Rambling about Escapism

Is our culture too invested in escapism?

We have TV everywhere and Netflix and video games and phones.

We are connected all the time.

We can have 650 “Friends” on Facebook and never have met any of them at all in real life.

We binge watch whole seasons of shows on weekends.

We have IMAX theaters where were can fully immerse ourselves in the story.  I remember my first experience with IMAX.  I was in Texas and it was this history film somewhere near the Alamo.  I wasn’t at all sure what I thought about it.  I’m still not sure.

Are we leaving reality behind too much?  Are we escaping so much that we fail to face the blunt force trauma of our own reality?

Do we need to unplug and relish the harshness of life’s cruel bends and clearly face them and solve them, or let them beat us down if that is what Fate has determined must happen?

In all the connectivity, do we grow?  Do we grow in the ways we should grow?  Do we absorb too much the tied-up-in-a-bow tropes and predictable storylines, expecting one day, that things will just “work out” for us, without applying any elbow grease?

Do we live in a world in our head that is almost reality- but not quite, because reality can suck and we don’t want to be there?  Do we let our problems sit, unsolved, unaddressed, un-felt?

Are we stopping ourselves from accepting uncomfortable truths about the lives we live and instead zoning out into something we find pleasant in order to hide?  Do we use these things to abdicate our own responsibility for our choices?

Is it fair to ourselves to hide from a rude or harsh thing that fate has dealt us, if indeed that is the case?  It is better to fall in and embrace the darkness of that fate, rather than create for ourselves a distraction?

I’ve found myself pointlessly watching “The Golden Girls” of late.  While I do laugh occasionally, I sit and wonder to myself at the plotlines.  Am I to believe that women in this age bracket are having relationship and friendship problems that a 14-year-old could clear up for them?  Or even a person much younger?

So why keep watching?  Is there a point?

Why do we watch things just to watch them?  Just to have the noise in the house, the pretend familiarity and warmth?  The illusion of people that are ultimately always safe and who never could actually do any harm to us?

None of us knows how to live a life.  Some of us flounder around trying.  Always attempting to figure it out.  Some people really try.  Some people never seem to care much, and come into this world sitting on a stump with a motionless face and go out the same way.  TV never seems to help much.  Unless you happen to run into some situation involving a comic misunderstanding with characters who only have a few dimensions.

That is where TV also gets us:

We think of people incorrectly, and people portray themselves almost as caricatures. Only a list of qualities based on stock roles.  We lose our complexity.  We fail to see the complexity in others.  We sell ourselves short on experiences and possibilities because of what we believe is fitting for us and who we determine we are.   We define ourselves by music preference and subculture and religion (sometimes as all three at once—as I mentioned in the previous post, everyone I meet thinks that because I am white I am also Christian, Republican, and listen to country music a lot.)

Some people may only be three things.  Maybe they aren’t multi-dimensional.  But maybe it’s because they never gave themselves the chance to be, creating walls of what must be, walls that would never let them change the dial from the country music station to the college amateur DJ hour.

Some of us fools do reach up and twist the knob.

Some of us do eventually turn off the TV and listen to the quiet and cry about our lives and thank our lucky stars for the good things while wondering still why we got passed over for some, and know that living our best lives means we may not ever have everything, but we give it a damn good try as much as we can.  Some of us do hit every station in the market.  Read books on the gods of every religion, and try dancing to alien beats. Some of us grab different wine bottles every time we are in the store just to see how different they taste.  We try the funny-looking appetizers and new fusion cuisine just to give it a shot.  We go to a restaurant without anyone having recommended it to us or looking up reviews, because, if it’s awful, at least we’ll have a story to tell.

Some of us fools allow ourselves to feel out of step with our surroundings.  To feel the discomfort. To realize that some things were our fault, but some things were dumb luck and out of our control.  That trope that hurts the most—the inability to make the magic-30-minute-resolution happen because you did the right things.

At the end, we, the oddballs, drink our totally random wine, sit outside on the steps and hope that maybe somehow, we are gaining wisdom in all our folly.   That we will have enough of wisdom to really feel different one day, but perhaps, that is an illusion too.

The fictional idea I find affects me the most is the “getting it right” idea.  The idea that we will cross a finish line and not make any further bad choices, mistakes, never have a thought come out of our mouth holding the wrong words… that we will somehow one day get everything right.  Our job will never disappear and our stock picks will only go up and we won’t forget we left something in the oven ever again.   Our skin cream will be affordable and eliminate pimples and wrinkles, all our plants will bloom and we will eat a proper diet and somehow extend the daylight hours in a manner that allows us to do it all and tie each day up neat and complete.

