INTERESTING TIMES

What Clinton's remark broadcasted is how little she thinks of conservatives in general. Her tone was so dismissive ("you name it") as to suggest that every xenophobe on the planet was unworthy of having skin. What she obviously doesn't understand is that we are all conservative at our roots, until these basic feelings are educated out of us, or overridden by culture.  Xenophobes are people too.

It has a lot to do with who we grow up with.  If we grow up in an educated multi-ethnic culture, then ethnicity no longer has such a charge.  But if we are acculturated in a homogenous group, we will feel more comfortable with people of our same kind.  This is the instinctive basis of xenophobia. It is reasonable to be cautious around people whose values are unknown to you, and whose behavior is not predictable.

Xenophobia can be trained in at any stage of life.  I have suffered the hate of the Navajo and Apache when living and traveling in Arizona.  I understand why they hate the white eyes, because I do too, but I personally do not deserve their bad treatment.  Still, I got the bad treatment, and now when I see a tribal member I am on guard.  The same thing has happened to me here in Portland.  I had always liked and respected every Jew I ever met. Then I was mistreated by an attending Jewish doctor who took offense at me saying the words "a Jew" because in her mind she inserted the word "dirty". That word was not in my mind until she explained to me how offensive it was for me to say "a Jew", and then threatened to flunk me, sanctioned me through the college and required that I take cultural competency training. Other Jews near to me have hurt my feelings since then, and I have developed a reaction to Jews that I did not have before, when I lived in Denver next door to the Ashkenazis and thought they were really decent folk.

In spite of all my education and knowing things, I have feelings that are influenced by what happens to me in my life. Does this make me deplorable?

Oh, and all you decent men out there who think that you are not sexist. If you were born and raised in the U.S. you are sexist. Ask any European, male or female. I am a woman. I have never made anywhere near as much money as my partner, in my opinion because he has a penis. Yesterday I drove a vehicle up to a boat inspection station on the highway and the man with the clipboard came up and started asking questions of a man who got out of the passenger door. At the gas station the attendant speaks to the men first. Men here invariably address men first when approaching a couple. This seems like a tiny offense, but compounded into the reality of daily life, a woman knows that this is still a man's world. Clinton knows it all too well. American men, including educated ones, are unconscious of this kind of sexism "lite".  There's no stoning here, but men are not aware of the degree to which they are programmed to be sexist, and should spend more time in introspection around this. I think part of the problem conservatives have with lesbians is the men have no one they can talk to.

I realize I'm making a bunch of generalizations, just like Clinton did. My point is that these base impulses are present in the vast majority of all humanity, and Americans are clearly not above it. Our culture seems to be regressing. In my lifetime I have watched our society and politics become obnoxious. Substantive debate is rare, name calling commonplace. If there is to be a conversation between opposing sides, there must first be respect. Respect is a Universal human need. People denied respect are hostile and possibly subversive.

Liberals in general need to stop denigrating conservatives and dig deep enough into themselves to understand the conservative position. Conservatives need to educate themselves to articulate their concerns and rationales clearly to others. Everyone needs to start with the assumption that the other guys are decent humans just trying to do the right thing, the best way they know how. Then the conversation can begin.

I must mark this moment when my LGBT friends are truly heartened by the change in US law. It brings a tear to my eye. My half-aunt in North Carolina is going to marry her longtime partner on Halloween day. Successful gay parents are gloating. My friends from all walks are sporting rainbows. The culture shift is generational as all large shifts must be.

Yes, yes you lawyers out there will have all manner of refinements to put on my headline. I have not really studied on this change, rather I've absorbed its impact while ignoring the news. It's just not OK anymore for states not to recognize gay marriages. Or something like that. I've heard that a state is still not obligated to PROVIDE gay marriages, but that is another step in a very long series. I've been busy with other things.... but I am noting this vibration through the land that something really has changed... and with it brings a little bit of hope that we might manage other changes.

I'm sure the social conservative media is damning. I need an antenna in that world somehow. (Thinking cult: which cults are most anti-gay?)

That cartoon of the rebel flag setting and rainbow flag rising is everywhere. Show me some fresh art, not so trite already.

