Originally published at Am I the Only One Dancing?. Please leave any comments there.
Turkey, despite all rumors to the contrary, is not essential to Thanksgiving, even in the US. Blasphemy, right? Thanksgiving is a harvest festival, and of course the fruits of harvest are important to the festival, but it is more than that. The essential Thanksgiving doesn’t require particular foods or table settings, but these ideals.
Originally published at Am I the Only One Dancing?. Please leave any comments there.
This little video has a catchy tune and an important message: Don’t do dumb stuff that will kill you.
For many years, an unofficial competition has raged, the Darwin Awards. At the link you will find over 400 documented cases of ‘What the f*ck was he/she thinking” for which we will never know the answer because the person died.
There’s a tendency to a great deal of schadenfreude in these cases, and to some extent, rightly so. When a person has spent his life fighting helmet laws and dies from a head injury after a car wreck it’s funny, right?
Except that it’s not. And deep down we know it, and that’s why we laugh. To err is human. “Man is the animal that laughs at himself” as Valentine Michael Smith said (via Robert Heinlein). And we laugh at ourselves because it hurts so bad. So yeah. Sometimes we abandon compassion, for a moment, because the ultimate human moment is to laugh at death, and the many, many ways we bring it on.
And then, we get back to shared joy and shared pain. We continue to try to improve our lives and the lives of others around us. We abandon judgment and embrace compassion. We seek knowledge. And still, we get it wrong. To err is human, remember?
As Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) said:
Mark Twain (from Facebook meme, originally from an image in public domain)
People believe a lot of untrue things, sometimes as many (to misquote the White Queen) as three before breakfast.
I’m sometimes guilty of that myself. But my challenge for myself, over the next several years, is to use my compassion and my ability to write to help people distinguish between useful knowledge and ‘knowledge’ that causes problems for people by preventing them from investigating further, which is perhaps one of the best definitions of truth.
The Darwin Awards (film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Back to the Darwin awards. There are lots of dumb ways to die. We invent more every day. It’s entirely possible that you or I might succumb to one of those. More importantly, however, there are a lot of dumb ways to live, ways that hurt us and the people around us, and we don’t have a nifty internet meme to identify them and point and laugh.
Maybe instead we shoule be looking for ways to teach, to share, and to help people, rather than laughing and judging. So yeah, go ahead and laugh. The video, especially, is adorable. And then…
Maybe its time to start identifying ways to live better, and to keep on spreading joy until there’s no room for the sort of fear and hate that keep infecting the world. Or as Lennon said, ‘Give peace a chance’.
Originally published at Am I the Only One Dancing?. Please leave any comments there.
 |
| Posing with ‘Tommy’ at the Kansas City Zoo |
Every now and again I’m startled when I’m out in public with one of my sons, who quite naturally (in my eyes) are polite and thoughtful and show interest in and respect for other people. When whichever son I’m with is out of hearing, suddenly a clerk or a fellow shopper or someone else at the event approaches me and asks how I did it.
How I did what?
Originally published at Am I the Only One Dancing?. Please leave any comments there.
 |
| daisies by countryboy1949 at flickr |
reads almost more as a memoir than a self-help book, which I think is part of its charm. It gives you an intimate portrait of Rubin’s attempts to find deeper and broader happiness within the context of her life, and her ongoing and daily struggles with integrating what she was learning.Originally published at Am I the Only One Dancing?. Please leave any comments there.
The author of this response, Beau Sia, has posted an excellent performance piece on the basic concepts of privilege and prejudice, in the voice of Alexandra Wallace of UCLA, without mocking her for being female, or for having large breasts. It is very refreshing to see a response that doesn’t rely on misogyny. Watch the whole piece.
His piece does not only apply to Asians in the library, but to young Black men at the grocery store, or women at the construction site, or Muslims at the high school. This is a fundamental bit of education, done in an entertaining fashion, that applies to the concept of privilege more broadly than the original prompt. Beau Sia’s YouTube bio lists him as an Oklahoman who currently lives in New York City and is a slam poet, whose parents are Chinese immigrants from the Philippines.
This also goes back to the series that Chally at Feministe is doing about origins, titled Where Are You From (parts 1, 2, 3 and 4), and who really belongs someplace. I am a Caucasian American, and most places I’ve been, I felt like I belonged, with one exception. In the deep south, when visiting, I was clearly a Yankee, and it was made clear to me that if I lived the rest of my life there, I would never belong.
Beau Sia makes a poignant case (as does the Feministe series) that many, many Americans never have the experience that I have, that I am automatically accepted as belonging. In some cases, as in the ever increasing hysteria on the Right regarding Hispanic Immigrants and Muslims, the ‘not belonging’ of it all is vicious hostility.
This has been perennially an issue for African Americans and women, two groups (among others) that wake up every day with the sure knowledge (conscious or unconscious) that the world they live in wasn’t built for them and doesn’t reflect their values.
Unconscious privilege is an insidious trap, and it is easy to get caught in it. This makes Daniel Jose Older’s piece “Beyond Manning Up”, in Racialicious all the more astounding. As an EMT, Older describes the process he went through as he realized, slowly and gradually, how normal violence against women is in our society, how utterly banal.
He compares the stages of understanding privilege to the stages of grief, and it is an apt description. When you have been raised to believe in a “level playing field”, which is a truly wonderful ideal, to allow yourself to stop believing that it exists is a deep loss. He rightfully concludes, however, that getting to the final stage, understanding, is only the beginning.
I can only hope that Miss Alexandra Wallace at UCLA learns a similar lesson, and that the rest of us can take something from her example, the fine response of Beau Sia, the series by Chally at Feministe, and the excellent article by Daniel Jose Older.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
branchandroot
