Archive for March 2025
Just to be safe I checked the definitions of the words I’m about to use. I challenge you to find definitions that contradict what I say here.
And why should we care? Because we live in a society where we want the comfort of clear dichotomies: divisions or contrasts between two things that are or are represented as being opposed or entirely different. In other words, we like to think in terms of opposites like male-female, good-bad, honest-dishonest, you name it.
Politicians propose laws that require oppositeness, literally enforcing differences that don’t exist in nature. In other words, there are areas where we must distort the truth in order to live legally. Or maybe even to live at all.
So what, really does opposite mean?
Adjective: diametrically different; of a contrary kind; completely different.
Noun: a person or thing that is totally different from or the reverse of someone or something else.
Right now I’m thinking of the political inaccuracy of pretending there are only two sexes: male and female. It’s just not true. Like everything else you can think of, the characteristics exist on a continuum. So, I repeat, in order to live legally one has to behave like a round peg trying to fit into a square hole. If we lived without such control – i.e. were truly free – differences could be dealt with in healthy ways with full understanding.
Oh but, you’re going to argue, at least black and white are opposites. Look it up. They aren’t.
What you see as a pigment with a black color or a light with a white color actually contains various light or dark colors. Nothing can be pure white or pure black, except unfiltered sunlight or the depths of a black hole.
What a free world it would be if we lived with reality instead of imposed dichotomies.
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Walking, talking
But not at the same time.
I remember when I could walk
Without knowing I was walking
I promised this for yesterday, but here it is today and I’m just barely making it. Where does the time go? Anyway, here’s the story. Remember, I’m in Europe in 1951 while the effects of WWII are still obvious. And it’s about the letter I received from my brother who was back in the states, a civilian after his wartime service, especially useful because of his excellent ability to speak and write German.
I received a letter from him while I was in Germany. When I opened it there was a photo of his daughter, my little niece Nancy, framed by a cut out section of paper, At first I thought it was a creation of my clever, creative, and funny big brother, but then I realized a whole segment of his letter had been removed, a victim of the Russian censors in Linz, Austria where, by the way, my brother had served his last years in the service. What a feeling! And to think this censorship happened all the time to the people around me. What a terrible experience, never to know what he said to me.
Of course, I was fortunate to be returning eventually to the United States, the land of the free, where we would never experience censorship. I would find out what he had said. But what a feeling, a whole piece of what I should know had been taken away from me.
In spite of our German guide who had warned, “This will come to your country someday,” I had never imagined censorship would come to us, banned books and all, including historical topics to be excluded from our public schools.
Twenty-one in 1951, fresh out of college with a major in Psychology, I spent eleven weeks in Europe with a National Student Association tour: Austria, Germany, Switzerland, France, England, Holland and Belgium. We experienced for ourselves what had only been disturbing photographs in our local US papers. Broken men, buildings turned to rubble, shortages of things like water and paper, efforts at rebuilding. With a degree of understanding of the German language, thanks to a super high school teacher, I had thought it made sense to plan on buying a book by Freud in his original language. It would be fun to see how easily I could read it. That’s when I learned about removing people from one’s history. Freud had gone the way of book banning and burning, nowhere to be found. Not even a glimmer of recognition of his name, or anything buried deep in bins of books waiting to be filed. Just plain gone.
How could those lovely people I was meeting, admiring, and enjoying have let it all happen? The question has followed as a theme throughout my career and I’ve discovered that part of the answer is “slowly.” So, when I read that the names of people like Colin Powell and other black heroes had been removed from the list of those buried in Arlington cemetery, my senses were alerted. Already concerned about book banning in my own United States I was ready to jump on the bandwagon of concerned Americans. Before running with it, however, I checked with Snopes. I didn’t find a clear “No, it’s not true,” but rather a long and detailed account of the reported event, with a conclusion that the report wasn’t entirely true. I’m including the link here.