In the process of googling various symbols that might be developed into a logo for my medical practice (I was studying on the rod of Aesclepius vs the rampant American confusion with the Caduceus) I ran across a blog that is distinctly American right wing Christian conservative in nature. The image that drew me in was this so-called "Obama Screw-U", which is derived from the Caduceus symbolizing treachery and profiteering:


That was humorous, but not exactly fair or kind. After a bit more surfing I found an article on Leftwing Pathology that posits that left wingers are essentially psychopathic. I will bypass the commentary on this page because in general it is name calling and not productive. But I do see how this is completely true from the conservative perspective.

Conservatism, most basically, is a limbic or mammalian mindedness emphasizing deep emotional connections, visceral aversions, and a strong instinctive sense of rightness vs wrongness. Liberalism is neocortical, involving the ability to weigh conflicting theories and integrate disparate data. To conservatives, liberals are immoral, or even psychopathic because they don't act from their hearts and guts. Liberals think about it, and make decisions based on information. The liberal method doesn't appreciate the power of people's personal attachments and belief systems. It hurts people's feelings. To the liberal, conservatives are dimwits who can't think rationally about anything. Of course the conservatives feel that they are the rational ones, they just consider different things to constitute "information".

It's about as bad as trying to get Israelis and Palestinians to talk to each other.

Conservatives feel a great deal more emotional pain when they are asked to act contrary to their own values. Liberals are expert at rationalizing--or neocorticalizing, if you will. Liberals are capable of acting more like a psychopath and being indifferent to pain both inside and around them.

But there's a spectrum. Some people are nearer the middle between emotional/instinctive/believing and intellectual/rationalizing/skeptical. Some can see both sides. Our limbic systems are intact and we can love deeply and hold values that matter, at the same time that our neocortices are developed enough to see that sometimes fairness that hurts is better in the long run than unfairness that feels safe and good. Maybe we could spend a little more time and energy trying to understand and be human to each other. We may not be able to develop policy that satisfies the deeply held attachments of conservatives, but we can at least acknowledge when the situation calls for deeply painful compromise, and try to be kind. The liberal who can't understand conservatives is more foolish than the conservative that can't understand liberals.

I'm not sure how they figured that I'm "pro-family". Probably because I support Ron Paul. Contrary to their assumption, I am capable of appreciating his positions without being a social conservative. The message behind the cut is stimulated by the Student Nondiscrimination Act which is before congress. They claim that this will be the last straw causing our descent into the vice of promiscuous sex, by way of indoctrinating our youth in "pro-homosexual" values from kindergarten on. I don't know about this being a significant law in the great scope of our cultural slide, but the writer is correct in his panic that all will be lost. What he does not see is that the new thing which arises from the ashes may well be an improvement. My personal position on homosexuality is as follows: May all people love who they love, no matter. Now, on to the ridiculous slant of this email:

Dear pro-family American,

The Radical Homosexuals infiltrating the United States Congress have a plan:
( behind the cut is the text of today's anti-homo spam email )

Here's the actual text of the EO. It looks kind of totalitarian on its surface, and the conservative blogosphere is screaming stuff like Obama seizes control over all food, farms, livestock, farm equipment, fertilizer and food production across America!!! But the Hot Air blog breaks it down relative to the old law, and it appears that the changes are really quite minimal. In the name of National Defense Resources Preparedness an assortment of agencies are authorized to do whatever they need to take over the means of production and supply the military. Which they already were.

I mean, I AM allowed to just go off about what I think, right? That seems to be what the majority of moralizing politicians do these days. It amazes me how surely the devil will assume high moral ground and dictate from it. The adjectives are awesome. Misguided. Dangerous. Wrongheaded. That last one is a particular favorite of mine. Did Shrub invent that word?

But seriously now. People seem to think that if something FEELS right then it is right. What if it feels right and is wrong? What if your gut is misguided? What if your certainty is wrongheaded? When do we begin to resort to intelligent consideration of trends and patterns, not just impressions based on isolated facts?

This is about how search engines such as google and networking sites such as facebook select for us what we will see based on what we have clicked on before. It appears to me that this limits our exposure to novel ideas, and funnels us into thought tunnels, ie dogma. Interestingly, I receive political ads from every direction, perhaps because I have found good candidates on all sides. I click both ways. On many spectrums. I wonder what google and facebook are NOT showing me.

Counterpart to the knee-jerk liberal is the new knee-pad conservative, always groveling before the rich and the powerful.
--Edward Abbey