I heard a guy with an English accent Use the word “pissed” in the American sense. No one else noticed.
He was talking to Americans And Americans certainly know What it means to be pissed.
A prominent example of an American being pissed. Note the red hat.
We are pissed. We all are. So much of the time And for every imaginable reason.
Over there on the other side Of the big drink,”pissed” means “drunk.” Being pissed is something you do to yourself.
But what are Americans drinking That makes us so angry? I answer that question all the time.
We swim in righteous dudgeon. We ride a high horse as we wade through the river. We vote our values.
Apparently, one of those values is revenge. Another is the fear of being wrong. But the greatest value is property.
You can own all the things If you buy them in installments. The things you own also own you.
Don’t piss it all away, some say. If piss has no value, Does that mean it’s free?
Like life in the USA is free? Or bought with borrowed money? Or rented, like beer and coffee?
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My sense of right and wrong is well developed and is based in justice, not in following the second-hand pronouncements of a god that I no longer believe exists.
I was raised in Southern Baptist churches. Every moment of my young life I felt like an outsider. The Baptists helped with that. Inside me was the hard truth that every day, I secretly wished I was a girl. I heard over and over again from the churchy people in my family, who insisted (without knowing what was true of me, because I kept that secret buried deep inside) that people with sin in their hearts were bound for Hell, and that femininity in a male was a sickness and a sin.
I was presented with a choice. And my choice was to embrace my whole self: to be a good person, and to let the idea that I was inherently evil go, instead of internalizing the self-hatred I had been raised to. Every positive step I’ve taken since then has led to a larger worldview and a stronger sense of myself in the larger context.
My sense of right and wrong is well developed and is based in justice, not in following the second-hand pronouncements of a god that I no longer believe exists. This is not to say that I have not been a little shit at times in my life. I have. I acknowledge that I have made mistakes, as everyone does, and I continue to try to move forward and choose to take good action for myself and those I love as best I can.
But the Southern Baptist Council, the governing body of the churches I attended as a child, continues to dehumanize and marginalize people, and continues to believe that its views should rule this country and hold dominion over this world. At the 2024 Southern Baptist Convention, attendees voted to actively oppose Obergefeld, to exclude from membership any church with a female pastor, and to keep the SBC’s financials from being made public, thereby confirming their ideology as toxic.
Of course, they also have this effed up resolution, dated June 1st, 2014, that permanently separates me from the ideology of much of my family: On Transgender Identity, which is contradictory and hateful on a profound level. They claim that “we love our transgender neighbors” and in the same document resolve to “oppose all cultural efforts to validate claims to transgender identity,” rendering the whole document nonsensical and branding themselves once again as hypocrites.
And that’s at the heart of my exit from that religion and from the positive regard of much of my family.
not my family, not my church
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Recently, I read that there are currently 70,000 people being held in Ice detention centers around the country, and that there have been over 1,000 human rights complaints lodged against ICE in the last year. I know that at least 30 people have died in ICE custody in that amount of time.
People can be so awful. What is it about the makeup of human beings that allows us to be horrible to each other? Big imaginations with no bounds on them? Our vision bigger than our hearts? Can it be that we just… can imagine enjoying being that cruel? It has to be more than that, doesn’t it?
Eastern Roman mozaic depicting the Sermon on the Mount, located in Ravenna
It strikes me that the people who seem to enjoy torturing others are the people with the least amount of imagination, though. They have parameters for acceptability, and somehow those parameters include… torture, killing, creating human misery. Why?
You won’t be surprised, I hope, to hear that I haven’t got any answers: only questions.
Lately, the name Phineas Gage has come to mind quite a bit for me. You might remember him from your Psych 101 course. He’s the railroad worker who got into a terrible accident in which a railroad spike was driven through a region in his brain. The story goes that he recovered, but was a changed person: cruel, violent, always angry, whereas before the accident he was though of as kind and even generous.
