Goodbye Patheos—Hank Fox Bows Out

I’m leaving Patheos in the near future. I’m working on a book and a separate large project (Senior Adventure Quest)—not to mention my full-time JOB—and though I have no shortage of ideas for posts, I’m having real trouble finding time to devote to blogging.

Many other bloggers have made the jump to blogging as a business, and can afford to do it. If you have enough posts—several a day—and you get enough reader hits, you can actually get paid for blogging. I don’t fault them for taking that path, but I have seen the clear effect of a commercial motivation, and it’s not for me.

There is a philosophy behind atheism, something … quite different and larger than anything we’re doing now, and we really need to winkle that out and explore it rather than writing the same >>OMG Police Dept. Bumper Stickers!!<< story.

Not saying that stuff isn’t important. It’s just that there’s this OTHER stuff that needs to be thought about and covered too. That has been one of my main goals in blogging. And, for me at least, figuring that stuff out is time consuming.

Thinking about those things, mulling over ideas and teasing out new conclusions, new viewpoints, new realizations, takes hours and days and month and years, but pays literally nothing. If I’ve made twenty dollars from atheist-blogging over the 15 or so years I’ve been doing it, I’d be surprised. It’s a labor of love, sure enough, and I DO get to explore and tease at these ideas. In addition, I have really loved the reactions of readers, telling me I got them to think, that I gave them new ideas and new arguments.

But sometimes, the money really matters. So I need to pull back a bit and refocus on some of this other stuff.

(Here’s yet another of my time-consuming activities that pays literally nothing. But I love doing it, so there’s that.)

I will be transferring the entirety of my blog over to a new site — A Citizen of Earth — in the near future, and posting when the mood and the time coincide, but probably not very often.

Also, for near-future reference, the book I’m working on is called (tentatively):

BrainDrops: The One & Only Ungodly Bathroom Reader—An Astounding Compendium of Wit, Wisdom and Complete Goddam Nonsense from a Complete Goddam Atheist (for Hellbound Mockers of Every Heinous Persuasion).

In case you didn’t know about it, my first book, Red Neck, Blue Collar, Atheist: Simple Thoughts About Reason, Gods & Faith, is still up on Amazon.

—And yes, you want to buy BOTH 😉

Somewhen—end of March, early April—you’ll see BrainDrops on Amazon, and wherever else I can manage to get it distributed.

There are a couple of other books in the works, Saying Goodbye to Dad: An Atheist Deals With Death, and a so-far unnamed book on Beta Culture.

Anyway, it’s been cool, being here. Thank you to the nice folks at Patheos for giving me this chance, as Ed Brayton at Freethought Blogs gave me a podium and a microphone before them. When I get the Beta Culture book written, expect to see me out there at atheist conferences, promoting the book and the ideas in a big way.

Until then …

20 Ways to Take Action: Postscripts

[ Continued from Part 2 ]

Postscript I: The Bargain

You probably never consciously think about The Bargain. And it’s written into no law I know of. But it’s there, and you sort of know it. It’s that bargain we all make with the Powers That Be.

Society around us is actually a complex web of agreements and compromises – and repercussions. For instance, part of my deal with the neighbors is that I will not start up my Harley at 2 a.m. and rev the engine. In return, they will not come out at 4 a.m. and pour a gallon of molasses on my Harley. (If I had a Harley, that is.)

This web of agreements is a big part of what keeps us from a Lord of the Flies / Mad Max situation, where every one of us is an individual survivalist with only his own interests at heart, and every neighbor is an enemy we must guard against.

But The Bargain is this other thing. It’s the deal we make not with our neighbors, but with the Powers, the Big People in our lives.

Here’s our part: We will study hard, we will work hard, we will play fair. We will obey laws, pay taxes, vote and participate with honesty and compassion. We will go peacefully about our daily lives, treating each other with kindness and respect. We will not take anything we don’t deserve. We will do our small part to make the world work.

Here’s their part: They will treat us fairly, tell us the truth, deal with us in good faith. They will help us in certain ways when we really need it. They will hold back the darkness, keeping us safe from the two-legged animals who don’t observe social bargains. They will sell us products that work, and that last, and that give good value for what we pay for them. They will allow us to prosper, to raise families and make for ourselves a place in the world.

Okay, how well are some of them keeping their side of it? Let’s see:

The Catholic Church broke the bargain when it allowed generations of children to be molested.

Cops and courts and legislators broke the bargain when they endeavored to make harmless things illegal, deadly things perfectly acceptable, and the court system itself a playground for the rich, a gauntlet of fear and difficulty for the poor.

The government broke the bargain when it began to treat us all like potential terrorists, and paid off banks after they almost destroyed the economy. It broke it when it worked to convince us our best chance of getting ahead was a lottery, rather than saving and investing.

The military broke the bargain when it sent young men and women off to die protecting corporate interests rather than our freedom and safety.

Corporate CEOs broke the bargain when they began to accept hundreds of millions in annual salary, but paid their workers minimum wage. When they decided fair competition was less lucrative than lobbying Congress for sweetheart deals.

Corporations themselves broke the bargain when they began to meddle in government, lobbying for favorable treatment at the expense of voters and citizens and the environment. Corporations and rich people further broke the bargain when they stopped paying taxes.

Product designers and marketers broke the bargain when they designed products to fail, or sold us shiny garbage, or persuaded us to eat food that makes us fat and sick.

The news media broke the bargain when it began to lie and manipulate and propagandize us, leaving us defenseless against all those others. When they lazily defaulted on digging into the hard stories, instead tossing out the easy, titillating stories, the ones that provoke outrage and fear and weepy sympathy.

If YOU break The Bargain, there are consequences. They can send you to jail, or prison. They can humiliate you in public in a way that never heals. They can kill you.

But here’s the thing: If The Bargain is broken by THEM …

Why should you continue to act as if it’s still in force?

Postscript II: Freedom of Truth

When it comes to Freedom of Speech – MY FIRST AMENDMENT RIGHTS!!! – we’re all over that like a chicken on a June bug. Yes, yes, yes, you have the RIGHT to speak up. To write. To protest. To tattoo the shit out of yourself, and to walk around with the ugly crack of your ass showing.

But there’s another freedom – sort of the counterpoint to freedom of speech – that never made it into the Constitution. It never occurred to the founders to include it because they were educated men, dealing with educated men. They were self-reliant, and assumed others would look out for themselves in the same way.

But the freedom is this: The freedom not to be lied to. The Freedom of Truth.

If I tell you a lie, that’s one thing. It’s wrong, and we know it, but it affects you and I and very few other people. That lie, assuming it doesn’t violate other legal rights and responsibilities, falls within the freedom of speech.

But if the GOP tells you a lie, or FOX News tells you a lie, or Exxon-Mobil tells you a lie, that’s something else. It affects millions, possibly billions, of people. It parasitizes and manipulates them – disrupting their very understanding of reality – in favor of that small group of people who stand to profit.

And it does it, usually, via the publicly-owned broadcast spectrum. So the government essentially stands by and allows it.

You think they should have the exact same Freedom of Speech you and I have, except amplified a billion times by publicly-owned media?

If your freedom of speech includes the right to lie to one or a dozen people, but THEIR freedom of speech includes the right to lie to and manipulate 300 million of us, does that make any sort of sense?

No.

If you ever have any doubts about this, ask yourself: “Do I have a RIGHT to know what’s true and what’s not? Do I have a RIGHT to know what’s going on?”

Answer yourself, “You’re goddam right I do.”

“Do they have a right to lie to me? To keep me in the dark, believing lies and propaganda?”

“You’re goddam right they don’t. And I’m tired of this shit.”

Postscript III: Hillary Rodham Clinton

She should have been our next president.

She was brought down by the media, by that asshole in the FBI, by the lies of the right, by decades of the most vicious attacks. Allegedly, believably, she was brought down by Russian interference in our American election. She was also brought down by us.

She tried hard. She worked her ass off. She cared. And half of America shit on her. Most of us have no idea of the emotional toll something like this has on a person. But here:

Imagine you work for a company that has a big plum position coming open, and you have your heart set on winning that position. Imagine you spend two years working with that one goal in mind. Not just for the money, or the power, but because you know you can do the job better than anybody. You learn the things you need to learn, and you learn them better than anyone before you, ever. You do the things you need to do, and you do them fantastically well. All your performance evaluations are aces, your employer is incredibly impressed with you, all the people in your department respect and admire you, all the people in the industry are looking forward to working with you. But also, your company benefits like never before, climbing to the top of the entire industry.

You spend TWO YEARS caring and hoping and sweating to get that position, and everybody around you agrees you’re a shoo-in.

Okay, now imagine that three weeks before the final decision, your company is bought out by a billionaire. On the big day, the new owner announces his nephew, just out of business school, never held a job in his life, is taking over that position.

Take a second and think about how you felt when your dad died, your grandmother died, your dog died. The emotional impact of losing that position, or this election, is damned near the same. When you think about it, it might even be worse – because this was not some accidental death, it was something of a murder, and the killers are walking around out there smirking and laughing, high-fiving each other and smoking Cuban cigars.

When someone loses something they love, you don’t get in their face and tell them this is all their fault. You don’t get all grabby and selfish and demand they do something to make YOU feel better. You reach out to give THEM comfort.

Hillary is strong as hell. But she’s also human. You can’t care about something like this, really care, and just walk away when it gets snatched out of your hands at the last second, and in such an ugly way. She deserves something better in this moment than being shoved to the side and forgotten.

Send her a card. Write her a letter. Tell her how much you value her effort. Thank her for all her work, and for trying. She’s one of us, and she deserves at least this much.

Hillary Clinton
Post Office Box 5256
New York, NY 10185-5256

Office of Hillary Rodham Clinton
120 West 45th Street, Suite 2700
New York, NY 10036

Postscript IV: Useful Links

Trump Resistance Reference Guide

And yes, this stuff is being used on you, against you, every damned day:

Logical Fallacies

Logical Fallacies Handlist

Propaganda Techniques

Propaganda Techniques

Advertising Techniques

Persuasive Techniques

 

20 Ways to Take Action in Trump-America — Part 2

[ Continued from Part 1 ]

11. Be the Better You: Recognize your strengths

Recognize your own huge strengths.

Look, you’re one of the most intelligent, most creative, most powerful and dangerous animals on this planet. Act like it!

