SOME RAPS ABOUT POLITICS AND ANYTHING
ELSE THAT CAME TO MIND...
Date: Wed, 9 Feb 2000 16:38:00 +0100
To: ______
From: peter webster <[email protected]>
Subject: speaking up
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Sure felt weird to speak up from my feelings yesterday! I'm still tumbling around what I actually did, waiting to see how the pieces of my past and present fit.
My old past was always--or 99% always--that of the outsider. Tolerated, but essentially unimportant. No, no wonder where that came from! But with humor and eager-to-help attitudes and actions, I could find tenuous places where other people would more or less accept me. Conditionally, of course. What a theme that's been in m y life--I can't tell you how many situations I've got into, compelled by that dynamic of wanting to fit in.
so, yesterday when you said, "Oh, nobody reads that stuff you send!" I suddenly felt this big hand of other people's approval pushing against the top of my head, compressing me down into that old kid, again. Only it was so clear what I was going through. A real strong internal voice said, "Dammit, that's not true--people DO read the stuff I send! I've got evidence I'm read and respected."
I've had that voice before: I guess Oofra would say its my guardian angel; Cher would say its a spirit power or Tunkasela, I can call it god, you can call it Maurice or something. It's always a clear voice and objective and insightful. The voice then asked me "What do you want to say about this?" That's when I said "that hurts my feelings, and it isn't true." And that I expect my friends to be able to speak for themselves, rather than appointment someone to do it for them. Pretty impressive for me. And I'm only 62, too!
...On the one side, my own experiences with seronton-affecting meds, brain scans, and recent research into brain activity and chemistry has convinced me that a lot of behavior is controlled by biochemistry. Not all of course.
Some, like fetal alcohol damage, is obvious. The lines of depression running through families, too. There's also, say, the effect of oxygen depletition on brain function: I was thinking of congestive heart failure and emphysema affecting those functions. At the same time, there's the environment--not just pre-natal (like the booze damage), but what kind of whacky scenes we grow up in, how we learn to adapt, to survive. I believe the family scene influences our chemistry too--maybe for life. "Influences" is the word, not "determines".
I think evolutionary strategies come in, too--young dudes jostling with the old ones for dominance, stuff like that. Stress, just the day-to-day stress of modern urban living, not only kills, in chemically maims people. And the social emphasis on non-accountability (like: the reason you aren't popular isn't because you're a jerk, its because you don't buy your clothes at The Gap, or you aren't popular with certain people because you don't match their standards).
And, yeah, that research gets distored by the racists. You bet. While people have been trashing Stephen Jay Gould for some of his writing lately, his book "the Mismeasure of Man" is a solid piece of work on the idiocy of I.Q. testings and how they've been used to justify discrimination- -and ultimately, ethnic cleansing and genocide.
So, where I end up is believing that its all the influences affecting us. I think the biochemical aspect is worth addressing. I'm glad I did, anyhow.
peter
Y2K AND FEAR
(obviously from '99)
I saw something about leap year/y2k panic on the news last night (I got caught between Wishbone and Seinfelt). It seems like another place for folks to focus anxiety. We live in a time that promotes anxiety and the "cures" for it. Race wars: more fears of "others." Crack and street crime: build more prisons. Weapons of mass destruction: go to war. Y2K bug: stock up on water and food--I'm surprised nobody began selling renovated Cold War bomb shelters as Y2K-proof shelters. International terrorism: more surveillance cameras, random searches, and crowd control.
I can vaguely remember back in WW Two, when there were blackout curtains and fears of sabotage everywhere. That anxiety decreased, to be replaced with the 57 varieties of communists working to destroy "our America." A couple of years ago we had the militia threats...All these things do is give people an external locus for their (more or less normal) anxieties, and promise security and safety. These "threats" mystify us with their world-wide implications, and fears of eminent catastrophes. And there are always, always would-be saviours or plans for salvation that end up making people more afraid and more dependent on outside solutions.
And they give people jobs: money. Prison is such a growth industry that dozens of community colleges and proprietary "institutes" have classes in how to be guards (oh, grand, more people watching other people--yeah!) More security companies, more places selling survival supplies, more money for defense and domestic espionage--and if the threats go away? Well, a lot of people would be out of work and we can't have that, can we?
America's god can't have people feeling safe or content. Or having any real faith or spiritual connections.
Grumble. Much healthier to build snowpeople and talk to the trees.
