It's easy enough for me to imagine what people think I should do, or "should'a, could'a, wouldve" done in the past. More than opening the mail,, perhaps. But if they are right, what does that say about the "meaning" of marriage and family. It's more a result than a cause.
Sunday, September 01, 2013
"Don't be a coward": That command is a double negative
I wrote a couple of provocative tweets Saturday
morning, after waking up from a particularly intractable dream. One of them was “The aphorism “Don’t be a
coward” sounds like a double negative”.
I followed up with “That is, you have to swing at least once when thrown
three called strikes, but you shouldn’t swing at balls.” I didn’t intend a pun. Sometimes “in life” you get on base by
walking, without risk. Sometimes you get
hit by a pitch, get hurt. You take one
for the team (like Troy McClain on Donald Trump’s “The Apprentice” way back in
2004). Later I mentioned the accidental
beaning of Jayson Heyward of the Atlanta Braves, costing the team one of its
leading hitters for the season. That’s
much more relevant that the recent battles between the Braves and Nationals
involving Bryce Harper and Stephen Strasburg.
Some people may have taken by tweets as predictive
of what would be discussed with respect to Syria later on, in fact all of
Saturday afternoon and evening on CNN.
Note, for example, that Charles Rangel (D-NY) brought up the military
draft again (Issues blog, Saturday).
The “Do Ask, Do Tell III” book that I hope will be
out officially by November, will have a long “appendix” chapter giving almost a
day-by-day diary or transcript of my fourteen weeks in Basic Combat Training
when I went through it at Fort Jackson, SC in 1968. It was difficult to edit, as I dealt with how
I could use economic advantage and education to reduce the physical risk that
others took, a point that is morally relevant even if the Vietnam War turned
out to be wrongly based. My actions
there, at age 24, seem offensive now (maybe “cowardly”), but it’s hard to see
where that sense of wrongdoing fits into today’s perception of personal morals,
where individual rights and personal responsibility, as seen much more narrowly
than in the past, rule public perceptions of expected behavior.
I’ve experienced indignation from others at various
points in my life, for being “different”, particularly as a tween, as a college
freshman at William and Mary, at NIH, in the Army, and then not as much in the
IT workplace where I fit in as an “individual contributor”, but then again
dealing with my mother’s eldercare, with constant solicitations today from
others, and with the unusually personal demands made on me by the post-IT
workplace, especially when I worked as a substitute teacher. One particularly relevant conversation from my first job, way back in 1963, pops into mind: my supervisor warned that I had a tendency to make enemies. No one else has ever said it like that. Maybe times have changed.
Being “different” I am really in that gray
transition zone (what they call a “termination zone” on a tidally locked
extrasolar planet). My level of “disability”
made it hard to compete socially and to “take care” of people personally in a
manner normally expected of young males, and it placed me in a position of some
dependence on others who made sacrifices that I could not see. But, unlike the case of many people in
somewhat similar situations, I was able to function well enough as an
individual in a technological world that what I do can really affect
others. So, some people express
indignation and expect me to stay in my place, maybe more than they would
people more obviously disabled. That is
the world of “mild” Asperger’s.
Come back to the baseball analogy. Sometimes you have to swing. Actually, if it’s a “suicide squeeze” you
have to try to bunt the ball even if it’s out of the strike one. Sometimes you have to “sacrifice”. Sometimes you do get hurt.
That’s a fact of real life, part of street smarts
for real people. I get this feedback
from them all the time, when things have gone wrong. “Courage Under Fire” (the 1995 movie with
Matt Damon) can be physical, it can be financial or occur in business, or it
can be emotional – the most difficult part.
It can demand openness to intimacy and closeness with people whom one
would not have chosen at first. (Some of
that idea drives Vatican moral theories about “openness to procreation” as the
automatic responsibility for any access to sexuality at all.) It can become combinatorial: physical maiming from military service (or
as volunteer firefighter) can lead one
to have to accept emotional attachment when one might feel physical shame – a very
sore point for me personally. It can demand that someone with compromised ability who "got a break" from above pass the willing attentiveness along. It is the
antithesis of “upward affiliation”.
Welcome to the world of George Gilder, that 1980s moralist (“Men and
Marriage”).
I do enjoy working alone, writing (and music
composing) and publishing exactly what I want, without compromising loyalties
to others. But that depends on a legal
and physical infrastructure that can be taken away. Legally, some of that is the constant tension
about Section 230, DMCA, SOPA, COPA, surveillance, trolls, SLAPP, tracking, and
similar problems. Underneath the legal
debate there are ideas about sacrifice to help those with real “responsibility”
(raising vulnerable kids). All this
affects the business models of companies whose services I depend on. But it may be the physical world “threat” that
matters the most. That involves concerns
about terrorism (EMP, cyberwar – maybe overblown, and various kinds of attacks)
motivated in part by a kind of indignation that sees ordinary “privileged”
westerners as personally culpable for the sacrifices in other parts of the
world. It also may drive the brazenness
of some domestic street crime, which has resulted in horrific events (outside
of the usual debate on guns and mental illness as pursued by “liberal”
commentators like Piers Morgan). There
are people who want “Revolution”, pretty much as on that NBC show. It can suddenly and unpredictably make a
disconnected person like me into a fool. I do love our modern civilization with its wonders and freedom; but it can fail suddenly, and if it did, there would be no use for someone like me. And it gets dangerous to even admit that in front of some people.
What I “take away” (to use the grade school metaphor
for subtraction in arithmetic lessons) from all this is that everyone sometimes
has to “step up”, and that if he or she doesn’t, he or she loses the right to
be viewed as a “victim” or be commemorated if something goes wrong beyond that
person’s control. The idea that we just
have to deal with some things seems to feed much of the complementarity needed
in long term relationships raising children and taking care of elders and
dependent extended family (even if it need not always be heterosexual). It’s a bit of a paradox: you can’t have
sustainable individualism and “equality” without accepting the quantum nature
of life on a personal level. As Rick
Warren writes, it isn’t always “about you” and sometimes real sacrifice will
happen. This apparent duplicity is what is behind some New Testament parables like "The Rich Young Ruler" and especially "The Parable of the Talents". I think that idea drove a lot of
my own interchanges with religious establishment in the 70’s ad 80’s. Beyond that, the “meaning” of personal desire
really matters, as it inevitably emerges and becomes more public. Of course, this observation does invite
authoritarianism and abuse of power. It’s
a two-way street.
It's easy enough for me to imagine what people think I should do, or "should'a, could'a, wouldve" done in the past. More than opening the mail,, perhaps. But if they are right, what does that say about the "meaning" of marriage and family. It's more a result than a cause.
It's easy enough for me to imagine what people think I should do, or "should'a, could'a, wouldve" done in the past. More than opening the mail,, perhaps. But if they are right, what does that say about the "meaning" of marriage and family. It's more a result than a cause.
So, there’s more expected than “following the rules”,
“not getting caught”, and “paying your bills.”
Call it “paying your dues” if you like.
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