🚀 go-pugleaf

Christopher D Dukes (cddukes@unity.ncsu.edu) wrote:
> In article <loapxoNb4faB089yn@vaxxine.com>,
> Laura Masters <lmasters@vaxxine.com> wrote:
> >So, lets see if I get this... There is a serial killer running around
> >killing Transgendered people and prostitutes, and terrorizing a whole city.
> >The police have no clues, and are making a public appeal for any and all
> >help they can get on the case... and the depth of your concern for your own
> >peers extends no further than curiosity about one of the victim's names?
> >
> >Wonderful ethics you got going there Joan....

> And aside from breaking the news in a someeewhat chilly fashion, all
> you can do is bitch about someone's coping mechanism?  Is Joan
> supposed to shave her head, rend her clothes into rags, and go
> around town sobbing?

Only when I lose someone I know personally.

> The world is filled with senseless violence.  Get over it.

Also, the world is filled with cheap hypocrisy.  I'm not a hypocrite.
No, I don't feel a lot of real, personal distress every time I hear of
someone being killed, for several reasons.  Primarily, I've buried too
many close friends in the last decade or so, and I got used to it.
Also, overmuch grieving is the body's way of dealing with its own fear
of death, and it puts the person feeling the grief in a non-rational
position to pity those "others" who must die.  But I'm convinced that
I will die, too.  In fact, it is not a totally bad thing to
contemplate, and becomes less bad the longer I live and the more I
see.  This blunts a lot of the motivation to pity the dead.  

If I work a case of an individual, and start getting to know them
after the fact, their loss will hit me much harder.  But the old
(Nazi?) homily is a fact of human nature: one death is a tragedy, a
thousand deaths is a statistic.  If it were any other way, we would
become so paralyzed we couldn't keep the world running, and death
would conquer us before our time.  Strategically, it is noteworthy
when one of our community gets offed, but not exclusively so, since
there are so _many_ ways we can die, that is just one more stat in the
risk column, and in a time as dangerous as ours, it is easy to become
inured to even high risk levels.

Conversely, I read alt.support.grief.pet-loss regularly, because every
time I do, I can guarantee full, sobbing crying in excess of 5
minutes, which dumps a lot of poison and tension from my system.  This
may sound cold-blooded, and it is, to the extent that I know what my
body needs, and try to provide it using the programmed cues which are
most reliable.  In an absolute sense, it is precisely as reprehensible
(or not) as masturbation, for precisely the same reasons.  If I could
get the same reflexive sorrow and loss leading to the same catharsis
over the loss of another human being, I'd do so, if only in the
interest of abstract morality...but my life experiences with people,
from the first encounters with them back in 1953, haven't permitted me
to like or trust enough human beings so successfully that I
instinctively care at that basic level what happens to them.  I have
to use the forebrain and the ethics routines to become outraged over
murder, whereas there is no conscious processing involved at the loss
of a pet cat, and no need to force an emotive reaction.  I am bound to
the dog or cat at a level I don't have with regard to my own species,
and there is no way to repair that kind of basic socialization at my
age...or at any age much past 12, for that matter.  This seems part of
the legacy of the abused child, but I don't think that anybody has a
monopoly on it.  If we can compensate with our logic for the lack of a
feeling, we will be doing all that can reasonably be required of us.
We simply have to remember that blind people don't apply for jobs as
bus drivers, and place limits on the things we try to do unaided.

We all react to things differently, and in the course of our lives, we
all react to the same thing in a variety of ways, depending on our
health, strength, and awareness.  This is how it is, everybody is at a
different point walking the path around the lake.  While we can see
each other, we can't feel what the ground is like under anybody's feet
but ours.  This can tend to make people want to dictate "proper"
behavior to others.  That isn't always a major aggression, it is
usually just a sign they're young at life, or they haven't thought
much about what they've seen and done.  And it _certainly_ can't be
fixed.  NO life lesson can be reduced to words, especially when the
people talking have been raised to treat experience as poker chips in
a game of male status.  Knowledge claims are instinctive, and real
knowledge is almost nil, beyond the basic body-knowledge and some
simple fears.  Only reflection helps, and that requires years or
lifetimes.

> BTW, I could swear that the news items both used a euphemism for
> prostitute to describe the T* folks.  I have no problem with that
> fact, but glossing over it does little to smooth down the tension,
> division, and hypocrisy of the T* ranks.

Nothing is going to be done to change any of those things by talking
to each other.  We feel too much unresolved angst, and seeing each
other we see the thing which stimulates that fear.  We need to go out
and do some basic repatterning and reclaim some of that 'turf' we've
ceded to 'the straights' before we'll really _believe_ we can live.
I'm rather expert at getting caught in concepts which may not reflect
reality, as does anybody who manipulates complex models.  The only
touchstone is to dive in.

Joan
-- 
=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=
Wombat! Transexual Menace! Vicus Lusorum! Curry!
Theoni Srith Nanklaren/Bubblegum Crisis/Rollerblade Macro EQ 
Quare tristis es anima mea, et quare conturbas me?