MAY 26, MONDAY

RANTING

Stop reading right here if you don’t want to hear me pontificate, give my 2 cents worth, about a problem that seems impossible for humans to resolve. This is just my individual, half baked, unprofound take on what is going on in the USA and most everywhere else.

DIFFERENCES

Even as I sit quietly in Winsen on the Aller in the emerald green of May all around me I am bombarded daily with notifications from the USA about the outrageous activities of Donald Trump as he plays president, a dark reality show in which the apparent purpose is to get constant attention and to increase ratings and to make as much money as he can from his brand.

But of course this is from my perspective sitting in Germany and being aware that the American way is not better or worse than the German way, just different.

What he seems intent on eliminating by threat of violence if need be is “wokeness” which seems to be to be a state of being wide awake, of being fully aware and as understanding as one can be. What he, and apparently half the country, feels threatened by, is DEI which I have finally looked up and find to be diversity, equity and inclusiveness which seem to me the opposite of a threat. DEI is the drive to accept all people regardless of their skin color, gender or religious beliefs. Somehow being accepting of the differences of others as they are is a threat to people’s identity. I have trouble understanding how being liberal, being open to all perspectives, including the MAGA perspective is a threat. How is accepting a gay person for being gay, a women for being feminine, a person being born with a different skin color a threat? It would seem that if we all accepted all differences that no one would be a threat to anyone else.

I wrote yesterday of the Winsen cemetery and how different it is from an Swannanoa cemetery. And I have often wondered about the difference in zoning in Buncombe County and zoning in Europe, in this case Winsen. The sense of personal freedom developed by people escaping from Europe and other places to North America is threatened by zoning or a national religion. I think this is even reflected in the floating of the raft down the river in tradtional uniforms that I wrote about yesterday and the appearance of the church service that I attended.

It seems that humans have developed almost endless differences in culture in the languages they speak, in the religions they believe to be fundamental, in the way they dress, in the variety of things they eat and the way they prepare them. We have created multiple realities. And yet when we come face to face with a made up reality different from our own we insist our own made up reality is fundamental and the very different reality is a threat.

Why is it that we can’t see that all of these realities are in a way dreamed up or projected and that one human way of maintaining our individual reality, our personal identity, is to band together as nations or religions or social groupings of one kind or another and to then feel threatened by differences?

It seems as simple as that. It is quite obvious that there is no right language. There can’t possibly with millions of people firmly believing in each set of gods or in different single gods be any right religion. How can there possibly be a right skin color? Can there be right foods or correct ways of dressing when humans eat or dress in countless ways.

In the end we seem to be guided by emotion. We affirm what feels comfortable to us and feel threatened by what makes us feel uncomfortable. That seems to me to be what the MAGA/LIBERAL divide is about. Liberals make MAGA people uncomfortable and MAGA people make Liberals uncomfortable and pretty soon they begin to demonize and hate each other. Half of the people living in the USA feel comfortable with traditional American values of white supremacy, male domination, gender uniformity, Christian fundamentalism and American exceptionalism and entitlement and world power. This is what half of America feels intuitively is right. But the other half has woken up to the relativity of human cultural values and sees that there is no right way of doing things, but even this second half still feels that somehow Americans are better than other people and more right. And we have on either side made ourselves to be very uncomfortable with each other.

But if we wake up to the fact that no one is right, that nothing is fundamental, that the only way we can get along is to listen to each other and to accept each other as feeling our own way through life as best we can. Liberal condescension or outright mocking of MAGA people is not liberal at all and is part of the threat MAGA people feel. To be truly liberal we have to be open to the perspective of others even when these cultural patterns are almost the opposite of our own. The only way out, it seems to me, is empathy, acceptance of others, which is as much a human drive as fear or hatred or defending ourselves against the threat of differences.

We have to almost blind ourselves in order to refuse to see from any other perspective than what makes us comfortable. Refusing to believe the scientific proof of global warming is deliberate blindness. Refusing to see the perspectives of other religions is deliberate blindness. Refusal to open up to differences in food or dress or differences in cemeteries or municipal zoning is deliberate blindness. These seem to refer to MAGA attitudes. But refusing to see the goodness of rural values and religion and ways of life by liberals is a deliberate blindness as well.

The one constant, maybe, is not cultural values, but human nature, the result of human evolution, the inner visceral drives that impel us through life that all humans share. We are all simply human and create countless human cultures, with the constant not being any right culture but human nature itself. We simply have to listen to each other and accept each other in our very different realities. But this threatens our identity and makes us uncomfortable, we almost have to be reborn in some way, in order free ourselves from the defending tribal side of human nature.

That is my 2 cents worth.

ADDENDUM

Even as I finish my rant I realize that what I call traditional American values are a matter of perspective and that seen from a MAGA perspective they are values to affirmed. White superiority can, from a MAGA perspective, simply be pride in what white people have done, male dominance is simply affirming the male drive to understand and protect and provide which seems undermined by the assertion of feminine values and also undermined by an economy that is taking blue collar jobs away. Christian fundamentalism is simply the assertion that rural emotional Christian values make people feel centered and very alive, values that are threatened by liberal, philosophical Christianity which seems to make everything relative. American exceptionalism is simply an affirmation that American culture with its freedoms and booming economy has been very good for many people. And America being great and powerful is simply an affirmation that we want to protect and not lose any of the things that make America a great place to live. Anti intellectualism is simply an affirmation that a strong work ethic and manual labor is rewarding and should be honored and not mocked by people spending their time reading and writing.

If I am going to have empathy for MAGA people, this, for me, is a starting point in accepting MAGA perspectives and the good people whose identity is rooted in these perspectives. Seeing these values as being threatening and ignorant is a step away from liberal understanding rather than a defense of liberalism.