An Open Letter to Brock's Dad, aka Everyass

I don't know you, but I see you. You could be any entitled rich white ass. You could be every entitled rich white ass. You are Everyass. You are the poster child of Rape Culture, White Culture, Might Equals Right Culture. Because it’s all the same thing. 

What I can take was always mine, and will be forever, hallelujah, amen.

You’re still in caveman tribal mode: Good Guys vs. Evil. In that fight, you're justified in using whatever it takes to survive, no matter what. Smash and destroy and betray and disregard and overpower. Take what you need and want. Survive. No time for integrity. No time for compromise. No time for anyone else’s needs but your own. That's the price of success. As the media has been in such a hurry to point out, your golden boy was caught raping a woman at a top university. His swim times are phenomenal.

Surely though you can see why, when you claim he’s too delicate for the sort of consequences the rest of us suffer out here, here in this fantastic dystopia that you, Everyass, and those like you fight so hard to create, our rage begins to grow.

When you don’t bat an eye as families are torn apart and parents languish in literal slavery, when you don’t seem to think brown and black children are too delicate to grow up without parents who dared self-medicate with weed instead of OxyContin or Prozac or Xanex, but god forbid your rapist son spend six months in jail for condemning an innocent woman to a lifetime of trauma, our rage grows. Maybe you’re right; maybe jail is so cruel and unusual that even the cruelest and most unusual criminals, like rapists, shouldn’t be subjected to it. If that’s how you really feel, it’s about time you got more upset about all of your fellow Americans being subjected to it for far lesser reasons. 

The truth is, you don’t care about justice or liberty. What you really want is a personal, consequence-free zone for you and yours. And the more you succeed at this, the more you protect your children from any experience that would allow them to relate to, care about, and grow into decent human beings alongside of the rest of us. Money can stand in for a lot of personal growth. It has clearly saved you and your terrible spawn from ever learning a damned thing from life. You've nurtured a careful inability to understand that other people experience pain, too. Well done.

Empathy is not a small trait to be missing. The ability to balance your own needs and desires against those of others is a baseline skill for participation in a community. Your son caused another human being grave harm. He should suffer over that. You should feel anguish over that. If you had this basic decency I'm talking about, which you're going to need if you don't want to be voted off the island one of these days, you'd be examining your teachings, thinking about what attitudes you hold and convey about the value of other humans, the beauty of individuality, the inviolable sovereignty of a person over their own body. Maybe you couldn't have done any better but maybe you could have, right? Maybe a rapist son is a good wake-up call, a good time to re-evaluate your ethical model of the universe?

Sir, this is what it looks like to care about others besides yourself: you'd tell your son to spend as much time and energy as it takes to help with this woman's healing, to understand what she's been through, to do anything he can do. You'd encourage him to bow his head and accept whatever consequences society sees fit to give him. "Don't think only about yourself and what you're going through, son," you'd tell him. "That's what got you in this mess in the first place. It's time to start thinking about what experiences we provide for others; what kind of world we're creating for the people in our lives. It's time to understand, from her side of things, what experience you forced on this woman that night."

If you had the baseline sense of empathy necessary to thrive in a community, you would recognize that the most important fact about your son right now is his demonstrated willingness to violently sacrifice another human's welfare to his whims. He is a threat to intoxicated women everywhere. You shouldn't protect that. Your son's delicate monsterhood doesn't deserve to be preserved!

What you call love is better known as psychotic overindulgence. A loving father wouldn't be trying to explain to the world about his son. A loving father would be doing everything in his power to help his son connect the suffering he will experience now to the suffering that others experience; the suffering that woman experienced. A loving father would be trying to help his son forge a new sense of self through adversity, shaped in important ways by the magnitude of the pain he has caused another.

I hope you figure out in time that the Everyass way of life is dying.

Sincerely,

A More Generous America Than You Should Expect

How to Shed Your Faith Without Losing Your Soul

Churchgoers! I’m here to tell you the good news! God did not put anyone else in charge of you. You’ve long suspected and feared this, and I’m here to tell you: it’s true. Each of us is a direct conduit of the divine. None of us needs someone else to interpret divine will for us. We are it.

