Your Heart

I suppose as close as we have become, we are still very different types of people. Still, no matter what else has happened and no matter what else will happen, I will never not be grateful for the opportunity to have known you.

I am a person of actions. Words. Shitloads of them. And though I have feelings like everyone else does, I've never really been that good at expressing them without words. It is this part of ourselves where we are polar opposites.

I have strived hard to be the kind of person where "reading between the lines" isnt necessary. I've made way too many mistakes in my life, and the number one mistake has always been keeping my mouth shut. It's why I don't anymore, but it's also why I've turned into an incredibly difficult shit to deal with. And that's nobody's fault but my own.

Even though we've known each other for 12 years, I'm sure that would be a legitimate shock to you. Even with all I've said to you. But we've only really come to the point of intimately being close to one another in the last year. So you've been able to get a glimpse of a person you didn't quite know recently even though we've known each other for so long.

Granted, I've always had a big mouth. And I've always been a sarcastic jackass, and most of my life a bit of an extrovert. But I can also say most of my life that's merely been a tactic. And in all honesty I can say it's been a learned and calculated way a relating to people in a friendly and affable manner just so I could keep people at enough of a distance to hide my real self.

The person you know today is a complex and very lonely individual. The more time I have spent over the years since my divorce trying to deconstruct just what went wrong in my life, the more I have realized just how messed up I actually am.

Granted I'm not a complete train wreck. I know I have a cogent and agile mind and intellect. And I can be grateful for the fact that my experiences both good and bad have allowed me to retain my kindness. My mother, who is both the most damaged and impressive person I have ever met, at least instilled in me the value of kindness and empathy.

Friendship, connection, and genuine love.....This is the business of the universe and literally the only things we indulge in that actually matter.

Our ancestors millennia ago struggling to feed themselves every day understood that perhaps better than we do ourselves. Life is struggle and bullshit and pain. It's random. The fact that any of us is alive is the most incredible dice roll there ever is or ever has been. And nothing is guaranteed. Nothing is ever guaranteed.

The struggle, to make a tiring point, is real.

I have tried to embrace this as my truth. Even if it's not actually the truth I still believe it is.

I'm ridiculously smart. I could at least sit in front of a bunch of teenagers and give a discussion of astrophysics and quantum mechanics that would not get frowns from a high school science curriculum staff. And I've never been formally trained in any of that. So I know I'm at least smart.

But I'm also smart enough to recognize that I might not know enough. Ironically being smart, if you're dedicated to skepticism and honesty, means you recognize how stupid you are.

And believe me in some things I completely recognize how stupid I am.

I know you babe. And I can say with confidence I know you better than you have had the courage to allow anyone else to know you.

There are so many things I admire about you, but I also know you live in a really dark place. And I'm struggling to understand that place.

I don't understand why you and I are not blissfully fucking happy at this point.

After 14 months worth of struggling together why aren't we blissfully fucking happy?

I have been ready to step across that threshold for so damn long. I don't understand what holds you back.

And I fully realized even if we were to come to some stunning realization tomorrow and put all of this nonsense to bed and decide to move forward together in every sense of the word that we would be facing a really difficult fucking year ahead. A year of difficulty that is largely my fault.

I cannot expect you to be on board with that. But at the same time you better goddamn be ready to be on board with that. I didn't fall in love with you because it was cute convenient or blatantly sexual or any of that nonsense.

I fell in love with you because I did. It happened. I'm not afraid of that.

You still are.

Please tell me why....

A Complicated Mother's Day

Mother's day was a mixed bag for me. I had to work. My mother passed away four years ago. And I couldn't spend the day with my girlfriend (she is a mother too).

For me, in order to move forward in my life I do often have to pause and look back. Not to be all pithy or trite, but the journey is as important as the destination. And despite it having been personally a very difficult and trying year I do have a destination. The first time I've had one in a very long time. Love will do that for you.

As the vast majority of my life has been a complicated one (some, but not all of which was my fault) I have to get my thoughts out of my head to make sense of them.

So.... Mother's Day. I miss my mother. Very very much. It was always a complicated relationship, and she was always a complicated person. She did her damnedest to raise two sons, but much of her life she was treated with everything from indifference to outright scorn and hatred. By the time I was old enough to understand anything at all  she was already damaged goods.

