I should be very happy today. Yesterday was a good day (not a great day, but a good day) for reason and sanity in many areas of government.
But I’m just tired. I’m tried of dealing with stupid/ignorant people. I’m tired of people who refuse to think logically and reasonably about decisions that not only affect their life, but the lives of 300 million people, and indirectly, the entire planet and the trillions of living things on it.
I’m tired of people who refuse to hold themselves and their chosen beliefs to the same standards that they demand from everyone and everything else. Whether it be politics, religion, science, or anything else.
I’m tired of idiots who think talk means something, when it’s actions that mean something. I can say I’m the king of France all I want, but until I go to France and am crowned, my statements don’t mean anything.
I want to live in a world where people think and use reason. I’m not always right, but no one is going to convince me by threatening to beat me up.
I want to live in a world where reasonable people act for the best interest of everyone, not just themselves. I want to live in a world where equality means ‘equality’ for everyone and whatever they want (provided it doesn’t harm or restrict others).
I want to live in a world where the religious understand that forcing everyone to live their way isn’t right. Books with 2000 year old myths are not even relevant anymore. It’s not that there’s not good ideas in them, but finding the good in religion is like finding the pee in a pool. It’s hardly even worth the effort, when these concepts are easily obtained via reason and empathy.
I’m babbling because I can’t do anything else. The world moves on and I’m stuck in a little bubble of worry and doubt. Considering that just under half the population of the US is convinced that a known liar, cheater, waffling, rich-kid with delusions of competence is a valid candidate, I wonder if there is any hope for humanity.
I’m glad that Romney didn’t win. But that’s not the end of the battle. It just puts the real battle off another four years. As long as we have religion and people who absolutely refuse to think for themselves (and one is the cause of the other), then we in the US will have this kind of massive fight every two years. And the US has annoying habit of just switching sides every four or eight years. One side will take full advantage of that, while the other side doesn’t. One side is united in some common goals. Of course, those goals are the restriction of rights for everyone except a select few, the crushing of the people who actually do things in this country, and the creation of a modern theocracy.
The fight for sanity and reason instead of emotion and repeating the mistakes of the past. The fight is for education against ignorance.
The one thing that I knew in logic, but experienced in full this election season is that you cannot use reason to convince someone when their opinion wasn’t arrived at by reason. I was honestly stunned by the displays of Dunning-Kruger and construct isolation and cognitive dissonance that I saw this year.
I had always seen that only in creationists and the global warming deniers. But now I’ve seen it in everything from what food we eat to whether people should have equal rights. I have seen drug users and sellers arguing that their religion is more important to them than the lies promoted by that religion. I have seen people with homosexual relatives who were perfectly happy telling their children that they could never be allowed to have a long-term loving relationship.
I am sad. I am tired.
I want the world to be better, but I’m afraid that most of the people in the world are already committed and will not be able to change. How can we educate people about reason and critical thinking when they are busy trying to figure out where their next meal is coming from?
I was fussed at for not being sufficiently supportive of the people who were impacted by hurricane Sandy. What I was mad about is the people who were whining because their lives weren’t back to normal 30 minutes after the storm passed. A week without power? Sorry, when you get to eight weeks without power, let me know. That’s the longest I’ve gone after a hurricane, in September, in SE Texas. That also is the longest we had to go without pay because of the storm.
I have more empathy and concern than I can stand, but it’s not for the people of New York who are stuck using their iPhones because the land-lines are out. My concern is for the entire bloody planet and for the type of society and culture that my child is growing up in. My concern is that we can barely make people take personal responsibility for their own actions, yet we are constantly forced to obey the requirements of religions that are thousands of years old and utterly, hopelessly lost when dealing with a modern scientific society.
My concern isn’t for a person, but for humanity. I help where I can, when I can.
