Don't Eat The Meatloaf

Somewhere, in the winding recesses of my brain, locked up tightly, and probably rightly so, is true, unadulterated honesty.  It's a promise of secrecy we often share with ourselves, careful to spill only a few drops out at a time for authenticity.  Honesty is a hard truth to tell, an array of a million judgmental telescopes, all pointed at the world around us.  We're victims of perception, slaves of an authoritarian device telling us what to make of things.  How we manifest those views into language, how we articulate the feelings to ourselves and others is the measure of how well others respond to it.  But, as the cliche goes, "the truth hurts," and so we elect to keep the pact of secrecy we've made with ourselves to spare someone's feelings.  It just might be a dangerous precedent.

Take, for example, my lack of desire to eat food that someone has made from home.  "Here's some ravioli," she says to me, eyes hopeful that I'll enjoy it, "I made it from scratch."  Declining the offer, undoubtedly, is offensive to the would-be chef and several questions immediately populate my cerebellum.  What does her kitchen look like?  Did she wash her hands? Did she taste a little of it and reuse the spoon afterwards, without washing it?  What do her pots and pans look like?  Have they been properly cleaned?  Has she made ravioli before?  Did she cook it at the proper temperature?  A slew of questions, which, in and of themselves would be offensive to ask before I gingerly accept the fact that I'm getting ready to put my life in someone else's hands.

I'm okay with the fact that this might be an absurd feeling to have.  I'm comfortable with it.  My comfort with the absurdity of it doesn't make it any less real for me, though, and I have opted for a tactic of preemption.  When I meet new people, it casually comes out that I have a propensity towards obsessiveness about not eating food from someone's home.  This happens when there is not yet even the idea of an offering.  Sure, it's a preemptive strike, hitting them while they are unaware to solidify the fact that I am not personally singling out your food.  It is a general irrational belief that all food from someone's home kitchen is somehow contaminated.  They dismiss it as an eccentricity and life goes on.  Three months down the road, when people at work somehow come to the conclusion that a potluck is in order, they are not offended when I tell them I will not be participating in the act of devouring roaches from their homes.  Obviously, I sugar-coat it to spare any residual offense they may take.  But the result is that people remember that initial conversation and connect, subconsciously in their minds, that its not personal, it's my 'eccentricity.'

Suppose, for a moment, that you selectively choose who's kitchen you think is clean enough to eat food from.  People see you try their food.  It's delicious.  You eat it up.  Then Violet, who might be one gene away from literally being a filthy pig, decides she will bring some food for others to try.  You've already eaten someone else's food.  She saw you eat it.  TROUBLE!  Now you really have to decline the offer, as meekly as possible.  "I'm full," you tell her.  Lie.  "That's okay," she says.  "Just try one bite and tell me what you think of it."  TROUBLE!  There's no way in hell you're eating her food.  You remember her telling you about her rat problem and how she caught one by stomping on it.  

When you premptively ban all food before there is an offer of food, it is essentially you saying, "It's not personal."  People cope well with it and all you might have to do is to remind them that you have an irrational mental hang up about food from people's homes.  They easily accept it because you've already set the stage.  But you HAVE to use the word "irrational."  People will not accept the notion if you try to defend it as something that makes sense.  It makes the concept a little more manageable for people to cope with, and though they don't understand it, well, they believe you don't understand it either, and that it just is.  

Back to honesty, back to the filter, back to the charity of sparing people's feelings.  We think offensive things about other people every day.  If we chose to unleash those thoughts on society, there would obviously be a retaliation strike and we don't want to deal with that.  I can certainly dish it out.  But I certainly don't want to take it, and not because I have a weak tolerance for meanness, because meanness is a false projection.  It's honesty.  I don't want to hear negative truths about myself.  I don't think any of us do.  The act of not being honest with negative thoughts and feelings about someone else is actually an act of self preservation.  There is no "high road" simply because you just want to spare someone else's feelings.  You are subconsciously quelling a retaliation blow to your ego.  

Believe it or not (though, how could one not at this point?), I think inwardly and assess situations mentally before I act.  But I move fast.  I suppose it means that I've had so much practice at it, I'm at a level of automation where people can't typically see the wheels turning.  I respond quickly to a million possibilities, choosing my perceived best option in nanoseconds.  I often wonder if everyone thinks this way, keeping that inner promise of negative honesty a secret, moving forward, compartmentalizing, cataloging perceptions, and choosing better options than instincts suggest.  

In the end, and I guess as a bottom line, please understand its not personal.  I do not want to eat your cockroach meatloaf.  Not today, not ever.

The State of the Union

I'm trying to decide what to write about today; feeling tired and its rainy out, so I'm just sort of coming off the cuff today with a few thoughts I've had lately.  An open mind is better than a closed mind.  I'm always open to possibilities beyond my comfort zone.  True or false, I dabble in the business of writing fiction, so any idea is always a good one to me.

