candidates they can't say anything good about because they are loyal to their chosen political party.
We have people that say they know that racism is wrong, but refuse to support changing how things are because their family is openly supporters of white supremist groups.
We have bad Doctors that keep practicing because their peers refuse to police themselves and predator priests because they are fellow clerics. We hide our rapists and scammers and bigots and other violent, unethical, wrong people because they are part of our group--they are one of us, one of ours.
I once saw a movie where a parent turned in their child for a heinous crime. That stuck with me, not because it was wrong of them, but because I know people that would never do that. They would, in fact, try to hide the crime, protect the grown or mostly grown child even at extreme risk to other people.
They were loyal.
Loyalty is not the same as love. It is not the same as caring. It is not the same as forgiving.
It is mindless.
It is based on nothing more than "us" versus "them".
We need more mindfulness and less loyalty.
I'm all for changing the connotations of the word loyalty to mean something--well--less positive. Use it to replace ignorant or silly, perhaps unthinking.
If you must be loyal, be loyal to goodness. Be loyal to preserving life. Be loyal to preserving a healthy and diverse planet full of life. Be loyal to caring about everyone equally.
Or just use your ability to put yourself in the position of other people and don't make crazy but loyal statements just to gain the approval of your group.
Love--the love of all life--is good. Loyalty does not provide much value toward improving all our lives. Just an old by-product of a world where siding with a winner will keep you alive. Very feudal.
Don't sell your soul for your own profit and protection--give it away for the good of all.
Saturday, July 2, 2016
oUT OF cHAOS COMES WhAt?
There is a part of me that really, really hopes that all the insanity of the current millennium is just the normal death throes of the old and birth spasms of the new, as I repeatedly heard when I was young.
It was definitely what a lot of New Age philosophers and astrologers predicted for the first 12 to 20 years of what was not only a new millennium but also potentially a new age--the age of Aquarius. The 5th Dimension even bought in with a song or two.
Birth can be pretty traumatic, as can the creation of a new mountain---or star.
Death can be either horrific or post-climatic, and unfortunately I have seen both. Death is hard to watch without being affected.
But what really scares me is that this might be more of the same: the pendulum swinging, the usual--revolutions, civil unrest, war, philosophical debate that has hard repercussions on those at the bottom of the food chain.
Who are we?
What are we really?
The human species is capable of greatness....at least that is what seems to be proposed by discussions of technology, medical breakthroughs, transportation, scientific understanding...even its art, poetry, music, dance and literature seem amazing when compared to--say--a beaver dam or a wasp nest.
But is that what defines us? Is that who most of us are?
Or are most of us much less grand, much more self-centered.
Whatever we are--we have taken over the world. We have taken every other species habitat with little concern for why we are taking it. We take.
Sure, male lions will kill the cubs of other male lions before keeping the lioness in their pride--and interesting that we call that group a pride, since humans have great motivation from their own pride. But lions didn't take over the whole earth. Perhaps if they had been less focused on their own personal genetic promulgation and more on the survival of their whole species, it would be the males with all the hair running the world .
But humans no longer kill the children of their newly claimed partners, that was a long ago and/or not generally talked about part of our human history.
We do kill though. And not just for survival.
We kill, using the children of our worker-bees (I truly hate when someone compares the people in a company or a nation that do the actual work that, such a sign that those in power consider themselves far above the hoi polloi. More a sign of a decaying social structure than of those at the top being better than anyone else.) and call it war or police actions or military intervention, but really meaning we had our people kill their people until the real important people screamed uncle and talked about doing what we wanted. When we are on our own soil fighting, its understandable, but when we ship our own somewhere else, hard to play the "good guy" card unless we are fighting for the people in their homes and were invited by them to help us.
But on our own soil--why do we ever get to fighting? Why are we killing?
Do we fight and kill for food and water and our right to stay in our home?
Or do we fight to take someone else's home or food or water.
Or do we just want more, so are willing to kill to get more with no thought of who we are taking it from.
We had ranchers willing to kill for the right to graze their huge herds on national land, everyone's land--land I can spend the night on without permission and paying. Perhaps they just needed to pay the people that owned the land to graze the herd and make sure that the land was not injured. Of course, these are the same people that want to kill all the other animals, deer, antelope, buffalo, wolves, mountain sheep, coyotes, whatever lives there, to protect their "investment". So it really is just greed, greed and selfishness that is urging them onward in their war to keep land that is not any more theirs than mine or yours.
