Cartoon of the Day: Change

This pretty much says it all:

The really big picture: A Re-balancing

Watching the white male patriarchy lash out in its death throes and the chaos we're seeing as people around the globe stand up for their independence, I can't help but think that we're living through an epochal era of change when the yin is finally emerging to re-balance the yang.

This is not one of those things that concludes over a news cycle, an election or perhaps even a generation. But the tectonic plates are shifting and the struggle is underway. We don't know the outcome, but I suggest that its important to see what's happening and seize the moment.

Gratitude as the antidote to what ails us

On this day dedicated to thanksgiving, I'd like to resurrect something written a few years ago by Nezua at The Unapologetic Mexican. The entire post doesn't seem to be available online anymore, so we'll have to make due with some excerpts I've used before.

To summarize, Nezua was looking for the common roots of the various "isms" the divide us.

I prefer not to dally too long dissecting the symptoms of manifested underlying ills, but prefer to look directly at those broad reaching paradigms or beliefs that inform them...Because if we all are truly interested in forming an ongoing conversation that cuts away the the husk of empty discourse and scoops out the Essential, we have to look not only at the symptoms of hate, violence, authoritarian rule, and oppression, but at the seeds that inform them and keep them entrenched, as well as socially acceptable. These vines are by now thorny and tangled and hearty, but the seeds were planted long ago, and the nourishment is delivered by all of us, and every day.

He finds those roots here:

... it seems to me that entitlement is key to nearly all atrocities, and that any threat to perceived entitlement will provoke hatred.

Entitlement is simply another way of talking about white male heterosexual privilege...those with the privilege are entitled to their central focus in our culture while the experience and perceptions of "others" are simply dismissed.

And so, what is the antidote? Gratitude.

And after all, what happens when we remove that sense of entitlement?

We grow humility.

What happens when you nurture a sense of humility in place of entitlement? You place your feet on the same ground as I...Entitlement is the antithesis of gratitude. And honestly, you are one lucky human.

Those of us with privilege often struggle with what to do with it. One response that doesn't do much to change things is that we feel guilty. It seems counter-intuitive to feel gratitude. But as Nezua points out - authentic gratitude is the opposite of entitlement. Recognizing that we have something we didn't earn strips away the assumption that we are entitled to it and opens the door for humility...and gratitude.

And honestly, I'm one lucky human.

Arrow's Story (reprised)

I feel deeply for the President as he struggles with our response to the situation in Syria. There don't seem to be any "good" answers to that question (including doing nothing). If I  was the praying type, I'd be asking God to give him wisdom and let him know that we recognize the burdens he has to bear in making this kind of call on our behalf.

In the meantime, in honor of the good people of Syria, I'm going to reprise a diary I wrote over 2 years ago - with a few adjustments.

Over the last week or so when people talk about our involvement in Libya Syria, a comparison is often made to our intervention in Bosnia. How valid that comparison is will have to be the topic for someone else. Because bringing up Bosnia always reminds me of one of the most beautiful books I've ever read, The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway. It is a fictionalized account of 4 people's lives during the Siege of Sarajevo, which went on from 1992 to 1996...

As Galloway tells us in the afterword of the book, it is based on a true story of something that happened during the siege.

At four o'clock in the afternoon of May 17, 1992, during the Siege of Sarajevo, several mortar shells struck a group of people waiting to buy bread behind the market on Vase Miskina. Twenty-two people were killed and at least seventy were wounded. For the next twenty-two days Vedran Smailovic, a renonwned local cellist, played Albinoni's Adagio in G Minor at the site in honor of the dead. His actions inspired this novel.

One of the characters portrayed in the book is a woman who's pseudonym during the siege is "Arrow" because she is hired by the government forces as a sniper to fire back at the enemy in the hills conducting the siege. She explains that she has adopted the pseudonym while she does this in order to draw a definitive line between the person she was before and the person she has become in hopes that someday she can return.

Here is one of our first introductions to Arrow.

Ten years ago, when she was eighteen and was not called Arrow, she borrowed her father's car and drove to the countryside to visit friends. It was a bright, clear day, and the car felt alive to her, as though the way she and the car moved together was a sort of destiny, and everything was happening exactly as it ought to. As she rounded the corner one of her favorite songs came on the radio, and sunlight filtered through the trees the way it does with lace curtains, reminding her of her grandmother, and tears began to slide down her cheeks. Not for her grandmother, who was then still very much among the living, but because she felt an enveloping happiness to be alive, a joy made stronger by the certainty that someday it would all come to an end. It overwhelmed her, made her pull the car to the side of the road. Afterward she felt a little foolish, and never spoke to anyone about it.

Now, however, she knows she wasn't being foolish. She realizes that for no particular reason she stumbled into the core of what it is to be human. It's a rare gift to understand that your life is wondrous, and that it won't last forever.

