Talking to the other side.

If you really want to talk about a controversial issue, step into the shoes of the person you are talking to. Why do they think that?

Because frankly, there is very little in this world that is entirely black and white. And there is a ton of political stuff that is not driven by evidence but by personal values.

And if you are arguing from a position of personal value, which most of us are – make sure you fully understand your own personal values. Why do you feel the way you do about an issue? What are the values that drive your emotions on the issue and how does the position you have taken support them.

Try to understand the values that drive the position of the person you are talking to.

Because honestly, for most people evidence will not weigh heavily against personal values. People will cite evidence all the time, but the evidence is not why they support their viewpoint. The personal values are the reason. The evidence is used to support a position they took long before they even knew the evidence existed.

And before you discuss an issue and cite evidence, please look up your facts. Check your sources and if all of your sources come from the folks who are heavily endorsing your political viewpoint, look a little deeper.

People who are politically invested with a lobby are not your most reliable source of material.

People are complicated.

Don’t EVER forget that.

They can care deeply about some important injustice and laugh hysterically at a silly viral video just moments later.

They can love fiercely and blow off a minor flirtation without regard to anyone’s feelings.

They can swear like a sailor on heroin and hug a child with a broken doll with all the tenderness of pure compassion.

They can win a nobel prize and still make ridiculous errors of judgment.

We are not just one thing. And the biggest disservice we do others and ourselves is when we try to define others or ourselves by one moment or emotion or achievement.

People are not defined by one thing. They are complicated piles of garbage and art.

It is probably the best thing we can do a human is to remember that about ourselves and about the people around us. No one is one thing. No one deserves to have their entire life be judged on one thing.

The bullshit of “If you really wanted it, you would do it”

This a popularly held piece of bullshit that has pissed me off most of my adult life after doing untold damage to my psyche as a child/teenager.

I am going to use my weight issue as an example, but the ‘wanting it enough’ statement is used for lots of things that people struggle with. And almost universally its bullshit. The reasons parallel quite nicely with my example.

I have been fat to some degree or another most of my life. And I tried daily for most of my teens and 20s to diet. I dreamed about being thin, I tried and failed at just about every diet that came down the pike. I knew more about nutrition and dieting than just about anyone I knew.

But I just got fatter not thinner. And it was said to me by friends, family and strangers “When you want it enough, you will be able to do it.” That was apparently the key to unlocking the problem. Just wanting it more than I already did.

Lets unpack that piece of stupidity.

If I want it enough, means that despite the fact that the dream and the desire to be thin was filling all of my imagination -it was apparently not “enough” wanting to allow me to successfully diet.

The constant planning for eating the correct foods, researching new diets, spending thousands and thousands of dollars on it hadn’t quite hit “enough”.

It means that even though my life on a daily, often moment by moment basis was a series of humiliations, of physical limitations, and of just plain pain, it was was somehow not outweighing some mysterious advantage to being fat and/or eating too much. Apparently I needed things to get worse than 400 lbs before I triggered the “enough” category of wanting.

Now lets consider what the implication of this sentence is. Not only am I fat, unattractive, unhealthy and utterly miserable, I WANT to be that way. That’s what someone is saying to me. I enjoy being all of that so much that my obsession with being thin – it was just a drop in the bucket.

And the further implication is that there is something wrong with me because I don’t want this enough.

What scared me was that I believed them. I just accepted that my constant state of desire and of obsession about being thin, wasn’t really “wanting”. I was constantly trying to figure out what I could possibly be getting out of the misery that would trump all of that obsession. It certainly wasn’t on the surface the way my apparently not “enough” desire to be thin was. I felt crazy.

And then one day, it dawned on me. That “enough” was bullshit. I did want it. The entire premise of wanting it enough is faulty.

And people say it because they don’t know why a rational person wouldn’t be able to stick to a diet.

I eventually got a gastric bypass. I don’t regret it. I regret the belief in the bullshit of “not wanting it enough”.

Wanting something is not the intrinsic piece of the puzzle that makes us do something.

People do lots of things every day they don’t “want” to do. They do them for lots of reasons other than personal desire.
People do lots of things every day that they get no advantage from.
They often don’t do things that they could get an advantage from.

Life is far more complex than that statement implies and using it supremely unhelpful advice.

Don’t say it to anyone EVER. For anything they are trying to achieve. Their inability to do something they dream about probably has nothing to do with not wanting something. Admit that you don’t really know why they aren’t succeeding in the endeavor and give them support.

Life isn’t Simple

Humans have been over simplifying the world, like I just did in the title for many millennia.