We have weapons manufacturers that fight rules for gun ownership--like having a gun is not at least as fraught with danger and responsibility as owning and/or driving a car. I have had to maintain a driver's license, car tag and liability insurance since age 16, the earliest I could legally and independently own and drive a car, but if Joe-blow gives his 10 year old a gun, that is okie-dokie. No lessons on how to use and maintain a weapon, no liability insurance, no shooters license-basically no regulation at all. Too bad our forefathers hadn't the insight to make an amendment guaranteeing the rights of us all to drive anything, anywhere, any way we like. I would have saved a butt-load of money--though I'm sure the number of traffic accidents would have taken a good number of us out of the population.
Sociologists have posited theories on connections between behaviors that thin the herd--wars, gangs, increase in non-breeding individuals, decrease in attempts to provide healthcare and basic sustenance when the population is becoming too large. That makes a kind of sense, so many of us we lose our value, but then why do we turn around and try to make it impossible to prevent unwanted pregnancy and abortion. What is the benefit of making people be born only to suffer and die young or live terrible lives.
Who are we humans?
I don't really think we have only had the craziness we see since the new millennium started. I'm pretty sure all that really changed is my perspective.
I sort of woke up and started watching what was going on. Always easier when you are not running on a hamster wheel trying to get ahead or struggling to raise children--with all the anxiety and pressure to not screw that up. My kids grew up about then.
We humans, we have always had a lot of chaos. We kill. We take. We judge. We are full of pride about things that don't matter. We worry about our place in the social order and finagle ways to put our offsprings out of the harms way that is just being just another kid of a "workerbee" We want status. We want nicer stuff than our neighbors.
We want physical proof that we are doing well.
We humans--so insecure.
Maybe we should all spend more time making something beautiful and useful; or just hugging each other.
It was definitely what a lot of New Age philosophers and astrologers predicted for the first 12 to 20 years of what was not only a new millennium but also potentially a new age--the age of Aquarius. The 5th Dimension even bought in with a song or two.
Birth can be pretty traumatic, as can the creation of a new mountain---or star.
Death can be either horrific or post-climatic, and unfortunately I have seen both. Death is hard to watch without being affected.
But what really scares me is that this might be more of the same: the pendulum swinging, the usual--revolutions, civil unrest, war, philosophical debate that has hard repercussions on those at the bottom of the food chain.
Who are we?
What are we really?
The human species is capable of greatness....at least that is what seems to be proposed by discussions of technology, medical breakthroughs, transportation, scientific understanding...even its art, poetry, music, dance and literature seem amazing when compared to--say--a beaver dam or a wasp nest.
But is that what defines us? Is that who most of us are?
Or are most of us much less grand, much more self-centered.
Whatever we are--we have taken over the world. We have taken every other species habitat with little concern for why we are taking it. We take.
Sure, male lions will kill the cubs of other male lions before keeping the lioness in their pride--and interesting that we call that group a pride, since humans have great motivation from their own pride. But lions didn't take over the whole earth. Perhaps if they had been less focused on their own personal genetic promulgation and more on the survival of their whole species, it would be the males with all the hair running the world .
But humans no longer kill the children of their newly claimed partners, that was a long ago and/or not generally talked about part of our human history.
We do kill though. And not just for survival.
We kill, using the children of our worker-bees (I truly hate when someone compares the people in a company or a nation that do the actual work that, such a sign that those in power consider themselves far above the hoi polloi. More a sign of a decaying social structure than of those at the top being better than anyone else.) and call it war or police actions or military intervention, but really meaning we had our people kill their people until the real important people screamed uncle and talked about doing what we wanted. When we are on our own soil fighting, its understandable, but when we ship our own somewhere else, hard to play the "good guy" card unless we are fighting for the people in their homes and were invited by them to help us.
But on our own soil--why do we ever get to fighting? Why are we killing?
Do we fight and kill for food and water and our right to stay in our home?
Or do we fight to take someone else's home or food or water.
Or do we just want more, so are willing to kill to get more with no thought of who we are taking it from.
