Posts
 |
| Jeremy Joseph Christian |
I'm no fan of Ayn Rand, the atheist writer who has inspired right-wing religious Republicans, but I've read several of her books. One of the questions she raised was: why should a person die for a stranger? Yes, why? What is the rationale for depriving your loved ones of your existence by dying for someone about whose nature you are ignorant? Although we praise those who risk their lives, which of us would even give a kidney for a stranger?
One of the men who died had four children. Was it right for him to deprive his children of a father? Would it be right for me to deprive Peggy of a husband?
Fifty years ago, I saw a man beating another man with a pistol. When I yelled, "Stop!" he turned the pistol on me, and I ran. It's not a decision that I have regretted.
I would guess that, out of every hundred people who die for a stranger, nearly all are young men, suggesting that evolution has arranged things so that the impetus to jump into the fray falls upon those who are the best able to come out alive.
 |
| Ayn Rand 1905-1982 |
A major downside of dying for someone is that it eliminates every other good thing a person might have done in life. The people whom I most respect aren't the ones who die for something, but the ones who live for something. For instance there's my blog buddy (http://catwomanflix.blogspot.com/) who has devoted her life to rescuing cats. Instead of praising Jodi for her sacrifice in spending her time and money on cats, and her heroism in crawling under abandoned houses and setting live traps in bad neighborhoods, most people contemptuously call her "the cat lady." This points to another thing about heroes: to win human approbation, they must help humans. Another misgiving I have about those Portland heroes is that I respect few of the people I know enough to die for them, so I'm hardly keen on dying for a stranger....
Maybe I would die for a child--particularly a child I knew--because I don't have a lot of years left to live anyway (call my thoughts about this a matter of economy, if you will). I would imagine that most people feel "programmed" to protect children without regard to either person's gender. But where the protector is male it's "women and children first." When I reflect upon the behavior of the men on the Titanic, I'm struck by the thought that all of those men who, it would appear, deemed their lives as less valuable than women's nonetheless denied legal, social, and political equality to women....
 |
| 1 of 1,000s of Jodi's rescues |
The only difference--within myself--that I can image had the men been black would be that their deaths would have countered my image of black people as criminals based upon the fact that the only black people I see on the local news are athletes and criminals, and even then, the athletes are often on the news because they got in trouble with the law. Because of this image, it's easier for a black person to make a favorable impression on me because I so much want to think well of blacks that I cling to their every act of virtue.
Because I so hate Islam, Peggy asked if I would have been less likely to speak up because one of the girls was wearing a hijab. Although I deplore hijabs (which I see as a sure symbol of gender oppression), the fact that one of the girls was wearing one wasn't the issue. The issue was that they were children who were being abused by a depraved bully. Speculating about what I might have done is an irresistible impossibility because I cannot know. All I can know is that, while I don't want to die for nothing, it doesn't follow that I wouldn't die for anything.
 |
| Ever the asshole |
"I am a lifelong citizen of the United States, and I live in Eugene, Oregon. I am writing to ask your forgiveness for an incident in which the childish man who represents my nation to the world shoved aside the man who represents your nation to the world. Neither I nor most of the people of my nation voted for Donald Trump, yet his boorish behavior reflects negatively upon us.
"After witnessing the campaign which put Trump into office, combined with the months he has been in office, I have come to understand Donald Trump fairly well—it’s easy to see the bottom of a shallow puddle—but what I don’t understand is why Dusko Markovic didn’t object to Trump shoving him aside as if he were a dead limb on a unwanted shrub. As if that apparent acceptance of his relative unimportance were not bad enough, Markovic added, “It is natural that the president of the United States is in the front row.”
"Sad though it is for the people of my nation to be represented by a brainless narcissist like Donald Trump, is it not also sad for the people of your nation to be represented by a man who fails to speak up when the dignity of his nation has been offended?"
11 comments:
And now he has walked away from the Paris Accord...
I suspect that the men in Oregon didn't realise that they were facing death, but instead thought that they were facing down a bully. And wonder whether their behaviour would have changed if they had.
I have no idea what I would do, but hope I would speak up. Staying silent rewards and affirms behaviour I do not want to accept, and certainly don't want to become the norm.
Here we go....
The deranged man who decided it was acceptable to berate and try to intimidate anyone needs no further comment from me.
I think you may have the wrong idea about Ayn Rand. Some Republicans have bastardized her viewpoints. She considered herself to be liberal using the definition you find in the dictionary. It simply means
open to new behavior or opinions and willing to discard traditional values.
Not the uptight rigidity that Republicans wish us to practice.
I like to think the three brave men who stood up for what they thought was right were honorable men. They saw someone abusing young women and asked him to stop. How could they know he would so violently turn on them. It is too sad that the people who care about them also are suffering.
