I'm guessing I have some minor illness going on. Slept last night for 9 hours. My average is 7. Not feeling as achy but just easily fatigued. I think I should be back to full speed tomorrow.
That's okay. It was rainy and windy a good part of the day. So, I stuck with regular domestic stuff around the house today.
Other than that, I hung around online and got politically active again. In most cases, I kept it all rational and educational. Not the kind of education a lot of people want to have but that kind of person is precisely my largest target audience. Some of my writing has veered further into the psychological arena.
Here are some of the things I wrote today:
The more we focus on mass shootings and violence in this country, the more we truly need to focus on the sources of these things in our own society.
Let me be clear that I am focusing on American society because issues do change from one society to another and one culture to another. This is only one issue but is a major one.
When you examine the root source of many issues of violence in our country, one common thread comes into play. Emotional repression.
Emotional repression has most commonly been a male issue. However, as we have seen from the last few decades, it is a growing issue for females as well. That is because of equal rights. I will stick mostly to the male perspective because, well, I am a male and most associated with that aspect. Though I fully recognize the growing female component.
Historically and even into today, male children are raised with the perspective that male children should learn to suppress their emotions. Males are told throughout our lives to “suck it up”, “be a man”, “man up”. We witness daily people who are overly aggressive, even violent being rewarded for this behavior and referred to as “real men”.
The actual truth behind much of this is that suppressing your emotions takes a medically and psychologically measurable burden on any person. This takes the form of increased stress, leading to such things as alcoholism, drug abuse, high blood pressure, depression, suicide, criminal tendencies, aggression, stroke and homicide. Even cancer has been proven to have definitive links to stress level.
Historically, these have been areas which men were more prone to these effects. In recent decades, women have been seeing an increase in every one of these areas.
So, it is obvious that a strong percentage of this comes down to personal responsibility. Though before that can happen, the individual needs to recognize the problem. That is hard to do in a society which praises people who are aggressive as leaders, refers to compassionate leaders as weak and at the personal level punishes us when we express negative emotions. Nobody is positive all the time. We have stopped treating each other like human beings.
Even the methods, however harmful, we once had are daily being stripped away. Alcohol was once the method many people used for dealing with stress. Alcohol came under fire and medications took their place. Now excessive medications have come under fire.
In no way do I defend chemical repression of emotions. Yet will not claim I have never been prone to exactly that in my younger days.
What can we, as a society, expect to happen when we tell people to keep their emotions inside? Both positive and negative? What happens is those emotions become bottled, pressure builds. There can be only one result after enough pressure builds. The vessel either implodes or explodes.
Every single one of this plays a part in this cycle. We either act as release valves for one another or we increase that pressure. Every time you belittle or invalidate the emotions of another person,you build that pressure. Every time you treat another person like they are invisible, you build that pressure.
In the end, it does not tend to take much to disperse that pressure. Depends on the person and just how much pressure has built up. The first step is simply treating other people with respect. When you have time, listen. And stop treating people like they are flawed when they have some moment of weakness. Even if they are chronically weak, what is really wrong with that? Not all of us have the same level of strength. Just accept people for who they are. Doesn't mean you have to adopt them. Just accept them. In the process, you could play a large part in preventing yet another tragedy.
No, that will not fix all our problems. But it is a really good start.
Here is another:
I have tried putting this nicely but for some people that just does not work.
So, let's try a different tack.
The people who hoard guns really do so for their personal safety. However, no matter how many guns they amass, they never feel safe.
There is a very good reason for this. The thing they truly fear is not outside. It is inside.
They want to feel important. Yet fear they are not.
There is no foreign army breaking down your door. Obama is not coming for your guns.
They go to sleep each night in their home filled with weapons, yet still afraid. Their sleep is broken, their dreams turn to nightmares of people attacking them and invading their homes.
Most have security systems, yet are still afraid.
They surround themselves with like-minded people, yet are still afraid.
What are they afraid of? Someone not seeing them as masculine enough? Being irrelevant? Being invisible to those around them?
One thing wrong with surrounding yourself with people who think the same way is that, together you do not feel more secure. Instead, the number of fears grows. Fear of women is added to by fear of Black people, then Hispanics, then gay people, then Muslims on the other side of the planet and the list goes on and on and on....
This is NOT an attack. This is meant to make some people reflect on this.