This thought may fill you with fear. The fear of responsibility. The fear of accountability. The fear of losing what is most precious to you. Religion has been your comfort, your foundation for your sense of self, for your relationships. You may wonder what meaning your life could have without it. What if I tell you that everything you cared about when you were religious, you still care about when you’re not? Your family. Your friends. Making the world a better place. Becoming a better person. Loving those who despitefully use you. Helping those in need.

Religion is just a scaffolding to help us “fake it til we make it,” so to speak. If you can see the point and feel the benefits of living a life that is honest, useful to others, and focused first and foremost on loving one another, you don’t need religion.

The sense of specialness you get from being exclusively in tune with God, the sense of piety from denying yourself pleasure, the anticipation of a much better afterlife, these things are nothing next to the peace of mind you attain once you give yourself full permission to address cognitive dissonance and begin taking full accountability for the outcomes of your beliefs and actions. Those special, light-bathed moments that confirm you alone are connected to the divine? Everyone has those moments. Everyone is connected to the divine. Literally everyone. And it’s awesome.

Your faith’s structures are fantastic. Don’t stop using them. Keep coming together, singing, enjoying the holiness of community, presence, and worship of the divine. The feelings you feel are real. It is holy to sing together and celebrate the fact that we are here on this planet, the great mystery of our existence, it is holy to bring ourselves in tune with one another, it is holy to gather and experience love!

Instead of locating the divine in something far above you that demands you fit yourself carefully into a box through constant war with your own urges, listen intently to the individual path on which you are being guided, trust yourself, and celebrate divinity in the people around you, in the coming together, in unity.

Keep visiting one another. Keep seeing to it that every human being has invested humans looking out for them. Keep taking care of the sick, helping beleaguered new mothers and visiting the elderly. Encourage others to do the same and offer them venues without first demanding that they align their personal moral universe to match yours.

Keep your rituals. When we engage with the physical world, we communicate with the unconscious. As above, so below. Open up your temples to all who are willing to be respectful inside of them. Let them see their own rituals through. The symbols of others are not in conflict with yours. The rituals of others do not contradict yours. There is room for everyone.

Keep doing missionary work. Send your missionaries everywhere, teaching people to love and respect themselves for their own divinity, and to love and respect others for theirs. Don’t stop doing the good work. Keep it up. Shed the skin of conformity. The demand that you live your divinity by suppressing someone else’s is designed to free you. Let the hypocrisy unravel your faith; it's supposed to.

Religions all carry within them the key to breaking free of them. The very first of the Ten Commandments is “Thou Shalt Have No Other Gods Before Me.” What do you think a human being standing in for divinity constitutes besides something coming between you and God, standing literally “before God”? Jesus Christ said that God is love, and that your only commandment is “Love One another as I have loved you.” Do you find that your faith makes it harder for you to love others or to receive the love that others feel towards you? Do you sense the intense wish of your unconditional love to flow free and unrestricted towards all, instead of stopping short when it encounters certain behaviors and ideas?

God is us! God is all! Free yourself! Surrender yourself to love!

Love Vs. the American War Machine

There's something you need to know about. It's called the American War Machine. 

Maybe you have an idea of what I mean; maybe you don't. But once I tell you, there's no going back. You can choose not to believe me, but unfortunately these things are well documented and the information is widely available online.

We're coming up on another election. Another charade of choice. When Jill Stein was trying to fight her way into a televised debate in 2012 she told reporters,

“Ninety million voters are predicted to stay home and vote with their feet that neither Barack Obama nor Mitt Romney represent them. That’s twice as many voters than expected for either of them."

Our current president now has the support of less than half of the people of the United States. Our confidence in the structures of power is already gone. So what does that mean for this next election? 