Even though I know is absurd, it affects me.  Something about the idea managed to wriggle its way into my brain, past all the TV and movie absurdities about love and heroics and success. This is the part that got through. Getting my choices right.  Staying on top of everything.  Although I know that no one keeps all the plates in the air all the time… I still think sometimes…. That if I could… I would break through to something else.

But there is nothing else.  This is my life.  And I’m living it.  This is it.  All there is.

None of us has the faintest clue what we are doing.

The Desperation of Rightness

Some of the people out there don’t understand what it is like to grow up in an evangelical home.  I can’t say my story speaks for everyone, but I think it speaks to a common mentality found in certain areas.

The mentality is this:

We are always right.  Your parents are always right.  You may know something that we don’t, but we are right about it by being your parents and therefore being older and wiser than you.

This is why reason doesn’t win.

You can argue all day long about the overwhelming evidence of something.  It doesn’t matter.  And it won’t matter what that thing might be.

For instance:  My father has argued with me about the meaning of the word “tenure”.  I work in higher education.  I have attended 3 different colleges and universities.  I know what tenure is. I know someone who was fired who had tenure.  However, he argued with me that it meant that people could not be fired.  I told him that it did not.  The argument devolved quickly into a nasty “IT DOES, TOO!!” from him.

I was 38 years old at the time.

I gave up.  He will never see my wealth of experience and knowledge or my professional level as being ever equal to something he heard some guy say on a Fox News show or during a sermon from the right kind of preacher.

I could literally write a book on something, and someone from that world would gladly tell me I was wrong about something that I had studied for years.

This is something beyond gaslighting.

This is a systematic devaluing of the knowledge of the younger generation, regardless of what their scope of knowledge is.  Some of it is mansplaining, but I also got it from the female members of my father’s family.

This is belief based in “rightness.”   And they believe in being right about everything.  The pattern of your wallpaper or what color car you should buy, even.   And that is what makes it hard to pin down as what it is.  It isn’t that everyone must fit a certain pattern, it is that everyone must fit the pattern that has been determined by someone else with more perceived “rightness.”

It is about the belief that all other white people are also Protestant and Evangelical, and that they are also Republican and listen to Country music and want and are expected to have exactly the same lives as their parents.

It is the notion that you will marry someone most likely from your hometown even if you don’t even live there anymore.

It is the idea that you want to live in a certain area even though you have never even voiced a desire to do so.  It is the assumption that you want what they think you should want without asking you.

It is constantly saying, to younger people who know something, that some mysterious “they” have you “convinced” of something – that the Muslims you work with every day aren’t planning your doom when they ask you where the scotch tape is, that tenured professors are fire-able.

I can only imagine some dark cabal out there determining that one must sneak around and “convince” us “dumb” people who actually work in a certain field what terms in that field mean, and that these meanings are somehow different from their actual secret meaning, which is somehow known to these other people out there.  Or that entire groups of people would decide “Let’s be nice about the office supplies and conduct ourselves graciously.  That’ll be how we get ‘em!”  The ongoing fallacy is that there is some secret code between individuals, who may have never met before now, and are deciding to do this complete social con game, full-on convincing other people into believing something. The fallacy that YOU disagreeing with them on a point about global warming or Charles Darwin means that that weird blob of random strangers has done their secret handshake behind the screen and has “convinced” you.

And this “having you convinced” will be proclaimed as truth–even though the person making this proclamation about you hasn’t managed to convince you of anything since 1983.  Because you just aren’t easily convinced.

But that screws with everything in their perception of you.  They want, nay, they NEED for you to fit the mold of a dumb kid, easily convinced of things by fancy people.

If I was a brain surgeon, I’m sure that would come up too.  And I would hear how wrong I was about something dealing with the brain.  How someone had me “convinced” about the benefits of some treatment or another.  If I sold cars, I would be told that some mysterious “They” had me “convinced” that one model was better than another.  I have heard my father argue with historians on TV.  I have heard him argue with scientists about the behaviors of tigers during wildlife shows.

Right.

Right Right Right.

That is what evangelicalism has to have.  Because that’s how evangelical preachers talk to their flock.  Admonitions rather than research and theological debate.  Evangelical preachers don’t care who disagrees with them or the level of knowledge of that person.

