Revenge . . The Dish Best Not Served

Television Show

I think as a culture we have a fascination with revenge.  We like the idea of the bad guy getting their just desserts. It’s a common theme in film, television, literature, and all forms of media.  Our stories are built on determining who is the good guy and who is the bad guy.  We like being able to assign blame and fault.  We like being right. And oh we love to see the outcome of such acts.  It's this subconscious verification that the universe does doll out the appropriate payment for certain actions.  Even though we know life isn't fair we are constantly seeking proof to the contrary.  So much so that we ourselves are willing to do the dirty work if the Universe seems stalled.

The only issue with this is that too often in our daily lives we can manufacture villains when there are not any.  We can seek someone who we feel deserves revenge when the only faults they truly have are being human. 

Being human is a tricky thing and what I feel provides most of the trouble.  We are in truth simple dumb beasts in a lot of ways.  We just so happen to also be very clever ones. We have encased ourselves into our environment in a way that makes it easy to forget that. Our ideas are shaped by our environment and culture.  We are easy to program through media and being constantly plugged in.

Brain Processing

Many studies have proven that being constantly inundated with specific patterns of thought and ideas has a lasting effect on how we view and deal with the world. Only with a lot of work can this be altered or even deterred.  Even so, exposure to any form of media for a long period of time has a lasting effect.

I think of how stories from the Bible have influenced the creation of our society and developed laws. From the creation of fairytales and how they have shaped thoughts and ideas about male and female relationships to how the voyeuristic nature of reality TV has created this subsection with this social media explosion we are currently in the middle of. We are constantly being influenced on how to think, what to think, and what to believe.

What terrifies me is how few people understand that in reality there is a very specific core group of individuals that get to decide what type of influences we get. Thus they are shaping the world in their image.  Slowly filling all of our minds with what they want humanity to be. What you see is what they want you to see, and how they want you to see it. In many ways the explosion of social media is the only thing that is breaking through the illusion cast by forms of organized media. However it is through this lens we can sometimes clearly see the effect of other forms of media on our thinking.

Social Media and the Brain

There are fascinating bodies of work being built based on social media sites and the things people feel comfortable expressing on them.  Clearly we see our culture and its concerns with discrimination, equality, and finance.   We live in a world where by a chance of bonding in a statement that is only 144 characters long a nobody can speak to a media icon. A world where 1000s of miles can vanish and you can have a face-to-face conversation through a machine. With our innovations however our basic make-up and what we need in a story or a plotline has not changed, just the way we deploy it.

But isn't this really the problem.  A lot of who we are as humans has not changed.  And now we can see ourselves clearly.  And even more impressive future generations will be able to catalogue some of our lives in intimate detail because we have become intimate with our communication methods and devices. We have not actually grown into our technology, it has grown despite us. And I believe it will inevitable force us to grow as we are creating a symbiotic union with technology.

Previous versions of humanity never had what we now have, a true reflection of the soul.  It began millennia ago with art, the need to create. It wobbled its first steps with the development of religion, absolute truths that we made ourselves believe so that we could learn to think. It matured in government, policy, and the creation of a ruling class. It manifest in social groupings, nationalities, our ability to separate used to extreme discretion. Its focus narrows in communities, chosen professions, supply and demand systems to fulfill our own wants and needs. And it completes the circle coming back to one and the reflection is finally clear, each moment documented and preserved by a system that unlike us will not forget our history.  Finally forcing us to not do the same.

I know what you're thinking, revenge is the topic. True but we can't delve into revenge until we understand perspective.  This plays a crucial role in determining what actions deserve to be avenged. Everyone has a point of no return action that takes mild mannered you and replaces it with bug ass nuts Batman. For most people it involves any hurt coming to loved ones whether on purpose or not.

The Question

The issue is that almost everything negates the thought that accidents are blame free. It negates that sometimes $#!& happens. While there are cases of obvious negligence, sometimes accidents just happen and yet we need to find fault. If not there wouldn't need to be so many lawyers on TV advertising their services for accidents. Clearly they can afford advertising it's a profitable business.  But why?  The need to assign blame, fault, and ultimately gain revenge.  The just desserts of the bad guy.  Because for humans bad things can't just happen. Someone has to make them happen.  And in a decent amount of cases this is true.  But not all of the time. Sometimes things are inexplicable and we should be damned glad that they are.

What is really gained?  A sense of satisfaction for setting right a wrong? What validation is the revenge seeker getting?  Well clearly how our society views this is at work.  We are social creatures, and the smug sense of knowing that you did 'the right thing' by the standards of others is sometimes too hard to resist, and is usually a good thing. 