We had ranchers willing to kill for the right to graze their huge herds on national land, everyone's land--land I can spend the night on without permission and paying. Perhaps they just needed to pay the people that owned the land to graze the herd and make sure that the land was not injured. Of course, these are the same people that want to kill all the other animals, deer, antelope, buffalo, wolves, mountain sheep, coyotes, whatever lives there, to protect their "investment". So it really is just greed, greed and selfishness that is urging them onward in their war to keep land that is not any more theirs than mine or yours.
We have weapons manufacturers that fight rules for gun ownership--like having a gun is not at least as fraught with danger and responsibility as owning and/or driving a car. I have had to maintain a driver's license, car tag and liability insurance since age 16, the earliest I could legally and independently own and drive a car, but if Joe-blow gives his 10 year old a gun, that is okie-dokie. No lessons on how to use and maintain a weapon, no liability insurance, no shooters license-basically no regulation at all. Too bad our forefathers hadn't the insight to make an amendment guaranteeing the rights of us all to drive anything, anywhere, any way we like. I would have saved a butt-load of money--though I'm sure the number of traffic accidents would have taken a good number of us out of the population.
Sociologists have posited theories on connections between behaviors that thin the herd--wars, gangs, increase in non-breeding individuals, decrease in attempts to provide healthcare and basic sustenance when the population is becoming too large. That makes a kind of sense, so many of us we lose our value, but then why do we turn around and try to make it impossible to prevent unwanted pregnancy and abortion. What is the benefit of making people be born only to suffer and die young or live terrible lives.
Who are we humans?
I don't really think we have only had the craziness we see since the new millennium started. I'm pretty sure all that really changed is my perspective.
I sort of woke up and started watching what was going on. Always easier when you are not running on a hamster wheel trying to get ahead or struggling to raise children--with all the anxiety and pressure to not screw that up. My kids grew up about then.
We humans, we have always had a lot of chaos. We kill. We take. We judge. We are full of pride about things that don't matter. We worry about our place in the social order and finagle ways to put our offsprings out of the harms way that is just being just another kid of a "workerbee" We want status. We want nicer stuff than our neighbors.
We want physical proof that we are doing well.
We humans--so insecure.
Maybe we should all spend more time making something beautiful and useful; or just hugging each other.
Saturday, June 25, 2016
influence
All my life, I've heard about "power and influence".
It was a phrase and almost a single word.
People with "power and influence" were important people. They lived in big houses and were on the fronts of magazines like "LIFE" and "Times" or today, "Forbes" or "Wall Street Journal". Their names were known in regular households and spoken by local newscasters.
Every town had their own people of "power and influence" and every local knew what neighborhoods they were most likely to live in.
Parents wanted their children to grow up to have "power and influence" although most parents were either more realistic or not feeling so lucky that they skipped encouraging them to also make some regular people plans with their lives.
The point is not that we have always had people with power and influence, but that we all have power, personal power, and we all influence others every day. Maybe even every minute of everyday.
Ask yourself, "who is the most important person in my life"?
That person has definitely had influence in your life.
But you don't have to be anyone's "most important person" to have influence.
We are all constantly influenced, for the good, for the bad, its all influence. We make choices based on influences.
Common influences are churches, spiritual leaders, school teachers, parents, grandparents, scout leaders, librarians, nurses and doctors, the landscaper, the tree trimmer, the bowling alley attendant that helps you learn to bowl. There are coaches and bosses, mentors and preceptors, best friends and old coworkers that all have there moments of influence. There are also incidental influencers, from eavesdropped conversations or from chance interactions--like the bench at the park or on the bus or in the checkout line.
So you don't have to be a winning politician to influence the creation of a better world. You don't need to have millions of dollars to help make a positive change. You don't even need a huge audience or an advanced and impressive education. Every one of us, everyday is influencing the people we interact with.
Sometimes we influence people without any awareness of it happening, like when we help someone solve a problem or share a personal story that ends up later helping them untangle their own problems.
Sometimes we influence people by stopping to aid someone in distress--not necessarily disaster-level distress but maybe a flat tire or out of gas or even a dollar short in the checkout line.
Sometimes we influence people by not people-pleasing. That sounds the opposite of a positive influence, but if you have ever worked with a person that is always consistent and always honest, it is so much more impressive than the person that brags up everyone and volunteers to do things they don't have the time for or the ability to do. People-pleasers usually influence us by teaching us what NOT to do.