Obama told us he was going to close Guantanamo and bring home our soldiers, and we believed him and we voted for him. But the Barack Obama we sent back to the Oval Office in 2012 has a kill list. He personally approves drone targets. Sometimes he will approve a strike even if the target is with their family. This practice has become an excellent recruitment tool for Al Qaeda. 

Most of us don't even know half of what our country does with our implicit approval. It's a horrifying thought, but it's also an empowering one. So listen up.

America has the meanest military around, by a lot. Whatever values we once stood for, our MO now is pretty much "we have the might, so we have the right," aka "fork over your lunch money."

Occasionally, one of the countries we've been taking advantage of gets it together enough to democratically elect a leader willing to push back. We're all about democracy, so we applaud them, shake their hands, and listen to their demands, right?

Wrong. We find some psychopath who's willing to be bribed, arm and fund his military coup, and say we've just conquered socialism.

I say “we” and “our” like we’re choosing this and/or benefitting it, when the opposite is true. We've all been pillaged, too. The vast majority of us can't claim a fair livelihood, a home of own, access to the world at large, proper medical care, regular meals, even. 

We are not powerless. We are literally the opposite. We are the labor, we are the power that makes the world go round. We can and should be beautifying our own communities, investing in things we collectively value, healing the world, and doing work that contributes to all of our well-being. There is enough food that no child need starve. There are more empty buildings than homeless people in the average city. Think of all the service organizations, all of the infrastructure, all of the communities that would benefit from more hands, more love, more attention. Think of all of the job creating we could do together if the bulk of the world's resources were in a public fund for the world's improvement.

Both parties love to call the other side brainwashed. The ironic thing is they’re both right. We’re all brainwashed. We’re brainwashed into deferring our dreams indefinitely. Even our most urgent and noble dreams. Like making sure our grandchildren have a planet to enjoy. Ridding the world of unnecessary suffering. Creating a society where taking care of one another is the rule instead of an admirable exception.

We have the technology now to vote directly on every issue that effects us. It could be an app that we check daily. Which bills are up for debate today? Ooh, the jobs bill. I vote for this bill only if Section 3 is deleted. I'm not sure what's going on with this one; let me go watch the condensed debate on youtube. Of course, there is no reason for the people in power right now to make this happen. If we want true democracy we have to demand it.

It's going to take trust in one another. We've got to stop giving in to our fear and hatred when it comes to people who see the world differently than we do. Hatred is easy. It makes us feel protected from our fear, but the cost is high. Love takes nuance. Balance. Love means respecting one another's desires, even when we don't agree with them. Love is the language of functional communities, of real democracy, the idealized, shiny, bright version we got in elementary school, the kind where everyone wins and no one loses.

We don't see a lot of examples of how to do this. People rarely reach compromises on televised debates or talk shows. If you believe the television, you’d think it’s literally impossible to make decisions that everyone can be at peace with. I’ve personally reached good compromises on gay marriage and abortion with my very Mormon, very Republican parents, compromises which leave everyone's values intact and don't threaten anyone's way of life.

Democracy isn’t failing. Its mechanisms have been subverted. It's time to update the systems. Get this machine running the way it's supposed to. Decentralize power. Put it back in the hands of people and communities. Get people talking productively instead of destructively again.

Everyone wants to be the hero in their own battle of good vs. evil. This is your chance.

Do you believe we should all have a say in what happens to us? Do you believe the world's resources should be used to nurture the world? Should people's labor go towards things that benefit them and the world at large?

Speak, people. Speak for yourselves.  Speak for democracy. #directdemocracynow #lovevsthemachine

The Sleepwalkers

Black children don't deserve to be protected by police, they deserve to be shot by both officers and vigilantes because their appearance is one we associate with violence. Mexican mothers don't deserve sanctuary from the violence brought on by America's bogus Drug War--they deserve to be separated from their children. Muslim families don't deserve access to the same safe shores that received our great- and great great-grandparents. The safety and comfort of white people is more important than the very survival of others.

How do these kinds of heinous beliefs flourish among a population which declares itself to follow the precepts "love thine enemy as thyself, turn the other cheek, even as ye have done unto the least of these, ye have done unto me?"



