What Kind Of Person Are You?

What kind of person are you?

If you say you’re not a racist or homophobic, would you hang out with people who are? Would you just sit by and listen to them say racist stuff, and talk about how other races are inferior or support genocide? Would you be fine with them talking about how gay or trans people are an affront to God, or disgusting and amoral, or advocate denying them their rights? Would you be okay with people you call friends if they were advocating violence against people based on race or their sexual preferences? Would you tolerate this kind of behavior from people you know?

If you saw one of your male friends sexually harass or sexually assault a woman, or hit a woman, would you defend the woman, or just turn a blind eye? If your friends talk derogatorily about women all the time, would you speak up? Would you stop them from hitting their wife or girlfriend if you saw it happening? How about if it they were doing any of these things to your daughter, or sister, or mother? Would it really make a difference to you exactly who the woman was in relation to you, or would you stick up for all women?

If you saw a bully beating up or harassing a small child, would you intervene? If you saw anyone picking on and attacking someone weaker than them, would you speak up? If you saw someone mocking a handicapped person, would you step in? If you saw an adult mistreating children, submitting them to cruelty or neglect, would you try to stop it? Would you stand up to abusive bullies, or would you join in?

If you saw someone kicking a dog or torturing a wild animal, or throwing harmful waste into the water supply, would you just stand by and watch? If you saw someone you know throw their trash into the street everyday, or pour antifreeze on the ground to poison any animal who happened to walk through it, would you just let them do it? Would you be friends with someone who loved hunting exotic and endangered animals for sport, and who proudly posed with their trophies of dead giraffes and elephants and rhinos?

If you knew someone pretended to be your friend, but who constantly sided with your enemies and people who wanted to do you harm, would you remain friends with them? If they broke into your house, stole your money, or trashed your reputation, or helped the people who wanted to hurt you, would you ever have them in your house again? Would you help them by unlocking your front door, and by giving them more of your secrets to tell others who want to bring you down, or would you cut them off, and file charges? Would you even put up with someone who simply throws you under the bus every chance they get? Would you remain friends with someone who has no loyalty to you whatsoever?

If someone close to you, be it a friend or a love interest, lied to you constantly, would you have enough self respect to call them on it? Would you have the self esteem to walk away from someone who habitually lies to you about important things, who is selfish and controlling and treats you like you’re garbage? Do you think enough of yourself to demand that the people in your life treat you with respect, and not treat you like you’re some kind of worthless idiot? Would you be smart enough to see when someone is using you, and strong enough to call them out, or leave them when they are?

Here’s the thing: If you support Trump, or today’s Republican party, you are aligning yourself with all the wrong answers to any of those questions. You obviously know what the right answer to all those questions are, but even if you answer them all correctly, and then you turn around and support Trump, you are lying, to the world and to yourself.
Our president is a racist, a homophobe, a misogynist, and a bully. He is a liar, of epic proportions. He mocks everyone, including his base. He is corrupt, and abuses his power and position every chance he gets. He is a traitor. He is a thief. He is insecure and petty. He is a sexual abuser, and in all likelihood a rapist. His administration is putting children in cages, in concentration camps. His administration is rolling back every protection for the environment and for animals that they can. He is making it easier to hunt endangered species and bring back trophies, and to murder wolves, and allow more cruelty in the meat industry. His policies are accelerating climate change. He is cruel, and full of anger and hate. He cannot be trusted in the slightest, in any situation. He will turn on anyone if he thinks it will get him out of trouble. He has no loyalty to his friends, this country, or anyone but himself. He’s monumentally dumb, he can barely form a coherent sentence.
If you are any kind of decent human being, with any brains and self respect, he is no one you would allow anywhere near you or your family. He should repulse you. He should make your stomach turn.
But yet you support him, and you support every wrong answer to important questions that you can easily figure out what the right answer should be.
So there’s the real question: What kind of person are you?

Revolution

If the Sandy Hook shooting where 20 children were shot and killed didn’t change gun laws in America, nothing will.

If videos of black people being murdered by police officers doesn’t even result in convictions for the murderers, nothing is going to change the way the police conduct themselves, and nothing is going to convince racists that there is a problem.

If the Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein cases, and a whole bunch of other high profile sexual assault and discrimination incidents don’t convince misogynists that there is a problem, nothing is going to.

If the staggering poverty and gross and unfair wealth distribution, the limited access to basic human rights, the horrible treatment of the poor and minorities, as well as the middle class, doesn’t make our leaders and richest people do something, You’re not going to be able to broach their selfish ways.

If all the videos of animals being tortured and treated inhumanely, and all the deregulation and abolishment of environmental protections and climate change doesn’t upset or alarm people, posting facts and statistics isn’t going to do it.

