FrayedEdges

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  • Color Blind

              He said, “I don’t see color” as if that was a contention of pride. I wondered if he had thought his statement through to its eventual conclusion. I doubted it. Feeling justified that you don’t see a person “based on their color” but based on something else… some nameless thing. But because it is nameless, it can’t be judged as good or bad. You can’t be racist or not, pure of heart or pure of bloodline? But if you don’t see color then you are colorblind. If a person is colorblind then they only see in black and white so wouldn’t that mean the division between people would be even further? I mean if there purple people eaters then not seeing color might mean something else. But if we don’t see color but distinguish between white, black, Hispanic, Asian, and more but none of these so called categories are colors then are you just neatly sidestepping the conversation to feel better about not having to confront dangerous thoughts? I wonder. I wonder when we will stop worrying about the colors we see and start worrying about the trash around us. We say life is sacred but who decides which lives we are talking about? I know my opinion is an unpopular one, but aren’t there more than enough humans? Couldn’t we do with a little less humanity and a little more of everything else? Sometimes I wonder if the weight of humanity is so crushing that it might just knock the earth off her axis, make her wobble and throw her completely off her path.

    Instead of trying to see less, shouldn’t we be trying to see more? Instead of closing our eyes shouldn’t we be looking around, walking further to see as much as we can see? How did humanity begin to think that we had seen enough? There are 8 billion humans on the world, shouldn’t we be looking at trying to make sure the current population has clean water and enough to eat? That they can live a good and happy life before worrying about what the life that is coming will bring?

    But I think that all of this isn’t about the sanctity of life or the difference between cultures, ethnicities, or races. I think it is about making people stay busy. If women are too busy caring for children, worn out from working and cooking and cleaning, then they’d have no time to look around and see what is happening. If we are too busy being angry at the differences of our neighbors, feeling justified in our anger that they are stealing something that we believe we deserve, then we will be too busy and emotionally charged around feelings of indignation and imagined slights that we will never see how those in power continue to claim more and more power. How they continue to line things up to take more from us and blame others for our lack. We are angry that our healthcare is so expensive. That we have to pay so much out of pocket even though we have health insurance because it rarely pays what we need it to pay. And who’s fault is that? It isn’t the immigrant worker who has come up from Mexico to work as a dishwasher for the local diner at below minimum wage. It isn’t the single mother who goes to the hospital to give birth and finds bills starting to roll in to the tune of over $10,000. It is our fault. We believed them when they said that free healthcare was socialism. And worse, we heard socialism and thought that would end our freedom. What freedom? Our freedom – if it ever existed – died in the wake of President Reagan’s trickle-down economics, President Bush’s fuzzy math, and Trumps claim to Make America Great Again. Freedom isn’t free, and a freedom is no longer a freedom if it isn’t enjoyed by all. No, instead it is now a privilege. When did we decide that the privilege of a few was more important than the right to freedom for all?

  • Locating the Axis

    Locating the Axis

    Understanding the Cycle of Political Dehumanization

    For quite a while now, it seems that our two political parties have been participating in an argument of which side is “more American.” Each party has defined what they believe it means to be American and then positioned all other views as the root of all evil. Remember Groundhog Day? How Bill Murray continued to live out the same day over and over trying to get it right? Honestly, I could only watch it through the first two or three repeats of the day before I got bored. When Supernatural did their version of Groundhog Day I ate that up. That was some great TV. But back to the groundhog day idea. This is where we are in politics. They are one-trick ponies trying to convince us they are cheetahs with stripes. The truth is our political parties saw how citizens rallied during WWII. They remember how simple it was and how easy it was for our nation to position ourselves as the savior of the world. I don’t know if that was the actual sentiment of the citizens back in the mid 1940s through the 50s, mainly because it was before I was born. However, I do know that that is how our nation and collective consciousness remembers it. And that holds way more weight than any truths or facts. And so each political party keeps attempting to position themselves as the defenders of good while the opposing side (and all other differing opinions) must be inherently evil.