You and the people you choose to work with can come up with ideas and goals, you can work to make them happen. You can come up with crazy guerilla actions that spark the minds and hearts of every person in America. You can RESIST.

Trump wants to build a wall? What if you built a wall around Trump’s hotels – a wall of garbage, a graffiti wall, a wall of soiled diapers, a wall of noisy protestors? What if you made it so nobody wanted to stay there?

What if you organized a demonstration out front of his hotel, with everybody carrying signs that say

>>> Поздравляю, товарищ Трампа! <<<
(Congratulations, Comrade Trump!)

If you’re reading this, it’s likely you’re better educated than the average conservative. (Not because my writing is so wonderfully highbrow, but because you’re, you know, READING.)

But you also probably suffer from the sort of thoughtfulness that makes you less practical, more apt to be distracted, while they’re busy taking action.

You have to be the better you, the stronger you, that you can be. Part of that is that you have to stop believing you’re a victim. You have lived in a time where you’ve had the luxury of being weak and fragile, but that time is over. If you still think you need trigger warnings and safe spaces, run home to your pillow fort, little dumpling, because you’re a dead weight, a liability, on everybody around you.

12. Be the Better You: Facts Over Feelings

Engage with the facts before you engage with your emotions.

People on the extreme right are easily subject to manipulation through levers of fear, patriotism, or religion. If you tell them a lie but couch it in patriotic terms (Support The Troops!!!), or tell them there is some plot against them, or that this is a test of faith, some significant number of them will not only leap to believe it, they will see any refuting evidence as part of a secret plot.

But you have to get the facts right before your feelings come into it. If your facts are wrong, your conclusions cannot be right, and your feelings about the thing, whatever they are, are misplaced. Worse, once you have any sort of strong feeling about something, every fact or non-fact that comes after will be assessed through the filter of that emotion.

I’ve been in many arguments online where someone misstated one or more facts, but refused to hear any countervailing evidence, even when I cited multiple sources. “No, I’m not wrong, all those sources are lies, and you only cite them because you want to destroy America. Obama is a Kenyan-born Muslim, Michelle is a tranny dyke, and their kids are adopted ghetto b*tches who smoke crack in the White House.”

Paranoid-afraid and angry, nothing I said could get through to them. They didn’t want to hear it.

The thing is, the bit about “getting your facts right before your feelings come into it” applies just as much to people on the left.

Oh, but you’re not subject to emotional manipulation, right? You don’t feel that sort of fear or anger, you don’t experience that knee-jerk patriotic fervor.

Yeah, hold off on the smug certainty, Reason Boy. You are every bit as easy to manipulate, every bit as resistant to counter-arguments. It’s just that your levers are different.

For lefties, one of the biggest levers is compassion. Tell them something is an attack on minorities, the homeless, transgenders, women, or hell, pit bulls, and they will buy into it with their weight in diamonds.

I’ve gotten into discussions with liberals that just left me gasping. Say ANYTHING they don’t already believe, disagree with a single point of a leftist compassion argument, and they will attack you in a howling mob, name-calling like it was the world Ad Hominem finals and they were going for the gold. “Why do you HAAAATE the poor homeless?? Why do you HAAAATE the poor pitbulls?? OMG, you’re HITLER!!”

Speaking of which, if someone states a fact, even if it is/was Hitler, the important thing for a REASONING BEING is the fact, not the identity of the speaker. No amount of name-calling changes the facts. It only blinds you to things you just might need to hear.

Never doubt that there are people out there who profit from working you. Here’s something I figured out some years back:

Under the lash of strong emotions,
human beings become less intelligent.

Angry? Stupid. Afraid? Stupid. Infatuated? REALLY stupid. Yeah, you.

And the less intelligent you are, the more you miss of what “they” are doing. Keeping you dumbed down, unable to think clearly or make plans to resist, is a blue chip investment for anyone who wants to run things.

Oh, you think they wouldn’t do that? That’s just a conspiracy theory? That nobody is that dishonest, that wicked, that organized? You keep believing that, kid — your simple faith and trust is just cute as hell.

But here in the real world, we have fellow citizens who have overthrown COUNTRIES with just such tools. Selling you a deadly long-term poison or getting you to vote for their guy over your guy is small change in comparison.

13. Be the Better You: Get and Stay Fit

How will you feel someday if your granddaughter is drowning in a pool and you’re the only person there who might save her, but you don’t know how to swim? Riiiight.

This is not just about swimming. It’s about physical strength, about cardiovascular fitness, about the sort of vibrant health that makes you not just stronger but smarter as well.

This is always overlooked in political activism, but it’s damned important.

The thing is, it’s not just yourself you have to be strong for – it’s for all those people you love. Think about that the next time someone tries to tell you you’re fragile and weak and helpless.

Remember those pictures you used to see of the guy holding out his pants in front, showing how much weight he lost? Facebook no longer allows such pictures to be posted. The image of fitness, rather than an inspiration and a goal, is now some sort of horrific attack. Because OMG FAT SHAMING!!! To which I say: Bloodyhelljeezusgoddamshit!

By contrast, I had a 60-year-old friend stagger through a quarter-mile of snow carrying a bloody 80-pound dog. The thing is, it was MY dog. They’d gone for a hike in a snowy park, and the dog ripped open his chest and belly on a hidden metal stake. Because my friend was in good shape, I got another 6 good years with my beloved four-legger.

I suggest we all remember the Boy Scout motto: “Be prepared.”

This is not just about physical strength, either. It’s about mental toughness as well. And again, not just for you. For your granddaughter. For your neighbors. For everybody around you threatened by this ugly new situation.

Make a conscious decision to be tougher. You don’t have to be a victim. You can be a warrior, a knight in defense of all things good.

14. Strategy One: Strategy Itself

From Wikipedia: “STRATEGY is a high level plan to achieve one or more goals under conditions of uncertainty.”

“Strategy is important because the resources available to achieve these goals are usually limited. Strategy generally involves setting goals, determining actions to achieve the goals, and mobilizing resources to execute the actions. A strategy describes how the ends (goals) will be achieved by the means (resources).”

Here’s why I mention it: A lot of people on the right are ex-military. Who do you think trains in effectively mobilizing limited resources to achieve goals under conditions of uncertainty? Riiiight.

The left, meanwhile, untrained, even unaware, of the concept of strategy, attacks every issue as if nothing was connected to anything else.

Most of us on the left remain convinced simple honesty and good will will win out in every situation. But here’s the thing: It won’t. You have black neighbors who have lived in simple honesty and good will every goddam day of their lives, and they still have to be afraid – in their own country, their own hometown, their own neighborhood – that they or their kids will be shot down.

To bring home to you the importance of strategy, here’s another ‘magic’ metaphor:

Picture yourself on stage in a contest with 20 professional stage magicians. People skilled in misdirection, sleight of hand, expert manipulation of cards, polished handling of the audience. First off, do you even know any magic tricks? Say you know one lame-ass trick, something that wows the 6-year-old nieces and nephews … how do you think you’ll do against the pros? They won’t even laugh at you. They will IGNORE you. If they notice you at all, they’ll be embarrassed for you.

As for the people we’re facing, they are equally advanced professionals. They have experts in advertising, in business, in emotional manipulation, in military and political tactics. They have multi-billion-dollar corporations on their team. They get together in groups and plan out years-long strategies to control the military, the media, international trade, state and local offices, hell, even your local cops. They also have money, vaults full of it.

If you persist as a hopeful amateur, ganged up with other hopeful amateurs to pursue the Issue of the Day, they will eat you a-fucking-live. You have to stop thinking each issue is a separate issue, that each election is a separate election, that each battle is the main battle and nothing of the future matters.

You have to stop REacting and start PROacting, thinking in decades rather than days or  weeks. Get together with others, decide what sort of future you want – 10 years from now, 25 years from now, 100 years from now – and start working on THAT.

Because you can bet your ass THEY have such plans.

15. Strategy Two: Decide Who You Are

Are you a Bible-believing Christian first, a Constitution-cherishing American second? In other words, are you a Christian-American rather than an American Christian? It’s an important question, and one which Christians in America frequently – in my view – get wrong.

Likewise, are you a first and foremost a feminist-American, a black-American, an LBGT-American, a transgender-American?

Fine, fight your little fight. But prepare to lose.

There is a sociocultural and governmental substrate on top of which Black Lives Matter and feminism and all this other stuff takes place.

Picture us playing tennis in a huge indoor enclosure with dozens of separate courts. You’re over there fighting your battle, I’m over here fighting mine, a dozen other games are going on elsewhere. But meanwhile, the building itself is under threat by a developer who wants to raze it and build condos.

How much does it profit you, how much does it profit any of us, to concentrate exclusively on our individual games? Without the building, there is no game.

In this moment, we’re not feminists. We’re not Black Lives Matter activists. We’re not defending the rights of the poor Muslims, or spilling out our hearts over homeless kitties.

What we’re defending today, right here and now, is the very ground on which all these campaigns are conducted. The ground on which they CAN BE conducted with any chance of success.

And news flash, kids, we just lost one hella big battle. Maybe even the war.

This bit here and now, THIS part, is going to be the heyday of big banks, of international corporations, of oil companies, of mercenaries, of secret overseas bank accounts, of tax avoidance, of surveillance, of openly flouting American law and custom and decency. If you thought it was bad before, with the GOP now in control of America, the barn door is open and the horses are loose.

We people of compassion and kindness – and hell, believers in democracy – have to be just as real. Don’t go imagining that airy-fairy happy shit is just going to automatically happen while you sit back and mellow out. You have to take the world in your hands and MAKE good things happen.

16. Strategy Three: Plan For Dogs in the Manger and False Flags

Do you know that first phrase? —A dog doesn’t eat hay, but he can lie in the feed trough and keep all the other animals away from it, snapping and snarling, protecting his turf, so that the animals who do eat hay can’t get to it. Ha-ha, funny, right? But not to THEM.

So you’re out on the lines with Occupy Wall Street, holding up your sign and feeling good about what you’re doing. If only that damned drum circle would stop, you could actually make your points with the news camera. But the drum circle doesn’t stop, hour after hour, day after day, until you can’t hear yourself think.

But what are you going to say? It’s a public space, right? And everybody has a right to protest in their own way.

Dog in the manger: A thousand dollars says one or more of the people on the drum circle were FBI plants. One or more of the other sorts of activists there to scream and wave signs –Indians! Marijuana activists! – were FBI plants. By the second day, sincere others would show up and the FBI guys could step back and watch the confused, milling free-for-all.