When my mother graduated high school in 1953, she immediately went to Charlotte to pursue her dreams. She went to college and started to learn to dance and eventually teach ballroom dancing. She competed both nationally and internationally in ballroom dance and got the opportunity to travel the world. At the height of her career, as a teacher of teachers and a district coordinator for the largest chain of dance studios in America, she was in a very unusual place for a woman of her time. She made what we would consider today easily a comfortable six figure salary. She bought owned and ran businesses on the side with her best friend in Charlotte. She was extremely active in the Civil Rights movement and helped found one of North Carolina's first chapters of the NAACP. During this time she met her first husband Bob.

Her first husband, my brother's father, was basically a self-centered egotistical ass. What little I remember of him from my childhood gave me the impression that he cared about nobody but himself. And even though I think he cared about my brother, his ability to step outside of himself and care about other people was probably quite limited. His extramarital affairs are what led to my mother's first marriage dissolving.

Another factor was that she was tiny, and she had great difficulty having children. After she had my brother she had three miscarriages and then just gave up or so she thought. She even had a tubal ligation.

By the time my brother was 8 years old she met and fell in love with the man who would be her second husband, my father. And though I remember almost nothing pleasant about the man, I do know that he was unimpeachably brilliant. His eagle scout badge was earned by helping found the North Carolina Natural History Museum, as he was passionate about nature and wildlife.

They moved to Inglewood California and my father took up a position as a mechanical engineer with Volkswagen of North America. He even consulted with Disney and actually built the stunt cars and camera cars that were used in the Herbie the Love bug movies!

And then lo and behold I showed up. Born yes after she had her tubes tied LOL. I was born at 5 and a half months and only barely survived.

My mother and my brother would tell me stories about our early life out there because much of it I barely remember. They had a Winnebago and went out into the desert digging for gemstones on weekends. They even did volunteer work with the Smithsonian Institution. I still have fragments of some of the fossils they were allowed to keep during some of those digs.

My father did have one problem. Alcohol. It'd be too long to tell the story here, but basically he had issues with alcohol since he was a little baby. Putting alcohol in his bottle was how my grandparents "babysat" him.

Even though I know my mother told me parts of their life back then were idyllic, her as a strong-willed independent professional woman who actually earned more money than he did was the problem. And their ego conflicts led to more and more drinking on his part. His drinking got so bad that he lost his cushy position with Volkswagen. In an attempt to salvage their lives he took the family back to Charlotte his hometown. But all that did was make things worse. As this was the seventies by now, ballroom dancing was a dying art and my mother's career was functionally coming to an end. By the time we were there, my mother was 36 years old. And for a woman at the time it's kind of difficult to rebuild a career at that age after you had spent most of your life dancing and working in theater.

So then everything went to hell. The number of times my father beat my mother and put her in the hospital were countless. By the time we left I think in 1975, she was basically suffering from PTSD though she wasn't diagnosed with that until a little later.

We came back to Spartanburg her hometown to regroup when my mother left my dad. My racist asshole KKK loving Uncle used this as an opportunity to continually belittle her for decades to come. My grandmother was there to support us, but she was timid in the face of my uncle, and even my grandmother had issues with my mother and her feminism and her civil rights leanings. So we were all black sheep in a family that merely tolerated us at best.

All of this led to me having a very unpredictable mother. Unimpeachably brilliant and full of kindness she most definitely was. But I could also come home to a house destroyed, or to my mother being drunk, or to my mother threatening to commit suicide and she did more times than I can count.

When things were okay, she encouraged me to get into the performing arts myself. And so I did for many years. I sang in the South Carolina All-State chorus, and spent a few summers at the governor's School of the arts. I also did a lot of local theater. And I was always expected to keep top grades.

All of these things became escapes for me. They gave me something else to do. They allowed me to put on a face for the rest of the world that I could cope with. Being at home most of the time was wondering what the fuck was going to happen next, and knowing that I was going to have to take care of my own mother when I couldn't even take care of myself.

