In a recent Facebook discussion, we talked about the value of occupations where people put their life on the line. This of course arose out of a conversation about the currently chaotic situation involving the police and the Black Lives Matter movement. A friend of mind said he leaned towards siding with police because they lay their lives on the line every day. Many people feel this way and it is oft used to not only build respect towards police officers, but also people in the military.
On one hand there is certainly courage getting up each day, knowing this could be a day you die…or rather a higher than normal percentage for the average citizen. Of course the average cop may have as good of odds as the average person who grows up in inner city areas that have a high crime and murder rate. That aside I agree that it still takes courage, but the stress of such a situation is likely not healthy without a good deal of treatment to deal with the stress. That kind of stress is likely to make you more likely to take less chances in any given interaction with the citizenry to protect your own life. Particularly in areas where there is a lot of crime, and for a job which doesn’t pay that well given the cost of your life.
On the other hand, one wonders what compels someone to choose that line of work? Do people say…”I really want to put my life on the line every day and be a cop or join the military, protecting people?” I am sure some of them do. Such nobility does exist. But I am sure there are plenty of reasons that come into play as well. Some may join because they can’t afford or don’t want to go to college. For the military, some may join for the opportunity to go to college, or the job opportunities that will be more plentiful upon graduation. Many join the military simply as a way to get out of poverty. Other factors may come into play, like trying to escape an abusive or dysfunctional household, doing it because your father and/or brother(s) did it. Other less noble reasons could also exist like just wanting the respect that comes with the uniform, picturing yourself as some action hero not even thinking about the consequences of you doing or wanting that instant authority over people. This has always been the trouble I have had with simply thinking of all cops or military personnel as noble heroes for being willing to lay down their life for others, because it’s unclear to me how much of this courage really factors into their decision to do the job.
But they do, do the job. At the end of the day isn’t that all that matters? Perhaps, but if laying down your life, whatever your initial intentions were make you a person with courage then such courage should also be bestowed on all people who have dangerous jobs. And there are such jobs even though they in no way are protecting other people. People who are loggers, fishers, and roofers come in the top 3. Here is a list of the top 20 most dangerous professions per capita (Police come in at 15). We also must then laud all those who lay their life down for a cause. This then includes your rebels, your gangs, your suicide bombers. This people also risk their life, sometimes end their lives for a cause they believe in. I think we can agree that this is not the type of person we want to elevate to nobility. Of course it is the values they hold, the values they fight for, the goodness that they protect. So if we can’t guarantee the motivations of all people who don the uniform, if there are more dangerous professions, and if what makes someone is a hero is the values they represent, it seems to me like “laying down one’s life” isn’t an overly relevant reason to elevate one to a position of automatic respect.
But you may say, “Big talk person with blog, but would you be willing to do the same?”. And I think it’s a fair question to ask and it’s also an important question I think to ask one’s self. “Is there a cause for which I’m willing to die for?” I certainly think I have the courage for it, but I know for me the death part isn’t what would hold me back. If there was truly no other way besides carrying a gun to solve the problem, then it is my passion that would override my fear of death, at least initially. It would simply feel like the right thing to do regardless of the consequences. What I will say is that I am definitely capable of making a mistake, and possibly a deadly one. Dying to me is quite honestly less scary than taking the life of someone who did feel I deserve it. Had I shot Tamir Rice. I would be wishing myself dead, and if they didn’t lock me up, I’d quickly turn in my badge. Because, how are you going to live with that?
Cop buys mother he caught stealing, $200 dollars in groceries for her kids. Values to die and live for.
When it comes the situation between cops and blacks in the U.S., all I can say is that there is definitely racism in the justice system, and most cops are simply doing their best. They see the worst of society and the see it every day. There is no question this wears on them, and there is no question in changes the brain. But so does poverty and racism. The key is I think is to reach out to all those who need help. You don’t have to lay down your life to support the police and black people. Things have to change or a lot more people are going to die and those are the lives we all need to work together to save.
Once again another mass murder brings up the debate on gun control, and unproductive discussions full of straw man arguments fly. As I write this I am sitting in Edmonton, Canada where I grew up. As a Canadian I have a hard time understanding pro-gun arguments, and I think it’s safe to say this would be true for a lot of Canadians and people in many other western countries. In light of all the gun related deaths and mass shootings in the U.S. it is unfathomable to a lot of us why this right to bear arms is so important compared to other things like health care or education which many people don’t see as rights. Two things that have the ability to greatly increase your chance of survival not only individually, but collectively as a society. Such things many people have simply turned their backs on. Other individual freedoms like the right to privacy have been openly exposed by Edward Snowden. The outrage minimal, and Edward Snowden is labeled a traitor. Things like income inequality, fair and democratic voting processes are sometimes discussed but little happens. This simply adds to why many of us from other countries are simply confounded and don’t understand.
And believe me, I am trying. If there is one thing you have convinced me of about America, is that any sort of ban on guns will not solve any problems, at least in a major way. In some countries this might be the case, but not in America. As many pundits decried after Sandy Hook, if the shooting of elementary school children is not enough to convince anybody that we have a national crisis and that maybe we have to revisit the applicability of the 2nd amendment to this current day and age, nothing will. I have rested on this conclusion for a little while now, and even wrote a blog piece before in which I ask the question about why, if we won’t give up our guns, can’t we fight for a society in which we don’t need them? It is along those lines that I want to write about again today, but perhaps looking at it from a different tack. Because I certainly want to talk about my views, but productively, and try to ask more questions, because I don’t know that I have a lot of answers. I just know that I really want there to be less shootings and schools and other public venues. More importantly I want to ask questions that perhaps change thinking and can change culture. Because I don’t think any true progress on the gun issue can happen unless there is a change in attitude about them.
America has a lot of fear. While I also groan somewhat at Michael Moore’s overplay to the emotional in his films, his documentary Bowling for Columbine had a central thesis, and that wasn’t about the banning of guns, but that is about us living in a culture of fear. When you debate about guns with people that are pro-gun, overwhelmingly their best arguments boil down to protection from violent criminals, but also to protection from a tyrannical government. The very intent, we are told, for the 2nd amendment. Fear can sometimes be a sensible state to live in, if those fears are real. Are they in this case? In 2009 it was discovered that of the approximately 15,000 homicides, only 1900 were committed by an actual stranger. This tends to be true for other violent crimes as well. It’s people you know. It isn’t because they broke into your home. You let them in. The Pulse shooter was a regular and had passed through the doors many times. They know you. Know something about your habits. Killers pick the time and the place, the chances of you being ready to defend yourself are small.