Buying another gun is not going to make you feel secure. Attacking the rights of other Americans will not make you feel secure or more important for more than a few seconds. There will always be something more, something different to fear. Always.
The truth is, the more people you alienate, the more your fear becomes justified.
It's true, nobody on earth will always have some level of danger. Look at Gandhi, look at Lennon, look at Bruce Lee.
So in the end, it all comes back to FDR. “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”
The call is your own. When you live in fear and allow it to rule every minute of your life, you lose. There may be no immediate enemy yet you lose. You lose seeing the diversity of life. You lose making friends with people whom you can learn a lot from, who do not expand on your fears but on your joys.
Fear is a hard thing to let go of. Ask anyone who has ever been in a hospital and was afraid to leave. Ask Holocaust victims. Ask former hostages. Ask veterans with PTSD. It is difficult but it can be done. But more guns are not going to help. The only thing you can do is admit that fear to yourself. Look around you at what you are really afraid of. How many times has your home been invaded? How many of rights really been taken away? Aside from the guns, if the government or anyone else looked at your life, what negatives would they find? Do you ignore or abuse your family, friends, co-workers or others only because of your fear? Once you admit it to yourself and realize there is no immediate basis for that fear, open up to your family and friends. Let them help you overcome it.
And stop attacking people. It does not help you, it does not help them, it in no way improves anyone's life. Turn off Fox News which only shoves things in your face which heightens your fear, no matter how baseless it is. Go volunteer actual time and effort at a homeless shelter or domestic violence center. Take a look in the eyes of people who have real things to fear. It will change your life. You may even wind up selling some of your guns to help them.
And last:
Here are the problems with tax breaks for the ultra-rich.
I will leave some aspects of this out for the sake of simplicity.
First, we have been trying this approach for at least the last 35 years. Which is how we have gotten to where we are now. But let's not focus on that. Let's go with very simple logic which has been learned from those 35 years. (Although it was predictable in the first place.)
Say a person makes $100 Million per year. That person gets taxed at 50 percent.
The result? They have $50 Million to live on. Not for their whole life. That is only for one year.
Ask yourself-Could you spend $50 Million a year?
Most of the ultra-rich actually do not. To use an arbitrary number, say they spend $20 Million.
That leaves $30 Million in the bank. Collecting interest. Interest paid by you.
The next year, they make another $100 Million, same result. They now have $60 Million in savings.
What is the actual effect of this, especially if they keep that money in offshore accounts?
That money is now removed from the US economy. It does not create jobs, it does not pay wages, it is not loaned to small businesses.
So, now you decrease the tax load on the rich to 20 percent.
Do they increase their cost of living? No. They still spend $20 Million per year. Which means they now have $80 Million per year, every year going into savings.
In ten years, that one single person has removed $800 Million from the US economy. Money they will never live long enough to spend.
That would be fine if it was one person. However, multiply that by just 100 people.
Now you have $80 BILLION removed from the US economy in ten years. This has been happening for at least 30 years. So, a low ball estimate means in those 30 years the ultra-rich have removed at least 2.4 Trillion from the US economy. That is for only 100 people making ONLY $100 Million per year. The actual numbers are much, much higher because the same rules apply to corporations which make Billions every year, some of which pay no taxes at all.
Nobody has suggested all the wealth be taken from the rich. But I tend to think $50 Million a year is enough to live on. Especially when the same people are exporting jobs on a daily basis and claim the poor are the problem with the economy.
So, yes, some of it is just re-wording of things I have written before. However, I will be quite honest and say that many of the people are either not very educated or are willfully ignorant. Getting through to them can be difficult. I'm not expecting any kind of magical transformation. Just planting the seeds of deeper introspection which may take years to sprout. I'm not even expecting to get through to everyone reading it. Some are nothing but sadists who take great joy in causing harm and pain to other living beings. Nothing will work on those people except ignoring them. Those are the ones who attack me for writing these things at all. So I block them to take away any joy they may take in the attempt to insult me. Though I also admit I toss out some very strong insults just before doing so. Those insults are distinctly tailored to their individual mentality and designed for maximum impact. Something I tend to be very good at. Usually used for good (and since I am trying to limit their harm, still is in a way) but can be used to inflict deep psychic wounds. I know it works at least part of the time because sadists do not tend to be very insightful, contrary to fiction. They are really just animalistic and not in any good sense. More like aggressive shit eating mongrels.