I look at people like John Fetterman, who had been a well-thought-of Berniecrat, but who had a massive stroke during the year in which he ran for the Senate. Now he’s the most conservative member of the Democratic caucus in the Senate. Is it worth thinking about that a cruel nature comes about as a result of physical damage to the brain? I’m sure that’s a vast oversimplification, but it’s something that I think about constantly, and not just in considering what happened to Senator Fetterman.
I’m sure you can come up with examples yourselves of people who were kind when you knew each other at some younger phase of life, but who are now almost inconceivably changed. Can you track the changes in the person who comes to mind for you? Can you think of the points in their history where something changed them? Not always, I’m sure, but I imagine that, like me, you can point to certain things and see a connection in some personal histories.
And I’m not suggesting that the only reason that people become reactionary and harshly conservative is based on neurology. But maybe it plays a role, in some cases. Maybe in a lot of cases.
Why do so many of the people who are generating the cruelty in our society now claim to be Christians? I think this is a question worth asking now. How can the followers of the guy who proclaimed The Beatitudes be so far from those principles? And being so far from those principles, how can they expect that we would follow them into their depravity, demand it with the ferocity that they do?
I’m flummoxed, and I’m desperate to find some answers and a path forward.
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It all speaks to some kind of elevated daily existence…
I live in a house in the country. I’ve lived here for 4 years now.
The people are friendly. I have never felt so comfortable to participate in conversations as I do here. The conversational pace is slow enough that my introvert-standard split-second processing pause before I speak doesn’t ace me out of the craic every time, just maybe about half the time. It may seem counterintuitive, since there are so many more things to be a part of in the cities and towns I’ve lived in before, but I feel more a part of things here. I’m still an introvert, and that will never change, but the personal battery doesn’t drain as much in a crowd here.
The light is gorgeous around my house. It’s strange. Is this a byproduct of cleaner air? Perhaps. There is a more crystalline, more buttery aspect to the light, a kind of radiance that I find soothing and wondrous. I feel attached to the environment here. I have a large yard that needs maintenance (which I’m only OK at attending to, it must be said) but it pays dividends in many ways. The many beautiful shades and hues of green, the flowers — some planted by previous residents here, some volunteers/wildflowers, some we’ve planted ourselves — that one can see from every one of the many windows in this house, the purity of the snow as it hugs the ground, never going black, never taking on the smoke and cinders and road filth the stuff always did in the city, the open space… it all speaks to some kind of elevated daily existence.
I call this “motif #1.” I’ve taken this picture many times.
And that’s not to say that life is perfect. Nope, nope, nope. I don’t have a place to go walking here. There are no sidewalks. If I want to go for a walk, I have to either risk the traffic along Main Rd. (which is not insignificant, and some people drive through here at well above the speed limit) or get in the car and drive 5 miles to find a place to walk. Either way, it’s inconvenient, and as a result I’ve put on a fair amount of weight. My life is far too sedentary.
But this is a problem that I can address, and will. And if I can manage that much, I believe my life “out here” will be all the better for the extra effort, and that there may be some unexpected benefits to go along with it. One idea I’ve had to make these benefits manifest is to do some nature journaling. I’ve done it before. It’s been fun and it’s taught me stuff about the natural world and about myself.
So, yeah.
I love it here. In the places I can see from my window and in this beautiful crooked little house, life is sweet.
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I hear the sound And it’s coming this way It’s not coming for you. Yet.
They got drums in their chests They got big sticks Fuck that they got bullets And their righteous fascist rage.
And you were just watching You were just trying to help. You weren’t mad.
And they’re Not coming For you Yet.
But if you get in their way – Impeding, as they say – They won’t mind Taking you out
As an example. With their big boy sticks And their little hands I mean big dicks.
And they’re shriveled up with fear And they see it as only fair That you should be afraid, too And then they won’t be so afraid.
To shoot you To round you up And take you to The Big Lock Up
When they start coming for you Which they’re not doing yet So stay out of their way And live another day
or two.
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