In terms of protection from the government, well it’s understandable this was a concern of our founding fathers given what they went through. How applicable is that today? We know of course many countries that have far less guns, who have less murders and their governments have not rolled over them. For instance the Netherlands has had between 0.8-1 homicides per 100,000 people (any method) for the past decade. This country has only 3.9 guns per 100 people. Such restrictive gun laws have been in effect for at least 20 years and to my knowledge the government has not attacked it’s people. There are of course other similar examples of low gun numbers, low homicide rates and restrictive gun laws without having a tyrannical government. Are those governments waiting to strike? Why don’t those governments roll over their unarmed citizens? Why aren’t the citizens more worried and fighting to gain more access to guns? Are they fools? What is different about them and us? And if they seem content with a lot less guns even when they are unhappy with their government is that an attitude we can learn too. In talking with a number of people who have served in the military they are rarely happy with their government, Republican or Democratic, and have said to me explicitly that if they were ever asked to turn their guns on the people by the government, they would turn their guns on the government and not the people. The military are not mercenaries, they are made up of us. They are trying to protect us. Why would they aim at us? The trust you don’t have for your government is the same mistrust the people who make up our armed forces have. So when you say you need your guns as protection from tyranny you are really saying you don’t trust your military. Even if these horror of a government were to convince the military to turn guns on the people, of course guns wouldn’t come into play anytime soon. There would be bombs from planes and drones, tanks rolling through the street, and long range missiles. Given how armed the citizens are, it seems like the most sensible strategy. Because among all those military people with guns come people with a lot of training, and experience in strategy. And the government knows where weapons are being stockpiled by the citizens. They are coming to destroy your stash first.
But let’s try and go a little deeper. It seems to me that there is a feeling among those who are pro-gun rights that there is inevitability to certain things. Governments will eventually always turn on the people. Criminals will always be plentiful. I am always in danger from unknown assailants and I need my guns. To me it is this inevitability that seems to be most damning evidence to this culture of fear. While no society is without criminals there are societies with a lot less. While there are no societies without homicides there are ones that have a lot less. While there are governments that attack their people, there are others that do not. So we have plenty of examples of how we can change for the better. What is the attitude and culture of those countries that make them safer from their government and each other? When you know someone who is doing things in a better way, don’t you usually try and do it that way too? This is at the heart of what I do not understand. Even if these fears represent a real in present danger why would we not strive for a society where we live in less fear? It requires no change to gun laws or the 2nd amendment. You would simply find that your gun would be sitting in a closet unused as it does in Switzerland. The oft used example of the safe country with plenty of guns. Those guns though come from mandatory military service, and they generally sit unloaded in closets by those men and women after they serve. Nobody is carrying them into the Swiss version of 7/11.
How much damage can an angry person with a knife do, compared to an angry person with a gun? I hope everybody would agree the latter will do more. The conversation about guns often focuses on the latter. It assumed that liberals are thinking that by removing the gun, anger goes away, and it is possible that some liberals think that. They would of course be incorrect. Just like there are many societies with low gun numbers, low homicides, and restrictive laws, there are also many nations with restrictive laws, high gun numbers and high homicides. What are the factors that make those more violent societies? They also seem to have angry people, and angry people with guns. Our initial question indicates two problems. Angry people, and angry people with guns. However both those problems, as you’ll not have something in common. If you could make people less angry, whether or not that person has a gun becomes irrelevant. And so I agree with the oft used argument that guns don’t kill people, people do. The problem is people with guns, when they get angry, can do a lot more damage. Taking away guns won’t reduce the number of angry people just the amount of hurt they can cause. We can’t treat the problem like it’s all or nothing, if we can reduce deaths we should be doing that shouldn’t we? But I’m with the pro-gun people, I’d prefer not to take away people’s guns, I’d rather work on the problem of how to make less angry people. There are solutions to this. There are examples of societies that have less of them. There are studies about what factors lead to more peaceful societies. It’s a challenging road, it means making a lot of other personal changes, but if you think keeping your guns is important those are your options. Fight for that society that gets the heart of the problem that causes people to want to kill other people. Don’t just throw your hands up and say it can’t be done. We know better.
Finally let’s ask an even more fundamental question. What are the grounds in which we should end someone’s existence? Trespassing? Burglary? Being suspected of a crime? Acting suspiciously? Not listening to the police? In debates over gun control issues with people you hear a lot about people deserving today. “He should have listened to the cops instead of running away”, “If anybody steps foot into my house in the middle of the night I’ll shoot him dead”. In Arizona a lady shot at a car that had children in it for simply turning around in her driveway. In a country with due process, with guns we suddenly all get to become judge, jury, and executioner all at once. In an excellent video about how we can arrive at morality through scientific means over divine guidance, they talk about why we have gradation of punishment in society for crimes. Why for instance do we not punish rapists (a horrible crime) with the death sentence? I honestly never thought about it before. Rape of course is an absolutely horrific crime. The reason is, that if you are already going to be put to death for rape, you have nothing to lose really by killing your victim. Your punishment can’t be made worse. Imagine if all crimes were punishable by death. Would this lead to a more orderly society, or a more violent one? So if, as many claim, there is nothing we can do about criminals. If we now arm everyone to the point where criminals now feel any crime they commit is likely to lead to them being shot, what is the response of the criminal mind? Does the criminal let fear prevent them from doing the crime, or does the criminal simply increase their own arsenal when committing crimes? Do the criminals not become more deadly instead of committing crimes less frequently?
Given the amount of guns in the U.S., we should be the most orderly society, but we are not. So once again, I agree that there have to be other factors that lead to a more orderly society with less violent crime. Can we not all agree to fight for those things? Can we listen to our sociologists, mental health experts, people who study deviant behavior? Can we all work together to de-stigmatized mental illness? Can we all fight against poverty and income inequality? Can we demand a media that doesn’t sensationalize and misrepresent statistics to attract viewers, but actually informs and covers issues objectively and reasonably? Can we all fight for a government that has politicians that don’t try to make you feel afraid to win your votes? They give you things to fear, give vague solutions on how they are going to make the fear go away, but they never do. If one side is so naïve as to removing guns from the equations is the answer, then you also have to take responsibility for suggesting that more guns is the answer either. If you are going to say having your gun is important, and that it is your right, then ethically if you have compassion, and care about living in a society with less death and violence you must fight for all these other things. You must research solutions to how we create a society, like many that exist currently, with less angry people (whether they have guns or not). Your evolutionary advantage is not your ability to shoot a firearm. It’s your brain. If you can’t see that increasing happiness in society is a more effective means of keep you and other safer then you yourself are a victim of the same fear that ends too many lives.
