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Well, Reader, I assume you mean “Why are white southerners so ignorant?” You say West Virginia because the recent Democratic primary in that state and news coverage thereof have thankfully given you another opportunity to compare yourself favorably to an unofficially sanctioned stereotype. With your real question thus revealed, I’ll give you the short answer first:

It is human nature to be ignorant, as much as it is human nature to be curious and to learn. We all feel an urge to stay within our comfort zone, to stay with those who look, think, and/or act like us. To make this easier, we feel an urge to demonize to some degree those who look, think, and/or act differently. As this keeps us from knowledge, it keeps us in ignorance.

Absolutely, at least some of the white Democratic voters who backed Hilary Clinton are ignorant and chose their candidate out of ignorance. A friend forwarded me this Daily Kos post with a clip from Comedy Central’s Daily Show that includes interviews of some of the ignorant voters. One forthrightly admitted, “I’m sort of scared of the other race ’cause we have so much conflict with ‘em,” lumping Barack Obama in with the dark-skinned bogeymen she crosses the street to avoid and the violent black youth she sees every day on the news. Another objected that Obama is a Muslim—which is blatantly false—while a third said unreflectively, “I had enough of Hussein,” linking Obama’s middle name to the former dictator of Iraq. Both of these ignorant women believe that Obama has connections with our terrorist enemies.

Of course, these are not the only examples of ignorance in race or politics. Blacks voting with a jerk of their collective knee for whomever the Democratic candidate happens to be is ignorant, but one can’t safely point that out. Blacks accusing other blacks of “Uncle Tomism” because their beliefs, thought processes, fashion sense, or education/income level differs from mainstream black America—that’s certainly ignorant, but it’s off-limits.

Like the old, white West Virginians in the Daily Show clip, blacks can live down to their stereotypes too … but white folk are not supposed to talk about it. Sure, you can find blacks who are lazy, shiftless, violent, and eaters of watermelon, but the only acceptable way to acknowledge those characteristicsis to blame them on white people. Except for the watermelon eating, because no one is ashamed to admit that everyone enjoys watermelon.

I do understand that a shiftless white person is not perceived to reflect badly on his/her whole race, while a shiftless black person is perceived to confirm the stereotype and make everyone look bad. To solve this problem, you need only bring your secrets out in the open and connect honestly on honest issues.

The next time you see an aging, poorly educated, low-income, white West Virginian woman mouthing off about the “nigras,” don’t label her as one of those racist southerners and contemptuously write her off. Instead, approach her with a smile and say, “Hey, I’m racist too! I hate white people!”

The next time you see a young, poorly educated, low-income, black male wearing his draws down to his knees and glaring menacingly at passing white folk, don’t excuse him as a victim of society and hurry home to e-mail your Democratic congressperson. Instead, approach him with a smile and say, “Hey, I slavishly follow the fashions of my peer group too! And I also hate working, and have been known to steal small items from Wal-Mart as a protest against corporate greed!”

In this way, we can end these silly games and acknowledge the truth: everyone is ignorant, self-righteous, criminal, and responsible for his/her actions. Let’s not fight about it.

Baby bounces out window, lives
Article Last Updated: 05/08/2008 09:41:04 PM (MDT)

(The Denver Post) – A 2-year-old girl bouncing on a bed bounced out an open second-story window in Westminster today, but the toddler appears to have escaped with only cuts and bruises, authorities said.

* * *

Powers: Body seems to be composed of a rubber-like material, drastically reducing vulnerability to many forms of physical trauma and allowing controlled bouncing movements of various degrees. Extraordinary powers akin to rubber’s flexibility and malleability may surface in the future, but are so far undetected.

Weaknesses: heat, fire, too much friction, extreme cold

I go to meet my family in Europe. The house is ours, and we are not on vacation, although we are not rich. It appears to be dusk, the sky a burning orange at the horizon, then successively darker shades of blue until the top of the sky is nearly black. The house is infused with the dusk-darkness and lit with very few, low-power lights or candles.

ED is there [, a woman from that city, whom I used to date when I was 18 and she 16. In her teens and early 20s at least, she had a reputation in the city's music scene as a tough and independent girl, a punk rock singer, whose large breasts had developed early].