The collective obliviousness of white people is a product of many things; a system of K-12 education which portrays all events in history through a "white equals right" lens, the media's misrepresentation of people of color as more dangerous and likely to commit crimes than white people, behind-closed-doors government policies of housing, loan, employment, and policing which herd people of color into ghettos and jails.

It's super lame that it's taken white people so long to wake up to all of this. It is very, very lame that they don't realize all by themselves that all of the articulate, big-hearted, intelligent POC's they know are emissaries from, not exceptions to, their cultural background. It is very, very lame that they allowed themselves to be convinced that the achievement gap had more to do with white culture being extra awesome and other cultures not so much, rather than do the small amount of research it takes to discover the actual causes of disparity. It is utterly, utterly lame that when white people look at the suffering of a person of color vs. a white person, they have a whole different set of standards for what they consider "the way things are" vs. what they find infuriating and unjust.

White people are beginning to wake up now. Voices of color are beginning to hold equal and in many cases superior sway (as should be the case when they speak about issues they are more familiar with than white people). Thanks to the increasing maturity of the internet, the collective debate is reaching a point of equilibrium. The intellectual elite is near unanimous in its intolerance of white ignorance, and we are beginning to experience the classic conundrum of revolutions: once the people who have been on the bottom get to the top, they have every incentive to recreate the cycle of oppression by humiliating and taking out vengeance upon their oppressors.

Only this time, it's not just the former oppressed perpetuating this cycle. It's also guilty former oppressors, seeking to exempt themselves from retribution, real or imagined. From ivory towers, the elite rain down righteous condemnation on poor white America, the brunt of our collective frustration towards ignorance, racism, exploitative policies, etc. finding an easy target in these dregs of the country. What is wrong with them? Why can't they seem to shake the spell of their racist pied pipers and join the ranks of smart, compassionate, worthy, non-racist human beings?

As someone who grew up with a keen sense of the economic injustices perpetrated against the population at large, I can tell you that it's an uphill battle not to be ignorant and white in a conservative state--a battle you don't properly realize you're even fighting; a battle you constantly get the uneasy sense that you're losing. You feel vaguely uncomfortable about the seemingly obvious superiority of your culture over others. Whenever you're in the company of people of color, you can tell they find you ignorant. You can tell they're angry. You can tell you're always saying the wrong thing, but you can never quite figure out just what it was you did. Maybe you're not always graceful about the fact that whites are superior, but what are you supposed to about it?

When I took a domestic diversity class and began to deconstruct "white equals right," one thing that struck me was how often my classmates insisted that most white people were *choosing* their ignorance. Their insistence that white people were *choosing* to capitalize on their advantages, knowingly and gladly at the expense of people of color.

Understandable...but problematic.

It takes a lot of humility and patience to undo a lifetime of conditioning. Frequently I was frustrated, frequently I felt myself reverting to my trained, automatic (and thus, easier) way of seeing the world. I want to believe, but I can't say for sure that I would have followed through with changing my views had I not benefitted from a patient, invested, and wise teacher helping me along the way. The way you feel you're being treated now might be a good way to understand how students of color feel in most other arenas besides this classroom, she suggested. Awesome advice, which I took. There is a certain amount of reckoning to be expected, some of which can be turned to the advantage of revolutionary work.



Imagine waking up and finding out you've been sleep-wreaking carnage on people around you the whole time you were asleep. Imagine you are confused but horrified, and you want to make it right, but they don't seem to want your help. "You've done enough here," they say.

There are many, many other sleepwalkers. You think you might have some understanding of them. There is still a great deal of carnage being wreaked, and it seems to you that it should be a first item of business, figuring out ways to wake the sleepwalkers so they'll stop hurting people and start helping in general.

"Of course you would focus on the sleepwalkers," you're told. "Just like a sleepwalker. So egocentric."