Every morning I, or occasionally my wife, start off the day by making tea. Specifically chai tea. As an aside the word chai means “tea” in Hindi. In my dad’s language of Punjabi it would be cha. So in a way saying chai tea is like saying “tea tea” which makes no sense, but I am starting with the familiar, but I usually just say chai. I am half Punjabi and should say “cha” but communicating my caffeinated beverage of choice gets more difficult if I am used to saying cha.
So first thing in the morning I wash the pot, if it is not washed already, and measure out the amount of tea I want to make. Usually about 4 mug fulls of water. I put the water on the stove and turn the burner on. As the water heats up I add an equal number of heaping teaspoons of loose Yellow Label Lipton tea. Then I take some green cardamom pods, whole cloves, fennel seeds, black pepper corns, and piece of cinnamon stick and put it all in a big stone mortar, and then take the heavy stone pestle and grind the spices and add it to the pot of water with tea in it. Once the water boils for a few minutes I add the milk. Whole milk, because chai without enough milk fat in it is wasted chai. 🙂 I add enough milk until the color looks right, and then I add a little bit of honey to sweeten it slightly. After the tea comes to a boil, I turn the burner off and pour the tea through a sieve leaving the spices and loose tea behind. Drinking that first sip of hot tea in the morning is a glorious feeling. Not only does it wake me up, but the taste which mixes the slight bitterness of black tea, the rich silkiness of milk, a blend of distinct spices, and a hint of sweetness from the honey has a solidness, a wholeness to it that I can’t quite describe. It feels like home to me as invokes many memories of growing up drinking tea with my family. At that time in my life I usually didn’t have morning tea, but late afternoon tea with my parents when they come from work. I introduced it to my wife when we met and she fell in love with it, and it is now as important to her as it is to me, and so it is now a shared pleasure. And on mornings when I haven’t had a lot of sleep, I may find making the tea to be a bit of a chore but that first sip in the morning makes me feel like I have the strength to face the day. The making and drinking of chai is a ritual for me. I think my only one. If I’m away from home I miss it and genuinely get excited for that first cup of chai when I get back.
We all have our rituals. In many ways I feel like rituals are like beliefs, they are like habits, they are repeated actions and thus forge neural pathways in our brain which when activated release dopamine. I think we need ritual in our lives to a certain extent. A repeated activity that simply brings emotional comfort should never be seen as a bad thing. Of course the way ritual can feel so solid and tangible can also be dangerous. As I wrote out my ritual for making chai and how it makes me feel I think to myself how I could never be vegan. But perhaps I should be vegan. There are many positive scientific and ethical arguments for being vegan. This clash is at the heart of how are beliefs or our rituals impact how we rationalize away good arguments in favor of those practices and beliefs we hold dear.
I think it’s also important to recognize that the tangible feelings those rituals give us are therefore an illusion. I remember when I was about 16 a friend of my mother’s, who was Greek Orthodox and cut hair in her home was giving me a haircut and talking about an upcoming Easter celebration. They were big meat eaters, especially lamb, but she announced to me that on Good Friday they don’t eat meat. She said “I don’t know, but not eating meat, makes me feel closer to God.” I found this to be such a strange statement, because I really felt like buddying up to God should really be more about helping people than whether or not you eat meat on Good Friday. It struck me at that moment how ritual influences our emotional state. And while I think we can afford some fantasy in our lives, when we get mired in ritual it is very much like an addiction. Ritual is like a drug for which we trade a certain euphoria we get by performing the ritual instead of actions that might be more productive to the lives of ourselves and others. The oft used example is quite true, that going to church every Sunday does not make you a good Christian. Many religious movements begin as an offshoot of other religions that seem to dogmatically get lost in ritual over more pragmatic practices that actually produce. Sikhism is a good example of this. This religion developed out of need to rise up from the oppression of the Mogul Empire in India at a time when the Hindus simply bore the oppression and turned to ritual and prayer for help instead of doing something themselves. Of course as the religion aged it too has become more mired in ritual as well, even though it began as a rebellion against it.
To see how easy we can get caught up in ritual the following text appears below the picture above at the website for this image. While I’d say that there is some hint that you should be doing good things in your life, I think words like these make it too easy for people to think they can bypass practical applications of a positive spirituality over performing rituals:
“A ritual is a formula which is meant to dovetail our consciousness to the supreme consciousness of God. The whole purpose of a spiritual ritual is transformation of the heart – from selfish passions to a spirit of selfless service to others, from arrogance to humility and from envy to having the power to appreciate others. If this transformation doesn’t take place in our heart, to create good character, personal integrity and ultimately love for God, then these rituals are all a waste of time.
The value of a ritual is to the extent we please God. Its not the ritual but the content of what our consciousness puts into that ritual. The real essence of all spiritual practices is to purify our heart and awaken the innate love of God. If our rituals are performed with that aim in mind, that ritual, like a vehicle, will help to transport our consciousness to the supreme destination. There is the analogy of a package. If you give a gift which has beautiful decorations outside but a horrible gift inside, the one who receives it will not be happy. The content of the package is all important. So our motivation for doing the ritual is all important, otherwise its just a ritual. So if we have the proper motivation to perform the ritual then it will have a tremendous substance. What is that substance? We access the empowerment and the mercy of the Lord. Thus by giving our heart to the Lord through that ritual, then that becomes the true content of the ritual.
In the beginning of our spiritual life we follow rituals for our purification. When there is proper philosophy and service behind it, it can awaken love of God. It is a way to express our intent to love God, to serve and please Him. So when we have the right enthusiasm and intent, then the ritual becomes something very deeply spiritual. If it is done under the proper guidance and with the right purpose, it purifies our heart and motivations and gradually real genuine spiritual experience awakens from within.” – Radhanath Swami
It seems that it is human nature to gravitate towards ritual. They make us feel good. They are comforting and safe. But like all things moderation is important. Introspection and reflection on these rituals is important. And some rituals are wholly harmful in practice and simply are inexcusable to allow them to continue. Maybe we simply need to make doing good in the world a ritual instead. 🙂
Feel free to share some of your rituals and how likely you are willing to give them up! 🙂
I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts called The Hidden Brain on NPR and they were talking about the climate change situation in a great episode called Losing Alaska. Basically they were saying that scientific arguments have little merit anymore in talking about climate change. I would have to say that I agree. As someone who holds a Ph.D. in the Atmospheric Sciences I can most certainly say that few people that I have debated with on the subject truly understand the problem scientifically and I don’t claim to be the smartest person in the world, this is simply the truth. My field is applied math and physics. Not only that, the climate system is complex.it Involves interdisciplinary knowledge as well in chemistry, oceanography and geology. To change someone’s mind from a scientific point of view, it would take a lot of study and learning. Now you may be saying, wait I accept man-made climate change, and it it’s pretty obvious. Well I would argue that you don’t really understand it, but it’s easier for you to accept because it already fits in with your ideology. And I don’t say that to be demeaning, especially I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad ideology to have. Specifically the one in which we recognize that something is very complex and we don’t have years to study it on our own so maybe I should listen to what experts are saying. Much like we tend to believe our doctor when they tell us we have cancer as opposed to learning the requisite knowledge we need in order to test ourselves.