Eventually even the news media – the few who showed up – would be unable to see any point to the whole thing. Dog in the manger: The FBI people weren’t there with any message, but they could keep the Occupy movement from getting their message out.

False flag: Say you’re out in front of City Hall, peacefully demonstrating for more funding for the local library, and someone carrying a ‘Fund Our Library Now!’ poster throws a Molotov cocktail through the window into the mayor’s office and then runs off and vanishes. Who do you think will get blamed? You and your whole group. Hello media shitstorm, bye-bye library funding.

Think stuff like that doesn’t happen? Ha-bloody-ha.

And if you don’t believe someone would do something like that, ask yourself this: Why would they NOT? Because they’re good and honest? Yeah, and monkeys might fly out of my butt.

Expect this stuff. In every major protest movement, especially those that look like they have some chance of success, some of the people around you are going to be government agents. If you don’t believe that, bless your simple little heart, and I hope you have a grownup taking care of you.

But whether it’s FBI agents infiltrating the movement or just plain idiots squealing “No, no, this is all about ME and MY issue!”, there are going to be counter-forces WITHIN your movement. Accidentally or deliberately, they will obstruct, distract, confuse and misinform you and others.

Find a way to deal with it. Press on.

17. Strategy Four: Venn Your Enemies

There really are enemies out there.

But not everybody who fails to agree with you on every single point is simply an enemy.

You know Venn diagrams? – those overlapping circles that show shared and unshared areas?

The Venn diagram comparing religious convictions of me and Johnny Christboy would show very little overlap. His ardent Christianity and my ardent atheism would be mutually exclusive. But the diagram of our political convictions would probably overlap quite a bit.

Well, if he was a conservative Christian of the nutty vicious sort, the overlap would be small. But if he was one of those generous, loving religious people, the shared area of his circle and mine would take up most of them.

After crossing paths with some online feminists of the craziest, meanest goddam sort, I realized I could never call myself a feminist. But our Venn diagrams regarding the rights of women, their safety and choice and equality, would overlap almost completely. The non-overlapping parts would be those bits where they insisted we live in Rape Culture, that every problem in the world is because of men, that women have NO advantages over men, and that if you disagree with any of those points, it’s because you hate women.

(Fair warning: If you think you need to start a war here over this last paragraph, you might as well fuck off now and save yourself the effort.)

I disliked former President Nixon with a deep passion over the Vietnam War, but I give him props for his environmental achievements. And I would have worked with him, gladly, on environmental issues.

I think John McCain is a complete fool for giving us the stinking dumpster fire which is  Sarah Palin, but I’m behind him 100 percent in the investigation of Russian hacking of our election. (If he’s not just doing it to shut down any real investigation, that is.)

The point here is that you can work with people on one subject while disagreeing with them on another. That you shouldn’t tune out anybody completely and forever. You may find you someday need them.

The point is also: Stop attacking allies. Focus on your samenesses and common goals – the large area of overlap – rather than your differences.

18. Strategy Five: Get Personal

The real stuff happens offline. The real stuff happens in person.

I used to go to City Council meetings. At every meeting, on every issue, someone would get up and say something they wanted councilmembers to hear. Their heartfelt conclusions about the issue. How it would affect them. Why they thought it was good, or bad. And in not one of those meetings did I get the feeling that input affected the councilmembers’ decisions.

They’d made up their minds BEFORE the meeting, in discussions with friends and cronies, people they met on the golf course, or in the course of their daily business. A lot of that stuff wasn’t even issue-specific – it was a mass of people around them CREATING A REALITY. “This town has to grow!” “We need law and order!” “If we don’t get that new golf course approved, that new casino approved, that new ski resort approved, tourism will dry up and we’ll all be out of jobs!”

You have to help create that reality. Turn off the computer, get out of your chair, and go to the city or county legislative meetings. Shake hands. Smile. Compliment.

Meet your elected officials personally. Meet the local cops. Meet the people at City Hall, and the County Offices. Make friends with them. Invite them for a hike, or for lunch. Ask them to MC your Boy Scout barbecue. Express an interest in their families, and their health. Care about them. But also, show them your life, help them know you as a person. And talk to them about the issues you care about.

(One question *I* would like to ask every state and local cop, and every member of the military, is “If you were given an order to fire on unarmed American civilians, would you do it?” Not only is it something I would like to know, I think it’s something THEY need to know, well in advance of such an order.)

Bear in mind they’re all human. If you’re in their faces carping at them every day, they’re not going to take that well. The goal is friendly influence. If you can get them sounding YOU out about issues, you’ll know they respect your input.

Two more things.

First: Infiltrate. Don’t assume every person working in City Hall, or the Governor’s office, is in full agreement with everything that gets done there. Hell, Donald Trump’s White House is going to be riddled with people he would consider traitors, but who are actually patriots. If you know any of these people, if you can meet them, let them know you’d like to help them in any way you can – such as getting word out without attribution.

Second: Make a point of meeting your local investigative news reporters. Find the guy or gal who’s been there 30 years and make friends. Invite them to the park for a barbecue, treat them to sushi or a shot of single malt. Give them whatever information you have on local subjects, but also feel them out about what they know. Gain their trust and never, never betray it.

19. Prepare For The Worst

“It’s not what happens, it’s how you react to it.” ~ Jim Rohn

This is an especially bad time to have Trump at the helm. Even aside from the crap he and the GOP are going to pull – and it’s going to be bad – there are forces in the world that don’t augur well for civilization itself, even more than for the United States of America.

Climate change. Peak oil. Overpopulation. Water shortages. Superbugs. Extinctions.

Just when we need good leaders, we have the worst. And we have a media already extremely comfortable with manipulating rather than informing viewers.

We’re going to have to take care of each other. That old lady next door. The nephew who needs money for college. That black neighbor who just moved in. The woman down the hall whose boyfriend beats her. The neighborhood itself, against the drug dealers and thugs.

We’re also going to have to go to the mattresses with the takers and liars.

Imagine if, rather than coming after your Social Security and health insurance, they tried to pass a law that would take guns away from 50 million Americans. Here’s the mindset they’d meet up with: “Yeah, you fuckers are about to learn some whole new lessons in respect.”

The fact is, most members of Congress would never even consider such a law. Because they know that violence would follow, and not a little bit of it. Somewhere out there is someone who would just kill them.

The demographic of retired people, those of us on SS or Medicare, all the vulnerables and the people who care about them, are going to have to figure out where and how to draw our own line.

Speaking of which …

20. Carry a Goddam Flag / Buy a Fucking Gun

Carry a goddam flag. Stop ceding the image of patriotism to the right wing freaks.

Get EVERYONE on your team, at every protest action, to carry American flags. If you’re a military veteran, wear something conspicuous to show that.

Look, we’re not pot-smoking hippies selling peace and love. We’re Americans, and we’re faced with, at the very least, a chute full of crap flowing our way. At worst, we’re facing the end of the American experiment of democracy.

Carry a flag, carry two flags, and wave them like your life depended on it. Because it just might.

Buy a fucking gun. Buy a lot of fucking guns.

Okay, sure, you “don’t like” guns. Fine. But visualize the difference between the Black Rock protestors and the gunny types that took over the Malheur Wildlife Refuge.

The unarmed protestors at Black Rock got police dogs, paramilitary cops, armored vehicles, water cannons and other “non-lethal” weapons fired at them.

The Malheur occupiers were openly breaking federal law, but authorities treated them like it was prom night and they were a bunch of Disney princesses. Hell, the bastards drew down on federal officials with assault rifles, and most of them just walked away.

And did you notice when things changed at Black Rock? When the cops stood down and a truce was declared? THE DAY AFTER veterans showed up and joined in. Why? Because you can shoot water cannons at a bunch of lame-ass Indians in winter, but you don’t dare do that to military veterans. Because 1) it would be really bad publicity, but 2) you don’t screw around with men you already know are willing to go to war.

If you think violence never solved anything, remind yourself of who occupies North America today. Hint: It’s not hundreds of tribes of Native Americans. It’s the descendants of people who were capable of advanced forms of violence.

If every Jew in pre-WWII Germany had a rifle or handgun and the will to use it, you think things would have gotten to the point they did? No way. But take note of how that particular part of history actually was ended – through the assistance of people who were equipped, trained and willing to meet violence and guns with even greater violence, even bigger guns.

There are more of us than there are of them. Really consider that fact.

If guns are legal in your jurisdiction, buy one, get your open carry permit or whatever, and carry the goddam thing to every public event. Learn to use it. Take a firearms safety course. Become a regular at the local firing range. Organize with friends for target practice. Do it.

The alternative is to practice bending over until you can grab your ankles quickly and efficiently when so ordered.

(And yes, if you have kids in the house, don’t be an idiot with the guns. Take every necessary precaution.)

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Continue for a short list of Postcripts.

 

20 Ways To Take Action in Trump-America — Part 1

I’ve been seeing the lists other people are making of things to do after this election. Taking nothing away from them, here’s MY list of things to do. This is the first 10.

(Fair warning: I’m going to use the F-word, and more than once, in this post. I think this is a moment for it.)

1. Accept what’s happened

Hillary Clinton isn’t the President. It’s unfair, it’s criminal, it’s ugly, but it’s also this:

>> OVER <<<

It’s done. Finito. Deal with it.

Even if Donald Trump is impeached, even if someone dropped a massive spy satellite on Trump and Pence and the entire Republican Congress, Hillary isn’t going to end up in the White House. Neither is Bernie, or Jill. There is no hope of it, no way it can happen. The election is done and the results are before us. Feel the shock and horror, go ahead with your grieving, but eventually we’re all going to have to give it up as a subject worth talking about.

Hillary lost, Trump won, the electoral college isn’t changing, Warts and all, Trump is the next occupant of the Oval Office, and much as I hate to say it, he’s going to be PRESIDENT Trump. Admit it, put it out of your mind, and let’s get on to the next thing.

2. Take A Good Hard Look at Donald Trump

The guy was born into a millionaire family and is now, supposedly, a thousand times richer. His social class is BILLIONAIRE; he has almost nothing in common with you.

