Nullius in verba

There is nothing more dangerous to freedom than a True Believer. 

The tendency may be to flip immediately to religion when I say True Believer. Some go to Muslim terrorists. Some go to Polygamist Mormons. They used to be big on Satanists, but you don't hear much of them anymore. 

The truth is though, being a True Believer isn't really about God or the lack thereof. It's about the lack of doubt. 

If you think Socialism, or Capitalism is the only way for society to survive instead of tools to shape an economy, you don't believe in freedom. You believe you know the way, the only way, and you're so certain about it you can make everyone act on your beliefs. True Believers think they are helping, or at least they say they do. They have the one, true answer. Why wouldn't they share it? 

Oh yeah, and if you think only one skin color is good or one sexual orientation is correct, you're an asshole and a True Believer.

For some reason though, True Believers don't seem to be real big on entertaining arguments that run counter to their belief. The reason their ideas fall apart in the arena of debate is not because they're flawed, but because you just don't understand them correctly, right?

Weird isn't it. 

True Believers generally won't let their kids make up their own minds. I think it's because they know what they're selling isn't the truth. If it was, they wouldn't have to force you to see it. If it was truth it would be able to stand up next to competing ideas and win. But, instead of getting an education on how to seek out and find truth, they generally just get indoctrinated into a belief system.  

The Truth is that none of them are good enough to be beyond doubt. You know what is? Sunrise. 

People never argue about it. Ever see a war break out about dropping something and having it fall down? 

They might argue, poorly, about the reasons why it drops, but the drop is coming. Theories are what you're arguing about, not facts.

Beliefs can be very personal. Who cares what somebody believes? Well, there's the real problem. 

Eventually, True Believers are going to try to take away your freedom. Those competing thoughts are dangerous to their beliefs so, you can't have them. Even worse, your competing ideas might spoil the purity of their children.

We've seen it before and I'm afraid it's trying to come back again, from lots of sides. I don't think we can survive as a species when True Believers are at the controls. 

Teach your kids to seek for and find the truth rather than telling them what to do and the future will understand freedom. For everybody. I mean, what more essential freedom is there than the freedom to make up your own mind?

If someone says they have the one, True Answer, don't trust them. For people who know the Truth, aren't really searching for the truth.

The stuff about which there is no doubt, is easy to see most of the time. The rest is just a theory.

Homophobia

I had an interesting and educational interaction on Twitter today. Of course, being Twitter, it was lost of miscommunication and anger. Much of this was probably my fault.

I want to do two things with this post. Explain what my original point was trying to be and then say why it was a total failure on my part.

First, the intent.

Someone posted an opinion that using homosexual sex acts as an attempt to demean Donald Trump and his relationship with Putin was straight homophobia. I replied that it was more about dominance and submission than about homophobia and perhaps not everything that could be about a minority group is about a minority group.

I still believe that to be true.

The reason I brought it up is because it reinforces a damaging negative stereotype. Every time, the stereotype goes, that someone who is part of an aggrieved minority group gets disagreed with they trot out their catchphrase, be it homophobia, racism, misogyny, or whatever.

Ironically I was immediately labeled homophobic.

Eventually I came to realize, in some part due to the conversation, why I was failing to communicate my idea.

Part two, my failure.

Apart from the possibility of being wrong, which is always a possibility with me, I failed to take some serious factors into account. First, LGBT people have been attacked for so long from so many directions, I can see why they might assume it's just another attack. If a thousand people walk up and punch you in the face, you don't assume person 1,001 is offering you chocolates.

The LGBT community has suffered enough damage that it is not right to ask them to be the bigger party and accept what could be considered (and certainly in some cases was intended to be) an insult in order to defeat a negative stereotype.

It's up to me and people like me.

So, my apologies. It was at the very least an awkward way to communicate something and at the worse end of the spectrum, a shitty thing to say.

White Privilege

I want to talk about white privilege. My white privilege specifically.

I am 44 years old. I am a white male. I am a husband, father of two, and a veteran. For the past nine years I have worked as an emergency room nurse. The world, I humbly submit, is a better place for my having been in it, even if only a little.

All of it, every little bit, if because of one moment of white privilege that allowed me a chance at redemption that too many people will never get.

I was 18 years old and living in a small town in Oklahoma. I don't know how much you know about small town Oklahoma, but there is a bit of a struggle for an unmotivated teen to find something to do. We had a saying, "Fight, fuck, or drag." I didn't like to fight. I wasn't attractive enough to find the partners for the second option and the drag was driving up and down the same strip of asphalt over and over and over again.

None of these sounded like good options to me.

So, one summer night my friend and I went searching for something interesting to do. We hit upon and idea. We discovered that a local convenience store threw out all their donuts just after midnight when the delivery guy brought the new ones. My friend saw them throw them all in the trash one night. We decided to go one night, about the right time, and see if maybe we could score one.

We hit the jackpot.

