Alternative Thanksgiving

On the surface, it appears the current obsession in the Modern World is evaluating and coming to terms with the past, mostly the shameful parts. This is useful in so much as it is important to cast off the polite fictions we use to convince ourselves of inherent superiority, manifest destiny, or self referential virtue. However, as C. S. Lewis said, "It's not out of bad mice or bad fleas you make demons, but out of bad archangels."

Looking closer, it becomes more obvious the current obsession is judging the past in terms of the present, and especially taking a biased selection of past events to confirm present narrative.  It's true that much of public education glosses over, or ignores anything other than signal events. We learn that the Pilgrims came to New England, but we don't look at daily life for Native or Euro-Americans.  We learn that the Civil War was about States Rights, specifically the right to own slaves, but we don't hear much in the voice of former slaves, or  drafted Union soldiers, or immigrant New England housewives back home for that matter.  However, all this so called hidden information is actually there if we look.  The issue isn't that it is being suppressed, but that it is being ignored.  The problem isn't that it is dangerous to teach it, but that it is easier to not pay attention, not in favor of some dominant power structure, but simple distraction, at all levels, including those who hold fashionably negative views about the colonial past.  Thus just as manifest destiny and inherent superiority did two centuries ago, narrative masked as justice fills in now.

The reality is this oversimplification of understanding, in-group favoritism as defined by whatever the fashion of the day is, and corresponding rejection of those who are not "in" combined with ignorance of history to justify current bias is nothing new.  The Greeks and Romans, and the Egyptians and Sumerians before them had their iconoclasts, cultural awakenings, and progressive regimes seeking to usher in a utopia, as has every other long lived mass civilization to our present day.  Meanwhile, a glance at history simply confirms this. 

A glance at history also confirms the futility of these efforts.  Even though the arch of progress is positive, the down trends carry away far more lives the higher up it goes.  Just look at the signal events, which are mostly related to wars.  However, we must look past signal events here too to see the whole story. 

The further truth to refute the dangerous notion of inherent superiority is fairly simple for the majority of us to find if we simply look at our own families.  It is a fortunate and possibly non-existent person who, growing up, had no bad experiences, was never disappointed by parents or siblings, does not have an aunt or uncle who is broken in some way, does not have criminals in the extended family to name a few banal examples.  Going farther back, in every culture, in every period in recorded history to include the current one there were rapists, murders, slavers, drunks, prostitutes, war criminals, abusers, womanizers, oppressors, losers, outcasts, slaves, and even sacrificial victims.  Many of these people had children.  It is staggeringly likely that all of us carry the genes of such ancestors, if not in living memory, at some point in our family story.  Jesus certainly did, and they are named in His genealogy. 

We are all, at some point the product of those who have done evil, who have contributed to those down trends in the arch of progress, and certainly from their victims as well.  If we look even closer, we will find we too fall short of any sort of ideal imaginable.  We have all hurt, been hurt, manipulated, been played, and carry scars, regrets, pain and disappointment.  Suffering, though more spectacular for some than others, is a universal human experience, and so is committing evil.  

However, here we are.  Some better off, some homeless alcoholics.  Some freeing the oppressed, some recovering from trauma.  Some trying to mend their wrongs, and some still ignorant of theirs.  We substitute narrative for reality to make sense of it.  To bring purpose to the pain and suffering.  But it is a delusion when it doesn't attempt to take into account as much of reality as it can.  If we aren't careful, we descend into vengeful, petty, self centered, and self imposed suffering.  The alternative is freedom, as no one can compel us to to respond any other way than we will to a circumstance. 

Thus the narrative I substitute for chaotic evil is one of thanks.  It is a powerful narrative because I am the one in control of it.  Though I am the product of suffering, and evil, though I have fallen short of any ideal, both through my own choices and the actions of others, I am thankful, and I have the choice to be thankful.  I am thankful because all these variables have contributed to my life, and to my current moment.  These inputs have given emergent rise to non-linear potential.  Potential that every human life shares in its basic substance, even the homeless alcoholics.  Even you. 

Happy Thanksgiving. 

   

Service

In an ideal world, there would be no need of a day to celebrate those who served, fought, and died in wars past and present. In an ideal world there would be no occasion for the mistake and resulting tragedy war always is. There would not be such extremes that allow for such brutality. As is evident, this is not an ideal world. However, beyond surface hero worship, which is more aimed at manipulating consumer sentiments than honoring veterans, the deeper meanings resonate strongly. 