I understand now that my Irish ancestors threw their black friends under the bus in order to be white. I know it's an old story and that most people who share my skin color have ancestors who were willing to let someone else occupy the bottom rung of society just so that they wouldn't have to. I understand now that Nixon and his advisers singled out people of color for a lot of suffering that I got to avoid. Does either of those things mean that I am by nature belligerent, hateful, and willing to take my pleasure at the expense of others? 

I'm a new-ish human. Nobody told me about those things at birth. They were disguised from me along the way. Now that I have a better sense of history, I interact with the world differently. I do everything within my power to counteract these systems, as I would expect any compassionate person to. Who does it benefit to insist that it is not the business of anti-racist activists to figure out ways to awaken the sleepwalkers? Who does it benefit to insist that they actively choose sleep and carnage?



As long there are people we can point to and say "this class of person is not worth attempting to understand, collaborate with, or love" we will be easy to control. This doesn't just go for the racists; it goes for the people who have the capacity to understand and help them but instead choose to mock and condemn. Fully acknowledging that some people very understandably don't have that will or capacity.

The problems we face collectively here on Earth don't come down to race or class or gender. Privilege magnifies things--less privilege means you suffer harder, more privilege means you can exploit on a broader scale--but the essential problems, likewise the solutions, are not the province of any one group of people. Those who are attuned to our common survival are going to behave in ways that reflect that; those who are concerned only with their own survival are going to reflect that in their behavior. They're going to try to exploit everything they come across to their own ends. There are people at every level who feel left out in the cold by the rest of us, and there are reasons for them feeling that way, and there are things we can do about it.

"White is wrong" culture is scaffolding to help us build a better world. It's not a permanent fixture of that world. America has been tuned in to the "white is right" channel for a crazy long time so we need a healthy dose of the opposite just to upset the default position. It's good to remember, though, that the exploiters benefit from both "white is right" culture and "white is wrong culture" inasmuch as they both keep us divided. Both discourage us from understanding or communicating with each other. Both turn actual human beings into unrecognizable caricatures perfect for reinforcing our worst ideas about one another.



One of the things we can start doing is making a clearer distinction between our condemnation of the people who actively create and maintain systems of privilege and the people who passively benefit from them. Poor white people are deluded into thinking they're in the same boat as the exploitative classes just by virtue of their skin color. We can stop feeding that delusion by acting as though all white people are oppressors by default.

The "Olympics of Oppression" is a well known concept within the anti-racist community. The general takeaway is "pain is pain, stop trying to assert that you have it worse than others and start trying to make things better for yourself and others." Does it make sense to draw a firm distinction between the suffering of people of color and the suffering of exploited whites in the work of liberation? Our oppression may be different in both degree and kind,  but we all have a common enemy: exploitation at the expense of community.

Now a lot of people are making a lot of noise about how stupid Trump supporters are, which only feeds into everything they're told about a liberal elite that gets off on feeling superior to others but doesn't actual have any moral meat to it. Alternately, there are some people offering hugs at Trump rallies. Sometimes we just don't have a hug in us for someone who has made our lives miserable. I get that. But hugging is greater than scorning. Internet culture will be truly grown up when our collective rhetoric shifts from a call-out to a call-to-duty model, where instead of ridiculing each other's worst selves, we remind one another to keep rising to our best selves.



I'm not saying that it's a negative thing for much work of liberation to focus on people of color exclusively. That's both positive and necessary. I'm not suggesting that all those who have a grudge against white people should just get over it. That's ridiculous and reductive. I'm saying that the tone of the collective conversation needs to change if we're ever going to get anywhere collectively. I'm saying that if we're tired of oppression, we should pay close attention to what feeds into it, and what interrupts it. 

Right now there's a great, miserable barrier of people who have been born and bred into ignorance. Those who hold the truth are the only ones capable of banishing lies. And it is disrespectful to the humanity in all of us to assume that anyone would choose to live a lie that hurts others if they were able, by themselves, to come to understand it for what it is.