Things actually got better for a little while. She met an amazing man. A man by the name of Ray Russell. He was a territorial manager for Clairol products and frequented the hotel she managed at the time. They fell deeply in love. And he was a genuinely kind sweet and honorable man as I remember him.

He was also black. Their relationship did not last long. And it failed because my uncle threatened to have him and his family killed (he had children from a previous marriage that I never got the opportunity to meet).

This broke my mother's heart for the last time and afterwards she was never the same. Not even until the day she died.

The chaos got much worse. She eventually realized after an intervention by one of my friends parents that she needed help. So she voluntarily committed herself to the mental institution in Columbia to get that help. This led to me spending the better part of a year at the Spartanburg County children shelter and being inside of the nightmare of DSS and the foster care system. I did towards the end of that run get semi rescued by my brother and his wife. But his wife was a complete psychopath and it was not a very comfortable arrangement.

Eventually me and my mother were reunited, but it just wasn't the same anymore. We were on pins and needles with each other for years, and the time she spent in the hospital really didn't seem to help. She was still suicidal. Still occasionally drinking really bad, and by the time I was sixteen she had so much difficulty holding down a job that I was paying all the bills basically while we were on food stamps and AFDC.

I'll try to shrink the story a little bit at this point, because by this point I got into adulthood and got married. I had developed some really bad habits in my behavior that I wasn't really able to shed until decades later after some hard lessons and a painfully bitter divorce which because of my ex-wife's misbehaviors led to both of my children becoming damaged goods themselves.

I'd given my mother a great deal of power over me. I was always having to be the fixer. She interfered in my marriage greatly, but in hindsight probably rightly so. But I was also a superficial fixer in my marriage. I did love my wife when I married her, but we were never friends. She was just the next project. and because I had so much of my actual true self hidden I was largely miserable for most of the marriage. When my career began to falter due to corporate downsizing that's when the backstabbing and her multiple affairs started.

By the time I got divorced I was completely penniless and broke. I had literally lost everything including my family. And the only person I had to turn to was my mother. And our relationship was prickly to be kind.

When I went through my most recent downsize in 2008 I was so stubbornly opposed to doing that again that I lived in my car for a while before I finally got a job again. That job is with the company I currently work for now.

And at the same time my mother started going blind. So we did it all over again reluctantly except this time I was really genuinely taking care of a very stubborn person.

The last year's of her life I think were the only ones where she was content in any vague sense of the word. She had to rely on me because she had no other choice. But the dynamic between us changed. And it was then that I realized that I was probably the only man she had ever trusted in her whole life. Her relationship with my brother would require writing a book of its own. Their history was fraught with lies deceit theft and even violence. And before she died they never reconciled all of that.

She passed away a sad and heartbroken woman, who still tried hard to be a good mother and grandmother. She felt like throughout her entire life that no one had ever actually loved her. I know because she told me this the day before we had to put her in the hospital for the last time.

When she passed away I had very mixed feelings. Some of which I am ashamed of. But I've had four years to reflect. I felt relief when she passed away. Ashamedly it was because a lifelong burden had finally lifted. But I also felt relief for her. A lot of her story may have been tragic, but I also knew in that last year of her life that she had made her peace with a great deal of it and she was finally at some point truly okay with their being an end.

With all of her flaws, I can still say that I genuinely miss her, and I know I will for the rest of my life. Despite all the negativity above she taught me many valuable things. It is from her that I get my curiosity and my critical thinking. It is from her that I learned the value of kindness and empathy, even though she struggled to have those things in her life for herself.

She raised two boys and got them to adulthood under almost impossible odds, and did so as a fundamentally damaged person. For that I am grateful, and I'm grateful for the fact that I got to know her.

There's still a lot of pain in my heart. But there's no pain at all about what we went through growing up. Not anymore. I've tried to grow too and I put most of those things in my heart to bed a long time ago. She showed me how to do that even though she wasn't really good at it herself.

The pain that's left is simply knowing that she's gone and I'll never see her again. But that's a good pain to have, because it is the proof of the fact that she existed and she mattered.

I take all these ponderings and all these emotions and all these lessons I've learned and just hope that I can apply them moving forward in the life I hope to have from now on with the woman I love.

Thanks Mom! I love you....

A Response On Healthcare & Economics.