    We must, as a community, recognize how damaging this ideology is. The simplicity and ego fortification of this ideology is dangerous because it is easy. But more importantly, it justifies all manner of actions. This is the epitome of the ends justify the means. This is the way rape, slavery, and genocide are accepted – because if all differing opinions are evil, then the people who think such things must be evil and if they are evil then they are not human and not worthy of humanity, justice, mercy or grace. When we allow ourselves to fall into this line of thinking, we unknowingly accept and believe that what we do to others, the way that we treat others, is in fact how we believe we should be treated. This manifests in a person’s, a community’s, and a nation’s inherent self-loathing which it turns upon the rest of the world. This is the path that our political parties walk upon, and the path that they want us to join them on.

    Some people may say this sounds extreme. The only reason some people are thinking this is because they don’t see around the bend in the road yet. But let’s think back to when 9/11 happened. Remember the language that our then-President George W. Bush used to describe Iraq? Axis of Evil. Although all reports pointed to Afghanistan and Pakistan as the countries most likely to harbor Al Qaeda, then-President George W. Bush was adamant that we needed to invade Iraq. He claimed they were hiding members of the Al Qaeda along with chemical and nuclear weapons. We invaded and decimated a country all to find out that nothing was there. Nothing but oil that our oil companies were greedily eager to get their hands on. To this day, politicians continue to use the propaganda from WWII, continue to justify the actions that do not support US citizen desires or needs through the promise of America being able to believe in itself again. But they are feeding us lies and we grow more and more ashamed.

  • Whose rights are right?

    Whose rights are right?

    In my first post I talked a lot about the idea of good and evil, and the people and their country – many times interchanging the people with the country. The two, although consistently interchanged by myself, the media, and our culture at large, are two different entities.

    In response to a question from a reporter, Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on Palestine said, “Beside this, there is no such thing in international law like a right of a state to exist […] What is enshrined in international law is the right of a people to exist.”

    We have, as a nation, allowed the rights of citizens to become second in importance to the supposed rights of businesses. And yet, we don’t hold the same expectations of businesses that we hold of our citizens. We seem to have created a separate sets of rules and expectations depending on the entity and the positions people hold within different entities. An example I’d like to use is one of the Presidency. The Presidency is an entity, a position that different people can hold at different times but are granted the same rights due to that position. But it seems that we hold a different set of moral expectations for the role of presidency than we do for a citizen. As a citizen and a community member, we expect each other to be kind, decent, help, and care for the land in which we live. We see this in how we greet each other as we leave for work, pull out our trash for trash collection, mow our yards, and shovel snow for our neighbors simply because we see that it needs to be done. I recognize that this is not how we behave every day, but this is an ingrained hope whenever we move to a new apartment or buy a home. Although these are principles that we believe in, we do not, as a collective expect this of our presidents.

    Instead, criminality in politics is expected to be the norm, and a tough, rude, and almost belligerent personality seems to be idealized and idolized. We, as a collective seem to believe that we must prove our toughness to the world or calamity will reach our shores. These are some deep-seated fears that I believe originate in the creation of our nation. It is something that deserves it’s own post, or more than likely, several posts to begin to delve into. For now, let’s accept that we have some deep-seated fears that reveal themselves in the ways we conduct business and the people we choose to lead our nation.