Instead of a Heavenly Father, maybe a Mother Earth isn’t a bad person to start worshiping.
But more to the point it really does come down to our personal ideology whether we accept the science, because let’s face it the science is telling us some pretty harsh things. Not only is the Earth in a lot of trouble, but we actually might be responsible for it all. And in order to combat the problem we are causing we are going to have to give up a great deal. Transitioning away from a fuel source we heavily depend on will require large shifts in business and industry affecting the jobs of many. And of course such a transition cannot be made overnight, but even at a moderate pace will require a cultural change at a rate faster than many of us would have a hard time adjusting too. That of course does not make it any less compulsory. Interestingly this podcast made the argument that we all are capable of great sacrifices at times of war or crises, and that dealing with man-made climate change requires an approach that is used by religion rather than one that is used by science. I find myself having a hard time disagreeing. While I would love to live in a society where science had a much more powerful influence on changing minds ultimately it does seem that we need to change minds at an emotional level over an intellectual one (which is to me what the podcast suggested by saying a “religious approach”).
In that vein, I wanted to address some of the main arguments I see used by climate change deniers, which tend to be more ideologically based instead of arguments that attack the scientific data on the subject. They are more dangerous to me, because they seem reasonable. They seem irrefutable. This is not the case.
Science had been wrong before, why should we trust scientists?
The Geocentric Universe
This is quite true. Scientists have been wrong before. In fact progress is actually built on that very premise. But notice the word “progress”. It always strikes me as strange that people overlook this aspect of science. Much like we learn from our own mistakes and grow and get better as people, this is how science works as well. So we do get things wrong, but we also get a lot of things right. Your daily lives in this modern world are a living result of that. From the car you drive to the device in which you are punching out your arguments. Now you could be right that someday we will discover that we were all wrong about this, but if we do, it will not because we were willfully trying to mislead people, but rather a new discovery has allowed us to view the world in a different way thus disproving our theory. So unless you’ve got that said discovery I can guarantee you that our assessment about the state of the climate system is based on the best available knowledge we have about how it works. And personally I see no shame in acting in the best interest of all on this planet based on what we know of it.
Finally, just because you don’t trust science or want to focus on the things it got wrong makes it your problem, and not science’s problem. To refute climate change science on those grounds is to commit the genetic fallacy. Directly address the assertions being made by those advocating the position in terms of their conclusions analysis of their data. That is really your only option. To explain it more simply “Al Gore is a democrat, and I hate democrats. Al Gore gives evidence for why man-made climate change is happening, but since he is a democrat, he must be wrong.” That’s not how it works. Sorry.
Scientists are just doing it for the money. IPCC is corrupt. Liberal media…
This argument is the same as the genetic fallacy because it is again an attempt to discredit to the reliability of the source to simply argue away what the source has to say. I’ll admit that in such instances I will use the same fallacious argument back, because, quite honestly two can play that game, and I can play it better. Let’s say all of us scientists are ego driven money-grubbing bastards. My options are renewable energy companies and liberal governments, or oil companies. Hmmm…I wonder who has more money. Not only that with all the other scientists clearly in the wrong camp, all that sweet oil money could be mine (as it was for Wei-Hock Soon) as there are even less people to share it with.
In terms of fame, the fallacious argument made by deniers fall even shorter. If I had definitive proof that all the other scientists were wrong. I would be the one who was famous. I’d be on all the news programs, giving talks around the world on a sweet oil company payroll, and even the liberal media would have me on their shows even to abuse me while I valiantly stuck to my guns with the full conviction that I was doing my science right. I would be the hero of deniers everywhere.
Sometimes even fallacious arguments are hardly worth the effort.
The climate has changed before when humans weren’t around. It’s natural.
This is the first part of an argument constantly used. It’s also known in logic as a type of naturalistic fallacy. Just because something can happen naturally, doesn’t mean it can’t happen unnaturally. Do floods happen naturally? Sure. Can floods also happen because of human activities? Absolutely. Natural selection happens in evolution. But you know what also happens? “Unnatural selection”. The fruits and vegetables we eat, the dogs and cats we have as pets, and the horses we ride are all examples of this. The same thing can happen with or without intention.
We cannot have an impact on something as big as the Earth.
The ecosystem formerly known as rain forest.
This argument is made without any substantiation at all. It is often also used by people who are trying not to be religious but would rather take the James Inhofe argument that God controls the climate! Of course examples of how we have changed climate locally can be found all over through the building of structures like dams on rivers, cutting down forests and poor farming practices. In terms of the climate change issue specifically this person does a pretty nice break down of looking at how the amount of carbon we produce can quite easily explain the increase in carbon since pre-industrial levels. There is no reason to believe that we couldn’t have such a global impact. In fact that argument always seems to me a way of insulting or discrediting scientists again because it’s a pretty important question to answer before we would even start putting out evidence about climate change. I mean if the amount of carbon we produce paled in comparison to the amount of increase we’ve seen then I am not sure how the scientific consensus could be developed in the first place. It’s like when people say, the warming is being caused by the sun, and I think to myself “Oh my…we scientists all forgot to take into account the sun. I better make a few calls. Can’t believe we missed that one!”.
The Earth will survive. We’ve had major disasters before and life persists. Whatever is going to happen is going to happen.
This is the most insidious arguments, because it’s not fallacious at all in a logical sense. However it is apathetic and immoral. A lot of times people will say things like…”we’re just another species. Whatever we do is natural, and whatever happens will happens.”
Let’s say you are an emergency manager who works at a national park in a mountainous area. The weather is starting to warm and there has been heavy rains in the mountains and typically when such rains occur, especially in combination with some ice jams in the water flash flooding occurs. It’s not a guarantee, but likely. A town at the foot of the mountain in which the river runs through is going to get flooded, people could easily die if they are not warned. This is a natural event, it was going to happen whether humans are around are not do you warn them?