“I KNOOOOOOOWWWWW that the Lord created Adam and Eve in six days, the scientists and the atheists are trying to convince yoouuuuu that you came from a monkey… “

There is always the desperation of rightness. There is always a verbally confrontational tone, which we see now in national politics.  The preachers I grew up hearing were all too happy to tell you that they didn’t care if they were told they were wrong, were called bigots for their views on gays, or anything else.  They didn’t care.  Because the name-calling people were going to hell anyway.

Small towns in the red states are ruled by this type of thought pattern.  It doesn’t matter, even, if that person has never been to church in their life.  The thought pattern is “I am right.  It doesn’t matter what you show me, I am right.  It doesn’t matter how many sources you list, I am right.  It doesn’t matter how many experts you have, I am right.  It doesn’t matter if you tell me you saw it yourself, I am right.”  The big kicker is that my father wasn’t always very religious, but he was always “right” about everything.  His turn toward religion more seriously has been a product of a lot of life upsets.  My not-actively-church-going relatives are also “right.”  That is why they voted for Trump and other individuals who pop up in news feeds with stories that make most of America shake its head.  He reminds them of themselves in his constant insistence of his own rightness.

“I’m Right.  I’m Right even if I’m Wrong.”  That is the core attitude that is held by current politicians and constituents in the red states that the Democrats and many moderates fail to understand.  But I know it.  I’ve lived with from birth.   Christians who are from mainline belief systems don’t understand that this certainty of rightness is exactly why Evangelicalism is so very appealing.  There is no consideration of multiple meanings or historical changes to word definitions.  There is only Rightness.

This mentality requires blinders.  You have to ignore that your cardiologists’ last name is Hussain, that the person cutting your hair is a gay man. You have to seek to actively “not get it.”  To be so inside your own head that it never dawns on you.  To actively assume your bubble is the one that everyone else is living in, too.  Or to live so externally as to be perpetually worried about what other people are going to say about you or think about you or feel about you, so much so that it supersedes the realities of your life happening all around you.  Either way, the result is a triumph of non-awareness that is impressive.

I don’t argue with my father about anything anymore.   I avoid it as much as possible and seek to avoid saying anything that betrays my real thoughts on any subject where differences lie.  Arguing is pointless.  The only thing that does work is letting him find out the hard way.

It is hard.  But there is nothing that works nearly so well as failure.  Arguing is a desired outcome.  They want you to argue.  They think it is a fun exercise to argue. They don’t want to learn anything.  They don’t want to absorb information from you.  They just want an excuse to be snide from the beginning of the argument.  The only way to win…

Is to let them think they have. To be more mature.  To avoid the problem.  Then, go do what you want anyway.  And you let them lie in the bed they made for themselves.

I can tell you the story of a teacher from my hometown.  She had a husband that was politically passionate.  Put up signs.  She would help and do and volunteer and give money, but when she went to vote, she voted for the other person, every time.  It must have been a hell of an act.

I think of that lady from time to time.  I wonder who she voted for in the last election.

 

Looking at Laura

.

I’ve always had a rocky relationship with Laura Ingalls.I’ve been reading the book “Libertarians on the Prairie” by Christine Woodside.  I have also recently read “Prairie Girl,” which is a collection of Laura’s unvarnished recollections of her life

I’ve been reading the book “Libertarians on the Prairie” by Christine Woodside.  I have also recently read “Prairie Girl,” which is a collection of Laura’s unvarnished recollections of her life

Growing up, I was always sitting in front of the television, watching this perfect American invention of what a girl should be, and our house was home to the entire series of books.  She was spunky, just the right amount to be mischievous and pull cute kid stuff, but never aspired to descend into any real rebellion.  Laura never brought home a science book with Darwin’s theory in it, asking difficult questions. Indeed, she was living in an age when they were first putting age restrictions on teachers, and a teaching certificate was only for rudimentary math and literacy.   Laura never listened to metal or punk or hard rock or gansta rap.  Laura never had a Barbie doll with a disco outfit.  Laura never tried to copy Soul Train dancers in her living room.  Laura never begged for a mini skirt (the tiered one with ribbon trim in different colors on each tier) or branded sneakers or cereal that had the cartoon of the day on the front.

I was overdosed with Laura and, when possible, the Walton clan, and reruns were endlessly on play whenever they were available.  My mother bought into and remained stuck in, that era of 70’s polyester pioneers and country simplicity bordering on bumpkinism.