He’s never served in the military, nor will any of his kids. He doesn’t pay taxes. Has he ever done his own laundry, or stopped at the supermarket on the way home to pick up something for dinner? Doubtful. He doesn’t feed his own dog (if he has one), or water his own plants. He doesn’t pay his own household bills. He will never ride a bus or train or taxi, he has a private security force around him at all times. He doesn’t even drive.

Not only does he have nothing in common with you, he probably can’t even imagine your life. He wouldn’t want to. Any intersection with average Americans probably ends with his maids, restaurant waitstaff, the caddy at the golf course. You and all your problems and interests are so far beneath his notice we might as well be living on different planets.

He’s not even an American, really, not in any sense you’d recognize. He’s this other thing – someone who considers the whole planet his playground and piggy bank. In the same way large corporations become extranational, moving production overseas, offshoring their money and holdings, viewing America as just another market and money-mine, Donald Trump is an extranational – probably the first to occupy the White House.

With projects and holdings all over the world, he has no allegiance to the country, to the Constitution, to anything you value as an American. As we’ve seen, he doesn’t even care about the truth, much less what people will think of him from one minute to the next for his lies.

How far will he go? Think of the stories of bank robbers who said “If I’d quit with that first one, they’d never have caught me. But I kept getting away with it. I knew I’d get caught, but I couldn’t stop myself.”

Trump did all this ridiculous shit, working overtime to offend Americans of every stripe, he pushed out to the edge, zoomed past it with the hyperdrive engaged, and HE GOT AWAY WITH IT. He’s still getting away with it. And he’s not going to stop.

Aside from his own continuing contribution to a disastrous presidency, Trump will be, as Robert Reich said, dogged by “questions, investigations, revelations and scandals.” It’s already started. And it’s not like that stuff shouldn’t happen. If the public backs away from those questions and investigations and scandals, democracy itself is over.

He weakens the office of President, he weakens America itself, simply by being where he is. He can’t do the job, and he won’t allow it to be done. He is ALREADY damaging our country.

One more thing: Trump is used to fawning adulation from everyone around him. If he got any negatives, he could barricade himself behind his lawyers and his wealth. But now the negatives are flowing like a river – hell, he’s getting LAUGHED AT! – and he can’t get away. There’s no place to escape to and nobody to shield him. He’s never in his adult life had to deal with anything like this, and it’s already obvious he CAN’T deal with it. He’s acting like a petulant child in full public view, and I suspect that’s going to rapidly get worse.

Sometime in the very near future, I’m expecting Trump to suffer a full psychological break, melting down in a very public way. Eventually, Mike Pence will become president, but in the interim, however many weeks or months it takes, the United States of America will be effectively leaderless. One entire house of U.S. government will be out of the game, at a time when we already know Russia – and perhaps others – are actively working to destabilize American government.

3. Take A Good Hard Look at the GOP

The GOP is an anti-democratic and therefore anti-American organization. Someone described them as “ambitiously criminal.” (In a recent piece, I argued that almost every recent Republican president has been an actual traitor. Trump will take one giant step forward along that path.)

The GOP is almost violently opposed to democracy. Why? First, because they’d lose, but second because it’s more profitable to be that way. And because nothing stops them.

They have to work within the FORM of democracy, but they have no interest in the SUBSTANCE. Listen, gerrymandering so that your voters have an advantage over other voters is not democracy. It has the form of democracy – people still vote – but has none of the substance.

Lying to voters, and then letting them vote, has the form of democracy, but little of the substance. Suppressing the vote of minorities that might not favor you, there’s nothing of democracy about that.

It’s not just not-democracy, it’s anti-democracy.

And what are they doing? Not serving the people. They’re making money. Feathering their own nests. Gaining power. Serving the interests of the corporations and special interests who pay them hundreds of thousands of dollars to do so.

Like Trump, the GOP can’t stop itself. Why should they even try? They keep winning.

They control the American government. They could sell off the national parks, they could imprison people without trial or charges, they could take away your citizenship. They could set up armed checkpoints in every city in America – you know, for “homeland security.”

Hell, if they wanted to, they could put Charles goddam Manson on the Supreme Court.

4. Take A Good Hard Look at Yourself and Your Allies

Yes, this was because of Them, but it was also because of you and yours. Unless you voted for Hillary Rodham Clinton, you pissed away your best chance to stop all this. This election wasn’t stolen, it was gift-wrapped and given away.

Now you can say goodbye to affordable health insurance. Say goodbye to abortion rights. Maybe even say goodbye to workable Social Security and Medicare. But hey, at least you can sleep well knowing that bitch and her emails won’t be in the White House.

Yes, you wanted inspiration. You wanted a rebel. You wanted Bernie, you wanted Jill, you wanted an outsider. You demanded angelic perfection. And you either voted for one of them, or you sat on your fat, stupid ass, staying home in protest. Or hey, maybe you “held your nose and voted for Hillary,” all the while repeating the lies about her to everybody around you. Yeah, you’re a real fucking peach.

There was just “something” off about her. There was all that stuff about Benghazi, and the emails, and the Wall Street speeches, and that business about her charity. And she practically drove Bill to his sexual escapades. There wouldn’t be THAT MUCH being tossed around if some of it wasn’t true, right?

Plus, she’s a woman, and you refused to vote for her because you hated the idea that someone should get into the White House just because of her gender. Hell yes, you’d vote for a woman in a second – maybe if it had been Elizabeth Warren – but not THIS one!

You intelligent, well-informed American, you. Sorry, but yes, this is your fault. You and yours helped it happen. You saw this piece-of-shit Ford Pinto on the lot, you listened to the sales pitch, and even though your friends warned you, you drove away with it anyway, grinning and shooting selfies. Sure, there was that well-maintained Mercedes at the same price and a dozen times better in every metric, but it had – OMG!! – mud on the tires.

Now you can just shut up and drive the goddam Ford with the exploding gas tank. Asshole.

5. Stop Falling for the Magic

Here’s something you may not know: There is magic in the world.

It’s not the Dr. Strange kind. It’s this other thing, a sort of stage magic that nobody ever tells you is stage magic, and so you buy into it, over and over and over.

If a stage magician waves his right hand in the air, or his pretty assistant smiles and wriggles, you can bet there’s something a little tricky going on elsewhere, something that will pop out suddenly and amaze you.

So why do you think Trump is tweeting all the time, all that outrageous shit? It’s not JUST because he’s loony as a goose. It’s because he’s the magician’s right hand. “Hey, look at that! Trump’s holding a press conference and he sounds like an absolute idiot! Ha-ha!” We zoom in on that, gleefully focused, and then, Alakazam! “Oh, wow, Congress just repealed the pre-existing conditions part of the Affordable Care Act!”

That little creep up front doesn’t even have to be in on the trick. The magicians in Congress see him prancing out into the spotlight, they say “Now’s our chance!” and do what they want while nobody’s looking.

Seriously, EVERY TIME YOU SEE TRUMP IN THE NEWS, doing or saying something outrageous or shameful or horrifying, turn away from him and look at Congress.

Because that’s where the REAL story is – back there behind the curtain. Right at that moment there’s something happening they don’t want you to know about. React to THAT, rather than to the orange boob’s latest antics.

On a related note: You think “those other people” are subject to lies and manipulation, but that you’re a clear-headed reality-based thinker and none of this stuff would work on you. But YOU are subject to lies and manipulation, too. You’ve been trained for it, kiddo. It started with Santa and the Easter Bunny, continued in Sunday School, then in every cartoon you ever saw, and finally in every TV show. One of the lies you learned from all that is that all stories have happy endings. That freedom and justice will prevail, that heroes will always win, and that snickering, evil villains will always get what’s coming to them. You probably secretly believe in karma – that bad people will automatically get what’s coming to them, and all you have to do is sit back and watch. Yeah, no.

6. Never Forget, Never Forgive

You know some of the OTHER people who helped this happen. The media, stuck to Hillary’s emails like a Catholic priest to an altar boy, all the while giving Donald millions of dollars in fawning, generous, free exposure. The liars on the right. Trump himself. That freak in the FBI. The paranoid fools in the outlands who acted like Obama was Hitler and Hillary was the Angel of Death.

But let’s move on, right? We have all this other stuff to do and think about. So we should just forget all that and move forward.

No. If you put it out of your mind, you’re giving them A RETROACTIVE FREE TICKET to do this stuff to you and our country, and you’re swinging the gate wide for all future shenanigans.

Hold them accountable. Hold the media accountable. Hold Glenn Beck accountable. Hold Bill O’Reilly accountable. Hold that prick George Will accountable. Never, never, never credit or believe anything they say.

Here are the bliss-ninnies: “Oh, Glenn Beck was a real nutball a year or so back, but he’s sounding so much more reasonable now. I really think he’s changed.”

No, Glenn Beck is like the guy next door who molested your son a year or so back. Are you going to forget that? No, you’re going to say “Shut up, you crazy bastard. I haven’t forgotten what you did.”

You have to see these right wing rabble-rousers for the poison they are, and you have to see them that way permanently, so that you never trust them again.

They molested our country. They raped democracy. In defense of yourself, in defense of your countrymen, never forget, never forgive.

Also never let them act like this is all just everyday politics, that this is all normal. Don’t let them normalize him.

Yes, we should have respect for the Office of President, but when the office is already disrespected by the presence of that man, there’s no reason to hold back. Insist they call lies by their proper title: Lies. Donald Trump is LYING, all the time, and that has to be made clear by mainstream voices.

7. Never Instantly Trust What You Read or Hear

There’s a plague of fake news these days — “real” fake news, not what Trump says is fake news — and we all know it.

For everything you read or see, hold off on conclusions until you can independently verify what you’ve heard. Check Snopes. Check Wikipedia. Check major news sites. Dig down.

Keep a list of fake news sites by your computer.

List of Fake News Sites
Fake News Sites
Fake News Watch

It doesn’t matter if a story gleefully feeds into your anger or disdain for Trump and company. In fact, those are the ones you should instantly suspect of manipulation.

And listen, if the headline contains ONE capitalized word (“GOP Congress STANDS UP to Donald Trump!”), especially if it’s STUNNED, or SHOCKED, that is a bogus goddam story.  It either contains outright lies, or it’s reporting some facts but adding a phony slant to them. Real news sites don’t have all-caps in their headlines.

If you see a political “meme” on your Facebook feed, don’t trust it. ESPECIALLY if it contains no links or attempt at verification of whatever idea it’s attempting to convey. Get back to the person who posted it – tell them to never again post anything without some sort of corroboratory details.