I wonder how we ever got better than being savages in constant fear, hunger and violence. And then I remember. We did it by convincing people through oversimplification that they should support X or Y change.

I hate the human need to simplify. Life is so very much more complex than all of our ridiculous declarations of Truth. But with all of that hate, I am still drawn in by the oversimplification of reality.

I want to understand. And simple is just easier to comprehend. Its easier to place new information into the organization that my mind has already laid out.

Complexity ,however, is beautiful. Complexity is the very nature of life. It deserves to be embraced.

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I would submit that the Interstate Highway System is the greatest achievement of the US government.

And we take it for granted.

It impacts you DAILY.

If you don’t understand its impact, think about the last time you drove on a road with some version this as its sign.

How many stop lights were there?

But the interstate goes the same places. No stops.

The clothes you wear, the food you eat, the way you get to work. Everything you touch is easier, cheaper and faster because of the interstate.

Every day.

It matters. And its not even something we think about except when its not working to the exceptional level we think is normal.

A road without intentional pause.

A road with EXCEPTIONAL signage. If you have a vague understanding of the geography of this country – you can drive the interstate system WITHOUT maps, from one end of the country to the other.

Its a primary example of when government works.

Eisenhower. Who knew? He looked so boring.

Life is about small moments

I follow a young couple on twitter. The young man (23 or 24) has cancer.

This is a sad sad thing. Of course it is.

But.

As they battle this cancer and navigate the hospitals and the hazards of doctors and medicine, they have reminded me so deeply that the small things are what make life most worthy.

They find cheer and hope and happiness in the most mundane moments.

The grand battles and big enemies, they are epic. They are bigger than any of us can fix or overcome. But none of us are fighting the grand battle. We are all of us living in the small moments.

Joy still comes is in quiet moment of enjoying a good dinner with friends.

The unbearable horror can be dealing with traffic on your way home from cancer treatment.

Empathy carries us another step when a shopkeeper who notices his usually cheerful customer is quiet and sad while she chooses her veggies and asks what is wrong.

Exhaustion is created by battling an unfair library fine.

Sudden energy comes from one person who steps out of the bureaucracy and provides needed guidance and information.

Those small moments are the moments we experience. They are things that define how we feel.

But we all think the epic struggle of cancer or war or starvation is the thing. Some large monstrous thing we cannot possibly grapple with.

NO.

Life is not the big epic battles. Its the tiny moments of struggle and triumph, of kindness or disdain that really define our lives and even direct our epic battles.

Those daily moments are not outside the realm of anyone to change. We cannot change the course of cancer as ordinary individuals. But we can touch the person who is struggling. We can mean something to the person in front of us. And how we deal with each other is how each of us experiences the epic struggles of our life.

We can’t fix everything. But we can change the course of the moment that sits in front of us. And sometimes that extra moment of effort means an unfathomable amount to the other person in the moment. You may never know it. But perhaps we should all act as though it does.

Nothing is ever really true.

All the remembered and current actions and events in my life change when I stare at them.

The way they look depends on how my brain is feeling at the time.

When my brain is seeing them from the cesspools of depression, all of my actions look like failures, all the events look like disasters, and I am a pretty bad person all around.

When my brain is seeing them from a healthy happy perspective, all of those same actions are reframed into necessary actions, learning curves, challenges I can find a silver lining for and I’m a pretty decent human.

Everything in my life is framed by my mental disposition at the time. Nothing has a black and white truth.

Humans don’t have a solid line inside of them that we can use to judge the world or our own actions with any accuracy. So we reach out to some outside reference point because if we look too long at the ever changing landscape of our past, we start to recognize the wavering nature of truth.

We realize – Nothing is ever true.

That is the attraction of looking outside of self for some unchangeable set of truths by which to measure our life. That is the attraction of fundamentalist religion.

Listening is Reading on the Internet

Yesterday ManuDS wrote a post about listening, or more accurately how we don’t listen. I agreed wholeheartedly with it.

I have always considered myself a good listener. In fact my job’s primary function is listening. I work in a call center. But on the internet, listening is translated into reading comprehension.

And I think the issue that ManuDS brings up are amplified on the internet when reading someone’s thoughts. I hang out in places like wordpress, tumblr, twitter and reddit where you can interact – leave comments. But I also am not as good a “listener” on the internet as I am in real life.

On the internet, I can skim. Or I can read until I get to place where it sparks a thought I want to express and I can just skip down and comment. I’ve done that.

I just caught myself condemning someone who started his comment with, I didn’t read the whole post, but I wanted to comment on… And then I stopped myself and thought – well at least he’s honest about it. I’ve done it before and not confessed.