If bombing abortion clinics and shooting up gay nightclubs and suicides from persecution and denying civil rights based on sexual orientation doesn’t convince fanatical evangelicals that their views are wrong and hurting people, nothing you say or do will alter their faith.

If all the corrupt and horrible things Trump says and does, and all his terrible policies and executive orders don’t make his supporters realize that he’s a horrible human being and destroying America, nothing is going to change their minds.

The point is, it’s probably time to stop worrying about changing these people’s minds, and get the revolution started already. We keep coming up with clever and reasonable arguments to illustrate the logical and rational points to people who don’t want to see them, and nothing we do is going to make them consider any of it. How many generations is civilization going to go on being held back because no one can be bothered to grab some pitchforks and get their hands bloody? You wonder why the people in charge don’t fear us? Would you be afraid of us? We can’t even stop fighting amongst ourselves and come up with a candidate we can agree on. No wonder a lot of conservatives view liberals as weak and ineffectual, and think the label is embarrassing. There comes a point where you have to make a stand.
Revolution might be the only way.

Give And Take

There are two types of people in the world, takers and givers. In a perfect world, people would be equal parts of each. Some people are, but not nearly as many as it would take to get the world to run smoothly and for half the population to stop thinking the other half a bunch of assholes.
Being one or the other doesn’t necessarily make you selfish or a pushover, but people today can’t seem to do anything in moderation. We are polarized, and everything in life increasingly seems to come down to two choices, and no wiggle room in between. We seem to have lost the time or patience for all the nuances of life. You get to be one thing or the other, that’s it, so here we are with your choices for today: giver and taker.
The weird thing is, as soon as you are established as one or the other, you take to that role with a vengeance. Once someone has defined you as a giver, that’s all they see you as. Once you define yourself as a giver, that’s how you see yourself as well. It becomes who you are. You feel a need to help care for everyone except you. You put other’s needs in front of your own. You tend to devalue yourself without even seeing it, because you are fulfilling a role. Eventually, you might even get your sense of self worth twisted up in caring for everyone, and you are spreading yourself too thin in an effort to get everyone to see you as you see yourself, and like you at the expense of your self image. Like I said, we take to our roles with a vengeance.
The problem is, once you are a giver, you usually wind up with a taker. The thing about takers is that most of them are completely unaware that they are takers. They might not have started out that way. They might have had that same hesitation and guilt we feel when people present us with the easy way out at one point, but they soon learn to ignore that. They develop the attitude that if someone is offering to do it, why not just let them, and there is always going to be a giver around to do it.
Once you are in these giver/taker relationships, you really settle in to your roles. The givers usually wind up putting their wants and needs on hold to serve the takers, and they convince themselves that they are happy to do it. In some sense, they are. They get their self esteem from feeling needed, so the more the better. They often become enablers, serving their takers and making it easier for the taker to become complacent and lazy, or to sink into their addictions more, or become more abusive and entitled. No one wins.
What’s kind of strange for a giver is that while your relationships with your spouse or partner, and your family, usually falls into the whole giver/taker mess, your close friends are usually givers as well. Perhaps it’s because you commiserate with them. It’s a frustrating way to live though, for a number of reasons.
First off, you can clearly see from the outside that they are being taken advantage of, even when you can’t see it in your own life. It’s frustrating because givers don’t take, they give, so they don’t want your help. That goes against everything they are. They are the helpers, they are the caregivers, and asking for help themselves seems like poison to them. Givers often get to the point where they cannot even take a compliment, because they have gotten so caught up in their role that even a kind word feels like they are taking more than they deserve. They derive no pleasure from it; in fact, it almost seems insulting to ask them to take even a tiny thing like that. That is not who they are. So when two givers get together, they will constantly try to care for each other, but neither will slip into the taker role, so everything eventually becomes a log jam.
