And a Nice Garnish on the Side

All I want to do is re-frame the discussion [about wanting or not wanting children], because I think that it has been so mired in stereotypes and just, you know, glib, flippant statements [...].
Meghan Daum, The Brian Lehrer Show, "On Not Having Kids"

Here I have to plead guilty to being glib and flippant about being "childless by choice." Mainly because wisecracking about how I love children: stir fried and over rice, is easier than trying to argue people's stereotypes and firmly-held beliefs with them. It's like any other faith-based understanding. Anyone who is willing to walk up to a stranger and confidently state they understand certain personality traits about them based on a combination of external traits and assumptions is unlikely to take a stranger's word for it that they might be misjudging. (And family members are even worse.)

There are any number of different flavors of "You're different, and that's bad," and, to borrow from the title of Ms. Daum's book, the idea that the intentionally childless are "selfish, shallow and self-absorbed" is merely one of them. For me, being glib and flippant about not being a parent had become a guard against answering what I understood was a charge of being a bad person with a charge that the person making the accusation was themselves the bad person. Fortunately, I've mellowed with and now I'm glib and flippant out of a combination of habit and snarkiness.

Go Me!

Seth Godin has an interesting post on how to deal with one's Inner Critic. And I think that it gets at one of the more difficult parts of dealing with the tendency we have to be critical of ourselves. He's right in that we should be positive with ourselves, and tell ourselves true things that contradict the voices of our Inner Critic.

The tricky part is understanding "the nonsense the lizard brain is selling as truth." Mr. Godin says that to deal with negative self-talk one should "surround it with positive self talk, drown it out and overwhelm it with concrete building blocks of great work, the combination of expectation, obligation and possibility." Which, I think is a great idea. Of course, that's not the way I do it.

In my own internal monologue, the negative whispers my Inner Critic murmurs are not lizard brain nonsense. Instead, it's all absolutely true. What's false is the idea that it's more accurate and more refelctive of who I am than the positives. I am worthy of my own positive self-regard not because of any great works or possibilities, but simply because I am. It is my positive self-regard that renders me capable of great works and possibilities, and, therefore to nurture those things, I must nurture my positive self-regard. Of course, there are many roads that lead to Rome, and while the one that I'm on works for me, it's good to know that others are mapping out the rest of them.

Life Spiral

Maybe it's just because I'm suddenly feeling my old age, but I've noticed recently that social media is often a place of intense negativity. I'm not talking about the constant trolling and harassment of people; rather just a pervasive air of doom and futility. Which I understand. People often use the Web to seek connections with others, and that makes it a natural place to talk about one's problems and dislikes and look for people to commiserate with.

Still, I wonder what would happen if we turned that on it's head, and sought to share the positive things that happened in our lives. It's not easy to do, to be sure. I try to be more positive in my own dealings with the Web, yet I often find myself sliding back into the comfortable role of Internet curmudgeon. I'd like to think that we could turn the tide by being supportive of one another and mimicking - answering positivity with positivity.

Stranger things have happened.

The Character of Scarcity

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
Martin Luther King, Jr.: The "Dream" Speech

This is often used as an argument against Affirmative Action programs. But that winds up making Affirmative Action into a judgement of character, when it should be simply a way of distributing scarce resources. And in a culture of scarcity, it's simply not possible that all character judgments are going to be objective, because, I believe, we have a tendency to place the divide between good and bad character in the same place as the line where the resources run out.

I was watching a documentary on fundamentalist groups within the Church of Jesus Christ and Latter-Day Saints, and one thing they noted was that in factions that practice polygamy, there are very strict rules that unmarried men have to abide by - so strict that many bachelors fail to live up to them and are expelled from the group. This tends to result in a only a very small number of eligible, but unmarried, men living in the community - thus reducing the competition and conflicts over sex partners. Thus harmony is maintained.

It would not surprise me to learn that the same goes on in our broader society, minus the expulsions, of course. When handing out scarce resources, like education or career opportunities, on the basis of character having more eligible people than there are resources to go around is simply a recipe for friction as people become upset by the unfairness of it all.

In the end, the easiest way to get to a society in which people are judged on character, and for those judgments to be objective, is to increase the pool of available resources to the point where the competition for them is sharply reduced. People who have what they need are rarely willing to go out of their way to deprive others, for reasons of color or character.

Of A Feather

Muslim shooter = terrorist
Black shooter = thug
White shooter = just a tiff about a parking spot

I first heard about this Tweet while listening to an interview with Himanshu Suri, a.k.a. the rapper "Heems."

I was reminded of it while reading about the case of one Ryan Giroux, an ex-convict who was recently arrested after shooting a number of people in Mesa, Arizona.

Photos of Giroux provided by the Arizona Department of Corrections show tattoos covering his face, including the number 88 on his left temple and a Celtic design on his chin. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, "88" is "neo-Nazi code for Heil Hitler (because H is the 8th letter of the alphabet)." The group also said that, for white supremacists, a Celtic cross represents the white race.

However, Mesa police spokesman Det. Steve Berry said investigators had "nothing to indicate [Wednesday's rampage] has anything to do with white supremacy at all."
Gunman in Mesa, Ariz., rampage has long criminal history, police say

Now, I'm not going to give the Detective any grief about his statement - innocent until proven guilty, after all, and there's no reason to think that I know Giroux's motives better than any other random person on the street.

But that kind of forbearance from judgement seems to be rarer than perhaps it should be. Ms. Kohn's Tweet is a generalization, and perhaps one born more of simplistic media narratives than public reactions at that, but if the media tends to give its audience fare that jives with their biases and desires we can guess that there is a market for simplistic narratives that pigeonhole people into neat stereotypes. This habit, of seeking straightforward patterns to explain the actions of people different than ourselves, is dangerous because, like most habits, it feeds on itself. Generalizations beget generalizations.

As long as we live in what we understand to be a culture of scarcity, negative generalizations about one another will have a life of their own, whether they're about religious extremism, propensity to violence or selectivity about giving people the benefit of the doubt, because those generalizations also serve to elevate the person making them (and those they understand as like themselves) at the expense of the competition. We'll make them, repeat them and defend them as a way of reminding ourselves that we're the most deserving.

We don't lose anything in allowing people to be individuals until we know enough about them to understand what group they may belong to. Whether we gain anything is debatable, but it's worth a shot.