It became clear the moment Barack Obama was declared the winner of the 2008 Presidential election, that a shift was occurring in American society, a momentous shift, the momentum for which had built over the decades since the end of the 1960's. In the highest bastion of white male dominance, a black man would reign, finally.
To many, it signaled the end of the world.
A cherished view of a nation dominated by the last vestiges of the exclusively white, male Founding Fathers was torn asunder, as if the Starts and Stripes were ripped from a flagpole, dashed to the ground, and trampled. The harsh, unendurable reality of hundreds years of secession, repression, segregation, criminalization, denigration, and enslavement of a people burst forth, as the damming of their drive for freedom was damned by the weakness of a white race unwilling or unable to accept that their view of the black race was built of tissues of self-approbation, self-delusion, and ignorance, not one single stone of truth.
As this wave of change flooded the lands once fertile with overt racism, the spores of that fetid crop were given rise to flourish once more in the light, nourished by the delusional hatred thus uncovered. So it began that the tattered remnants of those forces antithetical to the nation knit themselves into groups that hoisted banners long dormant, taking them to be symbols of the "true" nation, and voicing opposition to anything that spoke to the unity of the disparate elements that, conjoined, make up the United States. Suddenly, it was no longer all of us created equal, but some of us more equal -- and thus more deserving -- of freedoms than others.
These misguided miscreants, buoyed by their wretched enthusiasm, exhorted and supported by The Monied Powers, took to the airwaves and the ballot boxes and battered their way into Federal government, and as the mouse that nests in the gears of the grandfather clock, proceeded to gum up the works. A strong government that could -- and was enjoined to -- support the American people and defend her way of life, began to disassemble the core values that made her great. They put their heads down and rampaged through a system that, while imperfect, had managed to keep the nation together through feast, famine, war, pestilence, and internal strife. A well-oiled mechanism might have absorbed the blow; the government stitched together over two hundred years was not so tough.
It was a simple proposition: the newcomers and their mentors already extant established one goal: to deny the President of the United States any kind of legislative boon, no matter how much it was necessary to the operation of the country. Caught in the midst of a crisis of their manufacture in decades past, these hooligans in the castle proceeded to drag their feet, to spout useless puffery, to point fingers and assign blame, and brought the system of Federal governance to a crawl, barely able to keep it functioning from month to month.
And there was no reason for it.
For in this case, we take "reason" to mean that there was some flaw in character, some dark, deceitful streak, some malevolent undertone, that they could see and we could not.
President Barack Obama presented no such things.
Instead, he was earnest in his attempts to urge the nation along, to light a fire under a sputtering economy, to rein in the excesses of our forays into nation-building at the end of a sword. He spoke of peace, but was unafraid of war. He could wax eloquent about the true meaning of the founding of our nation and at the same time point out its most egregious flaws. Most of all, he was able to draw ire from both sides of the aisle, the surest sign that he was on the right track to handling a fractious and floundering country.
No, this foul, festering obstructionism was not the product of any realized malevolence in the heart of our President. It was -- and is -- the odious stench of racism, swathed in anti-government sentiment, cloaked in jingoism, and borne upon a howling wind of self-importance by Americans who are certain they owe nothing to anyone, even as they are sure they are owed everything by everyone else. It is a match set to the tinder of a nation desiccated by close to four hundred years of treating every person on the North American continent who was not of the "good fortune" to be born of the white race as inferior.
Is every opponent of the President's agenda a racist? Certainly not. If not, however, they have not been in a hurry to denounce their brethren who are. They have not been quick to denounce those who wish violence and death upon him and those who work for them. They have not been quick to derail the fanatical desire of some in their number to drag his name through the mud. They are certainly not quick to acknowledge his lack of malevolent intent. No, they are content to sit on the sidelines, eyes closed, ears plugged, pretending they are above it.
It is clear that there is one narrative in our nation now, that overrides anything reasonable, one that is given the widest possible latitude, one that is shouted from rooftops and television sets: President Obama is destroying America. If that were the case, it would already lie in ruins at our feet, for it was tattered badly by the previous administration's lackadaisical approach to governance and appeasement of its party base. All evidence points to a nation that has resisted a tide of disappointment, disaster, and chicanery, through brute strength and main stubbornness and a willingness of the average American to lend a hand to those in need. Despite every attempt by a petulant and fickle Republican Party to douse the flame of unity, we soldier on, as we always have. If anything, we are stronger for the fight to restore order.