This is my unedited response to a discussion thread I'd started about healthcare. In the below commentary and reply I try to explain WHY Universal Health is both the right thing to do, and why it'll be very complicated to pull off without deeper changes in our socioeconomic system and politics....

"Healthcare in those countries isn't free. It's just supported by the tax base. And we all are already paying essentially for Medicare we can't use yet through the payroll tax.

People are weird. They get all patriotic about overseas oil wars, but don't trust the government when it comes to taking care of domestic issues. People need to make up their mind. It isn't about trust. Trusting ANY politician is stupid, even and especially the ones you blindly agree with.

The problem with government isn't it size or its reach, it is the purpose that it should serve. Greed for the military industrial complex, the energy sector, or even the technology sector (Afghanistan sits on upwards of trillions of dollars worth of rare Earth metals) isn't a viable alternative (even though all of these create economic opportunity) to making sure our citizens have clean drinking water and infrastructure that isn't crumbling.

One can argue that Universal Healthcare is a bad idea, and if we do nothing else to the healthcare system or the underlying economy it probably would be. This is the reason why Obamacare, though extending access to healthcare, has done absolutely nothing to reign in costs. One of the compromises in ObamaCare (to get Republicans to vote for it...and they did) was to disallow the government from having any say so in the price of medical procedures and equipment, a power all other Western systems have.

Just look at a hospital bill sometime in the United States and ask yourself while you're paying $4 on average for that tiny plastic cup they bring you pills in, when I can sell you a pack of 250 for less than $2, and still make a profit. :-P

The problem with revamping Health Care in the United States is twofold. In the 1970s the United States was at the forefront of fundamentally changing nutrition in the Western world, all from adopting a now demonstrably flawed study known as The Seven Countries Study, led by the epidemiologist Ansel Keyes. This was a first ambitious attempt at doing what we refer to today as lineal regression analysis of a multitude of studies, and this was done before the era of computers being widely available. It is only in the last decade or so, that this study has been revisited in any sense, and shown to be fundamentally flawed precisely because there weren't computers available to check the rather glaring mistakes of the study's author. It was too ambitious and far-reaching, and too unwieldy for anyone to check his work. And no one did. and this study became published right around the same time our countries USDA had adopted policies (during the Nixon era) that dovetailed almost to a perfect storm level with the conclusions reached in the study.

This is what led to the adoption of the low-fat diet, and to the nearly one thousand percent increase in sugar added to processed foods. The two countries that ran with this in a big way are the United States, and ironically Saudi Arabia. which is why those two countries top the world's charts in type 2 diabetes and metabolic syndrome.

So our diet is killing us. That's the first shoe.

The second shoe is economic. All of the countries that adopted universal healthcare systems did so between the late 1940s and the early 1970s. This was an era when Keynesian economic theory dominated all Western democratic socioeconomics. The United States decided to not deliberately go the universal Health Care route, as the Western world was getting the jitters from the economic growth in the third world due to the beginning pressures of globalization. So the United States led the charge at turning Keynesian economics on its ear, and adopting what we refer to now as supply-side economics, or trickle down economics as it is more well-known. And it was precisely at this point, when we let free markets decide the nature of healthcare, that we started this never-ending upwards spiral of inflation when it comes to healthcare. The same can be said about our higher education systems because this also aligned with the same time period when government started playing less of a role in higher education.

The inflation in these two fundamental systems of our society has actually been driven by the fact that we have let free markets have free reign. And free markets are kind of a mythology baked in to supply side theory.

Most other Western Powers did not back off of either universal Health Care, or publicly-funded higher education. And because of that political inertia, you find that most western nations have vastly superior and less expensive health care and education as a general rule.

Now that is not to say that the United States still does not dominate in the fields of advanced medicine, or advanced and prestigious higher education. Because we still do. Barely...

But the inflationary pressures that we allowed to occur unabated is also the reason why Healthcare is the number one cause of bankruptcy in the United States, and why postdoc education at a prestigious University like MIT can cost upwards of a half a million dollars.

I got accepted to MIT in 1985, but couldn't afford it then. But even then a postdoc education was a quarter of what it is today.