The Crow

But the concept of revenge has usually been the deed of a villain not a hero. However our society has developed the anti-hero.  The concept that the bad guy can now be the good guy.  I believe this is a reflection of humanity coming to terms with itself. Now that our mirrors are so clear we can't be coerced to forget, and the little slips in history can't be covered like it was hundreds of years ago.  We have only been told noble stories of noble past deeds.  The truth is most likely closer to what we can now see.

The truth is, no one can be all good all of the time.  We all fall, we all are capable and sometimes unknowingly wrong someone.  But in a world where even accidents can be blamed on someone, you no longer have good guys.  You just have people making mistakes so tales of atonement become pressingly more popular. We can't be perfect, but the world still has to be fair.  You must pay your dues and gain atonement. Black and white is torn asunder and you are left with multi-tonal gray. 

Gray feels messy, unbalanced.  Shocking when the world used to be so stark.  It confuses you, it makes you uncomfortable.  The lines before were so very clear and now not at all. Eventually you realize black and white was too binding, gray is an excellent color. 

And Always

Gray accounts for mistakes, accidents, and well-intentioned mishaps.  It opens the door to no one being denied forgiveness or salvation. In gray is all of our hopes and dreams, true acceptance among each other. 

Gray doesn't really need revenge. Revenge is a residual response from those black and white days. Gray just needs solutions to existing problems.  You aren't being held accountable for anything but your own actions. And even those can be managed.  Give time a shot at it, amazing things happen in time. Because somewhere along the way of our journey to what we are now, time somehow managed to show us that.

Glorious Shades of Gray

And Always courtesy of http://www.leadliaison.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/use-marketing-automation-to-avoid-human-error.jpg

Brain Processing courtesy of http://www.disruptionmanifesto.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Slide7.jpg

Social Media and the Brain courtesy of http://johnbell.typepad.com/weblog/images/2008/09/04/pr_brain2.jpg

The Crow courtesy of http://www.dumage.com/img/fun/righteous-anti-heroes-in-movies/righteous-anti-heroes-in-movies01.jpg

Glorious Shades of Gray courtesy of http://www.seducingwithstyle.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/shades-of-black-and-grey-1024x789.jpg

The Question courtesy of http://freetheanimal.com/images/2012/10/Screen-Shot-2012-10-28-at-1.02.14-PM.png

More Minorities, Is That Really The Case?

In the past week or so there has been tons of articles about the racial make-up in America changing.  I don't know what other stories have had such a wide array of coverage by such a wide array of media outlets.  When I see things like this I think of how ridiculous it all is.  This is for a number of reasons.  The ones most pertinent are race is strictly a social concept, people will eventually evolve to being the color their environment dictates, personality notwithstanding, and why on earth is the one drop rule still applying.

Breakdown

Race is strictly a social concept, and it’s a bad one.  One that was developed for the purpose of creating a subservient class in what was perceived as the most efficient fashion.  It is a pattern that has historically always shown up because of our seeming inability to associate people that have even the minuet amount of difference from us as people like us.  Ask any blonde, brunette, or redhead.  Stereotypes exist for everything from eye color, height to shoe size. It is no shock that skin color is no different. 

Thought Lynch was a coincidence?

The biggest issue with this however is the end characterization of people with different skin colors.  No one believes that blondes are lazy and more prone to crime.  No one has lovingly instilled that brunette's are dirty and should not be trusted with meaningful careers or power. These damning assumptions are cast on skin color and persist because we as adults won't take responsibility for being part of the problem and teaching our children, peers, and family otherwise by our own actions.  Instead we laugh at racist jokes that aren't funny.  We agree with family by not bringing that person of another race home to meet.  We let the inaction in our lives carry racism into new generations so that the lessons of Willie Lynch are never forgotten. (Willie Lynch Speech) While it has been proven that the accounts of said Lynch are fictitious, the parable for American life is relatively valid when trying to understand the mentality that still persists in America. If you don't know the story, I don't have the time to tell you.  You should start your change into an active participant of the future of this society by looking him up and understanding the basis of this characterization, acknowledging the aspects of it that still exist.

The truth is in a few hundred years all generations in this continent would began to assume another shade anyway.  Its called evolution and for the religious zealots that can't understand that it exists and life isn't unchanging religious magic I ask that you recite the Serenity prayer to yourself and excuse yourself from this blog. Pay special attention to the part that asks God to let you accept the things you cannot change.  Evolution is a thing that cannot change because it IS change. 

