There’s a feeling I’ve spoken about before that I often get
as I’m driving in and around cities or meandering through neighborhoods. I’ve
taken stabs at trying to better define it with language that already exists and
obscure German words that may or may not exist given how hard they are to
rediscover through googling. It follows me when I think about Hitler 2
supporters. It strikes me when I read and hear condescending comments on the
feasibility of an idea. I’m awash in it every time I see footage of a refugee
talking about not being able to see their family or describing their poor
living conditions.
Part of it has to do with the imposition of shame. When I go do a drug study I become a textbook example of “white coat syndrome” in that my heart rate and blood pressure will increase as I think about the implications of both getting into the study as well as failing. I’m not scared of doctors. I’m extremely anxious that several thousand dollars relies on 20 seconds of a cuff that displays misleading activity regarding my resting heart rate. The shame comes in when I wonder how I manage to get myself so worked-up at the pivotal time when people live lives of perpetual woe that face actual problems.
Here’s always the rub though, as people don’t find it particularly wise or helpful to compare yourself to others and their circumstances. “Your anxieties and worries are real and valid!” They’ll profess from friend to therapist alike. “Fix what you can, don’t stress about what you can’t!” They don’t know any more than I do about how to fix something and their lives are often filled with considerably more stressful and time consuming concerns than I try to adopt. So often “life” is to be blamed or “history” or many people are frankly “unlucky.” Working in cahoots with those sentiments is the idea that “change doesn’t happen overnight.”
We’re a species of hypocrites and contradiction. This is taken as short-hand gospel for the dispelling of shame. We can talk about “human rights” till we’re blue in the face and be aware of maybe 2 places where we consider them under threat and would struggle to name a dozen that we’re supposed to be exercising as “free citizens.” We endlessly consume stories about the strength and importance of friends and family as we hunker down in lonely corners of the world and check-in from time to time. We can organize a team of nerds to thread the needle of placing a car-sized rover on Mars, and in the celebration, go in for the high five and miss theatrically.
When it’s our responsibility we want to believe it can’t happen now. When “society” gets invoked, we point to the immediacy of terrorist threats, environmental disaster, and economic woes. We begrudge a lack of budget, will, responsibility, or clarity on what to do moving forward. A story that illustrates this is a group at IU recently delivered a petition to make the campus a “sanctuary zone” for undocumented immigrants going to school. The comments under the article were terrible. Why should THE TAXPAYER be responsible for THESE ILLEGALS! WE DON’T HAVE THE MONEY! YOU’D BE CRAZY TO DEFY THE REPUBLICAN LEADERSHIP!
This method of viewing the world as it is right outside the tip of your nose I simply hate. I’m not just unable to understand it. I think it defies being human. You carry yourself like a deer sipping from crocodile infested waters, opting for precariousness and being a reactionary because you disavow the other tools you have to dig a fucking well.
I’ve read any number of explanations about people like this. They prefer “order” and strictly defined roles. They have brains that are less plastic than their liberal counterparts. They’re “justified” in their fears, because the fear is real after all, so the things they do in service to those fears need to be swallowed. There are class distinctions. There’s artless apologetics and punditry. Most, if not all of these professions, only serve self-satisfied smugness. As long as you think you have the answer, the waves you send out into the world must be dealt with on their own merits and your responsibility to them dies.
The question on my mind is how do you shame a nation? We elected Hitler 2. We have no capacity for shame. The protests aren’t shame. The myriad explanations aren’t shame. The naïve nostalgia and nose thumbing certainly aren’t shame. How do you force a perspective that isn’t bred out of increasingly horrific circumstances? It’s not just the U.S. It’s the rising right-wing in other nations as well. It’s the stronghold money has on government in general. Our human cultural anti-bodies are in full attack mode against ourselves, and worse, they seem to be growing.
It’s such a stupid giant pendulum swinging from one extreme to the next. WE’RE AFRAID KILL THEM ALL! EVERYONE CAN BE TAKEN CARE OF WE JUST REFUSE TO DO THE MATH! I WANT TO GO BACK TO THE 1950’s! I WANT TO LIVE ON MARS RIGHT NOW! I BUILT EVERYTHING I OWN! NOT THE ROADS, TRUCKS, BUILDINGS, TAX LAWS, AND CULTURAL ATTITUDES, FUCKO!
You don’t speak about protecting a few hundred “illegal” students in terms of the budget when your campus erects new buildings almost every year. You shouldn’t shit your pants about finding the money when you disregard the rise in tuition and student debt. You don’t talk about what’s “illogical” about your defiance of your DEMOCRATIC leadership, if you don’t agree their position qualifies as being a leader worth respecting. You always have to chase back the problem in order to remain internally and externally consistent. People don’t start from a point of coherence, so the things that come out of their mouths are every ounce of doublespeak they feel deserving of respect and consideration.
Do we even have a “pure” democracy so we can actually attempt to gauge what should be “legal” and “illegal” regarding students and their immigration status? No. Are we insulated from the “tyranny of the masses” that might help explain the electoral college? Absolutely not. Do we spend massive amounts of taxpayer money subsidizing projects that die slow painful deaths and inflate big business coffers? Way more than anyone should ever feel comfortable with. The irony being, if we paid attention, we could not only cut back on waste and government oversight/lobbying, but we could conveniently pay to protect human rights *shrug* and provide an environment where we could raise people to be more informed and coherent at a fraction of the cost.
