Sometimes

Sometimes I walk out, feeling the new rains,
Scenting playful petrichor, filling my chest with rhapsodaic bliss.
Saturating spirit in glorious melancholic joy.

Some nights I go out, watering the garden,
Sharing liquid life, gifted to me, among friends gathered around.
Singing songs of rapturous shared growth.

Some days I pass by, exploring among trees,
Shadowing water ways, hidden crannies, covered in dappled-light.
Skipping silent through phantasmal unseen space.

Some things I can’t say, holding absent thoughts,
Sighing wyrdling winds, quietly given, unrepeatable aloud.
Straining silently with encumbering lingual form.

Sometimes I find it, planting in my heart,
Sensing quickening quiet, barely noticed, life’s rhythm.
Stretching space in manifest blazing glory.

Resistance is Useless

“Dark and difficult times lie ahead. Soon we must all face the choice between what is right, and what is easy.” ~Albus Dumbledore

I was trying so hard to put off or avoid writing a post about politics.

This blog isn’t really about that: it’s about parenting, and magic, and my struggles with my own weirdo personal issues as someone who is very much the “outsider” living secretly in the middle of “normal” folk. Nearly no one reads it. And somehow I’m kind-of hoping nobody reads this either. Gods know that there are thousands of think-pieces out there, from more popular writers.

But I can’t really avoid writing it all out anymore. Politics has become unavoidable, even in my own “safe corner” of the internet. For the record, in case anyone wonders, I am an anti-partisan, mostly pacifistic, social-anarchist, professionally-closeted trans-person, with numerous “progressive” friends, living in the capital of a U.S. state that tended towards conservative politics before this election. This year swept all major state offices into that category. My parents are serious evangelical Christians and I know many of their friends from when I used to attend the same church. I inevitably have friends and professional contacts who are therefore fairly conservative.

While some people have the luxury of avoiding those they disagree with, I do not. So, especially given who I am, Political liminality is unavoidable. As a Vogon guard once put it to some rather unlikely heroes being carried along towards certain doom, just for trying to survive:  “Resistance is useless!!!”  Well, maybe it isn’t useless and maybe resistance is exactly what we need, but that should beg a question with a less-obvious answer: what are we actually trying to #resist?

Politics, whether we like it or not, is a manifestation of ideas and opinions that people actually hold. So unless you are one of the stubborn few who are able to completely ignore politics(how do you even manage it? I’d be impressed if it weren’t part of the problem! also, you’d best stop reading this post!) then you realize that at this point in history, getting political is a nigh inevitability.

We’ve been chucked into the air-lock. Time to write-up an improbability drive so the story can progress with our heroes still… resisting! In our present reality resistance has yet to be proven completely useless but only if you actually think and consider what need to be confronted and done carefully.

Unfortunately, the lousy/unhelpful opinions have been rather louder and more popular lately than the ones that are practical and useful. Probably because they are easier than what really needs doing while providing enough of a sense of action to let people pacify their consciences.

There are some things that have been coming up and voices of reasonable, if difficult I’ll post a short list of the useful ones that I’ve seen recently:

• Echo chambers are the same thing as putting your head in the sand. Pull it out and listen to the people you disagree with and even the ones you hate because you can’t fight for useful change if you don’t know what you are actually fighting against, or who you are actually fighting for. More than half of my liberal friends fall into this category, in one way or another.
• There’s plenty of blame to be placed on plenty of people. We do not now, nor will we ever have, a shortage of blame. Much of what is being said about blame is well-founded, much is not. It doesn’t matter which is which. Blame is detrimental to a nuanced understanding of what is happening and therefore to practical problem-solving.
• If you think things are suddenly bad now, you are wrong; they were already terrible and this is simply a manifestation of that in several ways. Try to look back over the past decade or two and think about what has lead to all of this. If it makes no sense whatsoever, then you’ve got a massive blind-spot or two somewhere that you probably need to look at and see about filling-in.
• America is no more racist or prejudiced in any other way than it has ever been, which is to say, that it always has been. It’s just displaying it more openly. If this surprises you, again, you almost certainly have a blind-spot, probably from living in a privilege-induced echo-chamber(see above). If you don’t have meaningful interactions on a regular basis(several times weekly) with people of colour, “rainbow folk”(as I prefer to call us in the LGBTQIA+++ alphabet-soup), immigrants, or people from minority religious groups… or if you avoid talking about issues that are pertinent to those aspects of their lives, then it’s obviously past time to start, so you can know where they are coming from and how your ignorance might have contributed to it.
• Just because someone voted for an agenda that the media has roundly deplored as racist doesn’t make them racist. Often it means they are ignorant or brainwashed or just focussed on different issues and dismissive of “overzealousness” they have been culturally trained to dismiss. Given the sheer number of people who did this, but voted in the immediate past for the “other side”, we need to be raising our eyebrows and examining the reasons why. And also why that is so surprising.
• Actions speak louder than words. It’s clear that the time for merely sitting around on the internet and complaining about problems is long past. The irony in making a blog-post about this is not lost on me at all, but I’m mostly doing this to get these thoughts out of my head so I can get on with pursuing some kind of useful action. Being an “ally” is all well and good, but only if it means more than just wearing a pin(which anyone can do, regardless of whether they are a real ally or not by the way). Real “allies”, acting from a place of privilege to help facilitate meaningful social change will need to be involved in actual volunteer capacities if real change is to occur.
• Sometimes words can be actions in one space, but not in another. If someone rants about how terrible something is to people who agree with them it doesn’t count for anything. If the same person instead explains how bad that same thing is to people they know who are part of continuing that problem then they are doing important work. A good rule of thumb is that if you don’t feel discomfort or fear of social repercussion in standing up for something that needs to change, then you almost certainly are “preaching to the choir” and it doesn’t count for anything.
• Both actions AND words can be damaging if done without proper examination. If you try to persuade people of something, but it’s not the right thing, then you are distracting from the real point(probably because you don’t know it from being stuck in an echo chamber). That’s just words. Riots reinforce stereotypes, and without any practical aim, do nothing to advance practical solutions. Protests and rioting are often totally called for, but I’ve yet to see a single coherent explanation for what the ones going on right now are meant to actually accomplish! Anger and frustration with a broken society are completely understandable, and can be useful if not diverted or hijacked. But when they aren’t guided towards practical and effective change they make it more difficult to find actual solutions. Both ineffective words and actions can and are widening the rifts in our society. People who might otherwise empathize and support practical change become alienated. It also vents anger that desperately needs to be channeled into pursuing real change. While violence can sometimes be an answer, directionless/generalized violence and protest isn’t.

That goes for social-ills just as well.

Ok, that’s enough listing. But look! There were some good thoughts up there! Don’t blame! Listen! Gather information from all sides! Use it to work together to deal with the real underlying(not superficial) issues!

There’s actually quite a few people saying these things, in various ways, across the internet. So despite some well-intentioned people spreading bad ideas long with the good ones, there’s a lot to be hopeful for; a ray of light through the darkness of confusion and fear.

There’s one key tho – we can’t just sit around.  An awful lot of us have been resting on perceived laurels. It seemed like things were getting better, but that was really just the illusion of our social echo-chambers amplifying the things we wanted to hear and drowning out the sounds of ongoing trouble and oppression. Whether it be from POC’s and LGBTQ+’s who are in danger both physically and economically, or WASP’s making the terrible mistake of falling for Trump’s propaganda because they are drowning in debt in the “Rust Belt”, we need to listen and realize that, even if we often act as enemies because of competition over economic resources and socially induced fear, we all have the same arch-enemies. Those are the powers who have been actively promoting fear and division between us over every difference or mistake we have for most of recent history. The ones who literally feed on the products of everyone’s suffering and struggles and need those conflicts and struggles to continue for them to continue devouring our lives in the name of profit.  

We are all humans of various sorts, and until more of us start focusing on our shared needs and goals and laying aside the miasmic biases that fill our world and cloud our understanding of reality nothing will get better. Yelling about how blind the other guy is does nothing, and is an excuse to avoid confronting the things you have power over in your own life.

As Gordon over at Rune Soup puts it: “Become invincible, have better ideas, never give up. That’s always been the play. That is the play before elections. That is the play after elections. That is the play during tsunamis, alien invasions, and zombie viral outbreaks. It has not and will not change.”