E suggests “walking around Arabia.” I am confused and agitated and ask, “What? The subcontinent?” and I won’t rest until I find it on a map. I trace my fingers around the sand-colored mass of land indicated on the large wall map and imagine walking around it. Then, I read a comic book in which a superhero team goes to Arabia to chase a supervillain, one of their archenemies. The sky in the comic is the same dusk pattern as outside. The villain is flying over a field of extremely tall, dense wheat or some similar grain in his private, one-seat airplane, and his plane crashes. Jets fly over and drop a chemical that burns the field. The villain is horribly burned and disfigured and blames “Arabian poison” as well as the superhero team.

When I finish reading the comic book, E is gone. She comes back not too long after this and she wants to go to the city. Next thing I know, it is bright daylight, maybe early summer from the heat, and I’m wandering alone in a city that looks something like the city of my teens and 20s, the dirty parts by railroad tracks with old warehouses that have been converted into nightclubs or rentable cheap workrooms or party rooms, signs and stores that mix small town and college town, local/provincial with generic national flavors. Everything looks dusty and faded. I’m walking down a street without any purpose, not looking for anyone or going to any place, feeling lost in semi-familiar surroundings …

There’s no sign of life—it’s just the power to charm. I’m lying in the rain, but I never wave bye-bye … but I try … I try.

Lightning trip through the urologist’s office this morning following up on what my internist diagnosed as prostatitis So this urologist comes in after I pee in the cup looks me in the eye shakes my hand introduces himself never stops moving I tell him about the three times in the past 1.5 years I’ve gone to the doctor for prostatitis dull pain in the pubic region of the abdomen becoming sharper and extending to the rectum flaring up to a sharp pain in that area and he says drop your shorts and he checks my balls and has me turn my head and cough and he says lean over and put your elbows on the table and he lubes me up and BAM anally finger-raped I’m not complaining I’ve taken it in the ass before and I kind of like it rough I just which my ex-boyfriends had lubed up that good when they did me He gave me some Kleenex with which to wipe myself clean which is more than my boyfriends ever did Comes back and says I don’t think it’s prostatitis, I think it’s pelvic floor pain, go to these people for exercise And I’m out the door

(CHICAGO) — Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley met today with several police, school officials, reverends, social workers, and activists.

Explaining the need for this summit, Mayor Daley said, “It concerns all of us, antamarrahng … again havacupa ministers and other people … just sit around an sez, ‘I-I-Is there any other solutions that we cuh we’ve lost?’”(1)

Many community leaders say they are dissatisfied with the Daley Administrations previous efforts to stomp out violence, including instituting a curfew, then making the curfew earlier when it was determined that kids routinely ignore curfews, asking parents to be responsible parents, asking them again and this time saying “please,” banning all guns within the city, achieving 100% enforcement of city gun laws by every available honest and competent police officer,(2) and asking for more and stiffer anti-gun laws.

Police officials interviewed before the summit said they would push for more police, more and bigger equipment, and an increase in salaries and benefits. The officers praised new Police Superintendent Jody Weis for planning a massive SWAT invasion into “trouble areas,” positioning rooftop snipers on every block, covering the sky with police helicopters, and knocking on doors wearing full body armor and carrying really huge assault rifles.

School officials disagreed with the police representatives, saying that a three- or fourfold increase in education funds, some of it earmarked for a new anti-violence curriculum, is necessary to get rid of violence in the city. Social workers echoed the school officials’ opinion, only replace “education” with “social services” and “curriculum” with “program.”

As the only groups not directly tied to the government, the activists and the holy reverends agreed that the most important thing was to make speeches about how the government should forcibly take the possessions of rich people and distribute them to the economically disadvantaged. The groups disagreed on two issues: whether religious leaders should be exempt from asset limits and whether daily baths should be mandatory.

For his part, Daley is reportedly intent on reducing the availability of guns in a city in which guns are legally not available. Rumor has it that Daley intends a police takeover of neighboring suburbs and Northwestern Indiana.

Related Posts Elsewhere …

The Bench: "MAYOR DALEY IS PISSED“

Cultural/Evolutionary Basis of Cutting

Human beings have been cutting themselves for thousands of years. Way back when, however, it wasn’t a solitary activity in response to overwhelming psychological stress. It was integrated into the community as a rite of passage, a ceremonial scarring to mark one’s acceptance into the adult community. Highly ritualized events like this not only provided a sense of direction and belonging, but they acknowledged the human need for intense physical experiences (pain in this case, but other ancient rituals emphasized sex, drugs, starvation, etc.) and gave those experiences boundaries of time, place, and community.