A More Perfect Union

This Mess We're In

You hear about opinions people in your party are supposed to have. Occasionally you come across someone who actually believes it. Some liberals think that you shouldn't have babies unless you can afford to take care of them--most liberals see that as cynical classism. Some conservatives think it's a good idea to make poor kids do janitor duty in their own elementary schools. Most conservatives recognize that if the senator really thought it would be so good for children to scrub toilets at their own school, he should start with his own children's schools.

Most of us are more compassionate, thoughtful, and willing to hear one another out than the people who represent us in the media and in office. Or at least, we started out that way. We used to take it for granted that our neighbors to our right and left care about this country as much as we do and desire largely similar outcomes for it even if we have differing views about how to get there. Don't we all want jobs that allow us to take care of ourselves and our families and preserve some level of dignity? Don't we all want a thriving middle class and a government that stays out of people's business unless explicitly invited?

In a functional society, we would spend the majority of our time coexisting peacefully in the vast territory of our common ground, and only venture into the tiny fraction of disputed territories when we're ready to engage with one another respectfully and thoughtfully, listen to and address one another's concerns, and refuse to consider solutions that leave even one person out in the cold. This is the only way good compromises can be reached.

But we never see this kind of discussion on tv. We only see entertainment-oriented ideological death matches. We've learned from this that compromise is impossible; that the only reason to enter disputed territory is to watch the other guy get pummeled, to crow when our guy gains a victory, to reassure ourselves that we are better, smarter, more right, more righteous. And so we have resigned ourselves, as a country, to the goals of our politicians: not to make life better for everyone, altogether; but to beat the other guy. To win.

Meanwhile, what's happening to our common ground? It's being systematically pillaged. All of the things we care about are being destroyed. We are all, together, getting worse, and worse, and worse off than we were before.

Bernie vs. Hilary. Trump vs. Cruz. Half of the country vs. the other half. If your guy wins, I'll move. If your gal wins, our country is going down the drain. If your guy wins, it proves the majority of the U.S. is depraved. If your guy wins, it proves most people are stupid. You really believe that? You're a sheep! No, you're a sheep! No, you people are sheep! No, you people are sheep!

Baaa! Baaa! Baaa!

What It All Boils Down To

Pundits tell us that being liberal means choosing an intelligent, grounded, socially conscious view of the world over a superstitious, proudly ignorant follower mentality. They tell us that being conservative means living a virtuous, disciplined life of service to others rather than succumbing to a lazy, amoral lifestyle based on taking pleasure at the expense of others.

Anyone with friends or family on both sides of the divide can see that it's not that simple. They know smart, grounded, socially conscious conservatives. They have liberal friends who believe in things without any scientific evidence, who say a lot of things they've never thought about for themselves, who are extremely proud of their ignorance of certain things. They know virtuous, disciplined liberals, leading a life of service to others. They know conservatives who spend most of their energy seeking to work as little as possible, dodge any moral consequences for their actions, and get as much as possible from others while giving as little as they can.

Neither set of traits, positive or negative, is exclusive to either party, but the pundits are very effective at working our biases about our own strengths and our biases about one another's weaknesses in such a way as to blind us to our commonalities (i.e. convincing us that liberals champion unions for substantially different reasons than conservatives champion stricter international trade laws; or that conservative reluctance to additionally tax or regulate businesses comes from a substantially different place than liberals' obsession with patronizing local operations and fighting big corporations; or that the conservative desire to allow private business owners to decide who to serve and why isn't remotely analogous to the liberal insistence that family planning is the business of families, their health providers, and their spiritual leaders).

It's not as simple as the Right Ones vs. the Wrong Ones, no matter who you are. On some level we all know this. But righteous wrath feels so...righteous. And whether or not we're making any headway, it feels good to take a stand for what we believe in and to strike out against that which we oppose. Confirmation bias ensures that we get more and more convinced of our superiority the more we hear about our side vs. their side. And the more partisan we get, the more tribal we get, the less we listen to one another, the more willing we are to think of one another as The Enemy Of All That Is Good instead of My Neighbor, With Whom I Disagree.