Now, as the grey skies part, it is time to turn from the business of survival to that of restoration. The bombastic lot that plunged us into the whirling chaos of budgetary shortfalls coupled with regulatory dismemberment lain on top of the admixture of nationalist fervor and the tyranny of the minority must be handed their walking papers. The United States of America is not ready to fold, not prepared to simply walk away from the table. We have come too far, survived too much, to allow a bunch of rabble-rousers to continue excoriating a government that has held this nation together for over two hundred thirty years. If they do not like the Federal government, they need not be part of it, but as long as they claim the individual rights and freedoms that that government protects and provides, they will not be allowed to destroy it.
So it is up to the rest of us to put a halt to this madness, through word, and deed, and ballot. Let us restore the faith our Founding Fathers had in us, when they built a nation Of The People, By The People, and For The People, by showing that We, The People shall not give in to the tyranny that some among us would claim as patriotism. Our nation must remain indivisible, with liberty and justice for ALL.
Saturday, May 18, 2013
Saturday, April 6, 2013
Founded By Geniuses?
This week I was exposed to the limited thinking of some, more-so than at any time I can remember. It came in the form of a series of statements trying to link current circumstances to the nation the Founding Fathers lay down over two hundred years ago. Each circumstance ended with the phrase: "You may live in a nation founded by geniuses but run by idiots."
Rather than reproduce any of them, and thereby lend them credence, let me focus solely on that last portion of each phrase, for it points out a complete and abject failure on the part of the educational systems of our nation that such diatribes could be thought of as some sort of truth. For on neither side of the ledger is the assertion strictly true: most of the Founding Fathers were not geniuses, nor are many of our legislators idiots. That is only a surface appearance that has been spun in to some sort of earthy, down-home "logic" that holds no basis in fact.
It comes from a place of worship and veneration for the founding of the United States of America, based on fractured, incomplete, and often misinterpreted information about the Founders and the state of the Colonies at the time of the Revolutionary War. Some in our nation conflate the Constitution of the United States with the Declaration of Independence, and draw the conclusion that somehow those men who founded our nation -- and yes, they were all men -- were paragons of virtue and thought, which could not be further from the truth. Tarring current legislators with the epithet "idiot" only further seeks to create an undue comparison between past and present, as if they could be compared on some kind of equal footing.
If we take a cold, clear, critical look at the Founding Fathers, we see only two who could roundly be described as "geniuses," and only one of them could be said to be an actual genius: Benjamin Franklin and George Washington. Franklin is certainly a bona fide genius in terms we might relate to Newton, Einstein, or the like; he was a scientist, scholar, inventor, and visionary, and foresaw what it would take for the American Revolution to be successful, trying his utmost to pull the strings quietly but firmly to push everyone in the correct direction. Washington was a genius in a more limited but still highly important role, as leader of troops and a nation. He was confident that Colonial troops, properly trained and equipped, could be a match for the British, and was more than willing to employ unique and unorthodox tactics to gain advantage over his foes. Once made President of the nation he helped forge, he saw how the future would need the nation and its leaders to follow a certain path, to bear good comportment, but be willing to use the power of the nation to quell the more radical elements still extant within it.
As for the rest of the Founding Fathers, many were virtuous in their own ways, men of The Enlightenment, willing to think a few steps outside their comfortable box, but not the geniuses many would now portray them as. Thomas Jefferson wrote stirring prose and helped launch a war of independence, but he thought only men were created equal, not people, and at that, black people were not even considered. He was a slave-owner who took full advantage of his property, even as he expounded on the necessity of his nation to be free. John Adams was a very smart, very clever man, and excellent jurist, but not a leader, not able see much beyond his own inadequate vision. It could be said his wife Abigail often saw what he could not, and perhaps it was she who made him a better man than he could have been alone. Alexander Hamilton was wedded to economics more than people, and while we might applaud for his efforts in trying to establish a collective and regulated financial structure, we have to wonder at how he went about it.
The fact is, they were no better than we are now, these captains of the foundation of our nation. In only one aspect of their forethought can we see true genius: the idea that the people of the United States must be able to govern themselves. But even in that, they did not quite do the most complete job of laying groundwork, riddling the Constitution with firm assurances and vagaries of comprehension we are still teasing out today. Perhaps this was a way to make future generations think, but it's more likely that it was simply the end product of the squabbling and bickering of a group of men who had anointed themselves the smartest people in the room. Whatever the case, the crafted an adequate framework, but left so much undone or in a muddle, that the nation is still trying to tease it our centuries later.