    Eight years ago, SNL did a skit that was an election party where three or four liberal white people were watching the results of the 2016 presidential election along with Dave Chapelle. It ended with Trump winning over Hillary and the white people shocked as they announce that our nation is racist while Dave Chapelle and Chris Rock respond with a, well yeah kind of attitude. I am not here to argue the level of racism that exists within our country. I believe there are far more qualified individuals who have argued this far more eloquently than I could. But what I would like to argue is that Trump didn’t win because he seemed more racist or seemed to side more strongly with white ideology. He won because people see him as the strongest person who wouldn’t allow the world to bully him – and by extension, us. How could a woman, whom we all know to be an inherently softer, gentler, and less strong individual, face up against a man – a man who is 6’3”, 215 lbs (per his booking report as listed on Fox 5 Atlanta), and the owner of Trump Towers as well as an icon of reality tv who is known for saying, “You’re Fired!” Ok, some of that was a bit tongue-in-cheek sarcasm, but there are certain gender expectations that we may not necessarily adhere to on an individual level, but when faced with the running of a nation, of a celebrity personality, we allow these deeply ingrained gender expectations and mythology – which have very little basis in reality – to lead the direction of our vote. The psychology of why doesn’t really concern me. I believe it is something that we will naturally grow out of as a nation if we have the guts and courage to face our history and work on healing. But what does concern me is that we, in direct opposition to a long history that proves otherwise, believe that the world is out to get us, will bully us, and take advantage of our wealth if given even a quarter of a chance. Perhaps this is a bit of projection on our part. Seeing as this is exactly the type of actions our government has enacted while telling the population that it is for the safety and security of American interests. But I have to wonder, what exactly are those American interests? And whose? When we look back on the wars and “skirmishes” that were fought “in defense of national interests,” it seems the American citizen has never actually seen the benefit of those outcomes. However, it is fascinating to see how big businesses have benefited from those bloody battles for our supposed national interest. When did these businesses become American citizens? And when did their importance outweigh the needs, desires, and morals of our citizens?

  • Idolizing Villainhood

    Idolizing Villainhood

    I don’t know where I want to start so I guess I’ll start right here, where I am. I am sad, mad, and frustrated with our government, our country, our culture, and with the direction we seem to be headed. When did we begin to root for the villain and kick the hero down? When did we see bad as good and good as bad? As a nation and a culture, we seem to be obsessed with villains, seeing villains as better than heroes – re-marketing them as anti-heroes and embracing our villain eras. We see it in our ever-revolving true crime documentaries on serial killers, worst roommates, and missing people. We embrace it in our disdain for a happy ending and a need for dark and twisted plots, in the competition that movie makers engage in when creating horror and porn flicks – trying to win a race of who can make the sickest, most vile, gut-wrenching stuff with a forever extending finish line. And we are living it in the ever-increasing incarceration rates across the nation, in our epidemic of mass shootings, ever-increasing homeless and drug addictions, and in our acceptance that our leaders are not people to look up to, but instead the toughest negotiators (who are also thieves, liars, and crooks) because we assume that is what it takes to make our country succeed. We see the world as one giant competition where dog eats dog and we have to fight everyone off to enjoy the scraps we are given in a country rich in natural resources and ingenuity.

    I wonder if a part of why we have become so welcoming of this ideal of villainhood is because we have, as a country begun to face some hard truths about our beginnings as a country, our past, how we became “great” and what our present is revealing. Perhaps we looked behind the curtain and saw how awful we were, how we destroyed nations in our pursuit of our own ideal world, carving this fantasy out of the blood and bones of indigenous people and enslaving millions to bear both the yoke of our dreams and the weight of those consequences. At this point we should choose to look at the pain we have caused, accept the choices we made in the past, and begin to heal. But we are choosing a different route it seems. Instead, we are doubling down on our sins, insisting that the past worked, the past got us here and so because we are where we are, it must be good. We must be good. We have been living a fantasy believing that we are good. That our country, the United States of America is good, is better than good, is a paragon of virtue. During WWII we positioned ourselves as the saviors of the world. We believed the hype, and during WWII it was a fight for humanities goodness – a fight that the Allied forces, with us included in the end did win. But because we saw our goodness in that moment, we as a people believed that our country would forever be good without fail. But we have never taken account of where we stand, not since then. We have not looked around at what we are creating, at what leaders we are gifting power and what that might mean. We assume that because we believe that we as individuals are good, that must mean that our country is good.

    But when faced with the information of the bad our country has done we have taken the meaning of good and decided that good is defined by what our country does, instead of evaluating the choices of our country by what we know good to mean. In this, we have now inversed the meaning of good. We are embracing selfishness, greed, isolation, ethnocentrism, and idolatry and have twisted words to see these things as good, as something we should strive for.