The people who create those things can put in anything they want, and if they’re conveying something factual, you know they were looking at the news story that contained that fact two minutes ago. They could have put in the link to that story, so you could read it for yourself, but THEY CHOSE NOT TO.

Or, you know, they’re just lying. Either way, their goal is not to inform you, but to manipulate you. Because they know you or someone like you is a gullible chump, a wide-mouthed fish ready to swallow any shit they float down the river at you.

Look at the picture attached to those memes and ask yourself why they chose THAT picture. There are a thousand pictures of Hillary Clinton out there with Resting Bitch Face. But there are ten thousand other pics with her smiling, laughing, looking confident and presidential.

(The one exception to this rule: If it’s Mitch McConnell, and he looks like a constipated turtle, that’s just what Mitch McConnell looks like.)

8. Never Lie or Exaggerate, Don’t Share Fake Memes

Having said that, avoid being one of the people OTHER people have to fact-check.

Don’t spread lies. Don’t let others do it.

One of the reasons I deserted the liberal fold and started calling myself a Rational Centrist is because some very large fraction of the stuff projected at us on the left – and shared by us – is manipulative and false.

If I see a video that says “Happy cows shed tears of joy after being rescued from slaughterhouse,” but I happen to know that cows don’t shed tears, my reaction is not “Oh look, happy cows!” I’m more like “Why, you sonofabitch. If you’re lying to me about this, you’re probably lying about the rest of it.” If any part of something you see or read is a lie, there’s no reason to stay for the rest. Genesis taints the whole Bible.

These things are worst when they come from your own allies. If I’m already inclined to agree with you, but you lie to me in order to tweak my emotions, you’re no different from any other emotional manipulator. You have assaulted me, in the same way the right assaults me with its lies.

Besides, if we think we have to lie, we’re admitting our case can’t stand on its own. There’s enough true stuff about Trump that nobody ever needs to lie about him.

Never lie or exaggerate. Check your facts, check your sources. Back up everything you say with links and evidence. Don’t repeat innuendo, smears and falsehoods.

9. Stop Saying 1, 2, and 3

Stop saying “Bernie would have beaten Trump!

No, he wouldn’t. A wild-haired, elderly, Jewish SOCIALIST? They would have eaten him alive. They would have dug up stuff on him, they would have made up stuff about him, the lies would have come so thick and fast it would have made our heads spin. Hell, they made up a story about Hillary being involved in an international child-molesting ring in the basement of a pizza parlor and millions of people found it believable enough to repeat and share. You think there wouldn’t have been a dozen of those stories about Bernie? Plus: “Socialist.” That one word would have poisoned his chances with half of America.

Some large part of the attack on Hillary was that “worst possible interpretation” of everything she ever did. (She dropped her fork in a restaurant? That was so she could bend down and look up another woman’s dress, the lesbian bitch!) Bernie would have been just as susceptible. And the people who believed the worst about Hillary — you know, all those people who voted for Trump, and probably you too? — would have believed the worst about Bernie. As to that bit about the DNC conniving to favor Hillary? —They were working to fulfill their one mission: To choose a candidate with a chance of winning.

Stop saying “They’re stupid.

Yes, it feels good to believe Donald Trump and the leaders of the GOP are complete idiots. But it’s SAFER to believe they know exactly what they’re doing, that most of what they do is part of a plan. Maybe it only looks stupid to you because you have no idea of a deeper strategy – to lie to people DELIBERATELY in order to control and profit from them. You see the surface of the ocean, while all the important stuff happens down deep. And maybe you’re not used to thinking that some people can be consciously and deliberately and happily evil.

As to their followers, they’re pretty much like you and I. The difference is, they’ve been lied to, cheated of the truth, thousands of times, and for decades. They’re no dumber than you or I. Think of them as zoo animals – healthy and smart when in the wild, but now trapped in a cage of manipulative fantasy. But just as with zoo animals, you can feel empathy for them without forgetting they’re dangerous as hell.

Stop saying “Maybe it won’t be that bad.

It’s going to be – ALREADY IS – worse than you can imagine. Refer to items 2 and 3 above. They can’t stop themselves. With both houses of Congress and the White House in their hands, they’re like teenage boys who’ve just gotten the keys to Dad’s Ferrari. They’ve turned the key, they’ve slammed down the accelerator, and they’re about to drive this mother to pieces.

Stop saying “I’m moving to Canada!

First, no you’re not. Second, you might as well be saying “I’m a traitor, and weak besides.” The only people interested in what you’re saying are other weak traitors. No honest citizen, no military veteran, will respect you. People who care about their country don’t flee when the Nazis cross the border. They stay and RESIST.

Some of the brainless sheep might agree with you, but Americans who actually think about stuff are going to say “Leave, you hippie freak! Don’t let the border crossing hit you in the ass on the way out.”

Besides all that, unless you’re a Nobel Prize winner or something, what makes you think Canada wants your lame ass? Hell, you deserted YOUR OWN country.

Stop saying “We’re in a war for America.

No, we’re not in a war. The word “war” presupposes both sides are subject to casualties.

Where will the casualties be in this little adventure? All on one side. If they cut your grandmother’s Social Security and Medicare, she gets to die, cold and sick and broke. If they cancel the insurance of your daughter with the recurring cancer because it’s a pre-existing condition, she gets to die, young and sick and scared.

Meanwhile, all those nice Republican congressmen? They get to live on, safe and free and RICH, grinning like happy monkeys the whole time.

This is not a war. It’s more like Hitler gassing Jews.

It’s only a war if you make it one. It’s only a war if you stop sitting at home muttering “If only, if only, if only,” and instead say “I am so tired of this shit!” And then stand up and DO something. It’s only a war if you go to war.

10. Stop Doing Nothing

If you’re reading here, you’re probably an atheist. Which means you chuckle when you read about nice Christians responding to a catastrophe by praying. Because you know the prayer 1) does nothing, and 2) dissipates honest caring.

Prayer is not just doing nothing, all too often it’s a type of doing nothing that replaces doing something. If there’s a fire down the street, and you fall to your knees and close your eyes, you’re doing NOTHING to save the people in that house. But because you think you’re doing something, you’ll meet any insistence that you come out and help with “But I am! I’m praying for God to save those people!”

For a lot of us, political activism can be the same way. We do a lot of little nothings (look up displacement) that reduce the pressure – we bitch about this stuff to friends, go on at great length about everything that bothers us, possibly with beer on hand to sooth our overworked throats.

But the real thing is to go out and take some sort of action.

Participate in a rally, sign petitions, write letters, start a blog, go to public meetings and speak up, volunteer as a poll watcher or pollworker, get organized, join a campaign to support someone for mayor, or city councilman, or governor, or Congress. Hell, maybe YOU should run.

Don’t stop with writing one letter to the newspaper. That can be just another way of bitching to friends. Consider a letter the bare minimum first step to action, not an action itself.

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Continue to Part 2.

Ten more to come.

The Root of Transcendence

Dan MountainsAs an atheist, you hear it all the time – the in-your-face assertion that Humans are “wired for God.” We believe in gods, we’re told, because it’s natural to us. Because we have something in us that NEEDS a god or gods. Maybe because it carries some evolutionary advantage, so we evolved to have it.

The conclusion, in the mind of any faith-professing Christian, is that we’re this way because there really is a god, or at least some sort of “something bigger out there somewhere” that makes it so. We believe because we need to, because we have to, because to do anything else makes us less viable organisms. Lacking a god-need is an evolutionary dead end.

In how many conversations have I had someone tell me “Well, I don’t necessarily believe in God, but I think there’s something out there. Something beyond anything we know.”? I’ve heard that a LOT. Even people I would otherwise consider full atheists have said such things to me.

I’ve felt that pull myself. I’ve thought many times, “We live our lives on a human stage. Everything we do is for other people. But is that enough? Isn’t there anything … more?”

I actually think there is. But it’s not God or gods or mystical superbeings of any sort. It’s this whole other thing, something real. But it’s something so much a part of us we fail to notice it.

I’ll tell you what I think it might be.

First, here’s me: Atheist. Beyond atheist, in fact. I independently came up with the term “antitheist” to describe myself 20 years or more ago, long before it was in vogue. Rather than the current fashionable pronunciation, “an-tee-THEE-ist,” I pronounced it “an-TITH-ee-ist.” I described it humorously as “Not only do I not believe in gods, but I don’t think you should either.”

But I’m also a realist. You have to face the real world and take what it gives you, even if you don’t like it, even if it flies in the face of things you think you know. So whenever I’m presented with a woo-woo idea, something I know isn’t right as presented, but which nevertheless seems to have some sort of substance to it, rather than dismiss it with “No, despite what it looks like, there’s nothing there,” I have to 1) accept whatever realness it presents, and then 2) see if I can figure out a real-world explanation for it that makes sense.

So do we have a need for gods? Are we wired for that? If not, what is it we DO have? Let’s explore a couple of conceptual trails and see where they lead.

Most of us, when we talk about going hiking in the woods, or camping in the wilderness, talk about it in terms of “going out there.” We live in cities, and we “go out” when we head away from the city into the wilds.

But it’s the other way around, isn’t it? Because cities are NOT our natural environment. Our natural environment is … the natural environment. It’s where we grew up, where we evolved to be. We’re not going OUT when we go to the wilds, we’re going BACK. The only time we go OUT is when we trek from the wilds into a city.

Our home, our real home, is in the woods, on the mountains, in the midst of trees and creeks and blowing wind. It is out in the sun and rain, in the dirt and dust, the pollen and bugs and mud. It’s out where we can stomp around in our bare feet, filling our toes with mud, seeing wild animals and birds and distant valleys, blue sky and fluffy clouds, nights filled with full moons and stars. Where we can taste berries and ripe fruit, where we can smell waterfalls and flowers and our own sweat, but also skunks and even blood and death.

I know you’re thinking all this is some kind of artsy-fartsy poetic allusion, but I’m dead serious. CITIES ARE NOT OUR NATURAL ENVIRONMENT. Cities are alien. Artificial.

They’re not even all that good for us. Yeah, we’re comfortable in our engineered and sanitized ’burbs, but we’ll also eat until we weigh 300 pounds, and then whine that we feel sick all the time. We’ll tolerate noise and pollution and chemically-adulterated foods until it weakens and kills us.