If they were said to be wise in letting We, The People, choose who will govern us from among our peers, it may be said that we have failed the Founding Fathers in that area, by allowing a class of politicians to enmesh themselves in the inner workings of government at all levels. Governance is gone, replaced by style and popularity and money. Rather than sweeping the halls of Congress clean occasionally and allowing for new blood and new life to pervade them, we simply allow the same weak, forlorn, outmoded thinking to persist. If those in positions of governance can be said to be idiots, we are the idiots for putting them there and leaving them there. The great body that is America suffers, for not being allowed to breathe.
Naturally, the "idiocy" we see is not always thus, for much that many would malign is simply the product of ancient ways fighting modern times. In over two hundred years, our nation and world have changed, are no longer the familiar grounds that Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, and the like strolled in their day. As these things change, so must we, and we must realize that new ways of think are not of necessity bad ways of thinking, even where they challenge what has held true for centuries. Enslavement of blacks, the denigration and patronization of women, religious and sexual intolerance... these might have been the order of the day one thousand years ago, even two hundred years ago, but they are not now. Change is inevitable, change is constant, and even the Founding Fathers, as men of The Enlightenment knew this, hence allowing the Constitution to be re-written and providing for a central government that could redress issues unknown to them and alter law to match the times.
The nation we have now is the nation we have wrought from more than two centuries of anguish, triumph, pain, and grief. Founded in imperfection, it was the wish of those founders that we take their work and improve upon it. If we are unhappy with the current results, perhaps that is more an issue with our lack of forethought and courage, than it is with the competence of our current legislators compared with the "genius" of our founders.
Rather than reproduce any of them, and thereby lend them credence, let me focus solely on that last portion of each phrase, for it points out a complete and abject failure on the part of the educational systems of our nation that such diatribes could be thought of as some sort of truth. For on neither side of the ledger is the assertion strictly true: most of the Founding Fathers were not geniuses, nor are many of our legislators idiots. That is only a surface appearance that has been spun in to some sort of earthy, down-home "logic" that holds no basis in fact.
It comes from a place of worship and veneration for the founding of the United States of America, based on fractured, incomplete, and often misinterpreted information about the Founders and the state of the Colonies at the time of the Revolutionary War. Some in our nation conflate the Constitution of the United States with the Declaration of Independence, and draw the conclusion that somehow those men who founded our nation -- and yes, they were all men -- were paragons of virtue and thought, which could not be further from the truth. Tarring current legislators with the epithet "idiot" only further seeks to create an undue comparison between past and present, as if they could be compared on some kind of equal footing.
If we take a cold, clear, critical look at the Founding Fathers, we see only two who could roundly be described as "geniuses," and only one of them could be said to be an actual genius: Benjamin Franklin and George Washington. Franklin is certainly a bona fide genius in terms we might relate to Newton, Einstein, or the like; he was a scientist, scholar, inventor, and visionary, and foresaw what it would take for the American Revolution to be successful, trying his utmost to pull the strings quietly but firmly to push everyone in the correct direction. Washington was a genius in a more limited but still highly important role, as leader of troops and a nation. He was confident that Colonial troops, properly trained and equipped, could be a match for the British, and was more than willing to employ unique and unorthodox tactics to gain advantage over his foes. Once made President of the nation he helped forge, he saw how the future would need the nation and its leaders to follow a certain path, to bear good comportment, but be willing to use the power of the nation to quell the more radical elements still extant within it.
As for the rest of the Founding Fathers, many were virtuous in their own ways, men of The Enlightenment, willing to think a few steps outside their comfortable box, but not the geniuses many would now portray them as. Thomas Jefferson wrote stirring prose and helped launch a war of independence, but he thought only men were created equal, not people, and at that, black people were not even considered. He was a slave-owner who took full advantage of his property, even as he expounded on the necessity of his nation to be free. John Adams was a very smart, very clever man, and excellent jurist, but not a leader, not able see much beyond his own inadequate vision. It could be said his wife Abigail often saw what he could not, and perhaps it was she who made him a better man than he could have been alone. Alexander Hamilton was wedded to economics more than people, and while we might applaud for his efforts in trying to establish a collective and regulated financial structure, we have to wonder at how he went about it.