None of us were raised by Saints or perfect people. Seeing someone do something differently than we were raised to believe it had to be done is both educational and very freeing. Those people that show us that, are very influential. (like vegetarians, if you had said that was possible when I was a child, I would have looked at you askance--a meal was not a meal without meat, our home ec teacher would have started talking about protein malnutrition, my cattle rancher relatives would have had them committed or arrested or hogtied)
Think about the important things in your lives, about the people that influenced your life. Consider who hears you and sees you, not just listens to you. Name a few names of those people with "power and influence" and ask yourself, which of those people can disappear from my life and leave the smallest ripples.
Don't stand in awe of the people with "power and influence".
Thank some of those people that actually had a positive influence in you life.
AND
Use your influence, your personal influence in the lives of the people surrounding you, to make a positive change in the world. Do it big or do is small but never think you have no effect so be wise.
That is real power and influence.
It was a phrase and almost a single word.
People with "power and influence" were important people. They lived in big houses and were on the fronts of magazines like "LIFE" and "Times" or today, "Forbes" or "Wall Street Journal". Their names were known in regular households and spoken by local newscasters.
Every town had their own people of "power and influence" and every local knew what neighborhoods they were most likely to live in.
Parents wanted their children to grow up to have "power and influence" although most parents were either more realistic or not feeling so lucky that they skipped encouraging them to also make some regular people plans with their lives.
The point is not that we have always had people with power and influence, but that we all have power, personal power, and we all influence others every day. Maybe even every minute of everyday.
Ask yourself, "who is the most important person in my life"?
That person has definitely had influence in your life.
But you don't have to be anyone's "most important person" to have influence.
We are all constantly influenced, for the good, for the bad, its all influence. We make choices based on influences.
Common influences are churches, spiritual leaders, school teachers, parents, grandparents, scout leaders, librarians, nurses and doctors, the landscaper, the tree trimmer, the bowling alley attendant that helps you learn to bowl. There are coaches and bosses, mentors and preceptors, best friends and old coworkers that all have there moments of influence. There are also incidental influencers, from eavesdropped conversations or from chance interactions--like the bench at the park or on the bus or in the checkout line.
So you don't have to be a winning politician to influence the creation of a better world. You don't need to have millions of dollars to help make a positive change. You don't even need a huge audience or an advanced and impressive education. Every one of us, everyday is influencing the people we interact with.
Sometimes we influence people without any awareness of it happening, like when we help someone solve a problem or share a personal story that ends up later helping them untangle their own problems.
Sometimes we influence people by stopping to aid someone in distress--not necessarily disaster-level distress but maybe a flat tire or out of gas or even a dollar short in the checkout line.
Sometimes we influence people by not people-pleasing. That sounds the opposite of a positive influence, but if you have ever worked with a person that is always consistent and always honest, it is so much more impressive than the person that brags up everyone and volunteers to do things they don't have the time for or the ability to do. People-pleasers usually influence us by teaching us what NOT to do.
None of us were raised by Saints or perfect people. Seeing someone do something differently than we were raised to believe it had to be done is both educational and very freeing. Those people that show us that, are very influential. (like vegetarians, if you had said that was possible when I was a child, I would have looked at you askance--a meal was not a meal without meat, our home ec teacher would have started talking about protein malnutrition, my cattle rancher relatives would have had them committed or arrested or hogtied)
Think about the important things in your lives, about the people that influenced your life. Consider who hears you and sees you, not just listens to you. Name a few names of those people with "power and influence" and ask yourself, which of those people can disappear from my life and leave the smallest ripples.
Don't stand in awe of the people with "power and influence".
Thank some of those people that actually had a positive influence in you life.
AND
Use your influence, your personal influence in the lives of the people surrounding you, to make a positive change in the world. Do it big or do is small but never think you have no effect so be wise.
That is real power and influence.
Saturday, June 18, 2016
What we have all known since we were young.
This is going to ramble. Childhood knowledge is rambling knowledge. But kids are collectors--of rocks and broken things and wisdoms they hear repeatedly until they assimilate them as absolute truth.
If there is one thing that will always get a conversation going, it is letting people reminisce.
