People who believe their opinions are important: "You should be outraged about what is going on (whereever). You should be angry. You should feel guilty for having a comfortable life. You need to pay attention in detail to every news story out there!"
And then I wander over somewhere like CPAAG, and I "say" something funny that makes someone laugh, and they go, "Thanks for making my day better." Or I look at cute pictures of ponies (real or cartoon) and feel happier. Or I attend to my own work, because perhaps on some level what I do helps people.
I don't know that going around bowed down and feeling bad about the state of the world does anyone any good. I know when I'm paralyzed - and it can happen - by the awfulness some people seem capable of, I'm less effective in my job. And when I am giving too much brainspace to trying to sort through all the talk on all sides of something and to push aside what can be marked "vitriol" and winnow out what is actually meaning and might be used to change things....well, it uses time I need to spend on other things. And brainpower, which in my case is not great this time of year what with allergies and the impending end of the semester. (I'm still kind of exhausted from Monday and Tuesday's grading marathon. Grading is hard brain-work but it's also hard emotion-work, when there's someone you've been pulling for all semester and they don't earn as good a grade as you hoped. (And yes, I give them what they legitimately earned, even as much as I am disappointed they won't QUITE make a B, or whatever. Because my sense of ethics is stronger than my sense of wanting someone to have a nice letter on their transcript)
Anyway, my response to the "You need to listen up and you need to be both upset over the state of the world and guilty over the fact that you've had a fairly easy path" is "I just want to go cultivate my garden."
Yes, I'm aware the world is in a mess. It's probably been in a mess since (depending on your interpretation) humans dropped down out of the trees and started roaming around in bands, or Eve listened to what the serpent had to say.* It's probably going to be a mess until the last human has breathed his or her last breath. My being upset and outraged and sad doesn't fix it, and what little I can actually do to fix things, I'm already trying to do. (And that's part of my frustration, that some people assume we're all sitting on our hands - it's similar to the frustration I feel at the health reporting where they talk about "just give up ONE SODA a day and you'll lose weight!" Um, I don't drink any sodas a day currently....so what else are you expecting me to give up?)
(*I will also observe, just in passing, that regardless of which of these you believe, another conclusion you can draw is that we are all related in some way, and therefore aren't that different from one another. I get tired of the "othering".)
I guess what I'm saying here is: if I see a practical solution, where I can go in and get my hands dirty, so to speak, and solve a problem or partially solve it or even throw a tiny pebble in the well (like donating money to Nepal relief), I'll do it. But there's a point where sitting around wringing one's hands and listening to the angry commentators from whatever or all sides is just....well, it's not practical. All it does is make me feel less charitably towards my fellow humans, because if you watch the news too much, you begin to suspect everyone is lurking around just waiting to (figuratively or literally) stick a knife in your back, and I don't like feeling that way.
(There have been a few high-profile local cases of late where someone abused someone else's trust, and the person whose trust was abused, in a couple cases, wound up dying)
I can't fix things. But I'm also not going to feel guilty because I can't. You shouldn't feel guilty, I think, about "can'ts." It's "won'ts" that are the problem - if someone close to you would benefit from your help** and you won't help them, that's a problem. But can't? I can't fly, I shouldn't feel guilty about that. I can't write three NSF grants in the coming six months - time does not permit, logistics do not permit. However, if a student comes to my office and needs me to explain something from the class material, and I won't do it - then I should feel guilty about that.
(**As opposed to someone you would merely be enabling. Sometimes tough love is the kind of love you need to give out)
I don't know. Part of this burst of omphaloskepsis is that I haven't been knitting as much lately - part of it is pressures at work, part of it is giving in to the siren call of the Internet in the evenings, part of it may be I REALLY need to get in to the eye doc and get fitted for bifocals (yeah, my near focus has really tanked in the past six or so months). I feel like my knitting readers have probably left me because I talk about knitting so little any more.
Also it seems like the loud angry voices just keep getting louder. Or the people who swoop in on twitter, drop off some brief statement that fails to catch much of the nuance of a situation, and then swoop off.
(Hm. Swoops in, makes a dropping, and swoops off? Maybe Twitter is aptly named)
I think part of the problem is that I see almost every real problem*** people face as being complex and multifaceted, and slogans or exhortations or pointing just one finger of blame isn't going to fix anything.
(*** As opposed to simple problems like "The computer in room 205 isn't talking to the projector" that can often be fixed by someone with the appropriate knowledge of the situation)
I don't know. I'm very close to blanket-fort time, or if not a literal blanket-fort, a figurative one, where I figure out how to block channels on my cable system and I block all the news channels and only allow in the cartoon and cooking channels and channels like TCM.....
Also, the "you should feel guilty because you had an easier path in life than some" insinuation bugs me ever so slightly - the pouty adolescent in me wants to roll her eyes and say, "I didn't ASK to be born into that family" and literally, that's true: life isn't fair and the family you get is a crapshoot. I happened to get uncommonly lucky. But just as I can't congratulate myself over having "picked" good parents, neither do I think I should feel personally guilty that other people may have had it rougher than I did. I should feel GRATEFUL for what I had in life, and I do, but.....again with the feeling guilt over things I have no control over, that seems kind of counterproductive. (And yes, maybe those of us with an easier path have an obligation in some way to help those who are in difficulty....but I try to. At least on the level I can. And "can" includes taking things like my extreme introversion and somewhat-social-anxiety into account, so for example, going in and doing literacy tutoring in the schools is something that really wouldn't work for me....)
Also, this morning, I remember something Chappy used to say, when people would ask her, "Where was God in [event x]" (like, the September 11 attacks). And she would respond, "God wasn't in the disaster that happened; God was in the people who came after the disaster and tried to make things better." The acknowledgement that sometimes things that are bad that happen, we don't know why, maybe that it's a fallen world, maybe it's that people have free will and choose to do bad things, maybe it's just how the rules of nature work (for things like earthquakes). But people can show their love by, I don't know, going out and standing between police and protestors and reminding both groups, "Don't start anything and there won't be anything" (like some clergypeople and men that I would think of as "elders of the community" did in Baltimore) or seeing that relief workers get water or.....any of a million things.
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