What Liberals Need to Understand

It's not stupid to believe in intelligent design. Contrary to popular belief, scientific evidence is not on the side of people who want to interpret everything as pure, random math. The more we understand the universe, the less probable we find it that matter just happened to organize itself this way. Random chaos, as far as we observe it, doesn’t properly allow for such a happenstance. It would be akin to just happening to stumble across the one chimpanzee out of the infinite who managed to accidentally jab out, not just a cohesive string of letters, but an entire Shakespearean play. It's no more statistically likely that we're just an elegant twist of chaos than that we're presided over by any one of the specific gods humans have believed in over the ages.

In other words, materialism is not the superior objective stance. A refusal to acknowledge any other world except the material one requires faith. Same as any other belief system.

What Conservatives Need to Understand

We each see events and incidents in our lives through a slightly different lens. When a pattern occurs, or some random, slightly unusual string of events leads us to the solution to a problem we’ve been struggling with, or has some kind of personal significance, some of us write it off as random coincidence. Some people see the external as a reflection of the internal, and interpret of the information they receive as some kind of lesson about their lives. By nature, the things that bring people to a belief in a higher power (intuition/spiritual impressions, personally significant signs or messages in the physical world, increased peace of mind or happiness as a result of spiritual alignment) do not translate well into the realm of common experience. If you believe in god, that's by design. A relationship with god is, by definition, intensely personal, a matter of the private sphere (rather than the public), and subject to verification only by each individual against their own experience.

In other words, the very nature of the holy denies anyone the right to claim a superior moral stance. The only evidence you can offer of your commitment to virtue is your actions towards others. Same as any other human, regardless of their personal beliefs.

What We All Need to Understand

Regardless of what we believe, each of us is dwelling inside of our own subjective world. Each of us finds our personal world more compelling, aligned with truth, comfortable, and/or survival-oriented than all others (when we start to find another world more compelling, we find ourselves drawn to enter it).

Some of us are comfortable entering other subjective worlds, trying them on for size (what do you believe, and why? What implications would that have for my behavior and worldview, if I believed the same? Does this feel true to me?)  and then returning to our own. Some of us feel safer remaining firmly in our own subjective world (I am steadfast in my beliefs. This is my truth. I would rather not expose myself to being confused and led astray by the half-truths of your worldview).

Regardless of which camp we fall into, we can't expect the opposite camp to either completely change their ways, or to accommodate us all of the time. I may be willing to enter your worldview in order to understand your actions or have a good conversation with you. That doesn't mean I'm willing to live in it permanently, just to suit you, and it doesn't mean that I secretly know that you're right and I'm wrong.

Conversely, just because I'm comfortable entering your territory, it doesn't mean that I should demand that you be willing to enter mine. I already know that you're not comfortable with that. It's not fair of me to expect it.

This can be a problem, though. When we all remain in our subjective worlds, we can talk to one another as much as we want but nobody listens. Even knowing that the standards of our own worldview aren’t an appropriate measure for the actions and beliefs of others, when we converse about values from our separate camps, we tend to spend the majority of our time asserting and defending our own value system, rather than trying to understand and negotiate one another’s value systems.

The Third Space

There is a need for a third space, a neutral space where everyone’s personal values, priorities, and beliefs are off the table argument-wise, and the only thing being discussed is how we can accomplish the things we’re setting out to accomplish without ignoring or violating things that are important to one another.

Our entire system of governance right now is based on an increasingly vitriolic feud. (Feudalism might be a good name for it.) My party vs. yours. My value system vs yours. Intense allegiance, not to the common cause, not to a more perfect union, but to our own personal causes. So that when our leaders get into office, instead of collaborating to serve us, they dig trenches and settle in to obstruct one another. Does this seem like a rational or efficient way of getting absolutely anything done?

Well, it is effective at one thing. It’s been very effective at distracting us from all of the terrible things that have been going on behind our backs: the privatization of prisons and militarization of police, the migration of American jobs overseas, the gradual concentration of all the wealth we’ve collectively earned through our record productivity into the hands of very few, the so-called “spreading of democracy” around the world by supporting military coups which replace democratically elected leaders with dictators more willing to allow the U.S. cheap access to their country’s resources at the expense of their own populace, and the dangerous enemies now rising up against us as a result of these bad policies.