Of course, we have disposed of those barbaric traditions, because we are now too civilized and too rational to do such things to ourselves or our children. Of course, drugs (including but not limited to booze) and addictive behavior; illicit and compulsive sex, prostitution, infidelity; violence and S&M dynamics of all sorts still flourish somewhere in the shadows (and often in the broad daylight) of the adult world. But at least the children are safe. (OK, I’m being obviously sarcastic here. I won’t insult your intelligence by drawing that out.)

My own opinion is that there is nothing inherently bad about sex, drugs, or violence. (There is, of course, something inherently dangerous about them, but it’s not a moral issue.) Nor are they demons from our distant past that we can stamp out through some sort of political, psychological, or social progressivism or reactionism. In fact, we run into virtually identical problems whether we liberate these forces from the prison of moral interpretation (replacing it by either excusing excess with novel designations of victimhood or celebrating excess with a blind eye toward its dangers) or beat them repeatedly with moral baseball bats. They have always been an integral part of the human experience and they always will be. The only choice we have to make is how to work with them, direct them into channels less likely to kill us and our loved ones. As long as we refuse to make that decision, old human patterns will persist in their more destructive forms.

As long as kids have little or no sense of purpose or meaning, no sense of personal identity (you can’t tell just by the hair or the music or whether they get along with their parents), no sense that their actions can affect the world around them, sex, drugs, and violence will flourish in their world, too. Pain will be a solution to pain. Cutting will not stop. But in some distant memory, in the chemicals that flow from our glands and swim through the primordial waters of our bloodstream, all of this connects us to an age when everything made a hell of a lot more sense.

Related Posts on Other Blogs

The RecoverYourLife.com Forums discuss whether seeking help is just “being selfish?”
ModBlog shows us a journey from “Self-Harm to Self-Love” using conscious and deliberate self-branding over cutting scars, and and another “Self-Injury Scar Cover-Up Procedure” using artistic scarification.
ModBlog also has some incredibly interesting posts on ritual and/or performance cutting (Caution: Graphic, bloody pictures).

Physiological Basis of Cutting

The easiest place to start is with the biochemical stuff. People understand that because it seems remote enough from the conscious choices we make. To the extent they have no choice, we don’t need to ask “Why do they do that?” Except, it’s not all that clear cut in this case. But it does provide a somewhat satisfying answer to the question, “What do they get out of it?”

They get endorphins coursing through their body, the body’s own natural opioid (kind of like heroin), which does a tremendous job (usually) alleviating pain and stress, lifting mood. Same stuff released during strenuous exercise and sex. It can help manage frustration, anxiety, depression, agitation, even some psychotic symptoms.

Like any short-circuit of the problem-resolution process coupled with an intense behavior-reward complex, cutting runs into the twin problems of limiting access to other coping skills and increasing dependence on (and addiction to) the rewarded behavior. Why spend months in intense therapy and struggling to change your behavior and interactions with the world so you can “feel better” when all you have to do is cut, and you know you’ll feel better immediately? And it does. It would not be this addictive if it were that effective in the first place.

… Next installment: Cultural/Evolutionary Basis of Cutting

… or a 30-lb. benign ovarian tumor?

My wife and I watched an episode of House from the first season (Netflix DVD) last night, and it raised some questions and question-like thoughts, such as …