The fact is, they were no better than we are now, these captains of the foundation of our nation. In only one aspect of their forethought can we see true genius: the idea that the people of the United States must be able to govern themselves. But even in that, they did not quite do the most complete job of laying groundwork, riddling the Constitution with firm assurances and vagaries of comprehension we are still teasing out today. Perhaps this was a way to make future generations think, but it's more likely that it was simply the end product of the squabbling and bickering of a group of men who had anointed themselves the smartest people in the room. Whatever the case, the crafted an adequate framework, but left so much undone or in a muddle, that the nation is still trying to tease it our centuries later.
If they were said to be wise in letting We, The People, choose who will govern us from among our peers, it may be said that we have failed the Founding Fathers in that area, by allowing a class of politicians to enmesh themselves in the inner workings of government at all levels. Governance is gone, replaced by style and popularity and money. Rather than sweeping the halls of Congress clean occasionally and allowing for new blood and new life to pervade them, we simply allow the same weak, forlorn, outmoded thinking to persist. If those in positions of governance can be said to be idiots, we are the idiots for putting them there and leaving them there. The great body that is America suffers, for not being allowed to breathe.
Naturally, the "idiocy" we see is not always thus, for much that many would malign is simply the product of ancient ways fighting modern times. In over two hundred years, our nation and world have changed, are no longer the familiar grounds that Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, and the like strolled in their day. As these things change, so must we, and we must realize that new ways of think are not of necessity bad ways of thinking, even where they challenge what has held true for centuries. Enslavement of blacks, the denigration and patronization of women, religious and sexual intolerance... these might have been the order of the day one thousand years ago, even two hundred years ago, but they are not now. Change is inevitable, change is constant, and even the Founding Fathers, as men of The Enlightenment knew this, hence allowing the Constitution to be re-written and providing for a central government that could redress issues unknown to them and alter law to match the times.
The nation we have now is the nation we have wrought from more than two centuries of anguish, triumph, pain, and grief. Founded in imperfection, it was the wish of those founders that we take their work and improve upon it. If we are unhappy with the current results, perhaps that is more an issue with our lack of forethought and courage, than it is with the competence of our current legislators compared with the "genius" of our founders.
Sunday, March 24, 2013
We Have Failed You
I will thank Melissa Harris-Perry for lighting a fire under me, to get me back to this blog, because of her message to the 16-year-old victim of rape in Steubenville, who has just seen justice done and seen two young boys shown that hubris and arrogance are not effective shields against law and justice.
You may peruse the video for yourself, and unless you are heartless, it will move you. The one sentence from the whole thing that got to me most was:
The "we" in that sentence is not some ephemeral construct, but the living, breathing condensation of a nation built around the concept of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. To allow for those things, our nation is built on law, law crafted out of thousands of years of law and governance and spirituality that have imbued every person on Earth at one time or another with a sense of what counts as "right" and "wrong." Of course, those concepts are not static - as little as one hundred-fifty years ago, the idea that white American landowners could own black slaves was considered not just "right" but couched as one of the "inalienable" rights oft mentioned. We moved our morality further from that particular stance through the auspices of blood.
I digress.
So, what Melissa Harris-Perry was getting at was, that We -- all of us -- failed this young girl. The failure extended far beyond the confines of the former manufacturing town; it could be said to rest on the dinner table in every American home, inside every public or private classroom, on every news broadcast, within every movie theater... it pervades every corner of our society, a clinging, seeping miasma of privilege and patriarchy that seeks to continue to control us as it has over a thousand generations. Though we no longer wrapped in the ignorance of the Middle Ages or those centuries previous, the faint echo of them continues to wash over us, causing us to live in a bubble of hypocrisy, where we proclaim the freedom of the individual even as we seek to deny it to many and denigrate them for trying to take it as their own, as is their due.
Individual responsibility is the clarion call that rings the rafters of our nation, only to have it fall upon deaf ears when young-and-talented boys engaged in popular sports ply debauchery at the expense of a young girl who is helpless to defend herself. Or when bankers seek to peddle dreams wrapped in tissue paper, then sit back as the world around them collapses, secure in their fortifications of wealth. Or when we will not take the logical precautions that might keep citizens from being gunned down in the streets by maniacs who find it all too easy to arm themselves like combat soldiers. Or when we continue to allow our nation to be so steeped in want, need, and hunger while some simply toss away the plenty they are given.
No, the failure is pervasive, and nowhere does it crystallize more than in the rape of this young woman, because it is horrid enough that it should happen, that these young men should be surrounded by a local culture that tells them that who they are gives them the right to do what they want, but that even when justice is finally served, some in that same community would seek to continue to pummel this girl further, to heap degradation upon depredation. What does that say of us, that some cannot so easily see that the rape of a girl, or a woman, or a man, or anyone of any stripe, is solely the province of the victim?
