Momentary Gods

Refusing to put up with bigotry is not "just as bad" as bigotry itself.

My family does not get this. Scenario: It's my sister's birthday, and my brother is in one of his Moods. When he's in these Moods, you can expect nothing but "hilarious" jokes about black people, Hispanics, gay people, and women, and a heaping helping of sexist condescension if you, a woman, dare to question him on ANYTHING.

So he starts going on and on about how "those people" need to "learn English properly" and how there was this one time he was visiting a friend at work, and there was this poorly-spelled and poorly-written letter from another coworker on the bulletin board, and it was OBVIOUSLY written by someone who was gay and foreign, and it was GAY GAY GAY, he could TOTALLY tell, and the letter OFFENDED him because how DARE someone not know English PERFECTLY.

...and I asked him if all the "gay" stuff was totally necessary. He looks at me like I'm stupid and goes "yes..." in that condescending "how dare the little woman question ME" tone he does when he's in these Moods. I then ask him, before he can go on with this rambling TOTALLY HILARIOUS story, if people reading his writing can tell he's totally straight. He gets offended, but shuts up.

We move on to other topics, and eventually brother dear starts on how he wants to go buy a legal knife, and omg, it's sooooo unfair that his legal knives got taken by the police (he carried them on school property and has told me he's assaulted people with them), and it's soooooooo unfair that he can't carry his illegal ones around.

I ask him - nicely - why he has to get illegal ones in the first place. Cue this:

Brother, looking at me with his "the little woman is STUPID" look: well, why do YOU buy BOOKS?

Me: That's not the same thing.

Brother, louder: why do YOU buy BOOKS?

Me: Books are legal.

Brother, leaning aggressively over the table and talking over me: WHY do YOU buy BOOKS?

I decide I'm not putting up with this shit and leave.

Now, my sister is blaming me for "ruining her birthday" - and is not blaming our brother at all. My mom has decided she's angry "at both of us equally" because we were "both just as bad" - yet she's only yelled at me, and is only giving me the cold shoulder, not brother. They are "so angry" that I ruined the birthday party.

Um.

Let me get this straight.

They're mad at me for not putting up with my brother's shit. For telling him to knock off the bigotry, and then for ultimately leaving when he starts pulling his aggressive-bullying-MAN shit.

Sorry, folks. At one point, y'all had me completely brainwashed into thinking the greatest sin in the world was to rock the boat, but I've grown up. It's not rocking the boat that's the problem - it's that things are so intolerable I have to.

I want nothing more to do with these people. Too bad we live in the same house.

My vote is mine.

No party or candidate is entitled to my vote. I refuse to play this "but if you don't vote for the Democrat, you might as well be voting for the Republican!" game. No, I'm just not voting for the Democrat.

If you want my vote, you have to earn it. This ties in with the above; no one gets my vote by default. I won't vote for you just 'cause you're a little less bad than the other guy.

Along with this, if you break your promises, I won't vote for you again. I do make allowances for the nature of our government. The US government is designed to force compromise. I don't expect miracles. But I don't expect contempt of your base, either.

Lastly, I refuse to play the liberals=good, conservatives=evil game. Maybe this makes me not a progressive by default, but I don't care. I am sick to here of this demonization of the enemy, and it sickens me more when I see my supposed allies doing this, frankly. I am also incredibly sick of the notion, unfortunately common in progressive circles, that any vote for a Republican is unreasonable, is stupid, evil, and insane, and clearly a case of "voting against your own interests". Maybe I'm just stupid, but I refuse to be that condescending. Folks who vote Republican aren't my enemy. They're my fellow citizens, and they are just as rational, for the most part, as I am, as my supposedly-fellow progressives are. If they vote Republican, I trust that they have reasons for it.

Progressives aren't saints, and compromise is not evil, and Republican voters aren't stupid, and the Democrats don't automatically deserve my vote. Anybody who thinks otherwise can get the hell off my blog.

It tastes very bitter at times.
But it is good for you.
It spreads rapidly.
It pops up everywhere.
And you can never, ever get it to go away.
You can try; you can uproot it, mow it down, obsessively shoot it full of poison.
But it will be back.
Because its roots run deep.
Because it only takes a single seed to start an infestation.
And those seeds travel far.

I present to you Star War: The Backstroke of the West.

They all have eerie eyes, the Lights.

They can all pass as human, every last one of them, if a little too pale or too dark or too off, if a little odd at the joints or in the gait or in the hair or the tooth or the nail. Humans can swallow a lot. But the eyes cannot be so easily written off.

They used to tell you, in the old days, to check a stranger's eyes. Human eyes are so very human, and a Light's so very alien, that neither could be mistaken for the other. Then, you'd know.

Today, it is not so easy. Today, there are things like sunglasses and tinted contacts. Tomorrow, other things.