Think about all the animals we’ve invited out of the wilds, bringing them into towns and cities to live with us. Compared to their wild cousins, domestic animals are almost invariably weaker and dumber. More fragile.

Wild animals are generally tougher, stronger, faster and fiercer than our pets and livestock. We’re used to how soft and cuddly kittens and puppies are, but pick up a baby raccoon – which I did, years back – and you’ll be shocked at how hard it is. The little bastards are tough as boiled leather.

Just as our pets are, we humans here in cities are soft. Less robust. And probably a lot dumber than whatever wild cousins we once had.

But there’s a deeper point than that our real home is in the wilds. It’s this: That we’re a part of the world around us – profoundly inseparable from it. We’re no more alive without the world around us than a toe is alive when removed from its foot.

Allow me to argue the point:

Say we wanted to define “human.” We’d probably have a fairly involved description, possibly accompanied by a picture of some individual person, maybe some other animals for comparison. But what we wouldn’t have is a full understanding of what being a human means. Because we never really even think about it.

You’re sitting there right now believing yourself to be a complete individual, a discrete quantity of personness, probably picturing your exterior, your skin, as the boundary between “you” and “everything else.”

But your skin is NOT the boundary. In fact, when you really think about it … well, think about this:

Take a human. Hang a large sign around his neck, “Human.” Have him stand on a stage with no other person around, and take a picture of him. QED, this is a human, right? This is all a human is, all there needs to be. No, because you still haven’t separated him out from a great deal of other stuff.

But take that same human and drop him through a portal that deposited him someplace where he could REALLY be alone – say 50,000 lights years away, out in the space between galaxies. What do you have? A dead person.

We never think about it, but the definition of “human” has this hidden implication – that the human is alive, and that quite a lot goes into that aliveness. We never think about the food and water, the gravity and atmosphere, a solid place to stand, other people around to make life work, other animals and plants, a lot of them, somewhere nearby to eat.

The atmosphere we breathe doesn’t just go in and out of our lungs, it seeps into and out of our skin, penetrating us on a cellular level, maintaining a pressure without which we’d die in seconds. The food and water we consume, and later excrete, forms a flowing river of input and outgo, without which we’d also die in short order. And the thing is, the food and water comes from somewhere, the air comes from somewhere.

So we are linked, bound into, an entire system of processes that extends backward in time and outward in complexity in a way that no end can really be found. The oceans? Part of us. The mountains? Part of us. The rainforest, the arctic, the deserts? Part of us. The clouds, the rain, the snow, the bees, the plants, the rocks, the crustal plates, all part of us.

The sun? Oh, yeah, part of us. BIG part of us.

And WE are part of IT. We don’t just live on Earth, we’re nailed into it, soaking in it, connected to it in a way that allows no separation. Even the International Space Station astronauts can live for only a brief time before they start suffering serious health effects – and they get continuous supplies from Earth.

There is only one way to define “human” without also including all this other stuff – the way that specifies “dead human body.” To have a live human, you have to include everything else … at least as far out as the sun.

We say “we” and we say “I” but those are rhetorical conveniences that have no true reality. The view of ourselves as separate and individual is purely subjective – a view which is fantastically, stunningly, titanically oversimplified from the real situation.

The truth is, our mysterious and powerful “something out there” is the natural world. Yet here we are off in cities, acting in our vast ignorance as if we’re discrete individuals, separate from our larger inclusionary selves.

On some level, I think we know this. We yearn for that larger part of us. We reach for it. We desire to be a part of it, to touch and be touched by it.

But divided from the natural world in cities, ignorant of it, we think the missing “something out there, something larger” is a god, or gods, or some other mystical formulation.

It’s a drastically wrong, tragically misleading answer. But sadly, it’s all most of us can understand or accept.

Donald Trump & The Adaptive Limit

dead endI’ve recently been toying with the idea that each of us has an “adaptive limit.”

The adaptive limit is that point at which growth and change becomes impossible.

Some people are flexible and adaptable for almost their entire lives. They’re the ones who can take on new ideas, new thoughts, new viewpoints, and not get bent out of shape by them. They can hear arguments that don’t agree with their own and calmly consider them. They can be creative, they can change and grow.

Others have a lower adaptive limit. For these people, new or contrary ideas, new conditions, literally cause a stress reaction. The way they avoid that stress — which might be mere discomfort, or might rise into fear that can verge on panic — is to avoid the new idea or situation.

The adaptive limit can change within one’s lifetime. Education — the gaining of new knowledge or skills — can raise it. Conditions that enhance personal empowerment, such as better diet and physical fitness, can raise it. But various other kinds of of stress — illness, injury, aging, emotional trauma, the death of a loved one, fear, even simple poverty — can lower it, temporarily or permanently.

Those who reach or approach their adaptive limit become less able, sometimes unable, to think about new things. They simply reject them. All they can handle is simple, or simplistic, concepts.

That rejection, by the way, can range from simple refusal to think about a thing to violence — an attempt to destroy the new thing, or the person who embodies it.

The thing is, reaching one’s adaptive limit is probably not something you can hold against a person. For instance, I don’t think people voting for Trump are necessarily evil or stupid. It may be (probably is) that they’ve reached their adaptive limits, and simply can’t think about contrary new ideas. They’ve grown comfortable in that Fox News / Teabagger cradle, and can’t even imagine leaving.

One of the things this means is that calling them stupid or evil is actually counterproductive. It stresses them more and causes them to react with even greater stubborn (or even violent) adherence to whatever position they hold.

Another thing is that if you WANT to lower someone’s adaptive limit — in order to make them easier to control or manipulate, for instance — you just need to scare them, to keep them scared and paranoid. You end up with a bunch of people who are neither creative nor thoughtful. People who will take no chances and who, when in doubt, will default to obedience to traditional leaders or beliefs. Willing drones, in other words.

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Side Note 1: Nothing I’ve said above implies that you have to enable whatever sort of destructive effect an adaptive limit victim visits on you. You have to stop them, but it’s because of the destruction rather than because you don’t understand their plight.

Side Note 2: Also by the way, I don’t think Donald Trump’s problem is a low adaptive limit. It’s more that, as a child of vast privilege, he’s grown up with stunted empathy and conscience. In short, he’s a rich asshole.

The Hillary Campaign. No, the OTHER Hillary Campaign.

HitleryAs a lifelong wordsmith, I notice the nuances of language — how the words are used, and the sometimes hidden implications behind them.

So I think you should read this:

The Great American Brainwash: Half a Billion Dollars to Turn the Public against Hillary

For some years now, I’ve watched this thing happening out in full public view, wave after wave of attacks on Hillary Clinton. I figured out eventually that there was something deliberate behind it. I didn’t know who, exactly, was doing it, but I had no doubt there was some one person or conservative group operating a coordinated campaign to — metaphorically — assassinate her.

There were no solid claims to wrongdoing, it was more of a whisper campaign. Accusation after accusation, most of them baseless. But it never stopped, never let up.

And I saw the effects. People I knew very well — even Democrats! — were repeating that Hillary was untrustworthy, deceitful, slick, calculating, over-ambitious, cold. Facts supporting those evaluations were thin on the ground, but it didn’t really seem to matter. Once you believed the STORY, you could link her to ANYTHING. Benghazi, emails, selling U.S. uranium to the Russians, murder, laughing about getting a rapist off. No claim was too absurd, no link too remote. She was Killary, Shrillery, Hitlery. The vicious bitch she was, that was something people just KNEW.

Except *I* didn’t know it. For a while I kept digging for the factual grounding on each new claim, but once I figured out the facts didn’t matter, that the thing wasn’t really even about facts, I flipped around and automatically discounted every new claim and story UNLESS there was some sound corroborative evidence. Which there never was.

The whole thing was like … well, like the girl you might have known in junior high school that everybody said was a stinking slut, but you knew her personally and knew she wasn’t anything like that. But you couldn’t get anyone to actually listen to you, because the very act of defending her made YOU smell bad.

My view of Hillary Clinton is based on quite a number of things, but ONE of those things is the fact that this vicious whisper campaign exists. The second I notice a multi-million-dollar ad campaign, that’s the second I start to trust the product less. The product of “Hillary Clinton — Cold, Calculating, Murderous Bitch” is just not something I’m willing to buy.

In the deepest part of me, I know I can’t trust a product sold through lies and emotional manipulation. If you’re manipulating people with flummery and falsehood, if you’re trying to manipulate ME with fear and rage and paranoia, you are SO not someone I want to listen to.

One last thing I’ve said many times:

Fact 1: The GOP hates Hillary Clinton with a blinding passion.

Fact 2: In the years Hillary has been in the crosshairs, the GOP has controlled the White House or Congress or BOTH for some large fraction of that time.

Fact 3: IF IF IF Hillary had done something illegal — even arguably illegal — she would have been arrested and indicted so fast it would make the Roadrunner’s head spin. Even if the charges were flimsy, she WOULD HAVE BEEN charged. And we all know it.

Fact 4: If she hasn’t been charged with something, with anything, it’s not because the fix is in. Read Fact 2 again — the GOP would have pounced on her like a pit bull on a Christmas ham. —It’s because THERE’S NOTHING THERE.

That goes for all the non-criminal accusations. You think she got those four men killed in Benghazi? Well, you’re wrong, for many reasons. You think she conveyed classified information via email? Wrong again. You think she laughed when she got a rapist off early in her legal career? No. Sold uranium to the Russians? Uh-uh. Had her license to practice law taken away? Nope.

What she is, is this: She’s a woman who’s just about to break through the highest glass ceiling. A lot of people don’t like that, not for any reason of fact, but because she’s a woman who’s just about to break through the highest glass ceiling.

But I happen to like that.

I like it quite a lot.

The fact that she’s qualified, WAY qualified, that doesn’t hurt either.

I’m not voting for her because she’s less horrible than Donald Trump. I’m voting for her because she’s good all on her own.

Beta Culture: Movement Cuckoos

cuckooI’ve said many times that every time atheists put up a billboard or other public display, they should absolutely expect it will be vandalized, and should set up cameras to record the vandals in the act. Anytime we think “billboard,” we should also think “vandalism preparation.”

It’s probably impossible to prevent the vandalism, but we could start a YouTube video collection to argue that nice Christians vandalize atheists’ property about a thousand times more often than evil atheists target Christian properties.