It says that the values we pretend to abide by, the beliefs we claim to live by, and the words we take as gospel are mere phantoms, not at all a part of our moral fiber. You may wave a holy book above your head, expound upon the righteousness of documents over two hundred years old, but at the end of the day, they are worth nothing if you do not understand, but more importantly, practice, what they say. Our society is a contradiction, saying that we as individuals have rights, but we owe a greater debt to all of us as a whole, but that seeming contradiction is not so, when we consider that while our energies individually can sustain only ourselves, it is by combining them, that we accomplish much more than any individual can hope to. Look around you, and see the belts of copper that drive electricity to the far corners of our nation, the ribbons of steel and asphalt that move our goods and ourselves, the invisible waves that blanket our globe and allow us contact with anyone, anywhere, at any time.
Where we have the right to be an individual, we have a responsibility to our fellow citizens. Our individual rights and freedoms are ours as long as we do not intend or attempt to impose them on others. We do not ask everyone to believe the same thing, but we do ask everyone to understand that there are some things that move beyond the realm of individual belief and are best for everyone. Our law is just such a thing, seeking to apply the same level of justice to every person, no matter who they are. Our law says that your right to be yourself is protected; it does not say you may violate the rights of another with impunity.
So yes, We failed. We failed this girl because we have let our society wander from the path that built it, a path that said you would reap what you sowed, a path that said that together we would create a nation of liberty and law. We have let too many in this nation pervert it, weaken laws, weaken public discourse, put their interests above those of the nation. We failed this girl because we allowed hubris to be substituted for judgement, arrogance to be substituted for rights. We failed this girl... and we cannot allow ourselves to fail her, or anyone else, again.
You may peruse the video for yourself, and unless you are heartless, it will move you. The one sentence from the whole thing that got to me most was:
“I am sorry we have failed you.”This simple sentence says more than just about anything, because this shameful and deplorable incident does not merely affect the town of Steubenville, OH, but has repercussions that rippled outward to consume our nation, and possibly the world. For this was not simply a tale of a young girl being drunk and being taken advantage of, which might have disappeared into the fog of youth in decades past. No, this was a moment of degradation broadcast for the world to see, brought to light by those forces of the Internet that seek to goad our society into actually righting wrongs as opposed to our continually claiming that we are a nation that stands on the principles of truth and justice while we turn a blind eye.
The "we" in that sentence is not some ephemeral construct, but the living, breathing condensation of a nation built around the concept of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. To allow for those things, our nation is built on law, law crafted out of thousands of years of law and governance and spirituality that have imbued every person on Earth at one time or another with a sense of what counts as "right" and "wrong." Of course, those concepts are not static - as little as one hundred-fifty years ago, the idea that white American landowners could own black slaves was considered not just "right" but couched as one of the "inalienable" rights oft mentioned. We moved our morality further from that particular stance through the auspices of blood.
I digress.
So, what Melissa Harris-Perry was getting at was, that We -- all of us -- failed this young girl. The failure extended far beyond the confines of the former manufacturing town; it could be said to rest on the dinner table in every American home, inside every public or private classroom, on every news broadcast, within every movie theater... it pervades every corner of our society, a clinging, seeping miasma of privilege and patriarchy that seeks to continue to control us as it has over a thousand generations. Though we no longer wrapped in the ignorance of the Middle Ages or those centuries previous, the faint echo of them continues to wash over us, causing us to live in a bubble of hypocrisy, where we proclaim the freedom of the individual even as we seek to deny it to many and denigrate them for trying to take it as their own, as is their due.
Individual responsibility is the clarion call that rings the rafters of our nation, only to have it fall upon deaf ears when young-and-talented boys engaged in popular sports ply debauchery at the expense of a young girl who is helpless to defend herself. Or when bankers seek to peddle dreams wrapped in tissue paper, then sit back as the world around them collapses, secure in their fortifications of wealth. Or when we will not take the logical precautions that might keep citizens from being gunned down in the streets by maniacs who find it all too easy to arm themselves like combat soldiers. Or when we continue to allow our nation to be so steeped in want, need, and hunger while some simply toss away the plenty they are given.