We have two choices. We can keep pointing fingers at one another, blaming each other's values, political philosophies, and blind trust in leadership for how bad things keep getting. Or we can recognize that we're all obstructing a functional democracy through our very antagonism, and turn our efforts on an individual level towards peace and understanding. Resist the urge to demonize. Resist the urge to mock and belittle and denigrate. Stop playing into the hands of the people who benefit from our enmity.

Let's Venn-Diagram our Utopias

Neither conservatives nor liberals are happy with the current state of affairs. We have in common the desire for a better, safer, kinder world. The differences of opinion aren't about whether the world should get better. They're slight differences of what a better world looks like, neither of which is remotely antagonistic to the other side's worldview.

One group believes that our social and political structures can and should reflect the values we hold individually in terms of looking out for one another, helping those in need, and expressing gratitude for what we have by showing generosity towards those with less.

The other believes that individuals aren't living up to the moral guidance and order our current societal structures offer, and that only by reinforcing certain kinds of self-denial and self-discipline can a society help its individuals reach their personal moral potential, thereby creating a moral society.

So you can see that we're focusing on different aspects of paradise here: on the one hand, we're daydreaming about a world in which everyone is more patient, generous, and loving towards one another; on the other side, they're daydreaming about everyone working hard, contributing to their communities, and coming to enjoy the benefits of self-reliance, self-discipline, and tangibly benefiting the people you love.

They're both worthy visions, and depending on how we get there, they're not even slightly incompatible.

We need to stop attacking each other over our various differences of opinion (granted, there are many) and start focusing on the aspect's of one another's visions that we can get on board with. Instead of attempting to destroy one another's strongholds of moral opinion, we could seek truces. Instead of finding reasons to oppose one another, we could join together to build towards both visions of paradise, and together create something that would more closely resemble everyone's ideals.

True, neither will be quite perfect, both will require adjustment and compromise, but I'm willing to bet the finished product of that concerted effort would be a damn sight better than what we have now.

Sex Ed, Abstinence, and Abortion

Nobody wants abortion to be women's primary means of preventing pregnancy. And most of the people who are against sex education are worried that their priorities will not be part of the sex-ed agenda. As such, why don't we develop a national sex education program with three primary tenets:

1) Sex as a big, adult decision which involves consequences and emotions that can be difficult to handle, regardless of your maturity level. It is your decision to make and no-one else's, and you should decide to have sex only if you feel completely, totally ready and comfortable. Your friends' opinions should not be a factor. Your partner's desires are less important than your personal comfort. Television, magazines, books, bragging friends, etc. can all contribute to make it seem like the sooner you have sex, the cooler you are. Not so. Ask any adult. The more of a conscious decision it was, the less influenced by outside opinions, the happier they were with their first experience. Nobody should feel bad about choosing to remain abstinent, and it's nobody else's business what you choose. Abstinence is an excellent way to make sure that you won't have to deal with certain issues until you're good and ready.

2) There is a huge contingent in this country that seeks to make abortion entirely illegal. We don't know exactly at what point consciousness enters a body, whether it is an embryo, a zygote, a fetus. We have no way of knowing. Some people want to draw a hard line immediately after conception, that's how worried they are about messing this up. Historically, making abortion completely illegal leads to women seeking unsafe abortions. As the majority of us would prefer that neither women nor children are hurt or threatened, we urge you to take this issue very seriously and do everything you can to prevent a pregnancy from taking place, thus ensuring that you will never have to toe the line of potentially ending a prenatal consciousness.

3) Here are some time-tested ways to keep yourself healthy, clean, and safe, physically, emotionally, and psychologically, whatever you do decide for yourself.

Instead of laughing off the concerns of the anti-sex-ed people, why don't we incorporate their desires into our agenda so that we all have equal stake in this?