Main St. and Fox Ave.

"Those are the ones that you have to be very aware of, and to watch out for"

"Scratch a liberal and you find a fascist"

Be Aware...Be Very Aware.  (heh--easy for me to say, since I haven't always been aware, which has gotten me into more trouble than I've bargained for at times)

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

There are mean, hateful people of different political spectrums everywhere; some vote Democrat, some are progressives/liberals, some vote independent, some vote Republican.    Some are in cities, some in small towns, and others live in beautiful homes out in the suburbs.  Some people are overt in their aggressions and hostilities towards people with differences, often resorting to physical and/or psychological bullying.  Some people who're hateful and mean cloak their nastiness under a mantle of gentility and respectability and find legitimate ways to be mean;  shunning, psychological bullying, ostracizing, exclusion from social circles,  and constantly making excuses for not inviting a certain person to do things on the weekends or after school, or to a birthday party, or whatever.  Some, on the other hand, exhibit token generosity, and occasionally invite an "odd person out" to an occasional birthday party or whatever, in order to assuage their guilt for not having treated the "odd person out"  better.  Some people express their dislike for the "odd person out" and desire to keep him or her out through physical assaults, taunts and insults.  Others resort to ignoring, rescinding previous invitations to the "odd person out" to do something with them at the last possible moment with some grandiose excuse(s), and others resort to cruel teasing and making fun of the "odd person out" for whatever reason.

As an adult, I've seen it in different ways;  I saw it at my last job, with supervisors who supposedly yearned for respectability, bullying and making it uncomfortable at the workplace for those with differences, and, subsequently, the "odd people" out were the first to go.  I've also seen it on other online blogs, where people aren't so tolerant of those who differ with the majority, be it in their interests, their style of posting, or whatever.  Often enough, be in on or offline, and in real life, there are vendettas going on against a certain person or persons to try (and often enough succeeding) to push them off the job, or,online, to hound them off of a certain blog.  Often enough, when the person being bullied stands up for him or herself, the harasser (s) roll over and play victim, claiming that the bullied person started it first, and then the bullied person eventually gets the door slammed on him or her.

I have found that the best way to go about it is to continue to stand up for myself, and yet keep my distance from people that I think are suspicious.  I understand the need for some people to wall out those that they see as suspicious, although that can be and often enough is carried too far.  

I see many of the same so-called liberals and progressives skewering people as racists who opposed mandatory school busing with really looking into the fact that there were shades of grey in between the black and the white so to speak;  that what motivated people in many of Boston's white workingclass neighborhoods to opposed mandated school busing wasn't so simple as mere racism.  There was more to it than that, since the issues were socioeconomic in origin, also.  When I first began posting here, I wrote a pretty long essay on it.

http://firefly-dreaming.com/us...


The more things change, the more they stay the same.

So, I think I tend to pity them more than hate them, though I do experience the full range of human feelings about them from time to time. The main thing I think is that they are missing out on much of life that is truly good and beautiful by effectively burying their heads in the sands of the easy indulgence in ignorance and hatred. The unexamined life is worth a lot less in the living than the examined one, as Socrates so artfully put it so long ago. Of course, I grant that it is possible to carefully examine one's life and the world and come to different conclusions than I have, but a truly thoughtful and intellectually and emotionally aware conservative is a rare thing in my experience. This is why many conservatives actually fear institutions of higher learning, in my opinion, because it turns ignorant conservatives into educated liberals and teaches people how to learn for themselves instead of merely blindly trusting authority.

"In proportion to the vigor of the individual, these revolutions are frequent, until in some happier mind they are incessant..." R.W.Emerson - Compensation

& everybody has these type thoughts...
the thing is the people you speak of never have any remorse

♥~

"Indeed, if a poor man will spend a year in prison for stealing out of hunger,
how high would the gallows need to be to hang the rich man?"
~The Patrician in 'Snuff' by Terry Pratchett

Thanks for your great posts, and your heartwarming compliments.  

Btw, your essays are super, as are Karmas.  Keep up the wonderful work, both of you!

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

There IS a difference and it is clearly distinguishable to anyone who will dispense with the need for political correctness about the issue. One of the biggest problems with the left is that many of us are unwilling to take the leap of understanding that dealing with the radical right requires. We cling to the notion that it couldn't possibly be true that some people have no conscience AT ALL, because our personal consciences function so well. We care about others because we have suffered with them in our body and in our 'souls'. Our empathy drags us, many times unwillingly, into imagining ourselves as the party in need of caring. We therefore really do feel their pain - that is not merely a cute phrase (btw, did you notice how even the idea that the phrase could possibly be true at all for anyone was ridiculed after BC used it??) We are caretakers by nature.

There can fundamentally be no reconciling of differences for us. There is no reconciliation to be had with the forces of uncaring. We either care for one another or we do not.

I would say that, for me, the hardest and the easiest part of acting on my personal understanding is actually caring about the humans who are afflicted with the no-empathy problem. It is hard because, of all categories of humanity, they are the only ones for whom I have almost no empathy whatsoever. My imagination fails me when I try to feel how they feel. The best I think I can do is to try to remember the world view I had as a two year old, before my bubble was burst and I became truly aware of the existence of the autonomy of others and their separate existence from my own. Prior to the events that created my true consciousness of others, I vaguely remember feeling that the world should act the way I wanted it to and that everyone should act in concert to fulfill my needs and that it was my job only to inform them of my needs/manipulate them by whatever means necessary and available. On the other hand, it is easy to care about them because it is my nature to care for others, whether they are capable of caring for anyone other than themselves or not.