No, the failure is pervasive, and nowhere does it crystallize more than in the rape of this young woman, because it is horrid enough that it should happen, that these young men should be surrounded by a local culture that tells them that who they are gives them the right to do what they want, but that even when justice is finally served, some in that same community would seek to continue to pummel this girl further, to heap degradation upon depredation. What does that say of us, that some cannot so easily see that the rape of a girl, or a woman, or a man, or anyone of any stripe, is solely the province of the victim?
It says that the values we pretend to abide by, the beliefs we claim to live by, and the words we take as gospel are mere phantoms, not at all a part of our moral fiber. You may wave a holy book above your head, expound upon the righteousness of documents over two hundred years old, but at the end of the day, they are worth nothing if you do not understand, but more importantly, practice, what they say. Our society is a contradiction, saying that we as individuals have rights, but we owe a greater debt to all of us as a whole, but that seeming contradiction is not so, when we consider that while our energies individually can sustain only ourselves, it is by combining them, that we accomplish much more than any individual can hope to. Look around you, and see the belts of copper that drive electricity to the far corners of our nation, the ribbons of steel and asphalt that move our goods and ourselves, the invisible waves that blanket our globe and allow us contact with anyone, anywhere, at any time.
Where we have the right to be an individual, we have a responsibility to our fellow citizens. Our individual rights and freedoms are ours as long as we do not intend or attempt to impose them on others. We do not ask everyone to believe the same thing, but we do ask everyone to understand that there are some things that move beyond the realm of individual belief and are best for everyone. Our law is just such a thing, seeking to apply the same level of justice to every person, no matter who they are. Our law says that your right to be yourself is protected; it does not say you may violate the rights of another with impunity.
So yes, We failed. We failed this girl because we have let our society wander from the path that built it, a path that said you would reap what you sowed, a path that said that together we would create a nation of liberty and law. We have let too many in this nation pervert it, weaken laws, weaken public discourse, put their interests above those of the nation. We failed this girl because we allowed hubris to be substituted for judgement, arrogance to be substituted for rights. We failed this girl... and we cannot allow ourselves to fail her, or anyone else, again.
Friday, January 18, 2013
Prevarications, Obfuscations, And The Outright Lies
They lie to us. If not overtly, then through omission. They seek to manipulate us, to drive us to adoration, or to fear, or to desire, or to action, but they do it through manipulation. They act upon the predilections we already harbor, or they pound into us a continuous stream of doubt, or simply repeat the words backed by a seeming surety and sincerity that resonates with us.
But it is all lies.
They want to convince you that they are clean, free of the taint of evildoing. They want you to believe they are right, no matter what the evidence says. They want you to trust them, though their behavior leaves you with a funny feeling in the pit of your stomach.
They are the poltroons, mountebanks, jesters, and megalomaniacs that exist at the edges of society, seeking to use their wiles to manipulate us into giving them what they want: power, money, respect, obedience, obeisance. They flit around us, walk among us, and meander through us, spreading their miasma of incoherence and insensitivity, which clings to us like an unseen coat, poisoning our faculties. We want to believe them, have to believe them, find it difficult to break from their penetrating gaze. We create a veneer of respectability around them that hardens into an armor that deflects even the most pointed queries about those parts of their behavior that trouble us.
We find them in business. We elect them to government, We elevate them in the celebrity parade. We kneel before them in houses of worship. We cheer them in sport. We surrender the natural power of our own intellect in their presence, allowing them to dull our senses and bypass our reason. We want to believe what they say and do is true; oft times, we simply surrender to that belief despite all evidence to the contrary.
Judge not, lest ye be judged, but that does not mean we must suspend all judgment. It means we should not simply place people and things into neat boxes without ascertaining the truth of them. It means we must suspend our innate desire to measure every thing against what we believe and be willing to accept those facts brought before us, irrespective of belief. We must be willing to bend, to narrow the number of absolute codes we carry with us. It means we must not allow ourselves to be so easily led or fooled by those who wrap themselves in the trappings of those things we trust.
The lie is not the thing, for to lie is as easy as telling the truth. It is the intent behind the lie that matters. We call upon the "white" lie to prevent the discovery of a surprise, to spare feelings, to cover a thousand minor infractions in our life, and very rarely can it be said to be harmful. The lie that harms us is the lie told as truth, the lie cloaked in fact, the lie embedded within a web of other lies, the lie built specifically to prevent us from knowing the dark purpose behind the lie. The worst of the lies is that which is coated in officialism, that is "true" because the speakers says it is true. When you have looked to someone as trustworthy, when you have invested in them a tremendous level of respect, when you have marked them as important, the lie they tell breaches your defenses and is deposited in the deeper recesses of your mind, to sit, to fester, to grow, to ensnare reason in the tendrils of deceit. The mind, so swathed, refuses to push back, and reason is choked off.
