the world, as it should be… according to me

I swore that when I had kids, I would NEVER give as an explanation because. My mother was famous for it. Me: Why??? Mom: Because. If she really wanted to make the point (and a power play), she’d say because I said so. arghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

Well, I never had kids. But I did end up with a few step kids. At first, any interventions on my part were always accompanied by explanation. I was a quick study though. I realized they didn’t care WHY. They’d ask and ask and whine and complain and ask WHY again a thousand times. But they never really wanted to know why. They were only interested in what they wanted and finding a way to actualize it. They used my explanations as an opportunity to stage never-ending debates, refuting all of my very sensible and very adult-correct thinking.

Mothers. They do know what they’re doing. It just takes years to figure it out. There’s not much after the old because I say so.  

I joined the establishment on this one. I can tell you. However, I did elaborate on the technique, just a bit. I’d say “because” and explain that I couldn’t explain. Adults are compelled to stop kids from doing things. There isn’t any rational reason WHY. It really is “just because.”

That seemed to confuse them enough to change the focus and the topic. Fast, pull out the playing cards or suggest a walk through the woods. Distraction. And a funny kind of honesty. Worked most of the time.

I pull this lesson into practice after surveying the upheaval of the last seven years. And I realize people who don’t agree with each other, in the fundamentals, don’t often hear or care to hear how one rationalizes their beliefs. They don’t care about WHY.  And “because” ends up being: because you’re an asshole, that’s why.

The crazy thing is that most of us seem to agree on concept. Like killing is bad. Abusing people and animals is bad. Not helping those who can not help themselves is wrong. You know, the 10 commandments et al. God…

But while the words sound the same, there is a black hole of difference apparently. For example, some (not all) people who describe themselves as pro life would vote for pro life candidates, regardless of the candidate’s support of the death penalty and/or war with Iraq. To me, that’s wrong thinking. To them, I’m wrong in my pro choice stance AND I’m wrong in opposing the death penalty.

How do you argue with people like that? Clearly, I’m right. Further, I see this as my intellect vs their DNA.

For me, it has become about our ability to reason past a survival response that doesn’t work in the world we’ve created. It is another epic battle in a seething universe. A structural change. Thought-evolution as a response to instincts gone awry. Tribal conventions scaling up to global dimensions.

This is how I make sense of things that I find otherwise hard to explain. I mean really. George W. Bush and everything that name conjures: the power-driven, the sycophants, the torturers, the theocrats, oil companies, the chemical industry (including big pharma), republicans, homeland security… No matter how you slice and dice it, most, if not all, of the constructs of these people/groups have dire consequences. Climate-altering. Politically-altering. Influence and affluence-altering. Species-ending.

So I ask myself, why? These people have access to the same information as I do. We share the power of observation: lighting and tornadoes in February. Rising sea levels. Drought. Over 1 million people dead in five years and inciting another 100 years war.

I mean why would anybody with all that power and access to knowledge/data/information skimp on safety precautions at chemical plants and nuclear power plants? Why would industries poison the Great Lakes?

WHY? Because. Because they can. Because they don’t believe they will ever endure the consequences of what they have wrought. They’re all like 21-year-olds who smoke cigarettes, drink/drive, or do any of the multitude of stupid death-defying things kids do because kids don’t believe in consequences. Or death.

WHY? I don’t know fucking why. Because. That’s why.

What is clear: Being right doesn’t move mountains. The truth is situational. And nothing appears to be absolute… except maybe for nothingness.

We need to find a different way into people’s heads.

One other thing I’m thinking:  it is people like us who have probably caused the brutes and bullies to kill untold numbers of people. All to keep us quiet and everybody else afraid to even begin thinking in terms of what is really in their best interest.

Because that is what this is all about. One’s best interest and how different groups of people interpret that very thing. This has never really been about right and wrong in the institutional/moral sense. But right and wrong in the survival sense. Survival produces its own ethic, its own morality.

The way I think. The way I am. My sensibilities inform how survival looks to me. And I say it is this:

Acting in one’s own interest is also acting on behalf of the sustainability of all earthlings and the ecosystems they need to survive.

The side-choosing begins. The fight shifts, as it should, from right and wrong to forcing one vision (or version h/t buhdy) over another. Those who want to control the board (the old evolutionary model) and all its resources versus those of us who are the new ones… the consensus-builders and resource sharers.

Simple, isn’t it? Why? Because…