April Flowers

 

Serenity

About a week ago, for a half hour, I was at peace. There was no stress, no anxiety, no anger, no neediness. I was, well, okay with myself in an odd, perfect sort of way.

It had been a strange week. I'd found myself in the middle of arguments between Christians and non-Christians, attempting to be a voice of reason. It was my Truth Reflex, kicking in again, and I was working to tell people on both sides of the dispute that, the people they were arguing with were better people than they presumed they were. Most people, it turns out, are terrible salespeople for their beliefs, mainly because they understand their positions to be self-evident to the point that any properly rational, discerning or ethical person should come to understand them as the Truth, and therefore, failure to come around marks one as inappropriately irrational, gullible or deliberately Evil. And apparently, arguing that rational, discerning or ethical people can disagree on such things is also grounds for being lumped in with the silly, foolish and wicked.

I pushed back against my irritation at being characterized thus by reminding myself that I was always entitled to my own positive self-regard, even if everything that they said about me, and more besides, was true. So what if I was irrational, gullible and/or unethical? Why should I internalize their requirements to see myself as worthy? I heard the voices of my Inner Critic, and, prehaps for the first time in my life, rather than running away from or fighting back against the judgments its voices leveled at me, I embraced them. I recognized that those judgments were a part of me, but they were not me.

And for thirty beautifully peaceful, serene minutes, it worked.

I knew at the time that it would not last, and I did not attempt to cling to it, instead focusing on staying in the moment, and letting it run its course. What was done once can be done again, and desire runs counter to self-acceptance. I know now that I have done it, and that, for now, is enough.

The Good Master

So, Cliven Bundy put his entire leg into his mouth by implying that "the Negro" might be better off if they (perhaps I should say "we") were still slaves.

“And because they were basically on government subsidy, so now what do they do?” he asked. “They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton. And I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy? They didn’t get no more freedom. They got less freedom.”
A Defiant Rancher Savors the Audience That Rallied to His Side

High-visibility Republican lawmakers who hoped to burnish their TEA Party credentials by publicly siding with him are now backing away from him, ostensibly, because of his odious views on race. Now, I'm going to go out on a limb, here and say that, more than likely, Senators Rand Paul and Dean Heller are being sincere in their condemnation of Bundy's remarks. After all, while there are White Supremacists out there, and it's likely that at least a few of them would openly favor a return to chattel slavery, that position is so far out of the mainstream that it's unlikely that any of them have made it into the current United States Senate.

But the thing about it that's being missed in the rush to throw stones at an old man too foolish to choose his words carefully when he's on camera is that Bundy wasn't being just a racist. He was also being tribalist, and that's likely what spurred him to speak up in the first place. As I understand him, yep, African Americans are the same, barely-civilized people that most of the antebellum South perceived them as being. And therefore, it is The White Man's Burden to uplift and care for them. The point that Bundy is making here is that people can either accept that burden or shirk it, and that keeping African-Americans as property, yet inculcating them in the correct "conservative" values is to accept that burden, while allowing them to live their lives as they see fit, but with public assistance is to allow them to backslide into savagery, and thus shirk one's duty.

And because the Conservative slaveowner is such a dutiful person, then the horrors of slavery, as it was formerly practiced in the United States, would never come to pass. Picking cotton would cease to become backbreaking labor. Slaves could have a family life without their partners or children being sold off at a whim for the slaveowner's profit - or as punishment. When the cotton picking was done, the benighted African-Americans would be able to do as they pleased without their owners seeking to saddle them with even more duties. All because Conservatives are the right kind of people. Therefore, even if you literally gave them other people as their property, to do with whatever they pleased, and with literal power of life and death over them, they would avoid becoming the sorts of despots and abusers that Liberals are.

It is, I think, this sort of tribalism, moreso than racism or White Supremacy, that threatens the United States. If a house divided against itself cannot stand, a house were people feel that they are above even the most obvious sorts of abuses while those they disagree with are black-hearted villains must be divided against itself. Slavery in the United States didn't descend into a horror of tyranny, maltreatment and misery because too many slaveholders shirked their White Man's Burden out of leftest ideas of human rights, the equality of all people and cultural relativism. And we should never let people pretend that it did. Even if we first castigate them for things we feel are worse.

Ready For My Close-Up

Gray Hat

I've never understood the insistence on the part of the United States government that we are attempting to be "honest brokers" in the "peace process" between the Israelis and Palestinians. It's always seemed pretty obvious to me that we've chosen a side.

America poses as an honest broker, but everywhere it is perceived as Israel’s lawyer. The American-sponsored “peace process” since 1991 has been a charade: all process and no peace while providing Israel with just the cover it needs to pursue its illegal and aggressive colonial project on the West Bank.
Avi Shlaim, Israel Needs to Learn Some Manners

But, as my father used to tell me, "obvious" is something that's so crystal-clear that you're the only person who sees it. (It is nice, through, that Mister Shlaim, and John Cassidy, over at The New Yorker also see it this way. It reduces the feeling that I'm missing something.) So I understand that there's a reasonable explanation for why people in the United States and Israel take the State Department and the White House at face value when they claim to be an unbiased third party.

What I'm not sure I understand is why it seems to be so difficult for us as a nation to understand why pretty much no-one else sees us that way. The United States has used its Security Council veto 42 times on Israel's behalf since 1978, and appears to take the public stance that Israel can do no wrong, and that international action against the Jewish state is always politically-motivated harassment, no matter how open the apparent violation of international law. The United States rarely considers such open support for an ally to be justified when other nations engage in it.

In its own eyes, the United States of America is self-evidently "the Good Guy." And we see this attitude in American dealings around the globe. Which is fine. But we don't seem to be able to get to the point where we understand that everyone else is the hero of their own story, too. And this allows us to think of our self-image as a reflection of an objective reality, rather than simply the result our perception of the world around us. And therefore, I think, the American mindset sees the world as a more hostile place than it would otherwise be.

One recurring attitude that I've encountered in a number of different facets of life is the idea that when you're doing things correctly, you will draw the unearned ire of people who have been, due to their own flawed characters, seduced into Doing It Wrong. And the common side-effect of this mindset is that the hostility that one engenders in those one doesn't like is proof of one's own correctness. This strikes me as dubious enough in personal relationships. I can't imagine that it's a viable way to conduct international diplomacy. Yet it appears to be the basis of American insistence that we're a neutral umpire, rather than a fan.