Not everyone is a liar and not every lie told is intended to do damage, but those that are, when coupled to those figures we deem important, carry tremendous destructive potential for our society. When placed in positions of power, venerated as heroes, imbued with the rank of their office, they can build barriers against the normal forward course of society, attempting to roll it back to beliefs and superstitions and nonsense that previously caused human society to totter on the brink of self-annihilation. Worse, still, they can make it seem that to do as they did or to speak as they spoke carries an air of veracity, that from their lips the words gained truth simply through being said by them.
The lie is perpetuated because it is left unchallenged for those who choose not to apply any discrimination to it. Where facts are rejected out of hand, where belief is stronger than reason, where fame outstrips normality, the lie suffers no damage to many, even where those outside it can support their contention that it is a lie with reason and evidence. There is no comfort in knowing that so many of our fellow human beings in our society choose to simply accept the lie uncritically, content to back in its shadow.
This is the critical point, like so many before now, where we must face down and gear up against the lie. Those in the reasonable, thinking majority of us can no longer stand idly by and let the lies go unchallenged, no longer put up with our fellow citizens and the rank hypocrisy they bathe in. Pull them kicking and screaming we must, out of the dark mists of Middle Age thought and into the 21st Century age of reason. Until we rise up as a mass and proclaim reason a more fit way of providing peace and liberty to all, we will suffer the indignity of ignorance and play with the fire that still threatens to consume us all.
But it is all lies.
They want to convince you that they are clean, free of the taint of evildoing. They want you to believe they are right, no matter what the evidence says. They want you to trust them, though their behavior leaves you with a funny feeling in the pit of your stomach.
They are the poltroons, mountebanks, jesters, and megalomaniacs that exist at the edges of society, seeking to use their wiles to manipulate us into giving them what they want: power, money, respect, obedience, obeisance. They flit around us, walk among us, and meander through us, spreading their miasma of incoherence and insensitivity, which clings to us like an unseen coat, poisoning our faculties. We want to believe them, have to believe them, find it difficult to break from their penetrating gaze. We create a veneer of respectability around them that hardens into an armor that deflects even the most pointed queries about those parts of their behavior that trouble us.
We find them in business. We elect them to government, We elevate them in the celebrity parade. We kneel before them in houses of worship. We cheer them in sport. We surrender the natural power of our own intellect in their presence, allowing them to dull our senses and bypass our reason. We want to believe what they say and do is true; oft times, we simply surrender to that belief despite all evidence to the contrary.
Judge not, lest ye be judged, but that does not mean we must suspend all judgment. It means we should not simply place people and things into neat boxes without ascertaining the truth of them. It means we must suspend our innate desire to measure every thing against what we believe and be willing to accept those facts brought before us, irrespective of belief. We must be willing to bend, to narrow the number of absolute codes we carry with us. It means we must not allow ourselves to be so easily led or fooled by those who wrap themselves in the trappings of those things we trust.
The lie is not the thing, for to lie is as easy as telling the truth. It is the intent behind the lie that matters. We call upon the "white" lie to prevent the discovery of a surprise, to spare feelings, to cover a thousand minor infractions in our life, and very rarely can it be said to be harmful. The lie that harms us is the lie told as truth, the lie cloaked in fact, the lie embedded within a web of other lies, the lie built specifically to prevent us from knowing the dark purpose behind the lie. The worst of the lies is that which is coated in officialism, that is "true" because the speakers says it is true. When you have looked to someone as trustworthy, when you have invested in them a tremendous level of respect, when you have marked them as important, the lie they tell breaches your defenses and is deposited in the deeper recesses of your mind, to sit, to fester, to grow, to ensnare reason in the tendrils of deceit. The mind, so swathed, refuses to push back, and reason is choked off.
Not everyone is a liar and not every lie told is intended to do damage, but those that are, when coupled to those figures we deem important, carry tremendous destructive potential for our society. When placed in positions of power, venerated as heroes, imbued with the rank of their office, they can build barriers against the normal forward course of society, attempting to roll it back to beliefs and superstitions and nonsense that previously caused human society to totter on the brink of self-annihilation. Worse, still, they can make it seem that to do as they did or to speak as they spoke carries an air of veracity, that from their lips the words gained truth simply through being said by them.