Today only the wealthy can afford good health, and the benefits of higher education properly. Regardless of what your intrinsic health actually is, and regardless of what sort of intellectual talents you may possess.

The part of the conversation that seems lost on many people is this weird concept that Democratic socialism is some weird anomaly that only occurs in countries that conservatives like to make fun of.

The United States actually invented Democratic socialism.

Read that again to yourself. Slowly.

GPS, The Interstate Highway System, two  thirds of ALL of the recreational lakes in the U.S., etc.....the list just goes on and on of all the PUBLIC WORKS you and I rely on every single day that form the (now crumbling) foundation of Democratic Socialism that makes your life possible. To deny this is plain hypocrisy.

And it was through that invention that we saw the gilded age in the latter part of the nineteenth century go away. It was again through a change in the social contract that we saw a country lift itself out of the Great Depression, which set the United States up to become the superpower it is today.

So for nearly a century the United States was the template and the role model for Democratic socialism for the rest of the western world. And it's really only since the late 1970s that this hasn't been the case.

There's a lot to unravel in order to give our citizens non bankrupting healthcare."

My Little Black Heart :)

Ok so this is a first for my blog. Normally when I post here it is to get intellectual or philosophical ideas out of my head so that I can make sense of them. And then I make the post public, because I invite feedback from EVERYONE to make sure I'm keeping my own intellectual bullshit in check.

This is the first time I've ever written something just for one person. You. So this is a bit more significant to me because the risks are greater. Granted I know all too well I wear you out all the time saying everything (probably incoherently) on my mind. It's how I'm made. I can't not do that.

I never meant for any of this to happen between us. Mind you, I'm glad it did. More grateful than I can probably ever say. But a part of me still feels just a tinge of guilt about that, given the circunstances. Often I feel like I'm being really unfair because I really never intended to unlock my feelings so thoroughly or so quickly. It's left me a little dumbstruck actually. Over the years that I've been at least mostly single I've always had at least a little of my guard up. Once you've experienced certain things in your life you learn the value of that. But I also know that keeping your guard up too much just gets in the way.

Maybe it's like you've told me before, fate. I'm not a big believer in spiritual matters, like at all. But this has been utterly profound for me. Maybe it was just the right time. I've known you for a long time, but the past few months have made me realize how little I knew, and how grateful I am to properly really know you. I'm in awe of the person you actually are, and at the same time deeply empathetic towards the situation you find yourself in. This has really and truly gone beyond merely liking staring at you and thinking really awesome thoughts about those possibilities (though I won't apologize ever for getting my jollies from that).

My experiences have taught me, rather harshly, to really grasp what matters in this life thingy we're all trying to do and live. I'm sure from your perspective often the situation you are in is utterly nerve wracking. I can't imagine it being anything else. I utterly hate the situation you are in. It's terrible. It sucks. I know all too well, because I've been in a similar spot myself, and more than once. So I know how soul crushing it can be. Struggling your hardest to do what is right and to take care of those you love, and get no appreciation for it, or even worse get bitched at about it. It breaks my heart to see someone else, especially someone I care about, go through something like that.

Though I deplore your struggles, I am inspired by how well you cope and by how tenaciously you sacrifice for your son. Everything you are going through and have gone through speaks volumes about the kind of person you are. And THAT is what I have fallen for.

I struggle with my patience here, but don't overthink that. It's MY struggle. I just endeavor to be as candid about that as I can, so you'll know. You deserve to know what you're getting into with a person like me. Burdening other people with my actual life, experiences, situation, and feelings.....isn't something I do very well. Or usually at all. At least in my recent history this is something I've been utterly relucant to do. So this whole thing is equal parts exciting, amazing, and downright scary to me. And I think it should feel like that, but it's been a very long time since I've really recognized that.

I'm all about the idea, the concept of love. Love is literally all we have. Yeah you gotta go to work and earn money and stuff. Gotta eat a sandwich. Gotta sleep. etc.... But the only thing of value in our lives is love. So I'm a fan of the concept. It's how I approach all of those few people I'm actually close to. So I'm all about some love. But I'm also keenly aware that I've been in a whopping total of three committed relationships in my life. And all three failed. So it makes me think really deeply, and really hard about this. It forces me to stop and think (probably too damn much) about all the stuff swirling around in my head.