We joined for various reasons. Some more noble than others. Most served honorably, and a few did not. None the less, we are are here now. In the greater scheme of things, we went to war for various reasons. Sometimes for survival, and sometimes for hubris, but always because there were failures, a few months, a few years, a few centuries up stream which lead to violent resolution at the expense of those present, and those who later must resolve yet more unsolved problems with blood, both their own, and of innocents bystander. War indeed may be just or unjust, and may even be unavoidable, but it is always a mistake if its causes are traced far enough back. 

Even the most necessary justice is tragic. Even the greatest good can be tragic when brought into a world twisted enough to snap even when graced by the kindest compassion. Even the birth of Jesus himself resulted in Herod killing the male children of Judea. The ideal world does not exist. Rather, it is uncertainty, fear, and suffering we are subjected to. However, it may also be faith, hope, and love we turn to for light in the darkness. To do so, you must be in a position to do so. You must be challenged. You must have skin in the game. 

There are many paths to personal risk and unselfish sacrifice. Military service is one of the most visible and most extreme, thus it is appropriate to honor those who did and continue to serve. However, the path to bringing order out of chaos lays open to anyone willing to do so, starting with the things closest to them. Rather than simply raging against systemic injustice, strike up a conversation with the homeless alcoholic on your street corner. Rather than simply decrying oppression, support and encourage those around you suffering it. Rather than just pointing out what is wrong, fix it to the best of your abilities, and thank a veteran or two for risking to do the same. 

The Opposite Of Political Correctness

For those of you who watched the recent fox news broadcast of the first ever debate between the Republican hopefuls for President of the United States, you may have noticed that Donald Trump, as expected, acted like himself.

I have limited patience for his positions, and do not intend to defend them here. However, it is noteworthy the extent to which he has, in a short time, generated considerable support simply because he is himself. The absurdity of his proposed positions does not seem to shake the majority of his supporters who I strongly believe do not support him so much for his proposed policy as for his seeming lack of ability to behave like a decent human being in front of an audience.

This signals confidence, decisiveness, and even clarity of thought. All these attributes are markedly lacking from postmodern society. They are also high human virtues that we are deeply attracted to, and for some of us this is regardless of content, as Mr. Trump has demonstrated.

We easily assume that Donald Trump is the opposite of political correctness from the opinions he shares regardless of if anyone asked for them or not, and it is easy to say he is as successful as he has been to this point because of his disregard for political correctness.

However, I challenge this position to ask who defines PC. It is often assumed that PC is a virtue of the left wing. It certainly is, but it is also of any point along the political spectrum that forgoes critical thought in favor of prepackaged platforms and rehearsed outrage at whatever is assumed to be destroying society. Outrage at the state of immigration, debt, foreign policy as apposed to income inequality, gender inequality, opportunity inequality, or anything held dear by the left wing is nothing more than what is PC for the point on the political spectrum from whence the position arises.

And increasingly, anyone who holds to any particular form of political correctness is causing flashes through my conscious of this character

and his supporters.

The actual non-PC path is to apply critical thought to the aspects of your own world view so that you have content worth raging for to begin with. Everyone may have an opinion. However, only those who understand theirs are entitled to one.

To take a your non-PC path into reality, you must exercise the above mentioned virtues of confidence, decisiveness, and clarity of thought, or to simplify, you must exercise both wisdom and courage, the true opposites of political correctness, and which I argue the majority of our problems stem from a lack of.

Postmodern society does not require more mass followers. It requires more individual leaders willing and capable of wisdom and courage. This does not require your candidate to win, or your position to be validated. It rather requires you to actually do something. Individuals remain the greatest potential black swans in existence.

You Can Choose Your Identity

As the essence of the enlightenment was the subservience of faith to rational thought, so the essence of the postmodern world is the subservience of rational thought to identity. 

We are very near coming full circle into something about the same as believing thunder is caused by an angry god, and that belief going unchecked lest it be an oppression to inform someone something other than what their identity demands. 

We are even now approaching a structure similar to that which demanded the excommunication of scholars because they proposed the earth rotated around the sun because this was against the correct beliefs of the day. 

We are coming to a point that, in the interests of not offending anyone, the only reasonable solution is complete segregation of everyone from everyone, lest someone commit the offence of cultural appropriation. 

Now let me ask, is this really the world you want to live in?