Laura was guided only by elders in her actual presence.  Laura on tv had hair that hung in perfect braids (which my mother may still not realize was a wig.) Book Laura was impressed easily by what modern international trade made into everyday objects.  Laura didn’t have the benefit of chewable vitamins and would never live to see Geraldine Ferraro as a possible vice president, or 80’s era feminism.  Laura didn’t have Commodore and Apple computers at her school.

Laura was the one of the most wholesome of the wholesome professions for women—a teacher.  Later, a journalist, but in the books, always a teacher, and then a mom and wife. I found out when I was dating a Muslim man several years ago that Little House on the Prairie was well liked in his country and passed the censors because it was so completely safe.

It became apparent as I grew older, that my mother was desperate to be the wise and admired mother:  The Caroline (or on The Waltons, The Olivia).   Full of uncanny good judgment on TV, full of ridiculous teenage faux-mature behavior in the books. The reason my mother had children was to have someone to be wiser than.

I was born in 1976.  The tumultuous times of Madonna and Cyndi Lauper and Boy George were time for a different kind of wisdom.

In my mother’s eyes, Laura was a perfect poppet of just the right level of mischief.

But she was also poverty porn.

My mother idealized even the difficulties of prairie life. If there had been a way for her to make me stay home and do a bunch of farm work to show me how tough life was, she probably would have.  She frequently made me (not my brother, mind) work on my uncle’s farm, but would not allow me a summer job of my own outside of the family.   Laura was an example, an example to be happy and impressed that I even had shoes from a real store.  That I was supposed to be proud of homemade clothes over store-bought, and that’s how it used to be so I should shut up.

Encroaching on this mentality was always the problem of geography.  I am from the area surrounding Augusta, Georgia.  The old antebellum South.  There was no prairie for me. No deep snows.  This was a place planted by Oglethorpe, and sexualized through the shaking and quaking of James Brown.  I would see GI’s outside the Fort Gordon area drinking copious amounts of beer in the Pizza Hut on Dean’s Bridge Road, and hear them telling loud and dirty jokes.  I would go to Chinese restaurants older than I was. This wasn’t the prairie.  The closest thing in town was the Augusta National Golf Course, complete with the held breath of class consciousness it brings.

When I was quite young, still in elementary school, we had a town centennial beauty pageant.  My mother made my dress.  It was brown calico, unflattering for my coloring, and had an off-white apron and a bonnet.

I lost.  The little girl that won had something much fancier, much more likely for the area where we lived and the time frame in question.   The older girls that won wore prom dresses that were popular at the time that sort of had a faux-antebellum vibe.

Sometimes I think about the Laura’s that I did know.  Wholesomely wholesome unquestioning individuals, absorbing parental lessons rather than looking up another source of information, who became teachers and then stay-at-home moms. Always Protestant Republicans who majored in Early Childhood Education.

But, I don’t hate Laura.

I find her sitting there in the corner of the house of the mind, a dusty book once again picked up.

Laura and Rose cranked out good stories.  American literature that falls into the right rhythm in all the right places, and you feel the wagon creaking across an empty prairie again.  It’s good writing.  I still recognize the craftsmanship of the work itself.

I wish I could go back in time and tell that skeptical little girl that her suspicions are true.  And that yes, Dorothy and Alice are so much cooler.

Your Feelings About Abortion Aren’t About a Baby

There is one abortion clinic left in all of Kentucky.  One.  This story appeared on my news feed on Friday and I felt my gut wrench.

One. In a whole state.

The idea that all abortions should cease is a minority opinion in this country, and yet, that minority opinion keeps getting louder and louder.  And the protesters get meaner and ruder and worse all the time.  Angrier and Angrier.  More full of vitriol all the time.

They hate women.

Wait.  Let me rephrase that:  They hate women that have been found as being able to be sexed by men.  It doesn’t matter if the circumstances were rape or incest.  It doesn’t matter if the woman is a confused teenager or a 37-year-old married woman.  What matters is that the woman is guilty because she has female parts and a man experienced sexual excitement in her vicinity– mattering not if that was brought on by violence and rage or affection or some deranged perversion.  That is what they are angry about.  Having a pregnancy (not a child, but a full 9-month pregnancy) is the punishment they believe women should have for the crime of having attracted, even if that attraction was completely unwanted or even unwarranted.