Of course, we had to hang around for a bit while we waited for the donut guy to arrive. While we waited, we shot the breeze with the store clerk. He was bored to hell with the overnight at the convenience store and welcomed anyone to talk with, even a couple of bored teenagers. Hell, he was maybe 20 or so. He'd run out of money going to college and come back home to work and save and maybe get a chance to go back to school

The donut guy didn't care at all. He emptied the donuts into our bag the same as if it were the trash. We got around 20. We ate a few and then chucked the rest at passing cars on the drag of people we knew. I told you we were bored. We were also young and stupid.

Really stupid.

We befriended the clerk. Mostly because he let us get free fountain drinks and buy cigarettes without any questions. Oh yeah, and the donuts. Besides, it was something to do other than the normal crap in town. One night our clerk friend told us about his classes at college and how depressed he was that he probably couldn't afford to go back for several years, if ever. He mused that it would be easier if somebody would come rob the place and shoot him. Then he could collect some insurance money and maybe go back to school.

My friend offered to shoot him right there.

I stopped that idea immediately. But, we opined, we might be able to find someone to do it.

Yeah, I said we were stupid.

The plan hatched over a week or two. We searched the place and found out which cameras worked and which were just wires leading into the ceiling and capped off. We came up with a plan and found a guy that was willing to do the deed. Yeah, there was a high school kid who said he was willing to shoot this guy for a small fee.

When the night the planned deal was supposed to go down, the guy we found backed out. He said he couldn't get his mother's car. (criminal masterminds I tell ya.) I figured he'd seen the stupidity of the whole operation and made a smart choice.

It just so happened that, that night, one of the clerk's friends from a nearby city was in town and he said he was willing to shoot the clerk.

Holy shit. This was going to actually happen.

The clerk said we could take whatever we wanted from the store, none of the cameras worked anyway. So we took some beer. We were teenagers.

We left.

The next day the news was about the robbery at the convenience store. We went to visit the clerk in the hospital. I was called to the station the next day.  Police got free fountain drinks too. We frequently chatted with them on their daily rounds and somehow, being genius detective types, they decided those teenagers that hung around the convenience store at all hours might know something.

They put pressure on and I snapped like a dry cracker.

I gave up everything. You see, the clerk had used his own gun. His friend, not packing his own, borrowed the clerk's gun and then tossed it back into his car when they were done. They had him. I had just turned 18 and was looking at felonies.

I got a felony charge of conspiracy to commit insurance fraud.

They booked me and took me to jail. I sat in the cell all alone and pondered my future.

I was cooked. I knew that, if I was convicted of a felony, I was done. Every job application I ever filled out again would have that box on it. Have you ever been convicted of a felony? And I was fucked.

So I figured I would be a criminal.

Hell, I had yet to figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up. Maybe that choice had just been made for me. I figured if I had to be a criminal, I need to study and be a good one. Jail sucked.

My mom scraped together the money to get me out and then yelled at me for being an idiot.

I got a lawyer. He was a former prosecutor and started our meeting by asking me if I knew a guy. I said no. He asked again and I continued to answer no. I didn't know any of the people he was talking about.

"So you're not a player."

"I guess not."

He informed me that I was an idiot. Had I talked to a lawyer before I talked to the police there likely would have been no charges.

Again with the idiot.

I went to court and that is where my biggest moment of white privilege really happened.

I got one year probation. And, after the year was up, if I hadn't been in trouble since, my record would be expunged.

Let's examine my privilege, and these are just the ones I recognize.

I was asked to come to the station. They called my mother and she told me to go in. I wasn't arrested on the street. I wasn't killed while being arrested for what was, in the end, armed robbery.

I got bail and got to go home instead of sitting in jail for however long. Since I didn't have the experience, I don't know what would have happened in that time, but I'm betting it wouldn't have helped me develop into a well-adjusted citizen.

I got a lawyer. Even though my family couldn't really afford it, my mother found a way to get me a real lawyer instead of a public defender.

I lived in a good enough neighborhood that I didn't know any of the people my lawyer named. So I came off as a good kid. Someone worth fighting for.

I got probation and the chance to have my record expunged.

Were I a young person of color, I don't harbor any illusion that the situation would have turned out the same.

Instead of being given a chance to go out and do something positive with my life, I would have been forced to be a felon.

I'm the same person. But, there would have been no military service. There would have been no nursing degree and no nursing job. I would have limited opportunities at best. With limited options for success in traditional channels, the decision to improve my situation through crime would have been much more appealing.

Instead, I got off. I got a chance. Too many people aren't given that chance and we, as a society, are poorer for that fact.

Even felons deserve a chance at redemption. Give them a path back to full citizenship. Look for places where people of color are not given the same benefits and assumption of inherent goodness as white citizens and help change that.

But for one or two choices, some of which were totally out of my control, all the good that I have done in this world would have not only been erased, but likely replaced with bad things.

Give people that chance. We all make mistakes. We're human that way.