A young man who grew up with my children was going to be a policeman like his father. One day he saw a man mistreating a woman and trying to steal her purse. He stopped to help her. The man shot him and killed him. Was the young man a hero? Definitely yes.
You hold the man in Tienanmen Square in high esteem. That man did not die. But did he know the tank would stop? No he did not. He is also a hero.
I risk your anger here. I recall the man who is supposed to be leading our country saying that he only likes winners. I assume that the young man who lived because the tank stopped was a winner and the three who were attacked and either injured or dead are losers?
Your blog friend Jodi is practicing kindness every day. She takes care of the cats who are not able to care for themselves. She too is a hero.
In the next paragraph you seem to ramble a bit trying to justify your feelings. You are certainly right to have your feelings and hold to them. However some people choose to give aid no matter what the circumstances are. There were women who went down with the Titanic too. Are they heroes or victims? Perhaps we would need to know more about each individual.
I despise any who offer "ifs" to further their own agenda. The "ifs" did not happen so there is no way we can know. We can only judge by what actually happened. Facts.
The leader of Montenegro behaved like a man. Even though he was treated rudely he stood tall. He did not subjugate himself. He gave the people he leads an example of what is important. Being at the front does not matter except to the man who was rude. And look where it is getting him.
I did like your letter. You let Montenegro know how most of us feel. That is a good thing. Dare I call you a hero?
I'm glad you used my kitten photo in your post. Thank you for all those kind words concerning my mission. I too wondered what good their deaths did and now their lives are gone. Every good thing they could have done---especially the youngest of the two--gone.
Are a bully's words enough to die for? I suppose they did not know they were going to die when they stood up, thinking maybe they could quickly diffuse the situation, not knowing he had a knife and would use it. One of those things maybe, like being distracted while driving, and accidentally cutting off another driveway, who is in a mood and shoots you or runs you off the road for really nothing.
I've read The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged, We the Living, the Virtue of Selfishness, and various of Rand's newsletter articles. I did this during my twenties when I fell under her sway because of her emphasis on individualism. However, if I had not been cured of her already, the behaviors of the neo-conservatives and Tea Party members would have finished the job. Unlike you, I think that, in most ways, they adhere to her values fairly well in that, like Rand, they: regard selfishness as a virtue; had rather see the country go into default than to compromise with anyone about anything; believe that laissez-faire capitalism is only intelligent form of government; trust private enterprise to solve all out problems; and would have no objection to people starving to death in the street since the people it happened to would deserve their fate. However, unlike them, Rand didn't even believe in ANY compulsory taxation (she believed that the only functions of government should be providing us with police and military), and speculated that, in lieu of taxes, government should finance itself by selling contract insurance. As for discarding traditional values, she wasn't just open to it, she was downright militant about doing it, particularly the one about altruism being a virtue. In fact, her novels consisted of her setting up traditionalist straw-men so she could knock them down with her vastly superior (and utterly selfish) protagonists. As for being open to new behaviors and opinions, she was notable for her fit-throwing intolerance; and anyone in her college chapters who questioned any part of her writings was soon ejected. She had no interest in nature other than for the exploitation, expressed hatred for anyone who preferred the view of a tree or a field to that of a billboard, and made the silly claim that she wasn't concerned about the sun burning out someday because she was confident that people like her fictional heroes would have invented a superior power source by then anyway. Are you familiar with the biography of her that was written, after her death I believe it was, by her long-term collaborator and erstwhile lover, Nathaniel Branden? I'm won't be reading it or anything else by or about her again, but I enjoyed both when I did.
"You hold the man in Tienanmen Square in high esteem. That man did not die. But did he know the tank would stop?"
I removed that example because, when Peggy previewed the post, I realized that it was too confusing. No, the man in Tienanmen Square couldn't know the tank would stop (not once but repeatedly), and, worse yet, he surely knew that even if the tank did stop, he would face a future more cruel than death. I saw two heroes in that incident, one being that man on the street, and the other being the tank commander who didn't kill the man on the street, and, given the brutality of the Chinese government, might have been punished for it. But back to the men in Portland, I don't doubt their courage or idealism, and I would even hold the world would be better off if we were all like them. Unfortunately, society praises such people without having the least intention of going out and acting likewise. It's as if society uses them for its own purposes and after the passage of a few days or weeks forgets them, so my thought is that, if you're going to do good, don't imagine that you're going to elevate society through doing good, but rather do it for yourself and for the immediate object of your goodness because, when it comes right down to it, society regards you as a bit too readily expendable. cont.
