Month: November 2021

I am convinced that bigotry is at the root of human mistreatment of other humans. Bigotry is intolerance of other people based solely on their group membership. It is an emotional rather than a rational dislike of a whole category of people. I’m pretty sure that bias and bigotry are both rooted in our evolutionary need for connection and survival. We seem to naturally prefer those who are like ourselves in significant ways such as ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation, nationality, or even love for a particular football team. It stands to reason that on an evolutionary level, humans reject those whose differences appear to threaten their connections and survival as a group. Perhaps bigotry is a first cousin to rivalry.

It is feasible that bigotry and rivalry are actually closer than cousins; perhaps they are brothers born from the same parents: tribalism and survival instinct. Our species has survived until now by banning together in tribes and fighting other tribes for control over land and scarce resources. Human history is a story about conflict, one group pitted against another as rivals who come to hate each other by concentrating on differences enough to kill, oppress, and enslave other humans. In the past, human leaders exploited these perceived differences using loyal and gullible members of their own tribes as pons to secure control over land or other resources needed for survival.

Today, the majority of leaders are motivated by personal economic gain and political domination, not the literal life and death survival of their tribe. And unfortunately, the most loyal and gullible pons who are get caught up in the dehumanizing lies about other human beings outside their political or religious tribe become ruthless killers. Bigotry is a powerful emotional tool, triggered only by immoral leaders. The FBI says such pons have been “radicalized”. We’ve watched this play out in the Middle East and Northern Africa and now it is here.

In the U.S., it has become painfully clear that new tribes have emerged along political lines with one tribe in particular looking to dominate the entire country. Their leaders have made this a question of survival around certain questions: Who will decide the moral direction of the population? Who gets the job opportunities? Who gets to make the rules? Who gets to decide right from wrong? Who gets to enter our borders? The young men in Charlottesville, chanting “Jews will not replace us” says it all. The insurrection was a warning.

Personally, I prefer sports rivalries over political ones. Sports is about trophies and bragging rights. Many of us were once willing to allow sports to satisfy our basic tribal rival instincts. On game day, we wore our colors and openly hated on the rival team. Things could get heated, but people seldom died over the rivalry. The Olympics was a good proxy for national rivalry for a while. But some leaders have abandoned sports as a satisfying substitute for tribal rivalry because the personal payoff wasn’t high enough. However, they need pons to do their bidding.

In our nation, we are reverting to a dangerous kind of tribalism that has less to do with sports, but more to do with politics. A few power-hungry republicans decided that having a black president was a bridge too far and decided to become an aggressive tribe, first destroying political compromise, then dehumanizing democrats as evil pedophiles and baby killers who are communists. They allowed a “strong man” to take over their party in order to create a tribal army. Trump republicans have become increasingly bold in their willingness to outright steal elections after stacking the courts. And now they are showing a willingness to take up arms against those who oppose them.

The problem is that too many people allow themselves to be pons. They have bought into the unfounded fears stoked by these greedy and power-hungry leaders who need them to wage their wars. These media and political leaders need tribal conflict to make money and to gain or maintain power. So, every day we see them stoking the fire, getting people riled up, because igniting bigotry is a surefire way to get people to act aggressively against others whom they now view as a threat. They think they are patriots, but they are not. They think they are preserving a nation when they are tearing it down.

The bigotry running rampant in our nation today is dangerous. If not curbed, it will surely lead to violence in the streets. Better humans will tap into their ability to reason and to overcome the instinct to automatically hate people with opposing viewpoints. Better humans will recognize that we don’t need bigotry as a motivator to vote for people, we need good sense and accurate information. Better humans will challenge bigotry, will call out leaders who provoke it, and stick to sports to fulfill their need for tribal rivalry.

I have unconditional love for those who share my blood line. I think this kind of love is baked into us as human beings. Maybe its some kind of biological imprinting. That doesn’t mean I don’t recognize family members for who they are. They could be horrible, hurtful and even dangerous human beings that we need to cut ties with for safety reasons. However, I discovered that this emotional love persists anyway because I never ceased loving my own father who had been a violent alcoholic who traumatized our family. To deal with my feelings in a safe way, I had to establish clear boundaries around our relationship. These lasted until his death in 1989 and I was the only one of his three children who could say goodbye to him without regret. In the process of loving my deeply flawed dad, I learned a powerful lesson about humans and blood line love. First, I learned that even the most depraved human has some redeeming qualities to offer and second I learned that blood line love becomes emotional poison if denied and unexpressed.

