an epistemological note

Just got home from some beers with a radical PhD student friend of mine and honestly it was a really helpful talk. Lately I've struggled with relating to my parents as I learn and change my views and the relationship with them has taken on a vague fictional antagonism in my head. The deconstruction of this feeling & the realization that it's manufactured is important; realizing that the stakes aren't so high (i.e., no one will disown me because of my religion/politics) helps too! Generally I've been thinking lately about my the perpetual state of righteous indignation against geopolitical and philosophical problems isn't an effective or healthy way of being. The humility to apply an ethically-neutral standpoint theory to the way other people feel and behave is helpful too. I'm finding the answers to the big questions for my own life, but these are grounded in my own life and experience. I would never claim to believe in objective truth, so it's arrogant to try to apply my own conclusions to the different experiences of other people. I won't stop pushing for political goals (I never could!) but must push differently. Not "hey, I have the answer and I'm super pissed that other people don't have this super smart and objectively correct answer that I've come to, and instead choose to live in ignorance and intellectual indolence," but rather respect for the experience and standpoint that bring people to draw the conclusions that they have drawn, and engaging them at their own level in a non-aggressive way. The encounter between two people and the co-construction of a mutually-agreeable conclusion is more valuable than me haranguing and trying to convince them of my way, because my bounded and limited experience - although compelling and moving to me - is valid for me and me alone. Humility in interaction and the objective to negotiate truth rather than pushing my own agenda would do me well politically, professionally, and personally.

Things that make me cry when I'm at home

Got the growing up blues real bad! If my life goes the way I want it to, this won't be my last spring break but will almost certainly be the last one that I spend at home. Did the grand couch tour of my house this break because I don't have a bed in my room anymore. That doesn't make me cry, but like basically everything else does. I hate arguing with the people that I love about things that matter a lot to me and matter a lot to them too, but I also hate not being able to say anything because I want to avoid starting an argument. I am so envious of people who are of the same political color as their parents but I can't be the same as mine unless I suspend disbelief and suppress my critical faculties. I wish this didn't bother me so much because political and social theory and practice are going to be my career so this will never go away. Maybe if I could just be a dentist or something then I could talk about work without starting shit. This actually kills me. So I kind of want to move far away and never come back. I don't actually want to do this but I think I am going to.

Also Charlie and the fact that my brothers and I have identical faces. And photos of my mom growing up where the likeness to the woman that I know slowly emerges over the time series. And the cool and revolutionary feminist stuff that she has done, like breast feeding activism groups, but she doesn't recognize it as this. And that the cousin who was my best friend growing up is having her baby shower tomorrow and I'm filled with ambivalence about it.

Mostly I want to get back to school and read Marx and get lunch with friends and be busy and stop thinking about this stuff for like two seconds

I am taking an independent study of feminist repudiations of christian misogyny. Only instead of doing it for course credit I am doing it for my own moral and intellectual edification

I don't usually write about politics on here

But I read this article (http://www.constitutionaldaily.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1395:help-wanted-dissidents&catid=49:the-philadelphia-lawyer&Itemid=65) and got so pissed that I wrote an essay in reply. Here it is. Read that article first though.

As someone who has protested within the Occupy movement, I doubt that the author has had any first-hand contact with Occupy protesters - his heavy-handed and stereotypical depiction of us could have come straight from Fox News. While it's certainly true that there are some in the movement who are there simply because they think protesting is cool and are therefore inarticulate in explaining why they protest, I have found them to be the minority in my experience. A great majority of the people I have met from Occupy participate as a result of thoughtful and well-reasoned analysis. Many, including myself, have executed the intellectual rigor necessary to conceive “informed, competing solutions” to the problems our nation faces.

I am also confused by the author's characterization of Vaclav Havel as a dissident but not a protester—Havel was imprisoned in 1989 because of his involvement in protests. The author belittles the strength and necessity of collective action by mischaracterizing protesters as “follower[s], complainer[s]” who are “by definition, intellectually lazy.” I find it suspect that he neglects to mention other instances of collective action, such as the civil rights, women's, and anti-war movements, who have achieved lasting change through “taking to the streets with a placard.” Were these movements, too, comprised of “angry, envious, unthinking creatures of emotion”?