Rather than the circular banter approaching the absurdity of monkeys in a cage panicking over a picture of a snake that is in fact the logical conclusion to the postmodern politically correct ethic, look up from the PC viral post you may be about to make, or at least just look up. Walk outside. Notice that there are homeless people on the sidewalk. Now ask, what is more important, words leading to irrational non-action for fear of being seen as oppressive, or actions requiring no words to alleviate oppression. You really don't have to go far to find the real thing. 

Most main streets and back allies in Urban America will lead you rite to it. Most rural farms worked by low/no wage workers will show the same thing. Most of the rest of the world experiences it as a daily norm. Most people don't have to think about it, much like some say privilege is. 

The struggle of our times does not have to be over sanitizing that which is not real, but rather over jumping into the reality that is not sanitary and doing something about it. 

Self serving ignorance of the chaos around us is neither satisfying nor practical in the long term, not for the single individual that even faintly aspires to do that which is the essence of humanity, and that is to care. 

The Pornoization Of Social Justice

Privilege. Consider yours. Some have more, and some have less. However, few who talk about it are without it.

The simple act of being able to talk about privilege indicates the absence of the pressing need to deal with your lack of it, which is of itself a privilege. Worrying about your next meal, medical expenses for your children, your legal status in the state you reside in, etc, tends to tax ones time and emotional resources to the point where the question of privilege is not as important as the urgency of survival. It is from thence that I do stipulate that those who are talking about privilege, in whatever context, are in a position to consider their position rather than worry about survival.

This is not to say there is not a spectrum of privilege along which its belligerents fall and certainly not to say that the majority who experience it who are equally unaware are excused from this discussion. It is simply to say that that spectrum is 50 shades of shit compared to the immediacy of suffering for those unaware and unable to discuss the concept, and because the suffering is immediate, the discussion is wasted if it detracts from addressing what is actually going on.

In fact, it is so wasted that it serves no purpose at all apart from the self gratification of those discussing it. This is strikingly similar to the pass time of so many that also serves no purpose apart from self gratification. Discussion of privilege is masturbation, and continuing to be drawn in to the tempting viral repost fodder of some examination of privilege that stands in for real discussion of social justice is nothing more than the pornoization of the same.

Identifying and deconstructing privilege, and discrediting other people's opinions based on privilege is about as helpful to granting civil rights to those denied them as watching porn is to actually getting laid. People in West Oakland, South Central LA, any number of other urban centers, and even the rural south do not need middle to upper class people, regardless of the lack of privilege from whence they came, engaged in debates about and guilt over privilege. They need higher paying jobs, not higher minimum wage. They need access to education, not more welfare. They need security in the form of equal access to government services, not just greater and increasingly less competent police presence.

Discussing inequality from the comfort of one's own intellectual bedroom, no matter how layered with faux sensitivity, is nothing compared to going out to the club, bar, gym......church, wherever one makes amorous pursuits, of current and immediate human suffering that does not have time to stop and consider how it got to be this way. 



Such discussions are a distraction. Furthermore, they ultimately resolve to nothing more than an anticlimactic encouragement to be aware of such privilege, or, much like masturbation, a sense of guilt in the same. 

Towards A More Perfect Union

I talk much about chaos, irrational fears, and our cultural habit of straining out the gnats of petty offenses only to swallow the camels of walking past the homeless alcoholic on the sidewalk as we virally repost some PC meme about social justice on our smart phones made with rare earths extracted at the point of an AK-47. 

However, amidst all the noise of our postmodern world, there is one signal that resonates even in the collective gnat straining and camel swallowing. No matter how absurd our opinions are, how damaging they may be to the long term understanding of the issues we encounter, and how uninformed they are, we are free to publicly hold them.

There is some well founded fear at the character assassination that often comes from holding a non-PC or just plain ignorant opinion in public. At the same time, we do not, in general, fear having our front door kicked down in the middle of the night soon to be followed by us being dragged from our house and shot in a back alley. This is a very real consideration for many people in the world right now. It has been for some time, and it is likely to continue to be so. 

The very real and very serious evils committed under our national flag and in the national interest, or at least with our consent, though they are not to be forgotten lest they be repeated, do not detract from that which has lifted us to the level of only global super power standing. The foundation of our success, and the reason we are looked to, even grudgingly by some, as the most radiant light in a very dark world is because we have taken the notion of personal freedom and opportunity to a level not seen thus far at such scale. We are where we are because some have taken the opportunity and been the change they wanted to see. 