But sometimes, maybe, someone will take off their glasses, and you will see Persephone's fathomless void, or lose a contact, and you will see the bitter reflection in Tezcatlipoca, or look you dead in the eye, and you will get a wisp of an impression of Varuna's piercing snares regardless. Or you will see a hundred thousand others, gods and heroes and saints and angels, virtues and justices, pillars and Lights, glimmering around the edges.

They used to warn you, in the old days, to keep an eye on your own.

Thinking back on my childhood, there are three things that immediately pop to mind: snakes, bats, and the old stump of what was probably an oak that was just large enough to make a fantastic pedestal for an eight-year-old.

The fourth thing, coming immediately on the heels of those, was the utter insistence of the people around me that fantasy and adventure happened elsewhere. At the beach, maybe, or in the woods of the mountains where we'd go camping, or in Grandma and Grandpa's huge backyard with the twisty crabapples and the bamboo and the big holly I could climb like a ladder. But those were all not home: fantasy and wonder are for wild places, or quarter-acre backyards that seem wild and vast to a gradeschooler. Not for cities. Not for suburbs.

Even now, that attitude persists. Except now, at least, some people are reclaiming the fantasy of a city, the cracks and nooks and crannies where faeries hide, and have hidden since Ur, waiting for us to notice.

But the cities are always figured, in such reclaiming, as wildernesses, as jungles, and again I am told that wild places are where wonder lies, and where I need to go to seek it, and the various suburbs which I've haunted all my life are too mundane, too boring, too cookie-cutter conformity to house fantasy.

Clearly, these naysayers haven't looked very hard.

There are just as many nooks and crannies and strange straggling wild things in a suburb as in a city, or in the mythic wild itself. There are great dark lobster-pots, big enough to serve as boats for children adventuring in their pantry. There are snakes curling across the sidewalk, or under the bush, or in the pool, bats in the fireplace like demons emerging from the embers of hell, foxes curled up on driveways as if the cars were holding the spot for them, butterflies battering kamikaze-style at your windows, hard black walnuts falling on your head with unerring, unnerving accuracy, crows chattering with your cat every morning, fey-touched things all. There are smoky sneaky ghosts like puffs of mist creeping across your carpet, and shadow voices in the night, rattling down the air vents, and the not-quite-people that wander your halls at night and watch you as you scarper along. There are brownies, and boggles, and bogeymen, and bunnymen, and nightmares, and dreamlings, and woody-hags; there are croakie frogs and cats and bats and little blue geckos and the occasional mighty cougar walking down your quiet streets.

These are the fey things: the loose brick in your wall, the wiggly flagstone on your path, the cobbles that don't - quite - match. The storm drains sucking down hurricane waters like great thirsty giants, and if you turn fast enough you might see a troll peeping from under its newfangled bridge. If you step into your yawing closet, you might step out in fairyland; if you're willing, look in the flowers, under the leaf-piles, in the runoff, up in the eaves, and you will find your wonder.

There are great strangenesses everywhere, and no place is too normal, too human, too bland, to house some.

The strangenesses, the little wonders, make those things normal, in the profound way real things are.

It's always ringing through his aura. And in my ears - dammit, I have enough problems with tinnitus.

So I haven't been posting here much. And I haven't been doing much - I know my Great Work, I know what I am to be used for, I can see it, laid out before me with the clarity of a divine plan cut into stone, and ... I'm stuck in place like a wagon in mud. There's so much pre-work that needs doing, so much crap to do, and it's bogging me the hell down.

So I freaked the hell out.

And promptly got laughed at. I still can't hear out of my left ear - it's ringing hollow like a cup's been placed over it. (It'll clear up eventually.)

I don't even know your name, I told him, in a fit of pique.

He just laughed harder. Yes, you do.

No.

Yes. You call me by it.

I call you the Fool, I said. That's a title, not a name.

There's no difference, he said. A label's a label.

He's not a he, by the way, except when he is. He changes rapidly, but at least in my experience settles into a form to converse with mortals, unless he's trying to disconcert or overwhelm or show off. Being the contrary sort he is, he seems to like to appear in some way opposite to the person he's speaking to - male if talking to a female, dark-skinned if talking to a white guy, you get the picture - but also, being who he is, makes himself look odd, or subtly wrong. With some people, that's as simple as showing up as a long-haired guy or tall girl; usually, he throws in varicolored eyes for the heck of it at least. Recently, with me, he's been showing up really odd-looking: with skin literally ink-black, sheen and all, or pearl-white, or pulling in other colors entirely that are nowhere near possible in a human, showing up with animal heads on, or, memorably, showing up looking like a more sharply-dressed version of my brother and then sticking a three-foot-long serpent's tongue out at me.

You get used to it. He's starting to let me see it's a mask, though. (Not that I didn't already know; he made that clear the second he claimed me. Hello, you're mine. Nice dreamscape you got here. I'm not showing you my real face. But now he's letting me see it; like an underlay, you can see something truer wavering beneath a stiff mask.)