Had those men known they were going to die for standing up for people's right to cross the city without being verbally assaulted, surely they would have behaved differently, and I wish they had. If the abuser had been physically assaulting them, it would have been a horse of a different color, and I think it likely that, even given my age and limitations, I might have stepped in rather than know that I would, for the rest of my life, get up every morning and look in the mirror at a man who had rather allow children to be murdered than to even try to save them. Ayn Rand would say, "Ah ha, see there, even altruists do their good deeds out of selfish motives, only my heroes are honest enough to claim ownership of it and even to uphold it as a virtue." It was an argument that used to stump me. Then, at some point and for some reason, I realized that the difference in good people and bad people isn't simply selfishness versus unselfishness but rather the nature of the selfishness. A bad person might be selfish in the way of Bernie Madoff (i.e. unbridled and conscienceless greed), while a good person might be selfish in the way of my friend who rescues cats.
(I remember one occasion when Jodi rescued--or at least tried to rescue--a dog. On this occasion, she had driven upwards of 100 miles to go camping, and, while there, learned that someone (from out of state, I think) had lost a dog and had finally gone home without him. It being the fall of the year, Jodi worried about that dog so much that she spent her trip looking for him, and then made one or two return trips to look for him. What those men in Portland did, while noble, was done on the spur of the moment and probably without knowing that they were putting their lives at risk. The actions that impress me most are the ones that require an ongoing sacrifice, make my own goodness look like (in the words of the Bible) "filthy rags," and are focused upon helping nonhumans because not only do such people NOT receive societal credit, they are told, "Why waste your time helping cats [or dogs, or mule deer, or etc.] when there are children starving to death in Africa?"
"In the next paragraph you seem to ramble a bit trying to justify your feelings."
Without reading the paragraph, I can but suggest that the cause might have been bad writing, or it might have been ambivalence. This incident seems to represent an easier analysis for you than it is for me.
"I risk your anger here. I recall the man who is supposed to be leading our country saying that he only likes winners."
You didn't anger me--you just lost me, although I wouldn't take it hard if you had angered me because I really don't want people to imagine that I'm either delicate or explosive. I mostly just like it that you have things to say.
"There were women who went down with the Titanic too. Are they heroes or victims?"
Huh? I'm not fitting within the either/or choices you're giving me. That aside, I suppose every last one of the women in steerage died (one result of that sinking, was that buying a first class tickets no longer meant that if the ship sunk, you would be given first dibs to seats in the life boats. I'm unaware of any women who chose to give up their seats.
"The leader of Montenegro behaved like a man."
Indeed he did at the time. It was his remarks after the fact that bothered me. For example, he said that Trump had a right to be in the front (they were gathering for a photo). I very much doubt that seating (or rather standing) was by assignment only, but even if it were, Trump had no right to push anyone out of his way.
When it comes to the issue of helping or not helping, I don't know that I ever give it any real thought. it is very much of a reflex with me.
Lying all the way about its imagined downsides while neglecting its impact on the climate and its boost to green businesses. Do you want to hear something hysterical about Trump? He thinks the rest of the world is laughing at us, and he’s going to make them stop. He’s a sad sack if ever there was one, and he has made such ethnic and racist attacks as occurred in Portland the norm. His supporters would argue that he never tells anyone to attack anyone else. Oh, but he has, and he has likewise stereotyped minorities and made it clear that they’re not welcome in America.
“I suspect that the men in Oregon didn't realise that they were facing death, but instead thought that they were facing down a bully.”
I think you’re right. I think they had it in their heads that they could calm him and talk reason to him. Unlike I, they were optimists and believers in the good that is supposedly present even in bad people.
“I have no idea what I would do, but hope I would speak up.”
But there again, was it worth dying for? Would you bleed-out from your neck feeling glad for what you had done. Such deeds are supposed to inspire us all, but how many people might NOT speak up in the future because of those murders? When I’m tempted to speak up, I think that very thing, by which I mean is it worth my life?
“The deranged man who decided it was acceptable to berate and try to intimidate anyone needs no further comment from me.”
As far as being interesting, I find him a lot more interesting than the men whom he killed. No one gets like that out of the blue, so what happened to make him so miserable that he would kill people in the name of HIS free speech when all they were doing was exercising their own right to speak freely.
“Thank you for all those kind words concerning my mission.”
You’re my good example because you carry on no matter how discouraged you become. I’ve wished a million times over that you could be affiliated with some shelter because I imagine that working with others would make your task easier for you. A funny headline just hit me: “Lone Wolf Rescues Cats.”
“One of those things maybe, like being distracted while driving, and accidentally cutting off another driveway, who is in a mood and shoots you or runs you off the road for really nothing.”
Road rage is the kind of thing that would have made me less likely to speak up on that commuter train because people are killed daily because someone didn’t like the way they changed lanes. It happened to me last week. A driver cut in so close in front of me that I had to slam on the brakes and seesaw all over the place to avoid him. I felt so enraged, and I thought that, there’s nothing constructive to do other than to be on my way.
“When it comes to the issue of helping or not helping, I don't know that I ever give it any real thought. it is very much of a reflex with me.”