I think most people would answer that they would. To me arguing that doing nothing is the only option we have because the Earth is just going to do is thing is tantamount to doing nothing in this example, and simply letting people die. Many people who accept the fact that the climate is changing but don’t think man is responsible still must accept the consequences to this warming. Some of the one’s we are more sure of are:
Rising sea levels drowning coastal populations and increased damages and deaths from coastal hazards such as tropical storms and tsunamis
Increased heat waves and droughts
Increases in extreme weather events as climate patterns shift
Increased severity of extreme weather events.
What’s more is that these types of things will adversely impact the most vulnerable of the worlds population. People who are in poverty. People who depend on subsistence farming. When local hazards happen communities do make sacrifices, and do look for solutions, through re-zoning laws, construction improvements, and other engineering solutions to try and make the world safer and have less loss of life. So even if man has nothing do with the problem it doesn’t mean that we don’t have a responsibility to act to come up with a solution.
One can be logically sound but be ethically and morally irresponsible. Ignoring what experts are saying, making sweeping and unsubstantiated statements that there is nothing we can do, that it’s just nature, and the Earth will be fine is really the same as having the power to do something to save lives and not doing it. And this is why I agree that the conversation about climate change has to shift away from science and facts and be more about compassion, about love for our fellow human beings, valuing equality so that we all have the same chance to adapt and survive the changing climate, and about taking responsibility for the home that sustains us all. These are important values regardless of what is causing the climate to change and these are things we can address and even already have some solutions for. Of course I know that is even overly idealistic to think that such a solution of addressing people on an emotional level might work. Hell it’s difficult to find a religion that unanimously agrees poverty is something we should do something about. I feel pretty bleak in general about us actually doing something about climate change. It requires people to move beyond nationalism, beyond their own religious beliefs and worldview, which tend to not be very worldly at all. Maybe we can’t win against the forces of nature, but it sure would nice if we could overcome the forces that divide us as a species. We can try. Maybe in the end it really is easier to move mountains.
Recently I read a blog by a transgender woman who wrote her post as an open letter to conservative blogger Matt Walsh, making some well-reasoned arguments against some fairly narrow minded views expressed by him in his blog towards transgender people being mentally ill and against the teachings of Christ. I hit like on her post and went on my merry way. I was surprised to find that in seeing my “like” she checked out my blog and left a comment on one of the posts where I discussed religion and atheism and left a polite comment, but made sure that the first comment she left was how she wished I could know God the way she did. I checked out her blog and it made me rather sad, because it seems a lot of what she writes is the typical self-debasement so typical in evangelical communities and she basically justifies her own struggles and flaws being born a woman in a man’s body as a punishment for original sin, and that God is really loving and has done so much but she is the one at fault. She is the failure. She is imperfect. Victoria over at Victoria Neuronotes wrote about this topic recently.
Believe me, I’m not criticizing this woman, because I can’t even fathom the difficulties that someone like her must face in a world that has so little tolerance beyond the black and white world they see. I imagine given such difficult struggles trying to find something that will give you the strength to fight, the strength to make some sense out of it all is strong. What I don’t understand is how one reaches for a religion or continues to follow a religion that is the very same one that has prevented her from growing up to be free to be who she is. It is the same question that I have for many African-Americans who are Christian and don’t seem to have be bothered by the fact that this very religion was the one that was used to justify them as slaves, as being inferior, segregating them from whites, preventing them from marrying someone who was white and the history of white Christians using their religion to oppress African-Americans continue to this day.
Look, I know the “No True Scotsman” argument is coming and we all know that’s a fallacy, so let’s put that aside. We all know there are loving verses in the Bible and disturbingly evil verses is well and everybody cherry picks the one’s they want to prove they are the true Christian. I’m not making an argument against God either, because I can see oppressed groups rallying around a spiritually uplifting philosophy. But why the very one that oppressed them? Why not choose Buddhism, or Hinduism, or one of many other choices out there?
I mentioned in a comment on a blog post from Sirius Bizinus recently that it seems we should question the validity of a system of beliefs that produces people from extremely kind, compassionate, and generous to derisive, judgmental, and unfeeling as a questionable system. That perhaps goodness has it’s source elsewhere than, at the very least, the religion that has essentially made your life a living hell. For me the psychology of such things is hard for me to grasp. Is it because they want to turn something that was bad to them into something positive? Is it a way to directly challenge those who oppress them with the same tool they use to do the oppression? Like an atheist arguing with a Christian by quoting bible verses to show how their attitudes are not very Christ-like, But even so does that mean that one must actually be a member of that religion to challenge it effectively? That doesn’t seem like it should be the case, but maybe it is.
I was listening to an interesting podcast about grit, based on the research by Angela Duckworth. If you prefer to read a shorter article about her work you can do that here, or listen to a short TED talk she gave about it you can do that here. I’ve talked before about the value of perseverance and why it is beneficial in my series about what I think makes a good human. In that series I tried to also perhaps point out where these strengths could have negative results. How we can perhaps go too far, or how their might be darker side to it. The podcast brought this idea into the forefront of my thoughts again because they talked about how grit might actually be drawback if we continue to try at something that we are not likely to achieve we waste our energy. We can become obsessive, and not know when to give up. This is more commonly known as stubbornness. What was really interesting to me was what they said in the final few seconds of the podcast which was that grit and stubbornness are really just the same thing, given different names based on the outcome achieved. If one is successful they had grit, if one was not, they were stubborn.
Sadly, failure is often dependent on effort too!
This then gave rise to a couple of additional thoughts. One was to wonder what other qualities fall under a similar category, where they are one in the same just depending on the outcome? The second thought I had was a bit of sadness about how easily our strengths can become our weaknesses. But then I thought, perhaps this idea we have about strengths vs. weaknesses is really an incorrect way to look at ourselves. Because we can certainly say that a world in which no person had any grit would be a much different one and one that I believe would be much sadder and without flavor. So we absolutely need these qualities and the consequence of such virtues is simply that we will not always succeed. And so we find ourselves, once again, on the topic of risk.
This one is pretty true. However someone with a natural extra helping of strength, skill, intelligence often has more potential. Damn you Neil Degrasse Tyson!
When we see that star athlete, or master carpenter at work, or a genius who has invented some technological marvel, it can be easy to be an awe, and focus on a talent that must lie within giving them an almost divine like quality in their ability. We see the end result and we don’t think about the years of practice. We often see the person who made it to the Olympics or the professional league, but not all the ones who failed to make it. We don’t see the less than impressive or faulty works the carpenter built before he mastered his techniques. We don’t see all the failed ideas and failed attempts associated with the process of creation and invention. History remembers the genius of Newton’s discovery in regards to gravitation, calculus, and his laws of motion. Few except those who really study his life know how obsessed he was in the field of alchemy, which was of course a big waste of time. Few know how much time he wasted searching for hidden patterns in scripture. Also, as the podcast points out that many people don’t enjoy the periods of grim determination and practice it takes to perfect their craft, whatever it may be, at least not in the typical definition of fun. It’s clear that idea that we may master something or have success can drive us forward through the less than savory hours and hours of effort it takes to achieve one’s goals, but in the end we don’t know whether our goals will be achieved. So grit also means that we are taking a risk, because we could spend all that time and energy, and still fail in the end.