So when Arrow pulls the trigger and ends the life of one of the soldiers in her sights, she'll do so not because she wants him dead, although she can't deny that she does, but because the soldiers have robbed her and almost everyone else in the city of this gift. That life will end has become so self-evident it's lost all meaning. But worse, for Arrow, is the damage done to the distance between what she knows and what she believes. For although she knows her tears that day were not the ridiculous sentimentality of a teenage girl, she doesn't really believe it.

And so, Arrow learns what it means to hate. Here are her thoughts as she watches some girls who leave flowers for the cellist.

Arrow wonders about the two girls who laid flowers in front of the cellist. Do they hate the men on the hills as much as she does? Do they hate them for being murderous bastards, killers without remorse? She hopes not. That's too easy. If they hate the men on the hills, then they are forced to hate her too. She kills just the same as they do. On days like today when she doesn't kill, she feels a loss that reveals a hostility within her that goes deeper than the lack of remorse. It's almost a lust.

But the cellist finally breaks through Arrow's hatred.

Arrow let the slow pulse of the vibrating strings flood into her. She felt the lament raise a lump in her throat, fought back tears. She inhaled sharp and fast. Her eyes watered, and the notes ascended the scale. The men on the hills, the men in the city, herself, none of them had the right to do the things they'd done. It had never happened. It could not have happened. But she knew these notes. They had become a part of her. They told her that everything had happened exactly as she knew it had, and that nothing could be done about it. No grief or rage or noble act could undo it. But it could all have been stopped. It was possible. The men on the hills didn't have to be murderers. The men in the city didn't have to lower themselves to fight their attackers. She didn't have to be filled with hatred. The music demanded that she remember this, that she know to a certainty that the world still held the capacity for goodness. The notes were proof of that.

My prayer for the people of Libya Syria is that, in the midst of all of this madness...they have a cellist.

Avoiding the poutrage

Chris Mooney explains:

...when we think we’re reasoning, we may instead be rationalizing. Or to use an analogy offered by University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt: We may think we’re being scientists, but we’re actually being lawyers. Our “reasoning” is a means to a predetermined end—winning our “case”—and is shot through with biases. They include “confirmation bias,” in which we give greater heed to evidence and arguments that bolster our beliefs, and “disconfirmation bias,” in which we expend disproportionate energy trying to debunk or refute views and arguments that we find uncongenial.

Liberals like to illustrate this by pointing to conservatives who are climate change deniers in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence. But this particular quote from Mooney's description can't help but remind us of certain lawyers-turned-ideologues on the left who demonstrate their capacity for what he calls motivated reasoning. If those ideologues close themselves off from challenges (ie, block people who disagree with them or attack them personally rather than engage their arguments), that kind of "reasoning" leads to what Julian Sanchez calls epistemic closure.

But before we get up on our high horse about this, its important to remember that this isn't something that only affects "those people." We all do it to some extent...it is the human condition.

The theory of motivated reasoning builds on a key insight of modern neuroscience: Reasoning is actually suffused with emotion (or what researchers often call “affect”). Not only are the two inseparable, but our positive or negative feelings about people, things, and ideas arise much more rapidly than our conscious thoughts, in a matter of milliseconds—fast enough to detect with an EEG device, but long before we’re aware of it. That shouldn’t be surprising: Evolution required us to react very quickly to stimuli in our environment. It’s a “basic human survival skill,” explains political scientist Arthur Lupia of the University of Michigan. We push threatening information away; we pull friendly information close. We apply fight-or-flight reflexes not only to predators, but to data itself.

The truth is, the only way we can ensure that we're fighting off motivated reasoning is to recognize that its our natural instinct and work against it by choosing to expose ourselves to "threatening information" and allowing the questions to surface.

One of the sure "tells" that someone is trying to engage you in motivated reasoning is if they are always attempting to gin up your emotional response - its why the term "poutrage"was invented. And its exactly why so many people on the left react negatively to "no drama Obama." Unfortunately, that seems to be what a lot of our new media excels at doing.

Don't get me wrong, anger and passion are essential tools in motivating people to change...they help us identify the problems. But they are not much use when it comes to reasoning out solutions. As a matter of fact, they often disguise themselves as reasoning and lead us to what Stephen Colbert so prophetically called truthiness.

Whenever I think about this I go back to something Nezua wrote a few years ago about the dangers of being sure.

...life is not like a series of books in a course on anything. It fluctuates. We fluctuate. We are not a being, but a becoming, as Friedrich once said. And sometimes ideas are hammered out and we draw lines and walls and are told we fall on one side or the other and so do our thoughts and so does all that follows from them...and so it goes. We buy into these illusory borders, too...

I am far more comfortable navigating the in-between than I am in any Place. I like no thing as much as the coming and going from one to another. It is on the purpling beaches of dusk and the roseing gauze of dawn that my true eye shines lidless and I see so much more than in broad daylight. In the falling away of my tired husk I remember my shape can only be held temporarily. And to cling too tightly to it is to rot.

Being sure is but the borderwall we place around a heart to ward off the skinstripping wind of the next living moment.