I feel the need for a well-considered plan. For example, “Don’t flip the bird at other drivers,” and “Don’t intervene when (as sometimes happens) a strange couple is in front of my house having a screaming fit.” Instead, call the cops because they’re paid and trained to handle bad situations.
“A young man who grew up with my children was going to be a policeman like his father. One day he saw a man mistreating a woman and trying to steal her purse. He stopped to help her. The man shot him and killed him. Was the young man a hero? Definitely yes.”
I agree, but think it appropriate to ask if he had exhausted all other options. Young men constitute the group that is far and away the most likely to intervene in an explosive situation, and young men often die in these situations, so this sours me on the prospect of them intervening unless the situation is a matter of life and death, and there are no other options. For instance, if I were on a jetliner, and someone tried to break into the cockpit, I could do two things. One would be to intervene, and the other would be to stay out of the way of men who are younger and fitter. Sure, I could be a “hero” and try to restrain the man myself, but I had rather be a smart bystander than a dumb hero. I remember an incident (from when I lived in South Mississippi) in which a woman and her parents were walking through the French Quarter when a mugger grabbed her purse and ran. Because she was athletic, she ran after him, and he shot her dead. That was nearly forty years ago, and all of the good she could have done was erased because she took on a man with a gun. Maybe she didn’t know he had a gun, but she knew he might have, just as those men in Portland knew that they were dealing with a seriously disturbed man who might be armed. Was she a hero? You, I believe, want to put me in a yes/no category by which I look at complex situations and smugly pronounce judgment. All I can say in response is that I don’t believe it’s a good idea to die for a purse as did the man you told about, and as did the woman I read about. When people get ego-involved, they perform acts that often go badly. That commuter train soon came into a station, and I would guess that cellphones were everywhere. Why die? Why not let the cops handle it with their .45s, tasers, pepper spray, and handcuffs, and then, if necessary, help the cops?
“I risk your anger here. I recall the man who is supposed to be leading our country saying that he only likes winners. I assume that the young man who lived because the tank stopped was a winner and the three who were attacked and either injured or dead are losers?”
I was tired last night, so thought I would give this another go, but I still don’t get it. Are you asking me to guess what Trump would say, or do you imagine that, like Trump, I tend to divide people into opposing categories regardless of whether those categories fit?
Trump is the epitome of a boor. Me, me, me, me. The Montenegro PM showed class.
I doubt the men defending the hijab wearing young women had any idea that they were in so much danger. A good question, what would I do?
Many years ago, some teenagers were making fun of a bald 10 year cancer patient at a beach. I didn't step in to my shame.
The social Darwinism that Ms. Ryn espouses seems to be the bible for conservatives. Screw the poor, they deserve it. Or maybe they should just read Horatio Alger homilies as Ben Carson recently said.
“Many years ago, some teenagers were making fun of a bald 10 year cancer patient at a beach. I didn't step in to my shame.”
I don’t know would have been the right thing for you to do. I hate talking to strangers about unpleasant things, because, at my worst, I get so mad that I tremble. Maybe there’s some point in asking oneself, “If I were the person I most want to be, what would I do now?” Calling those kids names surely wouldn’t help, but they probably wouldn’t have been open to a lesson about the effects of chemotherapy either…. I had rather talk to an adult than a teenager, because most adults have a little more sense, not a lot necessarily, but a little more. As I understand it, those men tried to appeal to the goodness within Jeremy Christian, but it’s hard to pull that off and not sound condescending, and he interpreted it as an effort to obstruct his Constitutional right to freedom of speech. I would guess that he was like a walking powder keg, and any effort to approach him was doomed to fail. I am so very curious about what made him into the person he is, that I wish I could dialogue with him. I see unutterable torment in his eyes, and if those guys failed to see it, and know that they were talking to a two-legged rattler, they were tragically unobservant. A lot of truly dangerous people broadcast the fact that they’re dangerous.
“The social Darwinism that Ms. Ryn espouses seems to be the bible for conservatives.”
Indeed. The “strong” survive, and we’re better off without the rest. Yet, the people who are inspired by her regard themselves as Christians. How many million will be losing their health care if Paul Ryan has his way—23,000,000 is it. Jesus healed the sick, yet his modern-day disciples are fine with letting them suffer and die. How can this be? How do these people sit in their warehouse size churches, sing their mushy songs, get a look of rapture on their faces, wave their arms in praise to God, and take all of those billions that they might do good with, and spend them on weaponry. I can no longer think of Christianity without feeling utter revulsion, and while I know that there are caring Christians, they’re not the ones who have become the dominant face of Christianity.
I'm not sure any of us know what we might do until we encounter the moment -- at least I don't. That's when we learn about ourselves -- what we really believe based on whatever action we take or not.
Post a Comment