The author seeks a solution to the myopic and stagnant political climate. Steve Jobs is not the type of dissident that can fix this.

It doesn't matter how well-reasoned or “competitive” a solution one individual may propose. The very stagnation and corruption of the political climate that the author bemoans prevent simple innovative ideas from changing politics. History has shown that the only way to enact meaningful social change is through collective action—protesting.

what I have been reading this break

"Religion is, therefore, not what we have always thought it to be. Religion is not a system of belief. It is not a catalog of revealed truth. It is not an activity designed to control behavior, to reward virtue, and to punish vice. Religion is, rather, a human attempt to process the God experience, which breaks forth from our own depths and wells up constantly within us. We must lay down, therefore, the primitive claims we have made for our religious traditions. None of them is drawn from otherworldly revelations. None of them is inerrant or infallible. None of them represents the only way to God. None of them can be used legitimately to coerce or compel another to belief.
...
So what the exile has done is to free us from the killing, idolatrous limits of the religions of the world.... The gods of these religious systems have also died. The god of church, synagogue, and temple is no more. The magical, personalistic, manipulative, supernatural, and sometimes vindictive power of these deities has been used historically not to enhance life but to bless the status quo, to increase priestly power, and to support those claims of state that have expanded the wealth and power of the ruling class.

The God who is the Ground of Being cannot be so owned. God is a universal presence undergirding all of life. God does not bless and curse individuals according to an imposed prescription of conduct. God, the source of life, calls us all to live fully. God, the source of love, calls us all to love wastefully. God, the Ground of Being, calls us all to have the courage to be ourselves. So when we live, love, and have the courage to be, we are engaged in worship, we are expanding our humanity, we are breaking out of our barriers."
- Spong 1998, p. 225-6

year in review and preview

accomplishments of 2011:
- academic performance/development, including completing grad schools apps!
- serious growth as an activist/organizer/leader from TDS presidency. Efficacy at making things happen. Passed the torches to capable and passionate underclassmen
- one year at the Writing Center, greatest job ever
- one year at the Great Place, with the Greatest roommates on god's green earth and the Greatest theme parties n. philadelphia has ever seen
- the year of lipstick! and more lipstick to 2012!
- dates with boys! advancement from hook up scene to dating scene, including the courage to instigate and ask for clarification when unclear
- spreading feminism and radically compassionate politics to friends and family members of all stripes
- legal drinking!
- participation in a historic social movement and collective action for the causes that move and motivate me
WE DID IT 2011

plans and aspirations for 2012:
- choose the right graduate school where I can grow and be challenged and learn, in a location that I will come to love and call home
- continue to refine the as-yet nebulous collection of moral/ethical precepts to better delineate a spirituality that is intellectually defensible and which moves me to greater compassion
- be able to weather the existential anxiety that is sure to ensue from the post-college transition; skillfully sustain relationships with those I love who may be further away
- maintain unwavering belief in my own self and abilities even when faced with the challenges that 2012, graduation, moving, and grad school are sure to bring
- more dates while keeping them properly weighted as not paramount to my own worth or happiness
- love more recklessly. Take emotional risks for the opportunity of growth/experience. Be more authentic with myself and with those I love
- have the fortitude and patience that are necessary for the sustaining energy of social change
- piss away less time on teh Internet

pathos

"Every time a man unburdens his heart to a stranger he reaffirms the love that unites humanity. To be sure, he is unpacking his heart with words but at the same time he is encouraged to expect interest and sympathy, and he usually gets it. His interlocutor feels unable to impose his own standards on his confidant's behavior; for once he feels how another man feels. It is not always sorrow and squalor that is is passed on in this way but sometimes joy and pride. I remember a truck driver telling me once about his wife, how sexy and clever and loving she was, and how beautiful. He showed me a photograph of her and I blushed for guilt because I had expected something plastic and I saw a woman by trendy standards plain, fat and ill-clad. Half the point in reading novels and seeing plays and films to to exercise the faculty of sympathy with our own kind, so often obliterated in the multifarious controls and compulsions of actual social existence. For, once we are not contemptuous of Camille or jealous or Juliet, we might even understand the regicide or the motherfucker. That is love."

Geramine Greer, The Female Eunuch, p. 150.