I've wanted to post something for a couple of weeks, except I couldn't find the words. Everything I rehearsed sounded either too accusatory (i.e. you're what's wrong with the world! Everyone should listen to me!!!), too naive (i.e. Why can't we all just get along?), too cynical/defeatist (i.e. it is what it is. Accept it and move on. Quit expecting better from people.)
Or it was just noise, noise in a tumult of noise, noise done just to make noise. Noise that nobody will listen to, or hear, when surrounded by so many different thoughts, opinions and beliefs.
And yet I kept wanting to post. To post something. So I figured I'd sit down, start typing, and see what comes out.
I heard a story some time ago, allegedly a Native American legend though I wasn't sure if that's just something people said to make it seem wiser. (A quick google search found this, so according to the site it really is Native American.) You can follow the link for the prettier story-telling version, I just wanted to dwell on the main point. That within all of us is the potential for great good and great evil, and that what determines whether we're overall good or evil is the traits we encourage.
I said 'overall' because people are complex creatures, with a mix of both...so if/when God decides to pass a final judgement on all of us, however He weighs our souls, it's to be hoped that the good we do outweighs the bad.
I've talked before about things that make us seem smaller. Uglier. Though it seems strange to apply such physical adjectives to something you can't take a picture of, most people know exactly what I'm talking about. It's like...we all know that pettiness is ugly, and that seeing one person act petty can encourage another person to act petty, which just makes things uglier all the way around.
Yet knowing that and resisting it are two different things. Calls to "take the high road" sound grand and noble, but often makes people feel defenseless and powerless against the ones who take the low road. Like, if taking the high road is so grand, why does it mean doing nothing when someone is lying about you? Or calling you names?
Of course, when you step back and look at other people, and how they interact, you can see why taking the high road is better. Just listen to an argument, or read comments on the internet. Trolls may be disruptive, but they're not persuasive. It's just ugliness, breeding more ugliness.
Most religions and cultures seem to know this, and to encourage us to be our better selves. Using the Native American legend above, they encourage us to be more compassionate. Loving. Generous of spirit. They encourage us to build connections to one another. The story of the Prodigal Son, who is accepted back with open arms by his loving father even after he squandered his inheritance. The Good Samaritan, where a kind traveler took care of a Samaritan - Samaritans were despised and looked down upon by the Jews of that time - and that being kind was better than the supposedly holy priests, who passed the Samaritan by rather than risk the impurity of touching a dead body.
We have this tendency to think along tribal lines. Our friends and family are our tribe, and we want them to succeed...and we want to dehumanize and fight the alien 'other' that threatens us and ours. Christianity (and most major religions, I believe) try to make us develop a wider sense of tribe. To apply the kindnesses we do to our loved ones to a larger group...to all of humanity. To strangers, particularly despised strangers.
"Love thy neighbor as thyself." "Judge not lest ye be judged." "How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye?"
I was kind of horrified when someone on facebook shared an article explaining why the parable of the Good Samaritan doesn't apply to refugees. It's like...how twisted! What a way to take a story that is clearly about our need to take care of each other, especially when that 'other' is despised and disliked, and twist it around to make it seem like it's perfectly okay NOT to take care of a despised and disliked group today!!!
How...ugly. It shrinks the soul, when religion (at it's best) is supposed to enlarge it.
People are so afraid...and angry....and it feels like we're headed into a time of scarcity, where you'll be lucky to take care of you and yours. Who has time to think about being generous and helping others, when we're worried about paying our student loans, getting a good job, taking care of our medical bills, and paying our rent or mortgage? Who has the time and energy to fund music programs at schools, when we're living paycheck to paycheck? Hell...I'm taking a bit of a gamble right now, going back to school. I think it's a risk worth taking, and I should be able to find a good paying job afterwards, but how long will it take? And will I find something that pays well enough? Or will I struggle to make ends meet for years, possibly decades, on end?
So I look at the issues of the day, at the people who are screaming and yelling out loud, and there's just so much anger and fear.
Now, don't get me wrong, anger and fear are not inherently bad. They can let us know when something big is going on in our lives, and give us the energy to do something about it. I suppose it's like the mentality of those of us who deployed to a combat zone. I've heard people say they could never do it, that they'd be too afraid of what would happen. And yet over a million people die in car crashes every year. Would you stop driving your car because of that? Or maybe we should all just sit in our homes, safe and sound...work from home, order food for delivery...except that still isn't enough to make us safe. Home is where the greatest accident risks occur.