The lie is perpetuated because it is left unchallenged for those who choose not to apply any discrimination to it. Where facts are rejected out of hand, where belief is stronger than reason, where fame outstrips normality, the lie suffers no damage to many, even where those outside it can support their contention that it is a lie with reason and evidence. There is no comfort in knowing that so many of our fellow human beings in our society choose to simply accept the lie uncritically, content to back in its shadow.
This is the critical point, like so many before now, where we must face down and gear up against the lie. Those in the reasonable, thinking majority of us can no longer stand idly by and let the lies go unchallenged, no longer put up with our fellow citizens and the rank hypocrisy they bathe in. Pull them kicking and screaming we must, out of the dark mists of Middle Age thought and into the 21st Century age of reason. Until we rise up as a mass and proclaim reason a more fit way of providing peace and liberty to all, we will suffer the indignity of ignorance and play with the fire that still threatens to consume us all.
Tuesday, January 15, 2013
Carrying On For Weywerdsun
It is considered laughable by some that those you meet in social media, people you have no other physical connection to, can be considered friends. After all, as we are surely all aware, the Internet is the ultimate masquerade ball. No one can ever be thought to be truly what they seem. Doubt nags at the corner of the mind for some; others take everything to be true. The Internet has scrambled our perception of reality and the people in it.
So many of us have so many connections via our social media that we often lose contact with people we have "met" at a time or another and found to be kindred souls. When you begin to interconnect with hundreds and thousands of people, some invariably get lost in the shuffle. Most of us think nothing of it, as they usually resurface at some point.
Then, last week, I ran across a bit of, for me, disturbing news. Someone I followed on Twitter has died, apparently right around Thanksgiving. His handle was @weywerdsun, his name unknown to me and perhaps the thousands that followed him. It took me aback, because I swore I had seen him many times, but realized that the holidays had created a temporal myopia that made me mistaken.
Herein, I do not seek to eulogize him, for to do so requires a depth of knowledge of the man I have no access to. He was an acquaintance, a free thinker, a man who would pose meaningful questions, not because he expected answers, but because he wanted dialog. He believed -- as far as I can surmise from our few interactions -- that problems were solvable with thought. He has the same level of impatience I do with politics. He also believed, as do I, that ignorance is our greatest enemy. Where we seek to believe but do not seek to question and to learn, we deny ourselves truth and the solutions to our problems.
Now he is gone.
As with Aaron Swartz, another person doing their part to lift up humanity from the weeds, @weywerdsun has left us. It is in this moment, when we sense the loss, that we can take our moment to mourn, but only just a moment. What it takes for us to truly prove our love and kinship to these people who are merely ephemeral to most of us, is to recognize their goodness, recognize their forthrightness, see what they were trying to accomplish, and to pick up where they left off. We must continue the dialog. We must continue to seek truth. We must continue to improve. We honor them only by our action, and so we must carry on.
So many of us have so many connections via our social media that we often lose contact with people we have "met" at a time or another and found to be kindred souls. When you begin to interconnect with hundreds and thousands of people, some invariably get lost in the shuffle. Most of us think nothing of it, as they usually resurface at some point.
Then, last week, I ran across a bit of, for me, disturbing news. Someone I followed on Twitter has died, apparently right around Thanksgiving. His handle was @weywerdsun, his name unknown to me and perhaps the thousands that followed him. It took me aback, because I swore I had seen him many times, but realized that the holidays had created a temporal myopia that made me mistaken.
Herein, I do not seek to eulogize him, for to do so requires a depth of knowledge of the man I have no access to. He was an acquaintance, a free thinker, a man who would pose meaningful questions, not because he expected answers, but because he wanted dialog. He believed -- as far as I can surmise from our few interactions -- that problems were solvable with thought. He has the same level of impatience I do with politics. He also believed, as do I, that ignorance is our greatest enemy. Where we seek to believe but do not seek to question and to learn, we deny ourselves truth and the solutions to our problems.
Now he is gone.
As with Aaron Swartz, another person doing their part to lift up humanity from the weeds, @weywerdsun has left us. It is in this moment, when we sense the loss, that we can take our moment to mourn, but only just a moment. What it takes for us to truly prove our love and kinship to these people who are merely ephemeral to most of us, is to recognize their goodness, recognize their forthrightness, see what they were trying to accomplish, and to pick up where they left off. We must continue the dialog. We must continue to seek truth. We must continue to improve. We honor them only by our action, and so we must carry on.
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