Unless quitting gives you more time to pursue something else that you are far better at and thus a higher chance of success!
Of course the easy answer is to say, focus on the journey, nobody is perfect. I’d like to believe I am that type of person as I often tout the value of perseverance when I think about the effort it took to get a PhD which seemed less about my intelligence and more about grit. At the same time, had I failed in the end, how much would I still be touting all that grit and determination? It seems harder to celebrate the process that got you there without getting positive results. I do feel that is what we must always try to do, because if did always focus on the end result we’re likely to be in a constant state of depression! And perhaps the only real weakness is an inability to learn from our mistakes. In the end that’s all we can really do, because there is value in the process, and most things that we think are our weaknesses might actually be our strengths with the wrong shade of intensity and it is only in reflecting on our behaviors and the outcomes can we gain the knowledge about how to use those strengths more wisely in the future. Even then we will still be taking risks, but perhaps with a higher probability of success. The final problem being that we are also terrible at assessing probabilities. Of course if we always did things based on the odds, we also might never try anything, and yet it can be easily argued that much of our progress as a species is the story of overcoming low probabilities of success through grit and determination.
In the end, it seems to be a truth (perhaps even one with a capital T) that we are always bound to make mistakes and have failures. The good news is that if making mistakes happens to everyone then there really is nothing wrong with us as long as we continue to strive to be more than we are, and strive to make this a world where everybody has that same opportunity.
Shame is the topic today. I’ve decided though that I want practice being more creative with my writing. While I enjoy writing out my thoughts in essay form, and many of you have been kind of enough to appreciate it as well, variety is the spice of life, and I need to practice more variety of expression. Especially I still have this dream of one day writing some sort of work of fiction, and so I need to practice wordcraft and storytelling more. And I venture it to such an area, I risk making myself more vulnerable as I express a part of myself I am less confidence in my ability to express. The connection between vulnerability and shame was brought to my attention this week through a wonderful TED talk. This culture of shaming,
especially through social media has been on my mind a lot over the past year or so, since I saw an excellent interview on the Daily Show with Jon Ronson. An article on the book he has published is here. So I shall let the talk and the article do the intellectual speaking for me, and I will instead put forth this poem on the subject. In my head this poetry would be expressed as a rap, or rather a dialogue between two rappers. In my head are a lot of the songs from the musical Hamilton which I am sure had somewhat of influence on my mode of expression. lol Also, fear not, in my head I also know I have the least amount of street cred to be rapping. 🙂
I’m not a lynch mob, I’m just here all alone, Reading about things that I don’t condone, Concerning people I’ve never really known, And shaming them from behind my telephone
You’re fat, you’re ugly, and you’re a fool, You’re so fucking dumb, didn’t you go to school? Are you even dimly aware of the newest rule? Exposing what you are, makes me look cool.
You see, I’ve made the world a better place, By showing you don’t belong in the human race I got no time to check the facts of your case, You can try to efface, but mistakes won’t erase
Each like I get invigorates me, And helps me hide my vulnerability, I don’t make mistakes, you want civility? It’s curt, but your hurt’s not my responsibility.
A million views, the shares have swirled, Filled with mocking laughter, insults hurled, I’m a link in this chain of shame that’s unfurled, A virtual crowd that’s crushing your world
Do you like what I said, do you feel remorse, Do you feel bad enough to correct your course? I scream and scream until my voice is hoarse, Shame is my game, I’m a dangerous force.
But what if you’ve not made anything better?
Addicted to shaming, bound by a fetter,
You’re just another follower, not a jet-setter,
Passing judgment on others letter by letter
Shame never informs, has little to tell,
Gives you nothing to build, and nothing to sell,
There’s no way it will ever serve you well,
Don’t be a part of that shaming carousel.
Was that 8 second verdict more than it seemed?
Shame them to goodness, is that what you schemed?
They’d learn their lesson, is this what you dreamed?
Do you think that’s how souls are really redeemed?
Instead you put a hole in the soul of those that you shame,
Anger, isolation, depression just fan the flame,
Of violence and hurt, now you’re partly to blame,
Should you make a mistake, do you deserve the same?
We need to focus on things that make us whole,
Don’t stride to divide, and stop being a troll,
Kindness and charity, let that be your goal,
Be a model of compassion, let that be your role
So you see with such ease we’re blind to the pain,
That we cause for momentary emotional gain,
In a world filled with hurt it’s so hard to stay sane,
Shaming doesn’t help, we’ve got to refrain
I speak from experience, I know how you feel,
To stare at the screen and think it’s all real,
But what part of the heart do your actions reveal?
Forsaking personal growth for mass appeal.
Oppose what is wrong, but don’t dehumanize,
Know your own imperfections, try to empathize,
Keep on yearning for learning and you’ll grow to be wise,
Add joy to the world and watch your spirit rise
I’ve been away from blogging for a little while as work became quite busy and stressful as I was given a project that normally would take several months to prepare for and was given two and half weeks. I’m not complaining though, I am still very fortunate to have the job that I do, and in the end it was a very rewarding outcome. I had to organize a Science Olympiad tournament for 40 regional high schools and middle schools and it ended up going very well. I didn’t actually have to do this task, but if I didn’t a lot of kids would have been hurt, and a lot of teachers very angry and so it really wasn’t something that I took any time to consider, I just knew it had to be done, and I did it because it was the right thing to do.
It got me thinking a lot about stress on how much it affects our behavior. It cost me my spring break and I was bitter about that. In that time I was also certainly less attentive to others in my life. I was more moody, snapped a little more than I probably should have at people that I care about and had a lot of trouble sleeping. The guilt of snapping at people at being less attentive to others, and lack of sleep are positive feedbacks which worsen your condition. I am fortunate that it was only a rough few weeks. I am fortunate to even have a spring break. I am fortunate that even though the semester still has lots of work left in it, there will be summer holidays starting in early May. There are people who face what I face, every single day of the year, with additional stresses associated with finances that I do not face. When I reflect on how irrational I might be in times of stress I think about the cumulative effect such things must have some people. How hard they might struggle to find a way out, who they might time to blame their stress on, and wonder what things they might rely on to find peace. It makes a lot of irrationality in the world understandable.