The Dualistic Distortion

Day and Night. Black and White. Left and Right. Wrong and Right(Ok, that’s enough rhyming). Chocolate and Vanilla. Happy and Sad. Optimist and Pessimist. Fate and Free Will. Body and Soul. Yin and Yang. Logic and Emotion. Arts and Sciences. Male and Female. Mine and Yours. Holy and Profane. Human and Inhuman. Man and Nature. Liberal and Conservative.

Us and Them.

Humans have a problem, which we’ve  ingrained in our cultures, and therefore, in most of our ways of thinking; we are addicted to binaries. Whenever we find a topic that has two significant components, it takes very little for most people to begin thinking of those two components as the only components.  Or at least the only ones that “matter”. So if “you” disagree with some element of “my” opinion then “you” automatically become associated with the other camp. Never-mind that maybe “my” experience is outside of your sense of absolute binary.

As I am writing this, I heard about the Orlando Nightclub Massacre which happened last night. Like lots of things along these lines, and maybe more than some others, the media frenzy and on a more personal level the human reactions to this are going to intersect with a whole lot of dualistic perspectives.

People are arguing over whether this was a hate-crime or terrorism(personally I don’t see a lot of difference). It’s being blamed on “Islamic extremism” and he’s being called a “monster” which are just different ways of making him into the dreaded “Them”; “The Other”. Except he was an American citizen, and he was the friend and family member of many people, who are also horrified and shocked that this happened. We need to look further to understand what really happened.

He was a human being with emotions and ideas that were as real as any others, and those are what drove him to commit this terrible act. In using the “Us/Them” duality we distance ourselves from understanding his motivations as a human being. It’s uncomfortable for us to realize that this is a very human act, and that any one of us is capable of being a “monster” in some way or other, because that potential exists in any human being. Which is scary and can make us confront our own biases and the evil within our own hearts.

And because understanding the underlying causes(not just the superficial motivations) behind such things is a necessary first step to confronting the problems with our culture and our society, that Othering that comes with a sense of dualism is actively harmful.

Another thing that is (very reasonably) being brought up is gun control. This is another incredibly dualistic issue where again, it shouldn’t be. For some reason this, like many other political issues, devolves into an extreme binary very quickly. “We need to take guns away from everyone so this can’t happen anymore!” says one side, while the other basically says “We should give as many people guns as possible so when something like this happens, someone will be able to stop it!”

Both of these positions are incredibly naive, and based on an instinctive reaction to take a “side” based on which mistaken extreme seems more reasonable to the individual making that false “choice”.

To those who want to arm “good guys with guns” it needs to be pointed out that without proper training in how to handle a gun, especially in high pressure situations, it’s very likely you’ll do more harm than good, with friendly-fire and the like. That’s not to mention how many people fail to follow basic safety procedures with guns. I say this as someone whose life was actually saved by a properly trained “good guy with a gun”(a friend of mine with his concealed carry permit who protected a group of friends from an armed criminal).

To those who want to start “taking the guns away” it seems pretty painfully obvious that black markets for guns will always exist, and that mass shootings happen even in countries that have fairly strict gun-control laws. Maybe not as often, but they still do.

I think we desperately need more flexible and nuanced ways of approaching things. The perspective that treats “compromise” on political issues as heresy is only a couple of steps away from the one that condemns gay people to death because their existence doesn’t jive with their religious or personal perspective.  Never-mind the political fact that compromise is the only thing that gets anything useful done in political democracies!

But I digress; this post isn’t directly about politics, because the fucked-up nature of our binary political system is a secondary problem. The arguments over abortion, over gender and sexuality, the arguments over gun-control, over big government versus small government, over use of military force versus pacifism, etc, etc, etc… they are all based on the fundamental cultural error of thinking that there can only be two real choices or opinions for most things. The same applies to arguments about religion(“our religion” v “everyone else’s”), international politics(“us/our allies” v “our enemies”), interpersonal/relational conflict(“men” v “women”), race (“black” and “white”)and more.

We do this even though, on some level, we know better. We know that categories like this are mental stereotypes that trick us into thinking we understand a vastly oversimplified reality. If a person takes a minute to consider what it would actually take to convince them(rather than some abstract Other person)that they should go and mass-murder a bunch of people, it will quickly become apparent to them that it would take a complex interplay of negative influences and bad experiences through life for a person to get to that point. People aren’t born “monsters”; even if humans have some negative predispositions, we have to grow into them to do something so fundamentally horrific.