This is gonna sound cliche' and trite......but I've been in relationships before. Far longer ones, and ones that led to more face-time and more intimacy than you or I have ever had the chance to experience. And what I can say is that I've legitimately not felt what I feel for you...like ever before. It's a bit unnerving. It's unfamiliar territory. It's weird. It makes me sit here and second guess everything I do and say....and everything I've done and said already. And it really worries me that I've just typed this out on a screen, knowing full well I'm planning to send you a link to this.

And I don't want you to think I'm completely off my rocker or that I've turned into some obsessive weirdo. I'll still be behaving myself like a grown person should. If I get nothing out of this that I truly want, I'll still value everything we have shared. And we have shared a lot. And it isn't like I haven't listened or paid attention. You've been candid with me about how you feel about me, so this isn't me doubting your words. Not at all. I trust you implicitly and believe everything you tell me. I'm inspired by you, in awe of you at times, and I worry so much about you. I think you've been done very wrong. And yet you struggle on, and still face me honestly despite what I am sure are conflicted feelings given how suddenly all of this happened to you.

I know I've helped you out here and there, and I know you're grateful. But that is that, and this is this. I want and need to be closer to you. And you need to be appreciated for the awesome woman that you are. I can't wait for us to have the opportunity to discover what that could be.

Communication Is A Minefield, And That's OK.

We truly live in an amazing time. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Kik, Whatsapp. And then there are social dating apps like Tinder, OkCupid, POF, Match.com, the list is nearly endless.

So many ways to at least attempt to connect with people. And while much of it is good, useful, and worthwhile.....a lot of it is NOT. I think people have slowly begun to lose a sense of what it is to communicate. And more importantly, they've failed to grasp HOW to approach communication that (in these popular mediums) doesn't involve using your voice, or your body language.

There are parts of the human experience that rely on a lot more than photographs, or memes, or 140 characters in a row.

Granted, I'm as guilty of playing in these pools as anyone else. I post so many memes on Facebook it's likely that I have an addiction and need some sort of intervention counseling. :P

And yes, for anyone that knows me well, I do that sort of thing with deliberate purpose. My sense of humor and irony is a bit twisted, and I'm not easily offended nor are most of my friends.

But on occasion, I do lose a friend. Even when that loss is due to misunderstanding, or someone just being juvenile it bothers me. Not a whole lot, but it does get inside my head and irk me. I lost two friends last week, two people I think are really cool. One of whom out of the blue accused me of being some colossal pervert, when I hadn't done anything of the sort. Go figure.

I think you have to approach social media with deliberate force, and with more honesty than most people are accustomed to, at least online and that makes some uncomfortable. But otherwise you run the risk of social media becoming a circle-jerk of distractions, rather than anything vaguely useful. When you're in close proximity in the "real world" with your friends you bare up much more bravely, and often much less socially polite, than you do online. And I think you have to treat online interactions the same as real ones. Then again lots of people do the same thing in the real world, and just carry over that behavior online.

This is why I am difficult. I know I am. I've had people tell me I am quite often. But it isn't to be mean, or to come across as unnecessarily complex. It's that I simply reject much of the dishonesty and fear that goes along with being socially adept.

Social media is a way to stay connected with real friends, and a way to make new ones from your circle. But it's also a minefield, especially if you have the desire to let yourself just "all hang out" there like I do. But it's only a personal minefield because I do become occasionally disappointed in people that I otherwise admire.

I have reached a point in my life where the only way I'm really comfortable is letting all of my "me" out into the open. Well maybe not all lol. No one really does that. But I gravitate towards almost all. On the occasions that I've tried online dating sites and the like (and lets be utterly clear, once you get past the 90% bot populations on almost all of them, they are still not entirely useless) I tend to write profiles that communicate precisely why you WOULDN'T like a guy like me. I believe this is incredibly useful, and certainly in that sort of scenario a whole lot more honest than "I like long walks and sunsets" or the usual laundry list of recreational activities anyone with a pulse could enjoy that you tend to find on them.

I use the same tactic everywhere. Well almost everywhere. I don't bear my extroverted "me" mode at work, but even in that aspect of my life I can't avoid giving glimpses. My role in my working life is different than my actual life. But that is literally the only area of my existence where I make that exception.