They hate that women are holding their head up and walking into a clinic, verifying to the world that they have, indeed, been found fuckable at some point by someone.

This comes down to the sin of being female.  The sin of being able to attract. Hatred of women as attractors.

This comes down to assuming “nice boys” from “nice families” only do bad things if a bad woman gives them a reason, confuses her intention, or fails to be chaste in every possible aspect of her being.  This comes down to the too-low shirt or the cheerleader skirt or the strapless dress when no one says anything about the shirtless pool boy.

This is punishment for having female plumbing.

“Be pregnant for 9 months.  Grow a baby.  You should not have been attractive to anyone ever.  I don’t care if that was your intent or not.  You shouldn’t have been something other people could see as fuckable. Even you, Sister Hilda from the Convent who was raped while wearing a floor-length habit.  This is your punishment for being fuckable.”

Snicker if you wish, but I guarantee you– if it is living and breathing, something out there is wanting to have sex with it, no matter what it’s wearing.

The hard truth is:

If anyone honestly gave a damn about the kids, there wouldn’t be a single child sleeping on the street.  We would have enough homeless shelters and care centers for all of them. Why aren’t these religious organizations starting more homeless shelters?

If anyone honestly gave a damn about the kids, there would be no bickering over free healthy lunch in schools, and the cafeterias would not be outsourced to a private entity, but properly maintained and monitored.  Why aren’t these individuals protesting their local or state school board’s practices?

If anyone gave an honest damn about the kids, there would be comprehensive sex education across the board in the US that contained the tools to not only discuss sex but also to discuss boundaries and appropriate behavior.   Because American parents are way too scared to discuss sex in any rational manner whatsoever, and some of them may not know a lot about real sex education either because they didn’t have in in their school.

If anyone gave a damn about the kids, we wouldn’t be letting them get their ONLY sex education on how the body actually works from cheesy and wholly unrealistic internet porn.

If anyone gave a damn about the kids, there wouldn’t be a single child who is waiting to be adopted and these same people would be spending some of this protest energy on launching protest campaigns to reduce the cost of adoptions and the time for adoption transitions.

The first thing that anyone says is, “They should give them up for adoption.” Quickly followed by, “But it’s so expeeensiiivee.  And it takes soo longggg.” No one is protesting those laws.  Why not?  Where is the outcry?  Where is the demand to change that legislation?  Where is the ever-vocal minority on that?  It doesn’t exist because they really don’t care about it.  If they did, they would be doing something about it.

No.  We get people harassing women at the only abortion provider left in an entire state.

I’ve seen our sexual culture change.  In my high school years (think about the early 1990s), sex was just a thing you maybe did or didn’t do, and many sexually active kids did have, purchase, and have access to condoms.  Many boys in my high school carried condoms in their wallet, “Just in Case”.  While some might snicker at the assumption that these teen boys would ever get lucky, the fact is, kids were having sex all the time.  Those condoms got used.  The pregnancies that happened were often because the condom broke, not because there wasn’t one.  Sexual responsibility was a part of emerging adulthood, regardless if that responsibility led to abstinence or responsible sexual behavior.

Now, it seems we are in a world where teens are almost given the culture of having sex accidentally and unprepared as being the normal situation.   There has been an emergence of an American subculture that wants the drama, the negative outcome, salivating over the punishment.   They keep setting up the perfect storm:  Lack of sex education, so that people, especially kids, can only make stupid decisions, which can be devoured later with their eyes to give some sense of smug self-satisfaction.  Giving only one path for escape, knowing most won’t follow.  All to visually feast and scream through bullhorns at those who bear the burden of failure combined with bad luck so that they can be made examples of.

Because that is what they want.  Not more babies in the world.  Satisfaction from seeing a punished, “fallen” woman.  A woman punished because her body is breasts and hips and thighs and that female-ness committed the crime of being and therefore attracting, a male.

Disasters of the Acronym Kind

Companies have a glut of internal reporting measures.  They overlap and report on information that already exists.  Why?  What is the point?   Why another quarterly report that is different from the other quarterly report that asks for the same information?   Why create endless rounds of repeated data, especially if you are not enforcing a higher internal standard than an outside certifying (or policing) organization would (especially if the area in question got certified last week)?

The economist inside me bristles at the time and money lost to these pursuits.  The productivity costs to an organization, including the time that could be spent innovating new approaches, processes and even products, are wasted.  Why? Because Sue in Operations decided we need a new report to determine the greenness of the lime Jello in the cafeteria, fully ignoring that Jello executives came in last week and gave the cafeteria a trophy.