At the same time it makes you really question why it has to be that way. We have the resources to feed everybody, we have the knowledge and ability to give good health care to everyone. We know a lot about the universe and how to give people quality education, and we know the things that make people truly fulfilled and happy. We know a lot about our own imperfections and biases so that we can avoid the pitfalls of our flaws. We know better ways to correct deviant behavior, we know better ways to reduce the possibility of criminal and violent behavior, and we know better ways to raise. We may not know everything, but we know better. “Civilized” society seems so counter to how we operate as humans that somedays I really question whether or not it is all worth it. Even though we might live longer on average than our hunter gatherer predecessors, and can avoid many of the deaths from natural disasters that our predecessors could not, sometimes I do wonder whether or not it was all worth it, and whether or not we shouldn’t all still be climbing trees to pick fruit. And yeah maybe it would be sad to lose a few people to drought, or malaria, but so much death nowadays seems to be preventable and avoidable. The destruction in Belgium and Turkey recently really makes one question whether all this is worth it. Has any of this civilization experiment increased happiness? Benefitted the home we call Earth? Given our evolution as a species perhaps this trajectory was unavoidable, but it feels so much easier to accept deaths caused by the pitfalls of living in the wild over seeing death occur from senseless acts of violence that will never lead to any gain, or seeing children die from hunger while not very far away somebody sits on a fortune of money and resources they do not even need.
Alright, I know this is not very cheery and I am not helping much to increase human happiness either, but I think many people share these thoughts. I of course do believe that this trajectory of civilization was to avoid human suffering and nobody really imagined the consequences we are facing now. Maybe these are the growing pains we must go through. I hope that our intelligence is great enough to get us out in the end. Perhaps the real shame is that our lifetimes are still too short to be able to see the end result of all this suffering. I wonder if a 13th century scholar who watched people die from plague after plague, and endless crusades and wars, could visit us now if he would actually be impressed with our moral progress. Maybe what we have now is further than he or she ever dreamed. Maybe they would remind me to consider myself lucky that I live in such times and that now that they have seen the change possible over the long march of time that there was every reason to continue to have hope and strive for more. And if there is one thing that I know for sure is that nothing has ever been made better by despair. And if I want a world in which people do not live in despair and have reason to be hopeful then I must lead by example, even if I only touch a handful of people in my world. Who knows how far the ripples of our impact will travel through time.
There are a lot of things in this world…perhaps brought about by humans, but nevertheless exist at least as part of our lives. They are important things, things we fight for, things we live for. I’m speaking of things like freedom, justice, love, spirituality, loyalty, equality, truth, and there are probably others that I’m not thinking of right now. These things often give rise to a lot of disagreements in terms of what they mean, they often lack a specific definition, and very much depends on one’s perspective based on the family, culture, society in which we were raised.
But they do. And maybe sometimes they should.
All of these things are core to who we are as a species and have the ability to impact our own personal happiness and sense of well-being, as well as how we treat each other and all life in general. All of these things can also be extremely frustrating because of how different we view them. Ever tried to love someone who wasn’t all that impressed with the way you did it? Ever had someone question your loyalty even when you thought your behavior expressed loyalty? Ever fought for some group’s freedom, but have the very same group question the way in which you fight for that freedom or even claim that you weren’t helping but making things worse? Ever believe something was very important to spiritual health only to be told by someone else that it was irrelevant? The truth is that that all of these things are really really complex, regardless of how simple and natural it might feel to you. These things are often very dynamic, leaving us with moral and ethical conflicts over time, sometimes changing our views slowly or rapidly as we experience new things. They are often tied strongly to our emotions and sometimes seem beyond reason, they are just how we feel. It also tends to be not very satisfying to be alone with our perspectives. We seek connection to those who share similar perspectives and points of view. I would say all this is good, and that our perspective should change over time. We should be seriously considering other points of view and striving towards some sort of universal truth about these things even if we never actually reach it in our lifetime. Because if we can nail down these things it is the benefit of all.
However there is another core part of who we are as a species. We don’t like things that are hard to define. We like to organize, we would prefer things to be simple. Simple is less costly, it gives us more time for other things. We spend less time sitting their thinking when we need to make sure we’re safe, getting resources to survive. It’s very evolutionary. When things are actually hard, when they are not quite within our grasp, that’s when the real trap springs. Our need for organization, categorization, and simplicity begins to create rules. It begins to create rituals. Rules and rituals are easy. I’m not saying that we haven’t created some convoluted rules and rituals, but they are easy because we know that when we follow them the conclusion is guaranteed. At least that’s the way we tend to think. They give us the intangible in tangible form. They turn things that are dynamic into the static. It takes things that might take a lifetime to learn into an instant discovery. For those with a penchant for defaulting to authority, it is a Godsend. Literally. And while it might be natural for us to do these things, it is a complete disservice to these lofty ideals and values we live and die for. And maybe it’s not even a bad thing that we try to create a system that fits these things, but when we reduce it to the system alone things usually turn out badly. Love has to be more than just placing a ring on someone’s finger. Justice has to be more than just an immutable punishment for an immutable law. Whenever we think we’ve reached a state of equality or discovered a truth, we must still question and test instead of resting on our laurels.
The Geocentric Theory. One of the best examples of human fallibility and seeing connections in nature.
I think that we have developed a very good “way of knowing” with the scientific method. It is demonstrably the best way of knowing we have so far. It takes very little effort to look around the world and see that the best way is not only not the only way in which people come to know things, and it is often by no means obvious. I mean it’s not to say we don’t start off life as little infants constantly testing and trying to understand our world through observations, but we do often make mistakes in trying to understand the world around us. Mostly related to our tendency to find patterns that done’t exist. Our senses often deceive us because we evolved for life in a small geographic environment, with a small group of people, and that is often what matters the most. As “ways of knowing” get better and more effective, it reveals our fallibility. It tells us we aren’t as smart as we think we are, and that we might not be doing things as well as we could. Even as a scientist, who feels like I know my way of thinking is a more reliable one, it can often not feel like enough in a world with so much suffering and when so many need help quickly. It is not realistic to simply wait for people to come around to a better way of looking at things. As much as I like to philosophize “ways of knowing” we must also remember that such things are not so easily divorced from “ways of feeling”.
Collapse after angle of repose is exceeded
History tells us that change comes through slow increments like weathering and erosion and also through suddenness of revolution, yet in both cases forcing it doesn’t necessarily help matters. It’s like life is like a slope of sand which slowly over time, grain by grain is deposited on a slope until we reach some critical mass beyond the angle of repose and the weight of the sand causes a sudden change in the landscape. With no real way to predict which grain of sand will cause it all to shift and give way. It’s like we all have to really try to do better, while at the same time just watch it all happen as if we aren’t even a part of the story.