It is also a problem when givers get together because it holds up a mirror to themselves, and on some levels they resent the other person showing them that they are basically a servant to an entitled master. They can only point out the problems in another giver’s life for so long before they start to notice the parallels in their own.
The ironic thing is, takers turn their children into givers, while givers often turn their children into takers. The role you give to your child will usually define them for the rest of their lives, so be careful. It is kind of unavoidable, though. Give your child too much, and they will think that’s how the world works, and they become entitled. Make your child jump through hoops or saddle them with too much responsibility, and they think that’s how you earn love. Parents are usually so entrenched in their own roles by the time kids come along that they don’t even know that they are doing it.
In that way, takers aren’t always simply selfish or bad, they just came up with the opposite idea. Someone being subservient and attentive to them seems like love, so they think that’s how it should be. They often don’t figure out that they are not providing that for the person they are with, but why should they? The system works, the giver feels like they are fulfilling their role in the relationship, so what’s the problem?
Givers aren’t all innocent themselves. Many times, they look for relationships with takers because they feel it gives them some control. The more a person comes to depend on someone, the more they are beholden and likely to stay. It can really go to extremes at times. The next time you look at some successful and amazing person who has shackled themselves to some pathetic loser, realize that it is because they feel like it gives them the power in the relationship.
Every good relationship is give and take, but that is supposed to mean that each person gives and takes in equal amounts. Somehow along the way, that got lost. Like I said earlier, we get a choice between two things, and in doing so, we have pared down the complexities and nuances in being human to a few easy labels. We just want someone to fit into their box and get on with it already. We even see ourselves in more simplistic and narrow terms, and we conform ourselves to that mold.
The problem is, that is not who we are at all. We are diverse and complicated, a mosaic of all the things we see and experience and wonder about. We cannot confine ourselves to simple roles and outlooks forever without tremendous willpower and sacrifice. As we get older, we start to realize that roles are stifling, and rob us of our potential. That is why many relationships don’t last. The things that define our roles change, the people we really are cry out for more as we see all the world has to offer, and all the time we spent ignoring it.
Relationships are complex, and ironically, the more time we spend trying to simplify them, the more convoluted and complex they become. We try to tidy up and streamline our lives, but that’s not who we are. The best chance we have is to be honest with ourselves and the people in our lives from the start, and work on learning to give and take in roughly equal parts. Learning to be less selfish and to start giving more is obvious, but It seems crazy to think that we have to learn to accept help or compliments, but I know that many people reading this know exactly how hard that can be.
I know it’s pretty impossible to get an equal amount of give and take on both sides. There is a reason that the whole giver/taker thing exists in the first place. To some people, giving is always going to make them feel better about who they are, and for others, being pampered or taken care of brings them comfort. It doesn’t have to be perfectly balanced, but it also doesn’t have to be one-sided all the time. The best you can do is be aware, and make an effort to give more, and to accept what you are given. If a taker makes an effort and is rebuffed or feels unappreciated, the chances of them trying again greatly diminish.
Like everything in life, try to be more complete, and encourage and cultivate all your complexity. When you do, find someone who is just as complex, and appreciates you for it. If you are already in a relationship, try to grow together. Beware, though. If the other person isn’t ready or willing to change and grow with you, it will probably not end well, but staying with someone who isn’t willing to grow is much worse. Just try to be encouraging and patient, but that is hard sometimes when you start to discover who you are. It often feels like other people are holding you back, and resentment grows, unfairly or not.
Or just continue on in your stifling giver/taker relationships. The world has been running on them forever, and will continue to do so. But take a look at the world. Look at all the bad relationships, the misery, the broken promises, the abuse, the children who are often left behind, the entire dysfunction the world struggles with on a daily basis. Is it really good enough, or is it time for a change?