Babies Don't See It

I find it amazing that because of the Bible it seems that some people cannot get around certain ideas.  I find it ironic because that strikes me as love of a false idol.  Bear with me for a moment.  No one has ever promised us anything in life accept growth, change, and death.  That is all.  Yet people need to believe so very much in a text that claims to recite the word of God, sometimes in spite of what life is showing them.

I feel like I have a very evolved relationship with God.  I do believe which is why I believe that the complexity of life cannot be summed up in a book.  I think this book gives us tales of other human beings and how they fell due to lust, vanity, envy, pride and many other human vices.  I consider these stories warnings and parables for what life could put us through penned by people who wanted to make sure that we as the next phase of humanity could learn from their mistakes.  And through this the wisest of us may develop a hint of an understanding of what God's plan is for us.  If you ask a theologian, and I have, they will relate something similar. 

So Many Religions

As a woman of mixed religious thoughts and ideas I have searched this earth for even a hint of what the Father needs and wants of me.  I have researched ancient religions and modern ones.  I have studied the tenets of Buddhism, the Tao, Shinto, the Koran, the Torah. I have read every book of the Bible as best I could, searched for lost versions, original translations from the Dead Sea Scrolls themselves, Calvinism, Puritans, even the Shakers.  I have tried to decipher ancient Egyptian, Sumerian.  I have delved into Shamanism, witchcraft and just about everything else short of Satanism.  And I see the same pattern in them all.  One book, one set of rules that all claim the same thing.  We have all the answers.  This tells me plain as day, no one does.  But as humans we must have faith in something and everyone has the right to believe what they believe.  What they don't have the right to do is try to make everyone else believe it too.

In light of this I propose another alternative.  I propose a deity that is capable of such advanced thought that evolution was always a part of the design. I propose that our sight is so limited that we cannot phantom what magnetism, gravity, the primordial forces of this Universe are actually capable of or what they even are. That we cannot see the big picture no matter how hard we look.  We have functions in our bodies that only the highest of evolved earthbound entities have found a way to master.  The rest of us accept our involuntary responses and our weakness as simple, limited, finite beasts.  And that is the only true honor any of us can give the glory of God, living the life He gave us as He leads us.  Dropping arrogance, judgment, and cruelty.  What Christians claim as being of that faith to embody.

Stepping off my religious soapbox I confront the silliest of the whole thing.  Its' this idea that the race of being white is somehow defaulted to impurity if a single other 'race' is mixed with it.  It’s this idea that as soon as a 'nonwhite' gene pool is introduced to a white one all of a sudden the person resulting cannot in any form or fashion be considered white.  I find this the stupidest because I can't tell you how many times a 'white' person has looked at me and claimed to be (insert fraction here) of Cherokee, or Navajo, or some other none European culture YET still claims to be white. Because by aforementioned rules, they should not be. However, if the mixture is with an exceedingly undesirable (read not ostracized from the American Dream in a reservation fashion) race such as Latino, Chicano, Hispanic, Black, Caribbean (tropical black), Aboriginal (Australian black), or (insert various Polynesian, Asian mixes here including Maori and Inuit), then they are then 'spoiled' and apart of that undesirable race grouping.  If white were so damned superior you would think it would trump the other, yet not so much. 

So. . .

The truth is children from these unions are actually both because they carry the genes of BOTH parents.  One is not superior in DNA matching.  DNA just sees dominant and recessive strands and it matches them together to create new and more amazing patterns.  The more you give it to work with the more amazing pattern it creates.  Another marvel of creation we are not evolved enough to understand.  The simple fact is this; God has already done the math.  There is a reason why you don't see certain crossbreeds out in the world.  Think about it.  You really believe God would be so forgetful as to not put one in place for us if certain creatures shouldn't exist.  The last I checked, creatures that shouldn't exist. . .DON'T!  It is the sincerest form of heresy and blasphemy to damn what God has deemed to live.

So that's my say.  Please pick up one of my lovely multicultural, multiracial, usually interracial romance novels and celebrate love.  If we all do it together maybe we can get the world ready to accept some of these amazing new patterns God is creating in America.

Babies Don't See it Courtesy of http://dailyhurricane.com/assets_c/2009/08/racial-tolerance-thumb-560x411-146.jpg

Breakdown Courtesy of http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2012/05/17/article-2145687-13220938000005DC-904_634x746.jpg

So. . . . Courtesy of http://www.trbimg.com/img-4fbbd225/turbine/bs-ed-horsey-birthrate-20120522/600

So Many Religions Courtesy of http://www.reikiwebstore.com/ProductImages/ProductImages/GridSymbols500.jpg

Thought Lynch was a Coincidence? Courtesy of http://www.finalcall.com/artman/uploads/1/willie-lynch_gr1_1.jpg