We don’t for deliberate reasons that you exercise every time you refuse to chase “your opinion” back to something fundamental. I tie us to together with my knowledge about how our brains fail us. I tie us together by your clichéd habits and ideas. I tie us together by mentally putting myself in a refugee camp and thinking “I don’t like this, what do I need?” It’s not even hard to imagine. It’s not some grandiose and complicated math equation. It’s basic shit for basic bitches.
I’m all the more emboldened to learn how to self-sustain. I can do the most good in the world when I create the means for which I can live and translate that to someone else. I think this is the grand underlying failure of modernity. We don’t care to teach so we forgot how to learn. You learn with an open mind and it’s spurred on by a deep curiosity for what you don’t know. It’s the alternative way to seeing positive change when you’re devoid of shame. What a nuclear option looks like to invigorate and encourage, I have no idea, and my chest tightens with the idea it may involve actual nukes.
When I think about my contradictory nature, I have no clue how I could be moved to become as intractably ignorant as the rest of the species. I often talk about being “on the level.” It’s not the highest pillar. It’s a balancing act. I know the worst demons of my nature and I know the best of me that I rarely ever get to live up to. If we’re just mathematical simulations, then I watch my life as it travels and sometimes diverges from the mean. It’s being open enough to not let your mind fall out and conservative in a way that isn’t hoarding. It’s thinking all lives matter and respecting why a minority group’s interest doesn’t lie in agreeing with you. It’s not demonizing people for the actions of a radical few. It’s not getting lost in poorly defined parameters of alleged social acceptability. It’s pursing your personal goals through the window of the rest of the world. It’s respecting what about you has been shaped and when you’re doing the shaping.
You don’t get there without paying attention. You can’t pretend you’re the only car on the road as you complain about traffic. If your favorite movie made 100 million dollars, maybe your interests aren’t that complicated or novel. Maybe everyone is just a different version of you that isn’t having some need met because you remain unwilling to take the time to figure out what those needs really consist of.
You’re never just killing yourself. You’re never just wasting your own potential. And I feel it. I’ve heard plenty of times where I can stick my dreams and ideas. My personal concerns are every ounce of privileged. And yet, all I can do is talk about how broken my community is. It takes my breath away trying to account for the dripping hatred and ignorance we protect. I’m not merely suggesting every single one of you should be writing and imploring each other. It’s necessary for our survival. You have to try harder. You have to fumble over the words. You have to identify what matters and how you’re going about it. It can‘t be private. You can’t be embarrassed. We are ending ourselves because we’re not sharing what matters.
Part of it has to do with the imposition of shame. When I go do a drug study I become a textbook example of “white coat syndrome” in that my heart rate and blood pressure will increase as I think about the implications of both getting into the study as well as failing. I’m not scared of doctors. I’m extremely anxious that several thousand dollars relies on 20 seconds of a cuff that displays misleading activity regarding my resting heart rate. The shame comes in when I wonder how I manage to get myself so worked-up at the pivotal time when people live lives of perpetual woe that face actual problems.
Here’s always the rub though, as people don’t find it particularly wise or helpful to compare yourself to others and their circumstances. “Your anxieties and worries are real and valid!” They’ll profess from friend to therapist alike. “Fix what you can, don’t stress about what you can’t!” They don’t know any more than I do about how to fix something and their lives are often filled with considerably more stressful and time consuming concerns than I try to adopt. So often “life” is to be blamed or “history” or many people are frankly “unlucky.” Working in cahoots with those sentiments is the idea that “change doesn’t happen overnight.”
We’re a species of hypocrites and contradiction. This is taken as short-hand gospel for the dispelling of shame. We can talk about “human rights” till we’re blue in the face and be aware of maybe 2 places where we consider them under threat and would struggle to name a dozen that we’re supposed to be exercising as “free citizens.” We endlessly consume stories about the strength and importance of friends and family as we hunker down in lonely corners of the world and check-in from time to time. We can organize a team of nerds to thread the needle of placing a car-sized rover on Mars, and in the celebration, go in for the high five and miss theatrically.
When it’s our responsibility we want to believe it can’t happen now. When “society” gets invoked, we point to the immediacy of terrorist threats, environmental disaster, and economic woes. We begrudge a lack of budget, will, responsibility, or clarity on what to do moving forward. A story that illustrates this is a group at IU recently delivered a petition to make the campus a “sanctuary zone” for undocumented immigrants going to school. The comments under the article were terrible. Why should THE TAXPAYER be responsible for THESE ILLEGALS! WE DON’T HAVE THE MONEY! YOU’D BE CRAZY TO DEFY THE REPUBLICAN LEADERSHIP!
This method of viewing the world as it is right outside the tip of your nose I simply hate. I’m not just unable to understand it. I think it defies being human. You carry yourself like a deer sipping from crocodile infested waters, opting for precariousness and being a reactionary because you disavow the other tools you have to dig a fucking well.