I typically don't post on politics, and I plan to keep the status quo here, but right wing, left wing, it doesn't matter, aren't you people embarrassed by your leaders?  What has happened to government?

  Once upon a time, there were some people that wanted to be free from religious persecution.  They moved to a place where they could practice their religion without that fear.  And that fear was replaced by a new fear: hostile natives.  They did the best they could, built homes, created families, etc.  Then they decided that they wanted to control how their tax money would be spent and didn't like the government that had established itself as the leader of this new area.  So there were protests which eventually led to a war.  A lot of people died.  Strangely, the rebels won and were free to establish their own laws and taxes and overall to govern themselves in this new area.  The sun rose on a new nation and everyone was hopeful.  The people of that new area decided that there should never be one person in power, because they knew that one person in charge meant that they could be forced to abide by a whim.  The people wanted the people to be in charge.  This way, they could have a say in what new rules and laws would be enacted.  

They got the help of this one guy, who they knew was capable of writing well and asked him to write a set of rules that would forever keep the people in charge of themselves, so that no one person would ever be able to control everything and thus make the people that decided to live in this new area victims of someone else's tyranny.  Ultimately, this set of rules would prevent the situation they were trying to escape when they fled to the new area.  Again, everyone was hopeful.

Things went well.  The people began to multiply and it soon became obvious that the people, since their numbers were becoming so great, would have to decide upon an individual to be a spokesman for them.  Leaders emerged and the people decided that the spokesmen should be people that could represent their particular town or village.  The people knew that not everyone could easily agree on things so they decided that the best way to go would be to let the chosen leader of their town or village lean in a direction that appeased most of the people in that town or village.  Essentially, he would speak up on things that was important to most of the people in the town or village he represented.  The people of each of these regions patted themselves on the back.  They now had one voice.

The area grew.  Years passed.  People, with hard work and human ingenuity, could become a relevant member of society.  They found that despite humble beginnings they could achieve greatness if they made a meaningful contribution to society.  The shackles of status or class were not forever etched in their family's history.  The individual could now achieve more than he could ever imagine.  But, of course, hard work and the worth of that hard work played a significant role in a person's potential future.  Turning a profit was admired and respected by all.

At some point, the power of those chosen leaders of the villages and towns corrupted them and they quietly made back door deals against the will of the people that had chosen them as leaders.  The deals provided the chosen leaders with power or wealth and in most cases, both.  The leaders wanted to make sure that their families would be forever taken care of, but they did it at the expense of the people they represented's wishes.  Often the people didn't even know; they blindly trusted the leaders they chose.  The leaders began to manipulate the circumstances of the people's choices so that the leaders could stay in power.  Some people caught on, but they had a hard time convincing others to beleive it and if the majority didn't believe in the corruption, the corruption would inherently continue.  That, coupled with the compromised system of choosing representatives allowed the corruption to infest this new system of government.

More years passed.  The people that had originally moved to this new area to escape persecution and persue freedom were long gone, but their children's children were still there and a lot were desperately clinging onto the tradition and ideas that their ancestors fought so hard to achieve.  Unfortunately, most of their children's children didn't fully understand what they had sacrificed for freedom and became complacent.  They allowed their chosen leaders to power grab and amass so much wealth that they couldn't get out from under the oppression of the leader.  The leaders, however, knew the underpinning situation and continued to fool the people with empty promises.  The people didn't know the promises were empty, and frankly had stopped thinking for themselves, since the leaders had most of them convinced that the leaders themselves could think for everyone.

There was a shift in what was important to most people.  They were trying to make ends meet, to feed their families.  They didn't have time to concern themselves with the freedom their ancestors died for.  That battle, in their opinion, was already won.  

Quietly, a new battle had begun.  Like the militia who hid behind trees to hit their marks instead of lining up in formal battle.  The government was sneaking behind trees, firing, then quickly retreating back into a secret foxhole.  It was so quick, one could question if it ever happened at all.  The people's freedoms were quietly dropping away from them as they contended with their everyday struggles, oblivious that their leaders had stopped representing them and had begun an engagement of self preservation.  

More time passed.  Today, our elected officials break our trust and more than half the population is oblivious or supports it because they believe it's in the best interest of the nation.  Long gone are the days where we were accurately represented.  Re-zoning, vote tampering, law changing, and purchasing power of our elected leaders prevents the common voice from being heard.  Laws are now putting everyone in a choke hold so that achieving the American Dream has become more difficult than it ever has been.  Once upon a time, one could change their stars.  Government is taking away the ability to raise our station in life.  It is choking out the creativity and ingenuity that made us a giant in the first place.  

My fear is that the wheels are in motion, and the brake line is cut.