It is not just old grizzled grandparents that enjoy that, although, given enough time, we do collect more material than your average 5 year old. But listening to children and psych patients and addicts and strangers at bus stops, I have decided we all have a few memories that allow us to hop from subject to subject using only our past experiences
The one thing I have noticed is that the absolute truths of my memories, fear of nuclear war, alerting when a plane seems to be coming in low, opening the windows on the east side of the house when the sky turns that weird green, what will happen to you if you use a Ouija board, why you can't let eel get cold after its cooked (it becomes raw again!) covering your ears when it is windy (those nylon head scarves were not just a fashion statement, not letting your feet get cold in the winter, not eating fish and dairy together, why mayonnaise will kill you, why crisco shortening is better for you than cow butter. (there really are a million of them) All those long held truths will make a person under 30 laugh like a fool.
Of course I remember my father worrying about pregnant women eating strawberries, but he understood the reasoning behind eating clay. And my mother convinced that communism, the same communism that was tried by John Smith in Virginia (Pocahanta's John, duh) was the same as the communism of the USSR and of the Peoples Republic of China and of North Korea and of North Vietnam and of Cuba. And it was evil, because if everyone worked and ate, the lazy people made out like bandits and the people that didn't like that were silenced-permanently. (apparently internal consistency was not required in childhood absolute truths)
I know from my childhood that drug fiends raped and killed people while on marijuana or heroin, but that prescriptions drugs were safe and good for you. I knew that antibiotics were always a good idea and would stop any disease and could never hurt you. (I hated doctors because every time I saw one I got a penicillin shot in the butt--colds, allergies, whatever, just in case. I ran from more than a few offices in undergarments)
I knew the United State was the only country in the world that never did anything wrong. Our soldiers were all heroes, our wars always justified and aimed at saving the world.
Yes, I was born before Vietnam and before the civil rights movement and before a lot of things. My childhood was plain vanilla, no diversity allowed, we were all white (with a cherokee princess as a great great grandma), we were all protestant, and we were all middle class, (although most of us were exaggerating on that) and we mostly came from farm folks--that was true, true-true, but most people lived off the land at one time.
We knew who was good and who was bad, who was right and who was wrong, and we knew our future roles in the world.
My childhood memories share little with those born in the 70's, and even less with those that came of age after 2000. But we all have absolute truths, and many times those are flavored by things and times we are so immersed in that we don't know they are skewed. They are all wearing colored glasses or listening to birds with hard rock playing in one ear. There is no absolute reality. We know what we know and that impacts everything we learn.
It is a little like being brainwashed, a little like being raised on propaganda, and a lot like being a human. We all are subject to it, just based on how our young brains work, how parents want to protect their children, and how parents were also once children just like us.
Changing away from teaching our kids and grandkids unreal truisms is like changing the educations system. The teachers in the system were once students in the system and most of those liked it enough to want to stay in it forever and don't want it to change what they liked or loved or remember fondly. Just letting go of chalkboards, workbooks and rows of desks with the teacher standing at the front "teaching" has been a long and slow process. The "It worked for me so it will work for them" mentality makes people hold on: parents, grandparents, teachers despite all the research showing how few students learn that way, all the poor results, all the failures to keep up with other nations can hardly dent that absolute truth of childhood memory. Poor students don't expect their children to like school or succeed, good students don't understand why anything changed, even though they themselves peaked out in high school or college.
But while we all know what is true in our youth, even though our truths are not identical, we can all examine those truths. It's not as easy as it seems, it takes self-awareness and fact-checking and not just accepting that if it was good enough for me its good enough for them, if it was ok then, its ok now. We must care enough about truth, fairness, whatever it is that makes most of us want to know--not just believe--that the world really is fair.
We can learn to laugh at the ridiculous stuff. Learn to be less black and white. Learn to be more tolerant of those whose truths are not like our own. And be more patient with those that are stuck.
But only after we get that our responsibility in the whole thing is figuring out that what we have known since we were kids--what we have always heard and always known--may have nothing to do with any objective reality.
Enjoy your memories, I know mine give me great joy--laughter, happiness, bittersweetness. But don't get stuck in the world you knew absolutely--when you were a child.
The world has always been more diverse and complicated than that.
If there is one thing that will always get a conversation going, it is letting people reminisce.