The world is not safe. You can not make it safe. You can not keep out the things that make us afraid.
What you can do is decide what matters enough to you, and work towards them. Despite the risks.
And you can mitigate some of them, though you have to be careful about that. Rockefeller, for example, helped mitigate some of the risks in the oil industry by smoothing out the rocky market (prices skyrocketing and crashing have a horrible impact on businesses)...and yet he also created a monopoly that in some ways unfairly hurt the market and others.
Insurance developed as a way to mitigate and control risk...we'd rather pay a smaller portion every month, then pay nothing and get walloped with a horrendously expensive medical bill. Insurance helps smooth those risks out, and yet we find healthcare prices rising out of control and insurance companies play a role in that.
A perfect functioning market is, frankly, hell on human needs. The 'perfect' economy where a company hires a worker when they need and fires when they don't is majorly disruptive for employees, who can't plan their expenses around such insecurity. You can't take out a car loan or a mortgage if you have no idea what you're going to make from month to month. (I suppose technically you could, but it's very risky and you'd probably have to pay a horrendous interest rate.)
It has costs to the businesses as well, in terms of training new employees and whatnot. Ford's willingness to pay his employees well helped his business because he had less turnover, which is horribly wasteful. But it also means that sometimes a business has to pay employees even though they don't need all of them (and who knows if that slump is temporary or the new normal?) Btw, this was one of the issues we saw with the contract labor we hired at our last job. It's supposed to give the business more flexibility, hire when we need and fire when we don't...but people don't work like robots. The temps tend to be less motivated, and for good reason...we don't really have a lot of incentives for them. Most of our leadership team would rather have one good full time employee than two or three contract/temp labor. Of course, this could also have just been our perspective...the business apparently thought it was still a better trade off, whether because they didn't have to pay for healthcare and retirement plans on the contract labor or because they still believed it was easier to fire them as needed, I don't know. From my perspective, it sucked.
Anyways. Insecurity can lead to fear and anger. We can do some things to address it. Fear and anger can let us know when we need to be more alert, when we need to pay close attention...but we should control them, not let them control us.
Letting fear and anger take us too far just causes bigger problems down the road.
I think Frank Herbert was right, "fear is the mind killer". And all I see from the right and left is screaming, fearful and angry people.
Or it was just noise, noise in a tumult of noise, noise done just to make noise. Noise that nobody will listen to, or hear, when surrounded by so many different thoughts, opinions and beliefs.
And yet I kept wanting to post. To post something. So I figured I'd sit down, start typing, and see what comes out.
I heard a story some time ago, allegedly a Native American legend though I wasn't sure if that's just something people said to make it seem wiser. (A quick google search found this, so according to the site it really is Native American.) You can follow the link for the prettier story-telling version, I just wanted to dwell on the main point. That within all of us is the potential for great good and great evil, and that what determines whether we're overall good or evil is the traits we encourage.
I said 'overall' because people are complex creatures, with a mix of both...so if/when God decides to pass a final judgement on all of us, however He weighs our souls, it's to be hoped that the good we do outweighs the bad.
I've talked before about things that make us seem smaller. Uglier. Though it seems strange to apply such physical adjectives to something you can't take a picture of, most people know exactly what I'm talking about. It's like...we all know that pettiness is ugly, and that seeing one person act petty can encourage another person to act petty, which just makes things uglier all the way around.
Yet knowing that and resisting it are two different things. Calls to "take the high road" sound grand and noble, but often makes people feel defenseless and powerless against the ones who take the low road. Like, if taking the high road is so grand, why does it mean doing nothing when someone is lying about you? Or calling you names?
Of course, when you step back and look at other people, and how they interact, you can see why taking the high road is better. Just listen to an argument, or read comments on the internet. Trolls may be disruptive, but they're not persuasive. It's just ugliness, breeding more ugliness.
Most religions and cultures seem to know this, and to encourage us to be our better selves. Using the Native American legend above, they encourage us to be more compassionate. Loving. Generous of spirit. They encourage us to build connections to one another. The story of the Prodigal Son, who is accepted back with open arms by his loving father even after he squandered his inheritance. The Good Samaritan, where a kind traveler took care of a Samaritan - Samaritans were despised and looked down upon by the Jews of that time - and that being kind was better than the supposedly holy priests, who passed the Samaritan by rather than risk the impurity of touching a dead body.