Is Sue just bored?  Is she just desperate to be a little queen of Jello information? Is this are even something that falls under her for review?  Why is Sue under the impression that she should also be entitled to the color of the underwear of the individuals boiling the water for the Jello?  Can’t she just take the world of the person in charge of that, that it is being handled appropriately and that THEY have the data and are happy to share it, no need for the Jello makers to create a whole new 150 pg report on proper underwear for Jello cooks of exactly the correct shade green?  And then yet another one next week on the orange or cherry?

But the problem is, Sue thought it was a GREAT idea.  She probably created a cute acronym.  And because she thought it was a great idea and has some (not a whole lot, but some) leverage, the WHOLE place is doing what this semi-important operations manager has deemed to be essential.  Because she just wants to know about already-certified Jello greenness.   Three months from now she will ask the same again, even though the data never changes.  She will ask the same measurement of people who bring the pre-made Jello from the supermarket.

She will probably also create a quiz.  And a training session on how to do it.  She wants to talk to your group.  Badly.  She is very proud of her power point and her quiz.  All you really want is less crap to do anyway.  And you wonder why Sue just can’t look at the data that you already all have on Jello greenness.   Sue likes her program.  Because while the data exists on Jello greenness and underwear colors and styles, it doesn’t exist exactly together in the table she made just for her.  She has, indeed, created an entire program, got buy in from the whole place, had her semi-important voice heard, just so you would put data together that already exists, because she wanted it easy to read in a cute little form just for her.   She will probably, in the presentation, give a vacant gaze and smile and say, “this is so great because now we will know…. ” and you will think to yourself, “We already do, you nimwit!”  She probably gave it a cute acronym that almost, but not quite, spells a positive word.  GREEAAT or SUPERRR or SMRT.

Overreporting is not a crime, but it really should be some kind of economic misdemeanor.   If the information exists elsewhere, just not in the particular format you want…. why don’t you go look it up for YOURSELF and put it on the form that YOU want? You are a pansy if you cannot do this.  A PANSY.   A BUSINESS WIMP.  A little Lord Fauntleroy of the workplace.

Stop wasting time on finding data that already exists or has already been certified by some other body.  Would the people be unallowed to continue if they didn’t do x, y, and z?  And they just got recertified?  and you are asking about it anyway?

WASTE. OF. TIME.

Think about programs before you put them into place. Some suggested guidelines:

1-does it already exist? can you literally walk over, grab five notebooks, and get the information that you need without hassling 15 underlings in each department who need to actually do the business of the business?

2-Is someone else already holding them accountable for the same measure to the same degree and doing it adequately?

3- Is the information not likely to have changed?  Would you likely already be aware if it had?  Would a short update if changes exist be a more appropriate measure?

4-Is the artificial due date you have created reasonable?  Why was that date your choice?  Was it well-reasoned, or did you just pick it from nothing?

5-Are you doing it because you really need the information, or do you just think “it would be gooooood to know… ”

6- Is the information really for the betterment of the company?  Why and how?  What will it do that the other data, once you get off your butt and look for it, won’t do?

7- is the information really in your wheelhouse to ask for, or does it feel more like the gardener asking for the latest numbers from accounting?   If it doesn’t fall into the umbrella of things that fit your position, why do you need the information?

Is your internal reporting really worthwhile?  Or just another thing that everyone knows is pointless except for the person who invented it?  Take a hard look… I predict you’ll be amazed at the time, money and ingenuity that you will gain.  And tell Sue to shut up.  Give her that report you already did last week for someone else and tell her to look for it herself.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Circling the Bowl

Why do people argue the unresolvable?

Why?

Why can’t people admit that they are on different ground rather the same and just be okay with it?

I’m talking specifically about the arguments I observe (as opposed to participate in) over religion.   People push one set of values presented in a religion over another and the comment thread or discussion goes on and on and no resolution is ever reached, just endless cycles of blah-de-blah-blah about what someone should believe but it also says this other thing that another person thinks is “more equal” in the religious viewpoint.  You aren’t a REAL  (insert religion here) unless you believe THIS.  Then someone else chimes in and

People push one set of values presented in a religion over another and the comment thread or discussion goes on and on and no resolution is ever reached, just endless cycles of blah-de-blah-blah about what someone should believe but it also says this other thing that another person thinks is “more equal” in the religious viewpoint.