Decisions, Decisions ...

Everyday starts with big decisions, just like today. For instance, will it be murder/suicide, or just suicide?
That's a joke, kind of, anyway. Life is hard, and although there are a lot of wonderful things to live for, sometimes you seem to hit a patch where there seems to be nothing but bad things. It doesn't even matter that you can see the light at the end of the tunnel, you start to wonder what the point is of getting to that light if there's just another tunnel beyond it.
Some rare and lucky people go through life and never find themselves bogged down with thoughts about how life isn't working out for them. They don't deal with the frustration and malaise of everyday life. They don't think too deeply about the things they'll never have, or lie awake nights wondering what might have been.
Then there are others, and I believe it's the majority of us, who are deep thinkers, who see the world for what it could be and what it really is. They believe all the things they were shown in movies and books, and they love harder and are loyal and true, they want their happy ending, and every year that goes by without it just hurts that much more.
It's not that life is intolerable. It's not that their lives are devoid of happiness. They are just unsatisfied. The things that seem to do it for most people don't do it for them. They are what people derisively call dreamers, with their heads in the clouds, and eventually you might get to a point where you don't even remember what your dream was, it just feels like there is some unattainable thing missing from your life.
But most of us make it work. We accept that the world isn't going to be what we thought it would be. We find our happiness here and there, we take care of our responsibilities the best we can, and we go on. We even keep trying to make the world better. We fight for change and progress, we help when we can, we try to bring some happiness and joy to others, to make the world that magical place we believed in for so long, even though we now see more tunnels than light on the road ahead.
Sadly, there is that other group, the people who see no way out. It's all just too much for them. They will never feel like they belong, they will never feel like anyone could ever love them, or if they did, they would not deserve that love. They feel overwhelmed or completely drained, and one sad day they decide that enough is enough.
Some do it quickly. Some when they are young, with their whole lives before them, and that is a real tragedy. I tried it young, and it didn't work, and I'm eternally grateful it didn't, because I would have missed out on so much, the tunnels and the light. Some do it slowly, they just stop caring or trying. They live dangerously, they give themselves over to addiction, they go out in a blaze of glory, or they just wind down while destroying themselves with whatever means are at hand. Some suffer from mental illness or depression, and every day is a struggle, until one day it just seems easier to give up the fight.
It's all tragic. They leave us behind to pick up the pieces, and we often feel resentful. We get angry, we feel hurt, and in turn that can make us feel guilty and ashamed. We feel like we could have done something, but sometimes there is nothing we could have done that would have made a difference.
We should still try, though. We should check in on the people we know. We should let people know we care and we love them and they matter. Not just the sad ones, but everyone. Many times, it is a complete shock when someone takes their own life. People are so good at masking things. That's why life and love and caring is so hard and so scary.
By the same token, if you are having a hard time, reach out to the people who love you. If your brain is telling you that no one loves you, it is lying. There are people who have done some unforgivable things in this world, and still, someone loves them. There are people who have done heinous and hurtful things to me, things that have left deep and lasting scars to this day, yet I still love them. No matter how unlovable you think you are, you are not. You might even resent or hate someone for loving you, because you hate yourself that much, but that's your brain or past trauma talking, it's not reality.
Take me. I have more people in my life who love me than most people do. They tell me all the time. Honestly, hardly a day goes by without someone I know telling me they love me, how much I mean to them, or just thanking me for being in their life. Part of that is because I'm lucky to have a family who is close and caring. I'm lucky to have friends who know that love and trust and companionship matter. We forge deep bonds over music and movies and philosophy and science. We are deep thinkers, and we get it.
I also really put myself out there. I'm accessible, I'm open, I'm honest, and I put long rambling things on Facebook about the meaning of life, and talk about real things, and that matters to some people. That's how I know about that middle group of passionate dreamers and the love they have to give.
So yeah, my life is filled with people who love me, some of them fiercely. Still, not a day goes by where at some point I feel that I am unlovable. I am surrounded by love, yet my fucked up brain whispers to me that no one could really love me. It tells me I don't really fit in anywhere. It tells me all the same things it tells everyone at some point or another, whether you're a huge success or living in the gutter.
We tend to base our happiness on things that aren't real. Not just movies and TV shows, or advertising, or pop culture. We look at others, with a distorted view of their lives, and we compare, we covet, we grow envious of some facet of their life that makes it seem like they have it all figured out.
But they don't. They are just like us, going through life with some wonderful things and some advantages here and there, but the same big missing pieces we all have. They have a lot of the same worries and fears we all do, because any of us can only have so much control, no matter how hard we try. In the end, so much is still just random chance.
The good news is, the chance that comes along, the random and fickle thing that will impact your life, has just as much of a chance to be something good. We usually view change as bad, but change is constant, and more often than not, it's a win. On top of that, you can exert a lot of influence on those seemingly chance occurrences. You can put yourself in a better position to have good things happen. You can work to make better decisions, you can work towards positive goals, you can make a conscious choice to figure out what makes you happy and go get it.
And yeah, that's not easy, and the older you get, the harder it is. Life is not kind to dreamers and lovers. It tends to punish you for caring or trying, and in turn, you learn to punish yourself. When you know what love is, it makes you feel lonelier to go without. Still, lots of people realize their dreams, or at least enough of them to be happy and find fulfillment. So can you.
A lot of those happy and fulfilled people were just as miserable as you might be at times. It's normal to think that everything sucks now and then. It's normal to play that game of rows and columns, whether it's worth it or not, or if it could ever work out. It can always work out. There's always a chance. Life has always been a fight against the bastards and fate and our own insecurities.
The dreamers and the lovers win more often than not, and I'll cast my lot with them every time. If you're reading this, chances are very good that you're one of them, and I couldn't be happier to be your friend. Together, we will forge our own happiness, our own corner of the world, where things make sense and we belong, and we will go on.

Now just so you know, I am not going to be killing myself any time soon. I have way too much to live for, and even though my shitty brain tries to tell me I'm unlovable, I know I'm not. So thank you to everyone who makes me understand that.
But more importantly, if it ever came to it, and I had the presence of mind, of course I would choose murder/suicide. Not randomly, of course, that's horrible. I would definitely try to take out some rapists, or animal abusers, or the antichrist, if they showed up. Or maybe just some of the people who have hurt the ones I care about so much. That's probably just a fantasy, but again, it's probably one many of us have played it in our heads. Or maybe not. Maybe that's some dark thinking that no one else ever pondered, but oh well. I told you I put myself out there, and some of that is bound to make you uncomfortable. We're all dreamers, but some dreams are dark.
Like I said, I know I'm lovable, but I never said I'd make it easy.