So what is the answer to seeing eye to eye on these very important values? I don’t know. I think the best we can do is accept that things change, and that nothing is settled. We can still try to create rules, as long as we are not a slave to them. We can try to make things tangible, as long we accept that those rituals are empty without a lifetime of effort. One thing we can say for certain is that life would lose far too much flavor if it all could be settled so easily. We must accept that life is hard in large part because it simply can’t be done alone. And while I might be an idealist thinking that we might someday reach at least some level of harmony among all humanity, I see no harm in striving towards that. What we have to gain, I think, is too great to just give up and say “It can never happen”. As I always say, there is much more in this world that we all have in common than what drives us apart.
I was listening to another episode of the NPR podcast The Hidden Brain this morning and it rekindled something that often comes into my mind when tragic events happen and this the act of forgiveness. This podcast was extremely interesting because they were talking with a researcher who was studying forgiveness by collecting data and interviewing people in Sierra Leone in the aftermath of their civil war. It is a unique situation because after they democratically elected a new government people who were on separate sides of a conflict were in the same communities, and even neighbors. You could be living next to somebody who cut off your hand, raped or killed a family member. What happened in that country is truly horrific, and no side was necessarily worse than the other. People were allowed to go back to their lives unpunished by the new government (with perhaps the exception of certain leaders). In the main story that they follow in the podcast the play excerpts of an interview with two men who were friends before the civil war and when one was captured by the rebels he was made to do horrific things. He came across his friend and the rebels wanted him beat his friend, and he would not do it, and so they shot at him injuring him and told them that if he didn’t he would be killed. Fearing for his life he did as they asked, and then asked him to kill his friend’s father. He also ended up doing that in fearing for his life.
I am going to stop there before I going into the aftermath. Right now some of you are judging the friend harshly who killed his friend’s father. Some of you feel extreme anger towards the adult rebels who would ask a youth to do this and some of you are just lost in sorry for the pain and anguish that both of these boys must have felt. You are maybe thinking what you would do in the same situation. You are thinking about it rationally and cooly. Let me say first that whatever decision you are making right now, may not be the decision you would make in the moment. And I think the most important thing that you should think about is that you never want to have to face this situation. Fear, when facing our own depth makes us capable of much more than we think. Sometimes horrific acts.
Now the question you have to ask yourself is how forgiving do you feel right now? And if you can forgive, how much should we expect those who were in that particular situation to forgive? The podcast asks the question, how does one move forward from such atrocities after neighbor has been set against neighbor?
The way Sierra Leone has dealt with this in trying to stitch their society back together is that all over the country they have reconciliation ceremonies in communities where people stand face to face with people who have done harm to them personally or friends or family members. They confront each without physical violence. There is confession and ask for forgiveness. And forgiveness often happens, because those who are willing to take part in the ceremony want to be able to forgive. When following up on those who had taken part in the ceremony and when forgiveness happened they found those people were more productive in their community. They made friends easier, they helped others in their community, more participation in politics and ensuring a positive political future and were more conscious of social justice issues. It all sounds pretty great. Forgiveness is a powerful part of healing and there is no psychological study that I know of that recommends holding on to anger and exacting revenge. Many think it will bring peace, but it does not. But if forgiveness is the better way, why do we have such a hard time doing it? Already there are a number of you who are thinking that you could not forgive in such situations as described earlier.
It turns out that the downside of these people who participate in these reconciliation ceremonies is that while society at large gains, the individual suffers. The act of forgiveness requires a great deal of courage because in that confrontation with a person who caused you harm you must also confront your pain. You must relive the trauma, the memories, and those horrific images. Individuals report greater depression and other symptoms of PTSD. The researcher’s recommendation is that the act of forgiveness needs to be followed by individualized mental health treatment. It makes a lot of sense. In addition to the obvious reminder about the importance of mental health it revealed to me that ultimately to truly overcome pain that we experience requires a confrontation within ourselves. As hard as it may be for two people stand face-to-face in these reconciliation ceremonies, it’s even harder to face the pain with in us. Perhaps this is why people choose not to forgive and seek external solutions so they don’t have to deal with that pain and never find that path to peace. Anger, addiction, or just disciplined suppression are all hallmarks of those who cannot forgive and this generally leads to more pain for others and cycles of conflict and violence continue. I say this without judgment, because no matter how rational my thought process is right now, I cannot know how I would react in the face of extreme fear, and extreme pain. I find it hard to blame others for not being able to forgive, and I don’t blame people for being angry when they experienced trauma and pain.
As I’ve said to others in the past, the most powerful part of the message of Jesus Christ has always been about the power of forgiveness and that if there is something to believe in, it’s redemption. The good news from the story told in the podcast is that those two men are once again friends. I am sure there are times when it is not easy. The one who killed his friend’s father helps the other plant his crops as he was injured during the civil war. There are no quick solutions I am sure for them but both are clearly on a path to peace and healing and a chance for a new generation to not have to face the horrors they faced. And maybe that’s the best reason to be courageous and forgive. Maybe our own wounds will still burst open from time to time and cause us pain, but maybe we can keep that pain out of future generations. Because when we act outwardly on our pain and harm others the suffering it causes as pain ripples outwards into their loved ones makes your wound everybody’s wound. And in I’m not saying it’s all easy but as a people we need to get better about supporting paths that lead to peace. Especially those of us who have been fortunate enough to not have such events happen in our lives. We need to help people confront the pain that tears through their soul and teach them how they can overcome it. Forgiveness has value in the face of hurt and harm in whatever form it comes in. We need to give compassion without judgment and replace despair with hope.
But they do, do the job. At the end of the day isn’t that all that matters? Perhaps, but if laying down your life, whatever your initial intentions were make you a person with courage then such courage should also be bestowed on all people who have dangerous jobs. And there are such jobs even though they in no way are protecting other people. People who are loggers, fishers, and roofers come in the top 3. Here is a list of the top 20 most dangerous professions per capita (Police come in at 15). We also must then laud all those who lay their life down for a cause. This then includes your rebels, your gangs, your suicide bombers. This people also risk their life, sometimes end their lives for a cause they believe in. I think we can agree that this is not the type of person we want to elevate to nobility. Of course it is the values they hold, the values they fight for, the goodness that they protect. So if we can’t guarantee the motivations of all people who don the uniform, if there are more dangerous professions, and if what makes someone is a hero is the values they represent, it seems to me like “laying down one’s life” isn’t an overly relevant reason to elevate one to a position of automatic respect.
I was listening to a
Cloak Unfurled 