[1125] 10 Paces

What's the argument you wish to have?

I find myself exasperated. Incidentally, it's not regarding any one thing or because I've come off some nonsense exchange online. I'll start just discussing the variables feeding my thoughtful moment.

I watched a documentary called "Uncharitable" about the hole nonprofit organizations got dug into after bad reporting and mischaracterizations about how funds are used. Macklemore released a song about the Israel/Palestine conflict. I had a session with a client yesterday in which she reported being more or less cured of the reason she was referred to me. I've been helping a friend navigate how and what to communicate with herself and her partner. I've began the CASA training and am about a month away from maybe starting groups funded through the health department.

It's a series of seemingly disparate sources of influence that at least provoked the opening line wondering what the argument you wish to be having really is.

I find a sickening reassurance when someone with maybe an advanced medical degree says something I do, or have said, in one of my analytically complaining blogs. For all of their brains, time invested, and connections or resources I haven't discovered, they're fucked by the exact same forces, at a larger scale, and are as flabbergasted as I am that this is how it works. Their funding runs out. They're criticized for budgets no one is interested in genuinely scrutinizing until years later. Bureaucratic or capitalistic entities with even minor stakes in your given mission find ways to obstruct.

What's been clear for decades is that we have the technology. We have the money. We have the manpower. We look at the totalitarian things China can accomplish in a decade as an antagonistic ongoing proof if we could only be persuaded to forgo a chunk of our individualistic pathology to manifest destiny.

The nonprofit person is arguing for something broadly conceived of as "obviously good." It's self-evident when you watch a child drink literally shitty water, if you can install a well for less than your coffee budget that month, everyone could have fresh water. It's not a thought experiment, for your average genuine do-gooder or resident of The West, whether or not veterans should have health care. Most people grasp immediately the consequences of pollution, threats to food supplies, and mass migration when you draw the seemingly stupid-proof arrows of what's been happening as a result of climate change.

The kind of person described above lives in an entirely different universe from the naked "capitalist." It's several worlds away from the malicious psychopaths and narcissists we know tend to rise to power across influential realms. They don't know, until it smacks them soundly, the nature of "the problem" that interrupts their ability to do obviously good things. Until relatively recent history, most might be forgiven for this as levers of government have previously demonstrated a capacity to actually demonstrate the will of the demos, if only briefly.

When you give a TED talk, what's your goal? If you think it's to "convince" the random asshole like me who's going to watch 200 TV episodes for every TED talk, you're probably at a TEDx event and don't understand the assignment. You're there to talk to all of the richest and most influential people in the room. You want them to engage in trickle-down propaganda. You want to ignite an evangelical belief system around your cause and perspective. You're a culture warrior, and you fight with words and compelling mildly enlightening and chuckle-inducing stats and facts served as sermons.

I get "comfortable" the more I contemplate my "real enemies." I have an almost-zero desire to argue with anyone regarding Israel/Hamas. Why? Don't I have the will, brain power, or basic human empathy to listen to their "points?" No. They don't have points, and it's not an exercise for your brain.

The mismatch begs to run again. There's people who wish to genuinely fix things against people who've never figured out how to fix things. People who fix things are hungry to learn, grow, and change. People who never figure our how to fix things scream, chant, and share empty anecdotes. You can't pretend to have a reasonable perspective on something you're unwilling to break open and contextualize. You can't claim to concern yourself about "human rights" when you pick the popular thing that flares up every few years, but have no regard or concern for the ongoing atrocities anywhere else.

It's co-opting and peacocking versus doing the work. You could be getting aggressively aggrieved by the actual forces that perpetuate the kind of violence you pretend to be incensed by. You know what fuels violence? Magic sky-daddy beliefs. You know what fuels violence? Cultures that bag their women. Your language, in the right setting, causes things to escalate. Your resistance to other forms of power causes friction. You, using your energy to fight and argue with the wrong things makes the entire exercise a parody and performance. It fuels the worst habits of attention-seeking media, and your ego, and the hopelessness that ushers in fascist "fixes."

My enemy is the willfully indignant, impatient, irrational, and imprecise. It's not been my worst bosses in ambivalent or capitalistic machines. It's not the power any one police force exerts sometimes disingenuously or disproportionally. The idiots chanting Jew-hating mantras aren't my enemy, necessarily, nor are the most liberal women and children positioned as bullet barriers Gaza has to offer.

When the in-crowd chanter attacks me for telling them where the saying came from, now they're the enemy. Now, the argument shifts from direct confrontation to an internal one about whether or what's worth it in service to the asymmetric influence on culture. I'll keep writing, sure. It doesn't cost anything but time well spent and it makes me feel better. When a religious fanatic (who certainly doesn't feel fanatical) asserts "There is no debate!" Hello, new enemy, who's actually just a weak approximation of the behaviors I wish to holistically influence through other practices than continuing to talk past or inflame further.

Gang violence gets better when you get kids enrolled in after school programs and provide support to their parents at home. Illiberal children screaming about issues they don't understand need to be surrounded by educated, patient, and persistent people. Institutions used to stand for something they no longer seem to. Debate and conversation are literally the only option if you care about the inevitable violence that will follow otherwise.

My enemies are timeless. The sin-system bores them out fairly well. I don't want my misdirected pride going viral. I don't want to be high on my own supply of mod-approved opinions. I can't figure out how explicitly not conservative I am, and yet, it's the crazy anger-inducing people "on the other side" that are bothering to entertain new information. They proceed to shit all over it in the forms of Kellyanne Conways, Ben Shapiros, and Candice Owens', but the remotely reasonable thing will slip out of their mouth that were you more patient with those types than me, might genuinely help you construct your argument or behavior. I wish I lived in a world where those idiots could speak and I trusted 95% of all who heard them would know explicitly how batshit they were. My argument includes striving for that kind of world.

You're under a spell. You have to be to function. It's not necessarily a malicious spell. I still think very highly of myself no matter how many days I spend mostly watching TV. I'm not installing the next shit-free well somewhere in the world. I'm not flooded with needy families I'm doling out sagely advice to. I'm not doing something akin to "training in the off season" so that when I get lucky "one day" i'll neatly fit into the mold of some dreamlike opportunity I always believed was coming if Just…prayed? enough. That's not the kind of spell I'm under anymore. I can fix very little, ever, especially if it's beyond my current level of awareness or concern. I can scratch the itch on my arm. I can talk to a friend in need. I can budget, if never really afford, potential steps for a later date. I can enjoy the last of my port wine.

What is my argument? Every day you're alive is a gift. Of all the things available calling for your attention, are you aware of what you're using for inspiration and why? I think you should figure out what you actually want to fight and why. I think we're all cliches who rhyme with patterns that either build or destroy. You can build your self conception and capacity to meaningfully speak or work across topics. You can crash like a drunken elephant into town after town you barely registered where even there and certainly didn't care who they consisted of. My enemy is "religious fervor" and "deeply held personal beliefs" that make it impossible, at specific points of contention when you try, to fix anything.

A volunteer is getting paid. Maybe they only know how to spend the currency, but it's not because they're especially moral or better or less blind to their motivations. Maybe it feels good. Maybe it looks good. Maybe it gives you a chance to formulate your asymmetric attack on a problem you couldn't begin to fix other ways. You're volunteering yourself to all sorts of shit at all times. In my experience, it's in service to getting taken advantage of. It's in service to someone else's pathological allegiance to their insecurity and immaturity. It's to the "hive mind" of the attention for its own sake and internet clout. The ones who can use that energy and misdirection will keep you spinning forever.