Oh, and stop freaking out. You're stuck. It happens; junk gets in the way, and you're in the process of clearing out the detritus of a lifetime, both physically and not. And you've got a bit of magpie in you, so of course it's hard. You don't want to get rid of anything that might be useful, even if you know you'll never actually need it.

But you're making progress, he said. You've noted that yourself. And you know exactly why you're low on energy right now; give yourself time to reorient your sleep cycle, and you'll be fine. Could you stand to make faster progress? Sure. But I'm the stubborn sort - I don't give up on those I claim. I'll grind you down to nothing and remake you, and so what if it takes so long that you have no mortal life left to give me in the end?

It's the remaking that matters most anyway.

Give me some water to drink,
Some shade from the sun,
Some food for my hunger,
And a story.

Spinning off the previous post:

When I say the government is there to maintain and build infrastructure, what do I mean?

Simple: the basic things society needs to function as we want it to. As it should.

This goes from physical infrastructure - things like roads, bridges, railroads, whatever else we need for the transport of goods and people, architectural safety standards, and so forth - to economic infrastructure - job safety and security standards, regulations on various corners of the financial and business world that keep the whole thing going as smoothly as possible without screwing everyone over, the coining of currency, the regulation of trade, the facilitation of communication, etc. - to defensive infrastructure - which is, bluntly, all I think we should have a military for - to social infrastructure.

Yes, there is such a thing. It encompasses everything we consider a basic standard of living, everything we would want as a reasonable protection for ourselves. A social safety net is only a part of that, but it is a part.

This includes things like education standards, and unemployment services, and child services, and, yes, health care, including mental health care. It also includes things like law enforcement: the vast bulk of the court system, for example, I would call social infrastructure.

There is one last category of infrastructure, which actually touches on all four of the others, but should be considered separately: disaster infrastructure. This includes emergency response from everything from the local level (firemen, emergency services) to the national. I also find it helpful to consider things like food safety standards, water supply regulations, pharmaceutical safety standards, and other such things aimed at preventing a public-health issue part of disaster infrastructure; I think one of the problems we've been having, with things like the many food-borne illness cases in recent years, is that such things are currently conceptualized more as strictly economic issues, when they really, really aren't.

So. To me, a government is a mechanism for structuring, building, maintaining, and regulating the infrastructure. What form, specifically, infrastructure takes actually does vary by society: for a cheap example, one that uses no railroads doesn't need government involved in railroad maintenance.

I also find it singularly unhelpful, our tendency to write of government as if it's an actual being with a will and goals of its own. Writing about the government's job or how the government should do something places the agency and authority for such things in the hand of some entity called Government, and allows us a cheap enemy, and lets us throw up our hands when we don't get the change we want, or scream like entitled infants who've been told 'no'.

Guys, the government is a mechanism. It is, itself, one more part of the societal infrastructure - its control panel, if you will. Stop personalizing the damn thing and start treating it like the cranky machine it is!

I have a very strong, very wide populist/individualist streak. I am extremely socially liberal, and fiscally, um, hard to pin down: I believe government is a mechanism for creating and maintaining infrastructure, end of story, and should be treated like the machine it is, and that politicians should get their nebs the hell out of everyone's business.

All that is prelude to this: I believe very, very strongly in the right of individuals to define themselves, and their groups.

People have the right to claim a label, and define it for themselves. Absolutely.

So I have the absolute right to call myself a Christian, even though according to most common variants I'm a rank heretic, and I have the absolute right to define Christianity, and who is and is not Christian. (Substitute "pagan" for "Christian" in that entire sentence, and it is still true.)

And so do you, for your groups.

But this gives people fits - we really, really want to define not only our own groups, but others'. It's so much easier to argue against a group when you've defined its boundaries, and you don't have to do this whole "I'm arguing against that version of Christianity/paganism/atheism/whateverism" thing.

But I think that specificity is important. I think it's important to be very, very clear just WHO in particular you're taking issue with. Hint: it's almost never everyone who claims a label. Not really, not if you're being honest.

That said: there is this thing about words, and here I am not talking about labels, but terms. Terms you can and do and should define for yourself - but only for you and maybe your in-group. (This is how jargon develops.) For definitions outside your in-group - for non-jargon, broader-language terms - you don't get to be the sole authority. EVEN if the term in the broader language is mostly referring to you.

Other people, you see, also have the right to define words, and the "definition" of a word, the common-usage meaning of it, is forged by a really interesting never-quite-formally-agreed-on consensus.

Want the broader, out-group, general meaning of a term to equate to your in-group jargon? You have to change the consensus. No matter who the hell you are, you don't get to grab up words, terms, and declare them yours, and declare that henceforth, they mean only what you want them to mean, amen and hallelujah. You don't get to say, hey, this word applies to my life, and not to yours, therefore I am the authority on its meaning.

No, no, no, no. It doesn't work like that.

We have the right to define our labels, absolutely. We have a right to our own jargon. We do not have the right to force others to use our definitions, because they have the right to self-define, too.