But I really want to talk about something else at the moment. Rather than enemies and backpressure forces outside the atheist movement, I want to talk about enemies WITHIN atheism. Or indeed, within any new organized social movement.

You’re probably aware of the European cuckoo, a “brood parasite” which lays its eggs in the nests of other species of birds. It’s a pretty creepy little bastard, actually. After the cuckoo chick hatches, it shoves the smaller eggs or nestlings out to die, and then obliges the hapless instinct-drive parent birds — which can be a fraction its size — to feed it to adulthood.

I bring it up to make a point about movements, which is this: Every movement or social justice organization which presents any sort of challenge to the status quo — or, indeed, a new idea of any sort — will inevitably end up with cuckoos. Or so I suspect.

The FBI in the J. Edgar Hoover era was notorious for infiltrating all sorts of organizations. The civil rights movement, anti-war protesters, environmental movement, hell even major political parties, had FBI plants within them, gathering information and sometimes actively sabotaging the movement from the inside.

Some years back, I had an extended conversation with an undercover cop, a massively-muscled man covered in tattoos, who’d spent more than two years inside a motorcycle gang. He worked his way into the post of second-in-command, not only gathering incriminating evidence, but assisting in, and even instigating, criminal acts. (The personal price of it, he said, had been damned high, as he necessarily alienated himself from his wife and children, but also because he developed a great deal of sincere liking for the men he would later betray.)

I watched the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement gather momentum and then diminish into apparent insignificance, a progression helped along by people I suspect were cuckoos. At a major demonstration in Washington DC, a drum circle sprang up, an extended effort that did nothing more than vigorously and monotonously bang on drums, but which disrupted and destroyed the thrust of the movement.

I’m not CERTAIN these weren’t all well-meaning drum enthusiasts, there to present their own attention-getting version of protest, but the fact that they could not be moved to stop leads me to think some part of the incursion was deliberately staged. Add in this data point from the linked Gawker article:

Unfortunately there is one individual who is NOT a drummer but who claims to speak for the drummers who has been a deeply disruptive force, attacking the drumming rep during the GA and derailing his proposal, and disrupting the community board meeting, as well as the OWS community relations meeting. She has also created strife and divisions within the POC caucus, calling many members who are not ‘on her side’ “Uncle Tom”, “the 1%”, “Barbie” “not Palestinian enough” “Wall Street politicians” “not black enough” “sell-outs”, etc. People have been documenting her disruptions, and her campaign of misinformation, and instigations. She also has a documented history online of defamatory, divisive and disruptive behavior within the LGBT (esp. transgender) communities. Her disruptions have made it hard to have constructive conversations and productive resolutions to conflicts in a variety of forums in the past several days.

A plant sent there by the FBI/Wall Street/some other government agency? It’s not all that hard to believe, is it? Yes, this is a conspiracy theory, but … conspiracies do exist. If you don’t believe that, in the age of tobacco and petroleum, Fox News and the GOP, you haven’t been paying attention.

Cuckoos don’t necessarily arise from enemy camps. They can spontaneous spring up from within the roll of faithful members, and perhaps completely unintentionally create major rifts in the solidarity of the movement.

The atheist movement was early-on a very friendly club of people discovering the pleasures of freethought and reveling in the newfound freedom to think and express themselves. I was one of those early celebrants, writing and commenting variously in Yahoo chat rooms, on my own GoatOnFire and Hank Fox blogs, on Unscrewing the Inscrutable, in my book Red Neck, Blue Collar, Atheist, and finally on FreeThought Blogs, taking a rather meek place alongside PZ Myers, Ed Brayton and other notables. The excitement of atheist solidarity eventually led to the first Reason Rally, and I never felt so HOME as on that one drizzly day in Washington DC.

And then Atheism-Plus came along. The idea was atheism PLUS social justice causes. I was already working on my concept of Beta Culture, and didn’t immediately jump in, but I was sympathetic at least as far as not offering vocal opposition.

I wanted to believe in it. I disagreed somewhat with atheist purists whose response to Atheism-Plus was pointedly negative, insisting that atheism was this ONE thing — atheism — and nothing else. One FTB blogger responded with the equally pointed “If you’re not with us, you’re against us.” In my view, that statement was the tipping point for creating a major rift within the movement, where we became “these atheists” and “those atheists,” rather than just “atheists.” FTB was suddenly presented with a seeming tidal wave of hate — not from religionists, but from other atheists.

Add in the fact that the major fraction of Atheism-Plus was an aggressive feminism which came to actively target other atheist bloggers — I got to see this from the inside at FTB, and I can tell you it could be nasty as hell (I seem to recall one astonishing declaration that no man should speak or write about feminism unless a woman was present, essentially to check his work!) — and we soon had a situation where you couldn’t be an atheist in good standing unless you were FIRST an ardent feminist. You might agree on every point in the feminist cant, and yet become an enemy with a single “wrong” word. And whoo! They would COME AFTER YOU.

I talked to other bloggers and commenters around the atheist web, and eventually had something like a dozen writers who said they would never again engage with the issue of feminism, because the price of making a mistake — which, again, could hinge on a single, often deliberately-misinterpreted, word — was too high.

Cuckoos. Feminists in the atheist nest, shoving out other atheists. It certainly worked on me! I moved to Patheos and largely stopped reading FTB, because I couldn’t bear all the heat and light of victim-feminism. (I find it interesting that Ed Brayton, one of the founders of FTB, also eventually joined Patheos, possibly for much the same reason I did.)

[ Side Note: Typically, any male blogger who addressed feminism in any even slightly critical way would preface every post with immense protestations of agreement and solidarity with the feminist cause. But I’m not going to do that for two reasons: 1) It never helped. You could be 99.95% in favor of women’s rights, equality, safety and choice, but that 0.05% disagreement would bring attacks which could be literally vicious. And 2) If you don’t know me by now … eh. Go read some other blog. ]

In the end, I think I have to agree with the atheist purists.  Social justice issues, no matter how greatly worth pursuing on their own, dilute and poison the ATHEIST movement when they are shoved in as part of it.

But to conclude with what is really my main point: Too often, those of us working toward progressive social or political goals are naively unprepared for the sophistication of opposition, or even the fact of it. Some level of opposition will likely come from outside, but it can also come from inside and be no less destructive.

But just as with the strategy suggested for atheist billboards (go into it with the absolute expectation of vandalism), every social justice movement should START with the expectation of aggressive, often deceptive, opposition and consider how to deal with it.

Definitely expect opposition from outside, but don’t neglect the possibility of enemies of internal origin — cuckoos — and plan some sort of approach to their potential arrival.

 

When We All Grow Up

adults2Every major change in life — and probably a lot of the minor ones — is accompanied by something I call Turbulence.

New job, turbulence. New baby, turbulence. Loss of a loved one, MAJOR turbulence.

It’s that period of discomfort and confusion that happens between one steady life state and another. Eventually you get used to new conditions of life — the new job is as familiar and comfortable as the old one — but meanwhile, you suffer the bumpy ride of the necessary transition.

I bring up Turbulence because I think we’re in it, society-wide, worldwide, right now. I suppose the people of every era feel their discomforts, but this one is a one-of-a-kind, first-ever-in-history discomfort, the sign of a BIG transition.

I’m thinking about Humanity on Planet Earth, and the changes in store for us, major ones, some of which are already taking place. What will be the end result of those changes? Where are we going?

Up til now it’s like we’ve been living through the human species’ childhood, where we could explore and play and fight and kill and burn and break and do pretty much anything we pleased, without any very serious repercussions. We could reproduce without limit, experiment with weird beliefs, exotic ways of living, silly fantastic ideas, and see what happened. All the while, we were rich enough in room and resources that our failures made only local differences. We could try out this thing and that thing and the other thing, and no matter how much we broke or burned, we could just walk away from the wreckage and try something new.

But there’s that time to come when we won’t be doing that stuff anymore. The time when we will practice restraint and finally become grownups, comfortable with ourselves and with life on Earth, living more or less gracefully and successfully, into the indefinite future.

I don’t say we’re GOING to make it. But if we do, it will be because we did this other thing, and so became able to survive. It’s like our doctor has said “Your heart is laboring, your liver is shot, your cholesterol if through the roof and your diabetes is getting worse. You’re going to lose 100 pounds or you’re going to die in a matter of months. There is no third choice.”

In the only good future imaginable, in the single survivable scenario, we change. Non-change, or half-assed change, will bring either extinction or something few of us today would want to live through.

The in-between time, the turbulence-riddled NOW, is our teen years. We’re still experimenting, playing and fighting and stumbling and living our rich fantasy lives, but with global warming, Peak Oil, so many other real-life realities being forced upon us, we’re discovering we can’t do just anything. Not forever. We’re finding out some things have uncomfortable, even deadly, results, both to ourselves and to the planet. We’re living in the midst of the transition from carefree childhood to … something.

I’m thinking about that “something” — the full adulthood of humanity, hanging out there in some hopefully not-too-distant future.

What will things be like when the human species is all grown up? What will be necessary? What will be necessarily avoided? How will we live? How will we relate to Planet Earth, and each other?

Humanity’s adulthood is a way off, sadly, and none of us will live to see it. It’s going to require generational changes; more than a few generations will be necessary before a critical mass of grownups appears on the world scene. The lot of us are unfortunately stuck back here in adolescence.

Doesn’t mean we can’t speculate. The fine details of that era are impossible to guess at — there will be arts and careers, entertainments, technology, unimaginable to us today — but I think we can predict something of the bigger picture, because some conclusions are pretty much unavoidable.

There’s a lot of stuff we simply can’t afford, or afford to do, anymore. For instance, we won’t be using fossil fuels in that future, because most of them will just be gone. Used up by we human children in a burning, partying, indulgent spree.

And some things, we just have to hope will be a part of the picture, because otherwise, that future won’t be anything those of us today could enjoy.

So here are some of my guesses about what it will mean for us to be sane and successful grownups on Planet Earth.

Population and Energy

First, like I said, we’re going to give up petroleum, and maybe even nuclear energy. Solar’s the way to go. Everything in our adult future will be powered by the sun.

Or yes, some “might be” futury energy source. But having gotten to 2016 with no sign of widely-available flying cars, which I’ve been reading about since the 1950s, I’m not counting on the rescue of out-of-the-blue science-fictiony solutions. I’d love to see fusion power perfected, but a question I’ve asked myself over the years is: What if it’s just not possible? What if it takes an actual star to keep a fusion reaction going? I’d like to see the research continue, but I don’t think it’s something we can count on.