It is not just old grizzled grandparents that enjoy that, although, given enough time, we do collect more material than your average 5 year old. But listening to children and psych patients and addicts and strangers at bus stops, I have decided we all have a few memories that allow us to hop from subject to subject using only our past experiences
The one thing I have noticed is that the absolute truths of my memories, fear of nuclear war, alerting when a plane seems to be coming in low, opening the windows on the east side of the house when the sky turns that weird green, what will happen to you if you use a Ouija board, why you can't let eel get cold after its cooked (it becomes raw again!) covering your ears when it is windy (those nylon head scarves were not just a fashion statement, not letting your feet get cold in the winter, not eating fish and dairy together, why mayonnaise will kill you, why crisco shortening is better for you than cow butter. (there really are a million of them) All those long held truths will make a person under 30 laugh like a fool.
Of course I remember my father worrying about pregnant women eating strawberries, but he understood the reasoning behind eating clay. And my mother convinced that communism, the same communism that was tried by John Smith in Virginia (Pocahanta's John, duh) was the same as the communism of the USSR and of the Peoples Republic of China and of North Korea and of North Vietnam and of Cuba. And it was evil, because if everyone worked and ate, the lazy people made out like bandits and the people that didn't like that were silenced-permanently. (apparently internal consistency was not required in childhood absolute truths)
I know from my childhood that drug fiends raped and killed people while on marijuana or heroin, but that prescriptions drugs were safe and good for you. I knew that antibiotics were always a good idea and would stop any disease and could never hurt you. (I hated doctors because every time I saw one I got a penicillin shot in the butt--colds, allergies, whatever, just in case. I ran from more than a few offices in undergarments)
I knew the United State was the only country in the world that never did anything wrong. Our soldiers were all heroes, our wars always justified and aimed at saving the world.
Yes, I was born before Vietnam and before the civil rights movement and before a lot of things. My childhood was plain vanilla, no diversity allowed, we were all white (with a cherokee princess as a great great grandma), we were all protestant, and we were all middle class, (although most of us were exaggerating on that) and we mostly came from farm folks--that was true, true-true, but most people lived off the land at one time.
We knew who was good and who was bad, who was right and who was wrong, and we knew our future roles in the world.
My childhood memories share little with those born in the 70's, and even less with those that came of age after 2000. But we all have absolute truths, and many times those are flavored by things and times we are so immersed in that we don't know they are skewed. They are all wearing colored glasses or listening to birds with hard rock playing in one ear. There is no absolute reality. We know what we know and that impacts everything we learn.
It is a little like being brainwashed, a little like being raised on propaganda, and a lot like being a human. We all are subject to it, just based on how our young brains work, how parents want to protect their children, and how parents were also once children just like us.
Changing away from teaching our kids and grandkids unreal truisms is like changing the educations system. The teachers in the system were once students in the system and most of those liked it enough to want to stay in it forever and don't want it to change what they liked or loved or remember fondly. Just letting go of chalkboards, workbooks and rows of desks with the teacher standing at the front "teaching" has been a long and slow process. The "It worked for me so it will work for them" mentality makes people hold on: parents, grandparents, teachers despite all the research showing how few students learn that way, all the poor results, all the failures to keep up with other nations can hardly dent that absolute truth of childhood memory. Poor students don't expect their children to like school or succeed, good students don't understand why anything changed, even though they themselves peaked out in high school or college.
But while we all know what is true in our youth, even though our truths are not identical, we can all examine those truths. It's not as easy as it seems, it takes self-awareness and fact-checking and not just accepting that if it was good enough for me its good enough for them, if it was ok then, its ok now. We must care enough about truth, fairness, whatever it is that makes most of us want to know--not just believe--that the world really is fair.
We can learn to laugh at the ridiculous stuff. Learn to be less black and white. Learn to be more tolerant of those whose truths are not like our own. And be more patient with those that are stuck.
But only after we get that our responsibility in the whole thing is figuring out that what we have known since we were kids--what we have always heard and always known--may have nothing to do with any objective reality.
Enjoy your memories, I know mine give me great joy--laughter, happiness, bittersweetness. But don't get stuck in the world you knew absolutely--when you were a child.
The world has always been more diverse and complicated than that.
Monday, May 30, 2016
Memorial Day
While I realize that nationally, Memorial Day is all about war and heroes and sacrifice, in my own memory, it is about family--family and flowers.
Today, my son and I are going to do our own version of those long ago trips to the family cemeteries, withou the trunk full of fresh cut flowers from the gardens of Grandma and my aunts and uncles and parents. We tried to go yearly though after 18 it turned into once every 5 years or so. We never went to my fathers, too far away and if we stayed home, we just went to the lake.