Maybe you aren’t the same religion after all.   Why is that hard to accept about one another rather than arguing a theological debate? Why do you feel an obligation to justify yourselves to one another?

Why?  Why spend time on it?

There are people who are in love with religion for its ability to bring judgment. There are people who are in love with religion because it might bring order to the universe, they tend to like having rules dictated to them, even if those rules hurt them personally.  There are people who are in love with religion because they think of it in a lovey-happy way– people who espouse the ideas of mercy and forgiveness and ideal, eternal love.

These people are different people.  They believe different things.  No matter what religion you are in, these people are going to have a different set of beliefs.  If they had been raised in a different culture, the temperature of their religious belief would largely be unchanged. They are, in a way, worshipping something inherently different within the religion, and will find a different set of outcomes rewarding to their sense of spirituality.  You can argue each other’s wrongness into the ground or next Tuesday but it won’t actually change anyone’s mind and it won’t matter to them.  They will keep justifying whatever it is to themselves anyway.
I vote everyone stops.
I am going to suggest a new tactic for comment sections and family reunions the world over.

Stop.  Just stop.  Put a stop to wasting your precious time and frazzling your mind over it and finding justifications for this beleif and that one.
Regardless of what religion you participate in, how different would your life be, if—
Instead of saying “Yes, I believe this, but my interpretation…” or “What that really means in the original language is.. “ – what if, instead you just looked someone in the eye and casually said,

“Yeah.  No.  I don’t believe that part.  I believe parts X-Y.  Can you pass the Ketchup?”

Can you imagine the reaction if you chose to opt out of the discussion instead of launching into a black hole of endless unresolved debate on your opinions of theology or the verb endings of languages you have never personally studied?   Wouldn’t that make life BETTER?  Just to stop?

Wouldn’t it be better not to discuss what a REEAAAALLLY REAL  (fill in the blank) believes?
Why can’t that be the answer?  Why shouldn’t it be?

You don’t owe anyone an explanation for your thought processes.  Not a single person.  They don’t owe you an explanation for theirs.  The problem is the endless justifying and verse-grabbing and historical veracity ad nauseum, because it is eating up precious seconds of your life without an end in sight.

You can pick and choose what you want to believe.  You can tell people to screw off if they don’t like it.  But that requires you owning what you actually believe.  You have to stop saying, “I know its wrong  buuuuuuuutttttt…. ” and just own that you don’t actually believe that bit of something.  It requires you to stop finding some vague verb tense only 3% of people majoring in dead and nearly -dead languages to determine what it “really means”.   It requires you to say, “I believe in the ten commandments, but I gotta tell you, I think the beatitudes are hogwash.  That hippie love crap is just annoying.”  Or the reverse.  Whatever is true for you. Own your current reality based on your actual life.

I’m telling you- go ahead.  It’s okay.  I don’t care if you do.  But you all need to start owning where you are and being honest with yourself. All you are doing otherwise is spending giant chunks of your life arguing over something you can’t resolve.  Who on earth would ever want to do that?  Why?

And who are you trying so hard to convince with that smidgen of information or vehement insistence?   Yourself?  If you have to fight that hard to justify something, no matter what it is, that’s usually a sign of a problem.

Is it hard to own your own mind?

Are we scared to know that instead of a few value systems there are infinite value systems, one per person, and we cannot legislate the mind?
Try it.  I dare you, religious peeps of various types—when someone gets all whatever and starts telling you what you believe,  what this book says or that, respond with, “Yeah, I don’t believe that part.”  even if you do. Take a look at their reaction.  Savor the moment you decided other people’s demands on your spirituality no longer were a thing for you.
What if, the next time someone tells you that you aren’t a “real (fill in the blank),” instead of getting angry or self-defensive– you just say, “yeah, I know” very nonchalantly and punctuate it by walking off to buy ice cream?

Endless debates on where the emphasis in religions should fall are a waste of your precious years on this earth. Time you can NEVER GET BACK. EVER.  When the time is gone, it is GONE.  GONE GONE.  Time you could have spent watching the sunset.  Remembering the names of the constellations overhead.  Feeling a summer breeze. Making snowmen.

Life is short.  Too short.  Don’t waste it debating the unresolvable just because you think you must.   Definitely, don’t do it because some clown is demanding answers out of you.  Your life isn’t about everyone’ else’s opinion.  It’s far too short to be.