What if Beauty had No Value?

I’ve never felt beautiful. But like almost every person I know, I always wanted to be attractive.

I know all the reasons that beauty if a foolish thing to value. It fades. It is skin deep and does not represent the person.

I know how much pain my continued desire for it has caused me. Just releasing that desire would be a great relief from the pain. A huge freedom.

But, like so many things of this nature, knowledge isn’t the course of mental change. Ultimately the deep rooted belief that beauty has worth is more powerful than the knowledge that personal beauty is not really representative of anyone.

Its the belief that beauty has worth that gives it value all over the world. Even though it is an illusion we all recognize, we still hand over the reins to the belief.

Logic is not the power player in my brain that I want it to be.

Why denial of Manmade Climate Change is a marker for a bad political leader.

The job of president is a job in which you make large decisions on subjects where you are not an expert.

It requires intellectual rigor. It requires the ability to assess what experts in a field are saying. To decide what the essential facts are from those experts.

If, in the face of an overwhelming consensus from experts in the field, you decide that a tiny non-expert minority are correct, you do not own the most basic requirement for being President.

The ability to make a decision based on information from experts is a PRIMARY JOB REQUIREMENT and they show they can’t do it when they deny manmade climate change.

Some of the climate change deniers may actually believe the climate change science, but are willing to take the denier stance because its politically in their best interest.

The second great indicator of a leader is the ability to do the right thing even when this might not work in their personal interest. In other words integrity. This one is where probably the entire field for 2016 fails, but its hard to pick out unless they deny climate change.

So if the Presidential Candidate is a climate change denier he/she is either unable to make good decisions based on evidence from experts – ie their entire prospective job, or they have integrity problems, which means nothing they say can be relied on.

Its a red flag for me. Climate Change Denier = NOPE.

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 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.

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.

Maybe we should just take her down.

statue of liberty

You know what the poem inside says?

Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

I imagine a future of Trump Land, where she will be dismantled and a large gold Trump sign will be erected with something printed below about being the home of white rich people who claim christian descent, if not actual practice.

Although, to be fair, we have ignored with impunity the sentiments of this poem for longer than is seemly.

Trump is merely the next logical step to our ever more legalized xenophobia.