• Why don’t Drs. House and Wilson tell the fat married Latina patient the actual dangers that may be posed by a 30 lb. benign tumor on her ovary? Not to force her to lose weight and look “normal” (which was her immediate and loudly, angrily voiced interpretation), but to dispense accurate and relevant medical information, which, as I understand it, is part of a physician’s job.
  • For the record, the most significant impact of large benign tumors anywhere in the body is due to their pressing on and displacing other organs. House’s patient’s primary complaint upon visiting the clinic was heartburn. This was found to be a result of the tumor presumably displacing the stomach and esophagus upward, allowing the hydrochloric acid to move from the stomach through the area of the esophagus normally constricted by the esophageal sphicter in the diaphragm. If the tumor grows, it will press  on other organs and possibly cause more dangerous symptoms.
  • Also, according to the folks at Gyn[Ob].com (the Virtual OB-GYN office), an ovarian tumor “can enlarge and its sheer size can cause an ovary to twist upon itself leading to gangrene. This is called “torsion,” and death of the ovary occurs because the blood supply is twisted off.”
• It turns out the whole episode is about medical issues that are masked by fat or mistaken for fat or underlying causes of fat (with deadly consequences). And I wonder how the Fat Nazis Acceptance  Movement Ladies would feel about this episode. (I searched on kateharding.net, but didn’t find a thing.) The patient with the tumor was written as the voice of Fat Acceptance, but she was shrill and inarticulate (I mean, more than your average activist in the Fat or any other movement) and she wound up having an (pretty dumb) ulterior motive for wanting to retain her fat (she wanted to continue to appeal to the chubby chasers with whom she was cheating on her husband). Not much of a poster child.
  • The patient with the tumor carried it low and looked pregnant. I once dated a woman who carried her abdominal fat low and looked like she was pregnant. She covered it up on our first date and I didn’t notice until the second. At that point, it was a little off-putting. I had not seen women carry their weight like that, not up close, and wondered if she was pregnant, which would not be welcome news on the second date.
• I really need to write shorter posts. Just for the sake of my schedule and my productivity.

I hurt myself today
to see if I still feel
I focus on the pain
the only thing that’s real.
–Nine Inch Nails, “Hurt”

I wouldn’t say I’m pro-cutting, but neither am I anti-cutting. It is a coping mechanism with a significant short-term positive effect and fewer risks than some other coping mechanisms popular among people who don’t know how to cope. The Internet has a healthy population of sites and articles and posts that say much the same. My disagreement with these sites and articles and posts is that they usually lead and/or finish with “Stop Cutting!”

“Stop Cutting!” is as short-sighted a slogan, in its well-intentioned way, as “Just Say No!” was for drugs in the ’80s. (Reminds me of NWA, We don’t just say no, we’re too busy sayin’ yeah.) As a recovering alcoholic, I refuse to tell anyone else to “Stop Drinking!” regardless of quantities or destructive behaviors or deteriorating health. It wouldn’t do any good, and may backfire. After all, what the fuck do I know about someone else’s life? What makes me so much better than someone else that I can presume to tell him/her what to do? Defensiveness spikes and anger increases the urgency to get fucked up. Or, Increase the Stress >> Increase the Likelihood of the Maladaptive Coping Behavior. The truth is, an alcoholic generally is not going to stop drinking until s/he feels like it, “hits bottom,” makes a decision, etc. Even then, it’s far from easy. And, in my experience, cutting is very similar.

The biggest problem for the Anti-Cutting movement (and for anyone who deals with the issue in any way) is the biggest obstacle in the way of cutters who otherwise might be ready to put down the knives and razors. When cutting comes into a conversation, the response I hear most often from noncutters is “You know, I just don’t get the whole cutting thing, never have.” It aggravates me a little every time, probably just because it makes such sense to me, and there was always something very satisfying about cutting. It worked. For a while. But it’s difficult to explain to people who haven’t experienced it, haven’t needed it. Below is my attempt.

(First, let me kick my credentials: I first cut myself at age 18 with a big serated knife in my parents’ kitchen. I don’t recall hearing about people doing that sort of thing back then, except maybe once or twice among more sophisticated city folk, and then in the context of art or performance. It was years before the current cutting “epidemic.” I continued cutting, though not as frequently as some other cutters, until I stopped drinking and drugs about 5 years ago. The last time I obsessed about cutting and nearly picked up the knife again was about 2 months ago. Now, I’m on track to become a nurse practitioner working with children and adolescents with psych issues.)

… Next installment: Physiological Basis of Cutting

Related Posts on Other Blogs

pulling out hair gives tips to cutters and friends in “Self Injury Support”
Sun & Shield says Thou Shalt Not Cut in “A Biblical view on self-mutilation, or “cutting””
Teen Issues says, patronizingly, “Wanna join the new fad? Don’t.”
the kids speak in “Multigenre Fun” on writing lives/teaching lives