I’ve read any number of explanations about people like this. They prefer “order” and strictly defined roles. They have brains that are less plastic than their liberal counterparts. They’re “justified” in their fears, because the fear is real after all, so the things they do in service to those fears need to be swallowed. There are class distinctions. There’s artless apologetics and punditry. Most, if not all of these professions, only serve self-satisfied smugness. As long as you think you have the answer, the waves you send out into the world must be dealt with on their own merits and your responsibility to them dies.
The question on my mind is how do you shame a nation? We elected Hitler 2. We have no capacity for shame. The protests aren’t shame. The myriad explanations aren’t shame. The naïve nostalgia and nose thumbing certainly aren’t shame. How do you force a perspective that isn’t bred out of increasingly horrific circumstances? It’s not just the U.S. It’s the rising right-wing in other nations as well. It’s the stronghold money has on government in general. Our human cultural anti-bodies are in full attack mode against ourselves, and worse, they seem to be growing.
It’s such a stupid giant pendulum swinging from one extreme to the next. WE’RE AFRAID KILL THEM ALL! EVERYONE CAN BE TAKEN CARE OF WE JUST REFUSE TO DO THE MATH! I WANT TO GO BACK TO THE 1950’s! I WANT TO LIVE ON MARS RIGHT NOW! I BUILT EVERYTHING I OWN! NOT THE ROADS, TRUCKS, BUILDINGS, TAX LAWS, AND CULTURAL ATTITUDES, FUCKO!
You don’t speak about protecting a few hundred “illegal” students in terms of the budget when your campus erects new buildings almost every year. You shouldn’t shit your pants about finding the money when you disregard the rise in tuition and student debt. You don’t talk about what’s “illogical” about your defiance of your DEMOCRATIC leadership, if you don’t agree their position qualifies as being a leader worth respecting. You always have to chase back the problem in order to remain internally and externally consistent. People don’t start from a point of coherence, so the things that come out of their mouths are every ounce of doublespeak they feel deserving of respect and consideration.
Do we even have a “pure” democracy so we can actually attempt to gauge what should be “legal” and “illegal” regarding students and their immigration status? No. Are we insulated from the “tyranny of the masses” that might help explain the electoral college? Absolutely not. Do we spend massive amounts of taxpayer money subsidizing projects that die slow painful deaths and inflate big business coffers? Way more than anyone should ever feel comfortable with. The irony being, if we paid attention, we could not only cut back on waste and government oversight/lobbying, but we could conveniently pay to protect human rights *shrug* and provide an environment where we could raise people to be more informed and coherent at a fraction of the cost.
We don’t for deliberate reasons that you exercise every time you refuse to chase “your opinion” back to something fundamental. I tie us to together with my knowledge about how our brains fail us. I tie us together by your clichéd habits and ideas. I tie us together by mentally putting myself in a refugee camp and thinking “I don’t like this, what do I need?” It’s not even hard to imagine. It’s not some grandiose and complicated math equation. It’s basic shit for basic bitches.
I’m all the more emboldened to learn how to self-sustain. I can do the most good in the world when I create the means for which I can live and translate that to someone else. I think this is the grand underlying failure of modernity. We don’t care to teach so we forgot how to learn. You learn with an open mind and it’s spurred on by a deep curiosity for what you don’t know. It’s the alternative way to seeing positive change when you’re devoid of shame. What a nuclear option looks like to invigorate and encourage, I have no idea, and my chest tightens with the idea it may involve actual nukes.
When I think about my contradictory nature, I have no clue how I could be moved to become as intractably ignorant as the rest of the species. I often talk about being “on the level.” It’s not the highest pillar. It’s a balancing act. I know the worst demons of my nature and I know the best of me that I rarely ever get to live up to. If we’re just mathematical simulations, then I watch my life as it travels and sometimes diverges from the mean. It’s being open enough to not let your mind fall out and conservative in a way that isn’t hoarding. It’s thinking all lives matter and respecting why a minority group’s interest doesn’t lie in agreeing with you. It’s not demonizing people for the actions of a radical few. It’s not getting lost in poorly defined parameters of alleged social acceptability. It’s pursing your personal goals through the window of the rest of the world. It’s respecting what about you has been shaped and when you’re doing the shaping.
You don’t get there without paying attention. You can’t pretend you’re the only car on the road as you complain about traffic. If your favorite movie made 100 million dollars, maybe your interests aren’t that complicated or novel. Maybe everyone is just a different version of you that isn’t having some need met because you remain unwilling to take the time to figure out what those needs really consist of.
You’re never just killing yourself. You’re never just wasting your own potential. And I feel it. I’ve heard plenty of times where I can stick my dreams and ideas. My personal concerns are every ounce of privileged. And yet, all I can do is talk about how broken my community is. It takes my breath away trying to account for the dripping hatred and ignorance we protect. I’m not merely suggesting every single one of you should be writing and imploring each other. It’s necessary for our survival. You have to try harder. You have to fumble over the words. You have to identify what matters and how you’re going about it. It can‘t be private. You can’t be embarrassed. We are ending ourselves because we’re not sharing what matters.
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