 

Though we rage against the machine we live in, the oil that lubricates its gears is this same freedom. For this reason, though there is much to be desired yet, there is indeed reason to hope, and not only to hope but to act because that which is left to be desired is opportunity for the individual to change the darkness into light.

It is said that freedom is not free. The true price of it though that all shoulder regardless of the sacrifices they have or have not made is the responsibility to now take that freedom as licence to act for the greater good. 

There will always be a machine to rage against. Likewise, there will always be someone in need close by if you so much as pay attention. The deference between the two is that you can most certainly effect that one in need close by for the good whereas the machine will likely require a bit more rage for a bit more time.

 

Thus, in the year of our Lord, 2015, and in the independence of the United States of America, the 240th, take the opportunity that freedom grants and be the change your wish to see in the world. 

It is through such collective actions of the individual more so than any sweeping policy that we shall indeed move towards a more perfect union. 

The Tools Of Ignorance

It is said that you do not have to be the sharpest tool in the tool shed, just a tool, so long as you are a useful tool. 

If this is the case, ignorance is vindicated by all of her children on a daily basis owing to the degrees of distraction the modern world is constantly addicted to. One week we are assailed with images of a woman who used to be a man, and in nearly the same instant exposed to cries of indignation for valor stolen by the same. This, of course, completely ignored the view of the individual put front and center, and whose narrative was so completely coopted by other interests towards no clear end other than more outrage. The next week we are assailed with accusations of someone posing to be an ethnicity she is not. For personal gain none the less, and not that being the above was ever a choice aspired to for personal gain. So much has been lost by so many for being the wrong color. But it is the most recent events that prove the degree of shock and awe required for the shortest period of depth and focus. 

Future readers will be able to look back in history to identify what happened only a few days before this entry was made, and thus I will not go into depth here apart from to say in agreement with anyone else with the slightest bit of reason that we have a problem. 

However, the extent of my agreement will end there. Only a few short days after so much evil waste of life and we are once again throne to the winds of chaos and distraction. We are even now assailed with talk of gun control, and systemic racism. We are told we have a gaping and ignored wound. We are made to believe this is a huge problem, which is no batter now than when we first began. These are indeed signals in the noise, but the constant feedback loop creates only more noise. Gun control, systemic racism, and ingrained hatred are indeed grave problems, but they are so in the same way a high fever is a problem caused by an underlying illness. They are symptoms of a deeper malady, one that has its roots in the same distraction that causes us to flit from one outrage to the other while all the wile never actually paying attention and never actually doing anything. Never really caring beyond a viral repost, or declaration of solidarity that doesn't require walking out the front door. 

Our deeper malady, our underlying medical condition as a society is the glorification and passionate devotion to ignorance. In mass we have become very good tools of ignorance indeed. We love to point to public figures and ridicule them for their absurd religious views, or their dramatic falls from grace, while ignoring the fact that we are the ones who lifted them up in the first place, or at least allowed it to be so. We allow the debate to continue on that more control will lead to less violence, while never backing down from extreme positions that will never be supported. We talk of systemic racism while ignoring what goes on every day and night on the other side of our home towns. We do what feels right rather than what is right. We support emotions rather than reasonable policies. We act out of emotion rather than even creating reasonable policy. We look to the closest relative advantage, rather than considering the great disadvantage in such a short sighted view. We unite is mass outrage against spectacular acts of evil, while never stopping to examine the banal evils we engage in every day. Do you really think that cotton you are wearing is free trade? The children in Uzbekistan who more likely than not picked it would disagree if they knew what free trade was. How about those rare earth components in you iPhone? Where do you think they came from? How about those drugs you insist are your legal and civil right to consume? How many people died as a result of the money you paid for them? What about those girls on the Internet? No one is so open in every sense of the term for no reason. What about the gas in you car? The water in your cup? The food on your table? Do you really think your existence is a victimless crime? 

There are second and third order effects to everything. There are many more shades than black and white. And there are a million and one excuses as to how it got this way and to explain whose fault it really is. 

While there are indeed second and third order effects to everything and there are more shades than black and white, for anyone who truly cares, who will do rather than repost, the only one to blame is you. Grand policy and sweeping legislation may be beneficial, even needed. Nothing though is more required every moment of every day than the involvement of the singe individual for good. 

One does not have to be the sharpest tool, but you do have to walk out the front door to be a tool for good. The objective isn't emotional satisfaction. It is justice.