There are going to be a lot fewer of us. Idiot optimists notwithstanding, Planet Earth just can’t support 7 or 8 or 12 billion humans. My guess is that somewhat less than a billion humans, maybe only a few hundred million, can live on the planet without eventually eating it down to bedrock. And why would we want more? If there are resources enough to allow 500 million people to live like royalty, or 12 billion people to live like slaves, cramped and poor, what good argument is there for NOT living comfortably within our means?

The question for me — and I think grownups in the human future — isn’t “Do people have the right to have as many kids as they want?”, it’s “Do children have the right to be born into a family, or a world, that can support them?” Note that I’m not saying some draconian governmental edict will come along and nix human population growth. I’m saying the real world will enforce some sort of solution, either voluntary on the part of Homo Adultus, or involuntary via any of a number of mass die-off scenarios.

There will be fewer of us.  How we get there is up to conscious decisions by us might-be grownups, or due to the already-in-progress default course set by the equivalent of idiot teenagers refusing to accept responsibility in a world of real consequences.

Education and Equality

We have to have full equality of every human, everywhere on the planet. Everyone has to have the right to vote, to medical care, to an education.

Speaking of education, we’re going to stop treating our kids like they’re children, and start treating them as if they’re going to be fellow adults expected to shoulder the load of making the world work. We’re going to give every one of them a full, free education — which we will expect them to actually work at and benefit from — up to and including college or trade school.

Speaking of medical care, we’re going to live a lot longer than we do now. Think about it: What’s the real goal of the field of medicine? To cure everything. Pretty much every disease is going down, and life extension will become a major focus of research. Because what is aging but just another disease? The end result of that research is going to BE life extension. How much? I like to think it would be well into the hundred-and-somethings.

Environment

We’re going to learn to live on Planet Earth without damaging it. Our smaller population will allow us to abandon large areas and allow them to go back to nature. We’ll have a reverence for life, with absolute protection of endangered species with no regard to national borders. Those mountain gorillas, for instance, are not Africa’s mountain gorillas, they’re everybody’s (and nobody’s) mountain gorillas, and we’ll feel they must be protected no matter what.

Society

We’re going to stop tolerating lies. One of the things we haven’t yet understood is that Freedom of Speech has to have this other freedom attached to it, Freedom From Lies. Every person (and corporation) has the right to say whatever they want to say, but that freedom is limited by every OTHER person’s right to hear the truth.

I can lie to you in person and you and I will deal with that privately, but on public airwaves or wires, where millions might hear and be adversely affected by it, there can be no “right” to lie, to incite others to believe falsehoods, and the penalties will be severe.

Lying is a form of pollution, when you think about it. Lies are a poison that destroys human understanding of the truth. It’s like secondhand smoke — when the lies flow over your metaphorical property line and into my life, your right to lie has ended.

(In my view, there is already no right to lie to a child, about any subject or for any reason.)

We’re going to have a common language. English? Probably. Doesn’t mean all the others will go away. Does mean we’re going to talk to each other, all over Earth, in this common language.

We’re going to have a LOT more public transportation, a lot fewer cars. We’re going to spend a LOT less money on wars and weapons.

We’re going to end racism and sexism. Skin color is about the stupidest, most superficial way of judging people, and we — all of us — will eventually realize that. As to sexism, we’ll eliminate the prejudices and limitations based on gender, but we’re also going to accept that men and women each have their own specific needs, and figure that more into the balance.

Our lives are going to be a lot more transparent, but we’re also going to become a lot more comfortable with our own nature and the inevitable foibles which attend it.

We’re going to come to understand that not all cultures and cultural practices are equal. That some are good for human freedom and dignity, some are simply not, and we’re going to abandon the not-goods. Speaking of which:

Religion

We’re going to do away with religion and mysticism. Goodbye Islam — don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out. But also: Goodbye Christianity — don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out. Schools will teach evolution with gusto, and every kid will grow up knowing he’s connected as family to all life on Earth. The idea of the universe being poofed into existence by a great big guy in the sky is going to seem like a fairy tale straight out of the Dark Ages.

We’re going to end genital mutilation of babies. Sorry Jews and Muslims, snip off the end of your own dick if you want, cut out your own clitoris once you’ve achieved the age of choice, but you can’t do that to kids anymore. They don’t BELONG to you, they belong to the adults they will one day become, and it’s that adult — and only that adult — who has the right to choose to make permanent changes to their bodies. You would no more cut healthy body parts off a baby than you would install garish permanent tattoos on their bodies. In both cases, it’s a trespass on THEIR right to choose.

We’re going to stop being ouchy about sex education for young people. Every kid on Earth is going to receive the full, unaltered Handbook of the Human Body in classes taught from kindergarten onward.

Business and Politics

We’re going to push corporations out of the driver’s seat of government. We’re going to end tax evasion by corporations and the wealthy, and the huge income inequality that flows out of corporate culture. In the coming era of transparency — particularly in international banking — I suspect most organized crime is going to go away.

Science and Technology

We’re going to use space, but probably not move into it. The minimum necessary life support system for humans is probably the size of a planet, and we only know of one. We’ll have robots out there, or humans for short periods, but we’re never going to have humans like you and I living on other planets.

Every person on Earth is going to have full, unfettered access to the Internet, and they will carry it around with them.

It’s almost inevitable that we’ll tinker with our own genes, improving ourselves in countless ways and ushering in an age of transhumanism. Not everyone will change, but everyone will have the chance. Overall, average intelligence is going to go up — we’re going to be a lot smarter.

Speaking of intelligence, we’re going to have Artificial Intelligence. It’s not going to be just like us, but one way or another it’s going to exist. It’s also going to be friendly, an intellectual partner rather than some horror-story master or adversary.

How?

I doubt that nations will go away. Local units of government are better at handling local issues. But a worldwide community of individuals — and yes, I’m thinking Beta Culture — who agree that certain things must happen can make those things happen. Not by undercutting government, but by convincing a critical mass of people in each country that certain things — women’s equality, for instance, but also all this other stuff — absolutely must happen.

Here’s hoping.

Beta Culture: Beyond Veterans Day

Salt Day copyI confess to mixed feelings about November 11.

I have a number of fairly conservative friends, and you can count on Veterans Day to kick off a massed booming v0lley of flag-wavery — heartfelt prayers, cheers, and best wishes for the men and women in uniform, those gallant, selfless warriors willing to give their lives for our freedom.

I can never join in with such fervent abandon. I mean, I GET Veterans Day. But still, considering some of the things the U.S. military has done … mixed feelings.

I also have this thing about calling anyone wearing a uniform as a “hero.” My definition of hero is apparently somewhat different from the average American. Here’s a hero:

11-year-old boy pushed sister out of way before being struck, killed by car

La’Darious Wylie was waiting at the school bus stop with his little sister, Sha’Vonta, on Oct. 27 when a car came careening toward them.

That’s when La’Darious pushed his sister out of the way.

She was fine. He died. Here’s this ordinary kid doing something extraordinary. Saving the life of his little sister. Losing his own life in pursuit of it. THAT’s a hero. Not just somebody who wears a uniform. Just my opinion, but …

Cops are not heroes until …
Firemen are not heroes until …
Soldiers are not heroes until …

… Until they DO SOMETHING HEROIC.

I honor the willingness of these people to put themselves in a position of danger. They’re still not automatically heroes.

For many years, I’ve made an effort to interject this point into the flag-waving on Nov. 11: There are plenty of OTHER people responsible for American freedoms and way of life — farmers, mathematicians, suffragettes, civil rights activists, philosophers, writers. Hell, doctors. Plumbers and electricians. Sanitation workers.

[I’ve suggested more than once that a Conscience Memorial would be a perfect addition to the National Mall in Washington DC.  As I’ve said elsewhere, there are scores of huge monuments to war and death in Washington, but not one single memorial to conscience or whistle-blowing or principled resistance. We have difficulty even recognizing that conscience and resistance is heroic, or that it can be braver in some ways than following along with the killing and dying.]

I guess when you get right down to it, I consider Veterans Day justified, but … incomplete. I have no problem with Veterans having their special day, or the rest of us celebrating it. (I do sort of wonder why there also has to be Memorial Day, which is essentially the same holiday.) The problem I have is all those others who deserve a day of recognition but don’t get it.

We have Mothers Day, and that’s fine. We have Fathers Day, and that’s fine (despite the legions of twits who leap in and tearfully demand equal time for single mothers, as if honoring fathers for one day out of the year is somehow an attack on poor neglected single mothers).

I’ve had in mind for all the time I’ve been thinking about Beta Culture that there would be special holidays or occasions indigenous to Beta. Of course the final roll of holidays would be crowd-sourced, but I’ve thought of several I’d toss into the hat.

For instance, Memory Day (NOT Memorial Day) could be one of them — a day to remember and honor departed friends, relatives, loved ones, and beloved pets. We’d get together and share stories, show pictures, or just smile and quietly enjoy refreshing our own warm memories.

But another cultural holiday, something of a counterpoint to Veterans Day (and held in a completely different part of the year — how about a half year later, on May 11?), is a day to honor some of those OTHERS who sacrificed and gave and lived and died to lay the foundations of the modern world. I call it SALT Day.

S-cientists

A-rtists

L-ibrarians

T-eachers

‘S’ honors all those who did and do science, not just the cutting-edge research, but everything short of it. Every tiny bit of modern civilization, we owe, on some level, to scientists.

‘A’ takes in visual artists, musicians, movie-makers, sculptors, dancers, novelists — every person in any field of art. They make life worth living and celebrating.

‘L’ is for librarians. I consider books one of the best things ever invented, libraries one of the cheapest and best things civilization has to offer, and those sterling beings who collect and catalog and treasure all those books in all those libraries to be the true shepherds of civilization.

‘T’ is for teachers, and I doubt I could ever say enough good stuff about them. Teaching is one of the noblest professions on Earth, and every one of us save the utterly ignorant owes a massive debt of gratitude to teachers … which never arrives. So why not include them in a cultural holiday?

Of course there are other people who deserve honors. But these, to me, are some of the most profound and worthy.

SALT Day would be a day to honor, to give gifts, to send cards, to call, to visit, to REMEMBER some of the non-military movers and shakers (pun intended) of civilization.