I think it is important to not dehumanize them because it is the one thing that could lead us to become more like them in our motivations and actions. In particular, the authoritarian followers of the sociopaths are much less culpable, though still responsible, for the effects of their group actions. Brainwashing works, and it doesn't have to be done in the confines of a dark closet with food restrictions and torture. It can be done in the open daylight and in the homes of the millions of authoritarian followers who impose their authoritarian ways of life on their children and on their cohorts by means which are sometimes quite subtle.

Well, I'm at least "on the verge" of rambling and may have gone over the edge, so I think I'll stop here!

"In proportion to the vigor of the individual, these revolutions are frequent, until in some happier mind they are incessant..." R.W.Emerson - Compensation

Peace to you, please, good sir.

Cheers!

I'm honored that you wish to quote me and hope that some larger good can be done than I have managed to do with my words.

OTB I also feel that we are "On the Road" - "The Road Less Traveled" - together, in that Kerouac sort of way as well as the Peck way! That goes for all the rest of you fireflies, too!

I might add, OTB, that my email is published under my user profile and all fireflies are encouraged to contact me directly if they so desire. I am happy to converse here in public as well, though.

"In proportion to the vigor of the individual, these revolutions are frequent, until in some happier mind they are incessant..." R.W.Emerson - Compensation

we could start with a seed concept - anything that anyone wants to explore that they believe will be of value to the community - and then each of the dialogue participants in turn could nurture the seed with a paragraph or two, and see how it grows. I believe it could develop into something really positive, foster further dialogue in the comments, and would be very much in the spirit of firefly dreaming's mission ~

firefly-dreaming is a state of mind....
that involves less stress, less anger & strife.
it's a different way of looking at problems we find in our world today, finding alternative solutions & in the process changing the path of status quo...

firefly-dreaming is a place where good things are emphasized, people who are doing it correctly.... organizations that really stand up for ALL humans rights, employee-owned businesses, american owned businesses who have 'old-timey values', who care for their employees &  produce quality products, entrepreneurial bloggers who are trying to follow their dream....

firefly-dreaming is a place where information can be found or shared... tending to aging parents, finding help getting medicine, healthcare & legal help, information on making do with less, gardening, becoming more self-sustainable, getting off the grid, reading a good book, cooking, loneliness, dealing with death of loved ones and births of new family members...

firefly-dreaming is a place where any topic can be discussed & while others may disagree they will remain respectful...

firefly-dreaming is where tolerance & compassion are ever-present, where creative energy combines & multiplies to produce energetic new pathways of thought that lead to creative solutions.....

firefly-dreaming is a place for people to find a little spark of hope, re-kindle the flame within & go forth to pass it on....  

I know it will take some effort, but I'm willing to help make it happen... maybe even a regular series to look forward to?

what do ya'll think?  

It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see. ~ Thoreau ... and, do no harm

You've certainly presented us with a great idea. Perhaps, as newp suggests (above? below? I'm still confused..heh) we can make it a group thing.

As for symbols, I want to give it some more thought, but the first thing that comes to mind is the Thoreau quote that newp shared in a comment in the essay "Henry's Pond"

I find that into my idea of the village has entered more of the elm than of the human being...

And when I just went to retrieve the quote, I saw this quote also [ibid]:

The poet says the proper study of mankind is man. I say, study to forget all that; take wider views of the universe. That is the egotism of the race... When another poet says the world is too much with us, he means, of course, that man is too much with us... In order to avoid delusions, I would fain let man go by and behold a universe in which man is but a grain of sand... I do not value any view of the universe into which man and the institutions of man enter very largely...

So, something organic, not human-centric but that refers to our relative and not-too-important place in things. But it also has to include the idea that we humans are present and watching and hopefully noticing...

If any graphic symbol could capture all that, it'd be worth making t-shirts and hats out of. Why, heck, we might even start a movement...

...And the only reason I'm singing you this song now is cause you may know somebody in a similar situation, or you may be in a similar situation, and if your in a
situation like that there's only one thing you can do and that's walk into the shrink wherever you are ,just walk in say "Shrink, You can get anything you want, at Alice's restaurant.".  And walk out.  You know, if one person, just one person does it they may think he's really sick and they won't take him.  And if two people, two people do it, in harmony, they may think they're both faggots and they won't take either of them. And three people do it, three, can you imagine, three people walking in singin a bar of Alice's Restaurant and walking out. They may think it's an organization.  And can you, can you imagine fifty people a day,I said fifty people a day walking in singin a bar of Alice's Restaurant and walking out.  And friends they may think it's a movement.

And that's what it is , the Alice's Restaurant Anti-Massacree Movement, and all you got to do to join is sing it the next time it come's around on the guitar...

Of course, there are other symbologies to consider as well, ones which could be used to tell THE story - more complex than a graphic symbol and a couple of blurb-words...

It is of course also apparent that the firefly theme and symbol are ready at hand... hmmmm...


"In proportion to the vigor of the individual, these revolutions are frequent, until in some happier mind they are incessant..." R.W.Emerson - Compensation