So why is it a tactic? Well there's a fundamental difference between being friendly, and being friends. I don't think enough people appreciate the distinction. If you want to legitimately connect with people, it also means you want to also find those who aren't going to....or can't....understand or like you. It might sound selfish, but the truth of the matter is that we all have limited time, energy, and resources. We can't be liked by everyone. I'd even argue we shouldn't be liked by everyone. And it's a fools errand to even try to have everyone like you.

That doesn't mean that I don't want to be liked. Far from it. I "need" to be liked as much anyone else needs to be. Human beings exist in a weird contradiction of states. We are all on some level fundamentally alone, and yet there is NOTHING worth doing or experiencing without the support of other people. Whether that support is a friends, or a family members, or a lovers....that support is what gives texture to our lives. No one, absolutely no one, can be an island unto themselves. Even the people you encounter that try to use you or take advantage of your kindness realize this. That's WHY they need you in the first place. In that scenario it's just a sick justification of what is nonetheless true.

I've lived a really messed up life, pretty much since birth. It wasn't all bad, but enough was bad to have both twisted my thinking for many decades, and at this point (I hope) finally cleared my head as to the nature of things.

I am the way I am, because I think I grasp the importance of communication. And I also grasp that modern methods of communication in no way make this any different. But I don't want to skate across the surface of my life in any realm, either the real world or the online one.

All too often people structure their speech so that you hear "what they want you to hear", or "what they think you'd like to hear". The former is dishonest, the latter is cowardly. But this is often how people are in the real world, and this tendency spills over into the online world.

That tactic, in both realms, well it might make things smoother......but it's incorrect.

Make waves. When you do, you discover important things. You realize that strangers might think you're weird, but that doesn't actually affect you in any meaningful way. You realize that some "friends"...aren't. And you occasionally will find your allies.

And those are the only people worth finding. Only with real connection can you really have friends. I think not enough people appreciate this, and confuse "friendly" with "friends".

It's still valuable to be friendly. I'm not a pig to people, at least not on purpose. But these are two seperate ideas.

I'm gonna continue walking this path, because I believe it is the correct one. It isolates me to some degree. But the few connections I do have are real and valuable ones that I cherish, so I think I'm doing what works.

Moral Proximity

There is a classic problem in philosophy you may have heard of, known as The Trolly Problem.

In this problem you have two scenarios. A street trolly rolling down a track loses it's brakes. As a switch operator, you could pull a track switch and divert the trolly, seeing that if you don't five people in a car are directly in the trolly path and will assuredly be killed. However, on the side track is one workman who would also be killed if you do choose to pull the track lever.

What is the ethical choice? Do nothing and five people die. Pull the lever and only one dies. It seems like a simple math problem.

Or is it?

What if you the observer weren't operating a track switch, but observing on an overhead bridge instead? And instead of a switch, and incredibly fat man stands beside you. You know that if you shove the fat man off the bridge onto the track that sure, he will die. But you are also pretty sure that he's so large he would stop the trolly, saving the five people down the track?

A conundrum eh? Ethics aren't so simple are they? Our intuitions are affected by proximity.

There are those consequentialist philosophers who claim that this quandry is truly ethically challenging, but I don't think so.

Why? Because we know, both observationally and personally that there is an ethical difference between pulling a switch and shoving a man to his death. It's just that the ethical difference, and therefore capacity to suffer exist with the observer.

Collateral damage and modern warfare clearly spells this out. A ground infantry soldier is far far more likely to suffer from PTSD than a remote drone pilot, despite the likelihood that a remote drone pilot has taken more human life. It isn't the dehumanizing label of "enemy combatant" that does this either. Rather it is the proximity to the consequences of violence and warfare.

So why am I going on about this?

In today's political climate many people of a like mind to myself keep pondering why Trump supporters can so easily dismiss the ethically crushing results of some of his administrations policies.

I am here to claim that, just as the problem above, much of our ethics are informed by proximity. And the distance afforded by divisive policy for many, makes the otherwise tragic ethical outcomes of far less consequence.

