"Families and values are the foundation of human happiness."
“You take care of yourself. You take care of your intimate partner. You
take care of your damn family, you don’t run off. You take care of your
community. You rescue the wisdom from the past. You stand up straight
and you be courageous despite the fact that life is tragic and tainted
by malevolence. Ancient wisdom, that’s what that is.”
“You’re going to pay a price for every bloody thing you do and everything you don’t do. You don’t get to choose to not pay a price. You get to choose which poison you’re going to take. That’s it."
-Jordan Peterson-
I am far from alone in being convinced that the greatest tragedy of the U.S. Civil War was, compared to everything else going on, a very underplayed one. Because of it, as you have likely learned, families had their sons ripped from them, and often that meant brothers killing brothers-family members killing and being killed by their own. It is arguable that the after-effects hung on for generations, possibly even to this day, in some fashion or another.
And yet, it seems we have learned next to nothing from that, when put to much smaller tests. And that might suggest that individualization has gotten to such a granular level that it has made forgiveness nearly impossible. On Nov. 9 of this year, the NY Post reported this recommendation had been aired on mainstream media, just in time for Thanksgiving, a holiday already riddled by displays of moral outrage and virtue signaling:
" A Yale-affiliated psychiatrist encouraged LGBTQ+ people whose family members voted for Donald Trump to cut ties and shun their relatives over the upcoming holidays — as fallout from the election reached hysteria on left-leaning MSNBC. Yale University child psychiatry fellow Dr. Amanda Calhoun dug into the issue of the post-election crises in the LGBTQ+ community with MSNBC’s Joy Reid on Friday night. “There is a societal push that, if somebody is your family, they are entitled to your time. And I think the answer is absolutely not,” Calhoun said in a clip shared online. Read more at https://nypost.com/2024/11/09/us-news...
Forgiveness is inconvenient and possibly unwise. As it's described by the host of YouTube channel Collective Psychology: "...From a worldly or human perspective, forgiveness can seem irrational. Think about it- when someone wrongs you deeply our natural instinct is to hold onto that hurt, seek revenge, or demand justice. In a society driven by fairness and self-preservation, forgiveness can make it look like you're letting the other person get away with something." But, from a non-worldly perspective, it isn't about what makes sense by worldly standards-it's about releasing someone from the moral debt they owe you, while freeing yourself of bitterness.
It is actually only a small, but doggedly vocal minority who do not believe human beings are valuable; that humans don't have an intrinsic, innate value in and of themselves.The majority, for the most part, finds it ponderous that anyone right-minded would think otherwise, although if they are honest and observant would also admit that that number is going up, fast.
It's mythological that suicides increase around the Holidays. In fact, if anything that is when normally fringe family members are more pointed at their own, maybe more in the per view of their family than normal. Either way, of course we must concur even further that "There is a societal push that, if somebody is in your family, they are entitled to your time.And I think the answer is absolutely not." I am of course being facetious here in order to point out the utter harshness and emotional tone deafness to be found in this kind of expert thinking.
And what better, colder efficiency is there than withdrawal of affection? It's sort of like a salad kit-it comes with everything you need to quickly dispatch something far too mundane to be allowed to encroach upon your time, mental state, and the lovingly-curated rarefied atmosphere you pursue with full prejudice.
One thing for sure is that it doesn't matter which side of the fence you are on. If you were brash, and didn't read the room, causing your loved ones offense-you played yourself. If you categorized a family member through anything outside of your own family-you played yourself. You got played anytime anything coming from a small group of unhappy people who don't have what you have managed to put a wedge in between you and your own.
Maybe this year, the Devil will stay out of the Details, we won't care that Thanksgiving wasn't like in the picture books, Pilgrims Bad, Injuns ill-portrayed. Maybe it would be good enough to accept Xmas as at least a time where people generally pause and take note of one another, whether in the spirit of just another dept. store holiday, or even if they know the 25th isn't Jesus' B.D. Maybe first-hand fellowship is good enough, and you really didn't need any more excuse to dislike that one any more than you kind of do in the first place. Maybe this will be the year when families figure out that there is a big difference between quarrels, and wars. The year when we remember how our organizations got here by not being played from the outside.
11.27.2024