We have this tendency to think along tribal lines. Our friends and family are our tribe, and we want them to succeed...and we want to dehumanize and fight the alien 'other' that threatens us and ours. Christianity (and most major religions, I believe) try to make us develop a wider sense of tribe. To apply the kindnesses we do to our loved ones to a larger group...to all of humanity. To strangers, particularly despised strangers.
"Love thy neighbor as thyself." "Judge not lest ye be judged." "How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye?"
I was kind of horrified when someone on facebook shared an article explaining why the parable of the Good Samaritan doesn't apply to refugees. It's like...how twisted! What a way to take a story that is clearly about our need to take care of each other, especially when that 'other' is despised and disliked, and twist it around to make it seem like it's perfectly okay NOT to take care of a despised and disliked group today!!!
How...ugly. It shrinks the soul, when religion (at it's best) is supposed to enlarge it.
People are so afraid...and angry....and it feels like we're headed into a time of scarcity, where you'll be lucky to take care of you and yours. Who has time to think about being generous and helping others, when we're worried about paying our student loans, getting a good job, taking care of our medical bills, and paying our rent or mortgage? Who has the time and energy to fund music programs at schools, when we're living paycheck to paycheck? Hell...I'm taking a bit of a gamble right now, going back to school. I think it's a risk worth taking, and I should be able to find a good paying job afterwards, but how long will it take? And will I find something that pays well enough? Or will I struggle to make ends meet for years, possibly decades, on end?
So I look at the issues of the day, at the people who are screaming and yelling out loud, and there's just so much anger and fear.
Now, don't get me wrong, anger and fear are not inherently bad. They can let us know when something big is going on in our lives, and give us the energy to do something about it. I suppose it's like the mentality of those of us who deployed to a combat zone. I've heard people say they could never do it, that they'd be too afraid of what would happen. And yet over a million people die in car crashes every year. Would you stop driving your car because of that? Or maybe we should all just sit in our homes, safe and sound...work from home, order food for delivery...except that still isn't enough to make us safe. Home is where the greatest accident risks occur.
The world is not safe. You can not make it safe. You can not keep out the things that make us afraid.
What you can do is decide what matters enough to you, and work towards them. Despite the risks.
And you can mitigate some of them, though you have to be careful about that. Rockefeller, for example, helped mitigate some of the risks in the oil industry by smoothing out the rocky market (prices skyrocketing and crashing have a horrible impact on businesses)...and yet he also created a monopoly that in some ways unfairly hurt the market and others.
Insurance developed as a way to mitigate and control risk...we'd rather pay a smaller portion every month, then pay nothing and get walloped with a horrendously expensive medical bill. Insurance helps smooth those risks out, and yet we find healthcare prices rising out of control and insurance companies play a role in that.
A perfect functioning market is, frankly, hell on human needs. The 'perfect' economy where a company hires a worker when they need and fires when they don't is majorly disruptive for employees, who can't plan their expenses around such insecurity. You can't take out a car loan or a mortgage if you have no idea what you're going to make from month to month. (I suppose technically you could, but it's very risky and you'd probably have to pay a horrendous interest rate.)
It has costs to the businesses as well, in terms of training new employees and whatnot. Ford's willingness to pay his employees well helped his business because he had less turnover, which is horribly wasteful. But it also means that sometimes a business has to pay employees even though they don't need all of them (and who knows if that slump is temporary or the new normal?) Btw, this was one of the issues we saw with the contract labor we hired at our last job. It's supposed to give the business more flexibility, hire when we need and fire when we don't...but people don't work like robots. The temps tend to be less motivated, and for good reason...we don't really have a lot of incentives for them. Most of our leadership team would rather have one good full time employee than two or three contract/temp labor. Of course, this could also have just been our perspective...the business apparently thought it was still a better trade off, whether because they didn't have to pay for healthcare and retirement plans on the contract labor or because they still believed it was easier to fire them as needed, I don't know. From my perspective, it sucked.
Anyways. Insecurity can lead to fear and anger. We can do some things to address it. Fear and anger can let us know when we need to be more alert, when we need to pay close attention...but we should control them, not let them control us.
Letting fear and anger take us too far just causes bigger problems down the road.
I think Frank Herbert was right, "fear is the mind killer". And all I see from the right and left is screaming, fearful and angry people.
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