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. 

   

South Park And Complex Problems

To every complex problem, there is a complex solution. This is to say that anyone saying that we need a common sense answer to nearly anything we face doesn't actually know what they are talking about. And yet, with our fruit fly attention span, we are ever ready to throw our support behind someone offering to let us forget our responsibility for self discipline, avoid harsh realities, and fall into a delusion of a golden path to utopia.

Take poverty for example. Any number of solutions to poverty can be proposed, from taxing the 1% who ostensibly horded all the wealth, thus creating poverty, to increasing social services to those in poverty with no clear path to actually getting them out of said poverty, but only keeping them on life support. Compassionate provisions for the the lowest members of society ensures we do not lose our soul. Likewise, expecting those with the most to also give the most is only in keeping with our notions of civic virtue. However, the simplistic theorizing of the application of these notions is akin to the South Park underpants gnome get rich quick scheme.



Needless to say, some important detail is missing.

We don't live in a simple world. We cannot will or ignore this important fact away. There is no perfect system and the reason we elect, employ, and allow people to run our political, economic, and social systems is because all these things require constant management and supervision. At the same time, we still cannot shake the messianic delusion of a clear path to utopia.

Complicate this with the understanding that for nearly all complex problems, there is no perfect complex solution, but only gradient of worse and less worse. Tax the 1% into oblivion and see in the same instant all major economic activity move somewhere else, but tax reasonably, and you will find there are loopholes the law didn't even know about. Likewise, as long as welfare is more profitable than minimum wage, you can figure out what the most economic solution is. Raise minimum wage and you will see that there are a lot more minimum wage workers allowed to work a lot less. But create more higher than minimum wage jobs, and see just how far reaching from environmental policy, to education, to urban zoning, to law enforcement, such a feat must be to be supportable.

There are many details to complex solutions. However, the first and most important is action down to the lowest level. This is the 1st civic virtue and one we blatantly ignore when we expect someone else to fix our problems. Rather than waiting for some policy to be voted on and executed to deal with the homeless man on the side walk, go by lunch for him yourself, and you will profit far more than these guys.

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.