My parents weren't from around here.
From those memorial day trips, I heard all kinds of family stories. About my uncle collecting a mouse from between graves and slipping it in his pocket. My grandmother laughed, but was obviously a bit horrified. Farm people--animals don't live in the house if you are civilized, there were barn cats to eat mice and farm dogs to watch the yard but mice--just nasty.
I heard about relatives long gone that my grandmother remembered like they just left. (I'm starting to get that, time does strange things in the mind, telescoping, shrinking, like seeing 2 times at once sometimes.) I heard about who was in which war, and who died young and who died very old. She even told us about the little marker in the family plot that said "baby",; a family traveling through that lost a child while staying nearby. There were details back then. Just a little sadness now for the family that lost a baby and then moved on to where they were going.
Back then, the roses and peonies were in bloom on this day. And while there are still a few straggling roses and the roses will repeat quite a few times this summer, the peonies have been gone a while and the lilies are starting. The spring started very early this year.
We used to go to multiple cemeteries on this weekend, because while they were my one family, they were not related 150 years ago when they started getting to that area. The cemeteries were small or large, well tended or a little seedy and showed no signs of corporate control. They had large trees or no trees, marble and granite or concrete and limestone, and in many of them, the graves had a rose or some other flowering plant that came back year after year.
So today, we are going to my parents grave. It is in a cemetery that was new when they bought there. A package deal they purchased after some death in the family without telling us kiddies what was going on. A deal that started with a cold call by a marketer of death. The cemetery is a long way from their home, but we moved to a city that was sprawling. It was a cemetery with a plan, a marketing plan, a maintenance plan, and its own flower shop. It is death done by big business. there are no weeping angels or little marble children holding hands.
I hate that cemetery. It is a cemetery that no one wants to go to, no one wants to wander in or pray in or sit and be alone for a while.
It is a cemetery that never quite meets the promises they sold my parents.
But I go because my son invited me and his kids could use the roots of such a trip.
I'm buying flowers at the supermarket.
Today, my son and I are going to do our own version of those long ago trips to the family cemeteries, withou the trunk full of fresh cut flowers from the gardens of Grandma and my aunts and uncles and parents. We tried to go yearly though after 18 it turned into once every 5 years or so. We never went to my fathers, too far away and if we stayed home, we just went to the lake.
My parents weren't from around here.
From those memorial day trips, I heard all kinds of family stories. About my uncle collecting a mouse from between graves and slipping it in his pocket. My grandmother laughed, but was obviously a bit horrified. Farm people--animals don't live in the house if you are civilized, there were barn cats to eat mice and farm dogs to watch the yard but mice--just nasty.
I heard about relatives long gone that my grandmother remembered like they just left. (I'm starting to get that, time does strange things in the mind, telescoping, shrinking, like seeing 2 times at once sometimes.) I heard about who was in which war, and who died young and who died very old. She even told us about the little marker in the family plot that said "baby",; a family traveling through that lost a child while staying nearby. There were details back then. Just a little sadness now for the family that lost a baby and then moved on to where they were going.
Back then, the roses and peonies were in bloom on this day. And while there are still a few straggling roses and the roses will repeat quite a few times this summer, the peonies have been gone a while and the lilies are starting. The spring started very early this year.
We used to go to multiple cemeteries on this weekend, because while they were my one family, they were not related 150 years ago when they started getting to that area. The cemeteries were small or large, well tended or a little seedy and showed no signs of corporate control. They had large trees or no trees, marble and granite or concrete and limestone, and in many of them, the graves had a rose or some other flowering plant that came back year after year.
So today, we are going to my parents grave. It is in a cemetery that was new when they bought there. A package deal they purchased after some death in the family without telling us kiddies what was going on. A deal that started with a cold call by a marketer of death. The cemetery is a long way from their home, but we moved to a city that was sprawling. It was a cemetery with a plan, a marketing plan, a maintenance plan, and its own flower shop. It is death done by big business. there are no weeping angels or little marble children holding hands.
I hate that cemetery. It is a cemetery that no one wants to go to, no one wants to wander in or pray in or sit and be alone for a while.
It is a cemetery that never quite meets the promises they sold my parents.
But I go because my son invited me and his kids could use the roots of such a trip.
I'm buying flowers at the supermarket.
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