Everyone wants to be heard. Its a form of validation. And humans NEED validation. People often condemn it, but its just nature and its necessary to our self definition, to our feelings of security, to our sense of place. Everyone does it.

The internet, or at least the places where I live on the internet, is one large attempt to gain some validation. To have our identity recognized through our thoughts, our humor, our fandom. But it is also a place that can slowly degrade your identity, because people may not really be seeing, reading, comprehending.

I think I will attempt to be more aware of the person on the other side of the words on the screen. To read the words like I’m listening to the person. To not comment unless I have fully comprehended the ideas and views of the person who wrote them. There is enough static in the ether to fuzz out most of us, my refusing to try doesn’t need to add to the fuzziness. statelibqld_2_179487_doris_auguste_heindorff_listening_to_a_gramophone_new_farm_brisbane_1903-1913

Politically Correct & Humor

There’s a post going around about a Christmas Card that a family sent. Its a family photo where the woman & two daughters have tape over their mouths and the man and one son, without taped mouths, hold a sign that says “Peace on Earth.”

Not surprisingly it upset a lot of people. The debate is why should a picture of consenting people making what they consider to be a funny joke, be considered so bad?

Politically correct is thrown out as the standard response to people who have a viscerally bad reaction to this photograph. While I find the derogatory response of “politically correct” to be a bad defense to any position, there are two sides to this issue.

Its about context. When you have a family where perhaps the female members are outgoing and do a great deal of talking and the male members are introverts, they might have an internal family joke about the situation. About the need for introverts to take cover to find a bit of peace and quiet. Perhaps the joke includes references to taping mouths shut.

The thing is – inside jokes like that have a whole context and framework of shared meanings and experiences that do not exist for anyone else.

Now the family thinks – wouldn’t it be funny to put our little family joke into a picture and send it out. Its funny – it sort epitomizes our little family dynamic.

But you see that picture doesn’t come to rest of us with all of the family’s context and history. We see it and we build our own context to it. And for women, that context is not a happy one. That context is built on thousands of years of being silenced in legal, cultural and social ways. So when we see this picture we don’t see an ongoing family joke. We see misogyny. We feel the misogyny.

Its a thing most women still experience in a multitude of mostly small inconspicuous ways. Over a lifetime its 10,000 tiny cuts. Each one insignificant but slowly building and draining you.

I don’t suppose it was EVER the intention of the family to communicate a message about silencing women. They had a family joke, which was probably centered more on personality but got gendered as many things do. But they didn’t consider the context in which it would be seen. They didn’t realize that none of us participated in their family and couldn’t see the context of their small joke but could only contextualize on the larger picture of how women have always been treated in society.

We are not considering the family’s context of an inside joke. We are projecting our context onto this picture. And raising a pitchfork army for an innocent joke is absurd.

But pretending that the feelings the pitchfork army has gathered around are imaginary is inane. They are real and so are their overall causes.

I have a cat for sale, swap, or frankly you can just have her no questions asked.

Type: Brown Tabby, generally considered cute. Often considered a Pest.

Gender: Female but without necessary connections for reproduction.

Name: Lily

Description: Well, right now I’m typing this with her chin on one of my hands. So. I guess you could call her “involved”. I call it annoying.

She enjoys computers. She will be the means by which you learn a great many things about how to unfuck computers, short cut keys and that sort of thing. She’s basically a computer tutor. She fucks it up, you fix it.

She doesn’t eat much. (due to chronic feline renal failure). However, she makes up for that by throwing up on a semi regular basis. Think of her as a home decorator.

This model of feline releases small barely detectable parts of herself… everywhere. They accumulate into very detectable piles. They will adhere to all of your clothing, furniture, carpet, walls, food. When you clean them up, she will watch and be mildly offended at your disposal of her discarded parts. She is everywhere even when she isn’t.

Your requirements: She likes to sleep with you. But is very particular about the set up. There will be a great deal of back and forth under the covers while you hold the covers up. YOU WILL BE REQUIRED TO HOLD UP THE COVERS during the settling in process. Your time and annoyance investment in her position will make it less likely that you will ever move because moving will require a new resettlement procedure, so DON’T MOVE.

You will be required to run back and forth through the home as though you are another cat playing chase. This is required only 2-3x a week as this feline is older and not feeling well often. Think of her as your fitness coach.

You will worry. Incessantly. About the how little she eats, how terrible she feels and how much you wish you could make it better for her. This isn’t a requirement so much as an involuntary response to her love and condition.

Benefits: She loves you. Always and completely.

Maybe I’ll keep her.

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