We have so many Trumplicans perfectly ok with the administrations immigrant policies. And so many of these people easily dismiss situations like we find in Texas where thousands of children have been separated from their families.

Why can they do that? Well first, it's because they have been convinced by years (decades even) of conservative propaganda that illegal immigrants are the root cause of many of our problems....even if they are demonstrably not.

How many of these Trumplicans could actually physically separate children from their parents and not feel abysmal shame?

And I mean this literally. How many people who agree with his policies would actually go and do the work of dragging children physically from the arms of their parents??

I'd wager, given human nature, far far less than are otherwise ok with this. And it's entirely because it's an abstract issue happening to someone else, SOMEWHERE else.

Think all Germans were as ethically bankrupt as the worst of the Nazis? It might make going to war with them easier to believe this, as much of the WW2 propaganda proclaimed.

All Germans were clearly not this ethically bankrupt. They just took the idea of patriotism too far, and to it's ultimate dark place.

Now do you grasp just how scary a place we as a culture find ourselves??? :-/

Gunzzzzz!!!!!!!! RAWRRRR

The gun debate continues, as it has for many years. As a gun owner, a liberal, a secular humanist, and a skeptic I find myself stuck in the middle of this topic. I might also be a magical unicorn, due to how nonsensical it seems to some people that I'm a liberal and a gun advocate. :-P

Clearly something needs to change. But the changes I advocate for are changes neither side of the debate from a policy standpoint seem eager to entertain. Rather, both side politically seem to simply use the topic as a means to create more divisiveness.

Sound far-fetched? Hear me out.

One of the really confusing aspects of gun legislation is how rarely our federal government has had the political will to actually legislate any of it. This is why we have our current quite problematic situation whereby individual states and cities have created a miasma of confusing laws. In Kentucky you can keep a gun in your vehicle at work under most circumstances, but in Pennsylvania you can be fired for it, with no legal recourse. Of course since Pennsylvania is an At Will employment state you can be fired with no recourse for wearing the wrong color shirt. There are plenty of areas the federal government has bowed out of having a say, but as gun rights are in the Bill Of Rights, it is an area legislatively the federal government must OWN.

I could give many many more examples of how the mess of local legislation creates issues for both pro-gun and anti-gun sentiment, but by and large the REAL issue is a lack of political will at the Federal level to address the topic. Not only in a common sense manner, but at all.

There are TONS of laws already on the books however, whether you're talking about the NFA in 1934, the GCA in 1968, or additional legislation tacked on in 86 and 89 that are still quite legitimate.

The problem is that only the bare necessities are actually enforced, and only so because of bipartisan effort. Sounds crazy even using the word bipartisan today eh?

So what do I mean. Well it's a rarely discussed aspect of this that should be.

The BATF. The BATF (and it's funding or lack thereof) is really at the heart of this issue. And NO ONE TALKS ABOUT THIS!!

An NFA Tax stamp from the BATF today still costs what it did in 1934. $200. In 1934 $200 was more like $4000 and served as a deterrent to the manufacturing of certain types of firearms. Now it's just a relatively small fee. The BATF has no legal say so over the fee, but they do have to approve the stamp applications.

Hard core gun rights activists and lobbyists have kept raising the stamp fee off the legislative radar for many decades. But the FUNDING of the agency itself isn't so cut and dry in the lobbying process.

Want to know why filing for an NFA stamp approval takes anywhere from six months to over a year (assuming a filling gets approved in the first place)??

The BATF is understaffed and underfunded. Big win for the anti gun crowd.

We have almost 70,000 brick and mortar gun stores in America (more than their are grocery stores). Counting in FFL license holders and the number jumps to more than 160,000. The BATF is mandated under law to audit these businesses and license holders for best practices and adherence to the law. But by the BATF's own admission, rather than annually they on average get around to this every 17-18 years. Why?

The BATF is understaffed and underfunded.
Big win for the pro gun crowd.

BOTH political parties have determined since the Reagan era that it is equally within their self interest to have a castrated BATF. For their own selfish political reasons. It's the one thing they agree on.

Wrap your mind around these facts and ask yourself. Will banning a particular gun or arming teachers fix this deeper problem? Or are you being sold a pile of shit playing on your fears for your vote???

Comments??