https://www.snopes.com/news/2025/03/21/colin-powell-arlington-cemetery/
Tomorrow I’ll tell a quick story about receiving a censored letter from my brother while I was traveling that summer.
olin Powell
I just finished reading another long analysis of why the Democrats lost the election. It’s a good thing I never laid claim to being a Political Scientist because I am just plain totally confused. There are conservatives who nonetheless agree with some liberal priorities, and liberals who feel strongly about conservative ideas. So which is which? And just what is it the conservatives want to conserve? Based on current events it’s certainly not our established government organization, or our free news media, or our traditional international relations, or respect for our legal system. And why do we cling to the dichotomy of the two-party system anyway?
It does seem that we are clinging to old fashioned and ill-fitting dichotomous thinking. Democrats vs. Republicans, Liberals vs. conservatives, right vs. wrong, good vs. bad, males vs. females. All imposed like square pegs being inserted into the round holes of the truth of who we really are. Of course the game is confusing, with all sides playing a huge monopoly game with principles that once worked. Sometimes the requests I receive for money to help in the political game feel like leaning against the closed door after the horses have left the barn. I feel like we old fogies are in denial about the real interactive complexities of our world. And maybe there’s no limit on how young a fogey can be.
It seems to me we need some really creative thinking to tear apart the ways that once worked and to create new adjustments to the real complexities. Come to think of it, that’s the first general step in creativity – to unravel the old patterns and put them together in new ways. Hmm. Maybe that’s what we’re living through right now. Trashing the old designs to make way for the new. Maybe being confused is just where we need to be.
But there’s nothing that says the process won’t hurt. And I certainly don’t want it to go on without trying to reduce the pain as the axe falls. And I sure hope we don’t get stuck too long in the hopeless, cruel, and violent effort to reimpose the way things never were, and probably never should have been, in the first place.
2:30 a.m.
I’m awake after my first two dream cycles – a wonderful deep sleep. But now I’m lying there, hoping in vain to get back into that deep-into-the mattress feeling. And I’m imagining what life might be like these days if humanity had taken it upon ourselves to pour all our strength into saving the health of the earth. I imagine the way it was during WWII when we pulled together as a community for a common cause. There was eager energy in the life-saving effort. Not like today when we ignore the devastating weather phenomena that continue to cost so much in lives and property lost.
I try to stop myself and move into my next dream (Maybe really a dream) of children all over the world getting up every day from their pallets or beds, rising into a clean environment, enjoying a nourishing breakfast, confident they will return to their beds at night. Pouring energy into a day of play, work, learning, joyfully celebrating their little and big bits of mastery. There’s nothing I like more than joy on a child’s face, whether over receipt of a new toothbrush or box of crayons or the realization of a source of pride in something they’ve done. I even like that look on grownups.
And then my thoughts slip into what’s happening to my beloved academia. What I once taught and encouraged so freely leads now to punishment and expulsion for some. Who knows, maybe even my forgiveness work would be seen as tainted.
Best I stop all this thinking before I plunge into grief. I pull some of my survival tools out of my psychological belt – especially thinking of getting back to work on my newly labeled book-to-be, I hope: How Could These Lovely People Have Let it Happen?: a Psychologist’s Intimate Journal. Doing something does give a sense of some control … Maybe it should be How Are We Letting it Happen?
Today in my email appeared a long letter rejoicing that support has been withdrawn for programs around the world that promote the very essence of freedom: diversity, equity, and inclusion. (I did check “unsubscribe” from the source.)
At the same time appeared an article on how we can force women to have more babies. My heart breaks! Sounds to me like a form of animal husbandry applied to the human animal.
Back in Connecticut, before my move to Minnesota, I used to have a shelf of books available for lending. One had a title that keeps floating through my head these days: The Opposite of Everything is True, by William H. Crisman. The rest of his title was: Reflections on Denial in Alcoholic Families. But I think we could use that title today for a book on Cultural Gaslighting.
Just sayin’
monagustafsonaffinito 