DISEASED

Dear Hiatus,

I return from you because it's been a really long time since I've written a blog post and I'm finally fired up enough to rant to 19 followers and whoever else has the misfortune of clicking on my Facebook redirect. I sincerely apologize for leaving you, Hiatus, but you had nice run as I furiously scribbled some of my more private musings this summer while I was trapped in an endless expanse of shriveling cornfields. Be content with the time you had eating up my succulent, unfiltered thoughts. Now it's time for me to go public with only slightly less inappropriate diatribes.

Love,
Ben


Dear Readers,

Welcome back! I missed you. I'm sure you didn't miss me, because, guess what! I'm going to whine over the internet about things I cannot control so I feel like I were an agent of change for mediocrity and stupidity worldwide! Truthfully, my audience is probably cognizant of all the things I'm going to say, the people I wish to inform of their imbecility will never read this, and even if someone who reads this fits the bill of my tirade, they'll most likely lack the self-awareness to experience a revelation. So, let the feckless fulmination full of gross generalizations get cracking!

DISEASED

I just spent a summer in the heartland of America- Nebraska. I met many wonderful people who you all would benefit from knowing. I also met the most unhappy (and almost the most close-minded) people I've ever had the pleasure of learning from. I say "learning" because I've come to a point in my life where I see it as a disservice to myself not to gain something from every interpersonal interaction. So, this summer I came to the conclusion that the bigotry we associate with the under-educated "hicks" of our nation are a product of geographic isolation, ideologic inbreeding, the "escape" mentality that draws its antimony out of the heartland (and southland) like a needle drawing blood, and the abeyant despair that awaits these people should their convictions, religious or otherwise, be discredited by "academic bull-shit" and "liberal media" lest the bounty of their piety and endured suffering be merely fictitious. (This warrants a longer post in about a month's time.)

Obviously, to the overly-educated, the fact that our actions have sociological, economical, and psychological underpinnings will come as no surprise. But now that I'm back in New York City, the place where any variety of whack-a-doodle can find unflinching acceptance, I find that these supposedly educated aren't augmenting their understanding or compassion or finding an effective outlet for change. On the contrary, I find they've chosen to foster bitter resentment towards people who don't share their views thereby mimicking the behavior of the alleged "bigots" whose ideas they seek to unravel.

These were the thoughts stewing in my head as I sat through diversity training today. DIVERSITY TRAINING. Diversity training, designed to mitigate these obstinate and restrictive attitudes! Instead, I felt that this supreme "open-mindedness" came off as superior and ultimately just as unproductive as "close-mindedness". With the former, you must comprehensively recognize all of a person's potential identifiers but are allowed no discriminatory or likewise abilities of discerning based on those identifiers. With the latter, you needn't bother with this process because you already know everything there is to know about people. Now, unless my fellow students were cleverly concealing similar brainwaves, they did not diagnose these opposing parties with the same disease.

This disease gone continually untreated has created the toxic political environment you know and hate today. It is the disease of bland interaction. The disease of absent, truly open dialog. The disease of self stagnation. The disease of overestimating your own understanding of other people's beliefs. The disease of then reducing that person and all others like them to brainless oafs who don't have as much heart, passion, and well-intentioned aims as you do. The disease of pandering. The disease of silence. The disease of putting amicable but inane social interaction above constant maintenance of your principles. 

Being on the side of minorities does not automatically spare you of dim-wittedness. I find many who share my political views scare me just as much as those who don't. Perhaps, if you are not blessed with considerable brain power or else taught true critical thinking skills you are doomed to espouse the views of your dominant influence without venturing on an intellectual odyssey that earns you the right to make epistemological decisions. Perhaps it's too hopeful to expect anatomical reduction of bias from everybody. Still, I'd settle at the very least for people to see that self-righteousness suits no one. Maybe for dessert I'd like us all to realize that an antithetic opinion does not warrant a reduction of another's humanity and my indulgent midnight snack would be engaged discussion in place of snubbing the conversation or a return to "politer" matters.

So what you can take away from this? I think everyone's wrong and I have joined the ranks of fierce intellectuals who've seen the light. Jk.
But for realz, do try to see how
a) someone else's convictions are probably as deeply entrenched and well-intentioned as yours, even if they represent a completely contrasting set of values.
b) your angry tirades, like my angry tirades, will do nothing to change them.
c) undercurrents of resentment and superiority do nothing to bridge the gap. Let go of your tightly squeezed anus for heaven's sake.
d) championing the oppressed does not make you right.
and finally e) totally letting go of your discriminatory abilities and staying "safe" in conversation is a detriment to your growth, others' growth, and the growth of our ever ailing national discourse.

A member of the diseased looking for a cure,
Jamin