The same goes for people who are less blatantly destructive, like politicians or the corporate psychopaths who are perfectly happy to bomb or starve those weaker than them for their own benefit, because their binary thinking lets them dehumanize others and value money/power as the measurement of “success” v. “failure”.

Or for that matter the parent who harms their child by teaching them that “boys don’t cry” or “only sluts dress like that” or “participation ribbons are for losers” or “only our religion is correct” or pressure them to follow the parent’s conception of “success”. This list is long, and these sorts of things all have underlying binary dichotomies that teach children to think in those terms, and whether they eventually accept those exact concepts or not, they are often trapped in that thinking.

So why do we fall into these ways of thinking? What is it that makes binaries so appealing anyway?  Should we try to reprogram ourselves as a species? Can we even do it?

Well a lot of these issues are touchy ones themselves in academic circles. Thankfully I’m not an academic, so I don’t mind just speaking my mind without hiding behind academic double-speak and technical language that’s about as clear as mud! [note: comment if you think I do this; I want to be easy to understand!]

So it really boils down to this: as humans, we’ve used binary judgements of situations and people to help us survive since we first developed rudimentary critical thinking skills(Academic writing warning!). All animals have some basic wiring that is tied into a “safe” v. “unsafe” binary judgement. Lots of us also have the “beneficial” v. “unhelpful” judgement as well. It(mostly) helped our species, and occasionally even individuals can do pretty well with it. But nature/evolution is a heinously cruel parent and doesn’t really give a shit about individuals; lots of people get screwed over by “survival of the fittest”, depending on what traits are most useful in the moment.

So we instinctively apply these fundamental dichotomies when it comes to food and mates. Which is all well and good(maybe)? And because we are extra-complicated animals, who have developed creativity and critical thinking, we’ve taken these tendencies a few steps further. We’ve gone and mutated them to “help” us make more complex judgements that aren’t as “simple” as, say, who we should have children with……

In other words, that instinctive use of binaries is a simple throwback to other basic binary decision systems from our deep evolutionary past. As I’ve already pointed out, they clearly aren’t capable of handling the complexity of human society, but people keep trying to instinctively use them anyway. And it’s not as though humans haven’t developed a couple of different methods for understanding and decision making. Plenty of those have mistaken binary ideas about reality also, but from a critical point of view, those can and should be broken down so that our decisions are more nuanced and reflective of the complexity of reality than simple dichotomies.

So to me it seems that if we can, we should. Since we have methods of approaching reality that are more reflective of that reality than dualistic “this or that” choices we should use them! If, in teaching change, we can prevent one person from going on a shooting rampage, or bombing an abortion clinic, or even just committing suicide, we should do whatever we possibly can as individuals to make that change happen!

What we need then is to make an effort, as individuals, as parents, and in whatever institutions we participate in, to teach and influence ourselves and those around us to be better thinkers and actors. Whether it is about the man who murders people at a gay nightclub, or about awful presidential candidates, or an acquaintance or friend who expresses an idea that seems distasteful, we need to try to understand them. And in understanding them, try to help the people we interact with(friends, family, children) to confront and bypass their own binary biases.

Only each of us working within our own spheres can change culture. It has to start like a snowball rolling down a blanketed mountainside, culture change happens with a few people compounding their influence through others and butterfly-effecting all over the world.

Certainly, there is always the temptation to boil things down because, unfortunately, lazy-thinking is comforting and easy.

But it can be interesting to break down and overcome binaries too. Once you start looking for binaries that don’t really make sense, you find them all over the place. And breaking out of them can really help in life; a clearer view of reality is just comprehensively useful, but it also means you avoid the stress of cognitive dissonance that crops up when binary thinking is confronted with situations that “don’t fit”.

And beyond self-interest, we owe it to our children; it is the one thing we can each do to help make the future a less-judgemental and partisan place.

It will probably even help prevent a few massacres and maybe even wars! So, maybe worth the cost of a little effort of self-betterment, and confidence that we can change the world?

I think so. Let’s do it!