So, during the disappointing circumstances that lead to my divorce in 1996, I sat my three adolescent children down and told them that they were biologically preconditioned to love their father for their entire lives no matter what he had done to hurt our family and that I wanted them to preserve that relationship for their own mental and emotional health. The relationship they maintained with their father was up to them and I would support it. To this day, I am thankful for that wisdom and understanding of blood line love as my children have enjoyed and continue to enjoy a healthy relationship with their dad. I’ve come to see for myself that the love and support of two dads (biological and step-dad) is a definite plus in their lives, especially because we don’t fight for attention, affection, nor control. We are able to keep our love for the children at the center of our relationship. Love for my family in the sense of emotional attachment comes naturally. But love of others outside my family is entirely different. Brotherly love or loving ones neighbor is a decision.

I find it easy to love people who like me, agree with me, and encourage me. I even find it easy to love total strangers. But the other folks–those who get on my nerves, hurt people, and destroy everything in sight are difficult to love. However, I take to heart the lessons from Jesus on loving my neighbor as myself and on loving my enemies. The key is not to expect the same emotional attachment I feel with my family because it does not exist. What does exist is a conviction that each person is God’s creation, each is a human being possessing both good characteristics and flaws. Jesus acknowledged human weakness and how God loves us anyway. So, I’ve come to realize that loving others isn’t about how deserving they are, nor is it about developing or maintaining an emotional connection. It is solely about how I treat others.

For me, being a better human who loves others means that I treat other human beings in the way I want to be treated: with compassion, thoughtfulness, and understanding. It means that I act with consideration, defend humanity, speak hard truths tactfully, and offer assistance based on our basic human needs. Peace and silence are not love. So, loving others does not mean that I ignore justice. It does not mean that I don’t hold people accountable. It does not mean that I ignore rude and destructive behaviors. And it most definitely doesn’t mean I stay silent in the face of dangers to humanity itself. Brotherly love is an action word, not a feeling word.

These days, a lot of humans are making it particularly difficult to love them. They act selfishly, refusing to wear masks in public or to get vaccinated. Believing lies about a stolen election from a morally bankrupt former president, they stormed the Capital on January 6th. Convinced that their white skin makes them superior to other human beings, they threaten violence and enforce discrimination. And the most difficult to love these days are the people who profess Christianity but have become the nastiest, most intolerant, hateful, oppressive, and stingy human beings on the planet. But being a better human means loving them despite their crazy. It means fighting for the best interest of their humanity and ours.

My way of loving these difficult humans is to speak the truth as I understand it without cussing them out, calling them awful names, or threatening them with violence. Admittedly, I have to stop myself from hoping they get what they deserve. I leave that judgement in the hands of the Almighty.

If we could all be better humans who love humanity we would experience greater generosity, kindness, thoughtfulness, and empathy because of an understanding that we are all humans living in this world together.

I often joke that we are living in the age of “The Jetson’s”, a favorite futuristic cartoon from my childhood. Absent the flying cars (which is possible) phone calls and business meetings are easily held on screen. That’s been the norm for the past few years and the pandemic necessitated a shift in how we conduct orientations, workshops, classes, business meetings, and even my 2020 family reunion was a Zoom and YouTube event. The rapidly changing technology, new software, and creative apps have made lifelong learning not only more feasible but also more important than ever for job security, efficiency, creativity, productivity, and conducting everyday business.

The world has gotten smaller while the universe expands. There was a time when we opened an encyclopedia to find obscure information. We worked out math problems on paper. And only the wealthy could see the world. And then things changed. But now just about anything you want to know or see is accessible in seconds by a simple internet search. What we learn and how we learn it is also changing. It is both exciting and intimidating.

The old saying, “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks” has been disproven by neuroscience. However, some of my friends express an unwillingness to try to keep up. Sometimes I’ll tell my husband about a new innovation and his response is, “I’m good”, meaning he is unwilling to learn about or even try using the next new thing. However, when his doctor’s office moved to telehealth because of the pandemic, he had no choice but to learn about teleconferencing. I find myself often stepping in these days to show him how to do things on his phone or on the Smart television. And thankfully, my children also assist me.

In the last few years, I discovered YouTube as a valuable knowledge resource. I learned how to use my new iPhone 12 by watching YouTube videos. I also learned more authentic ways to make fried rice, chicken swarma, and sushi on YouTube. Learning Spanish, gardening techniques, medical information, recipes, and a dictionary are accessible on my phone through apps like “Duolingo” ,”Plantin”, “Web MD”, “All Recipes” and “Dictionary”. I’m currently taking an online class to learn calligraphy through an instructor on “Teachable.com”. And just this week, my son, a Facebook friend, and Oprah Winfrey convinced me that I needed Oculus 2, a virtual reality system that allows me to travel the world without leaving my home. It also has games and other useful content for virtual business meetings.

I purchased the system for $399 and watched videos on YouTube to learn the best ways to use it. Already, I traveled to Botswana to hang out with the rangers who protect elephants. I traveled to the deepest parts of the ocean with explorers to learn about the life that surprisingly thrives in that environment and how our plastic waste has even made it there. I’m excited about the places I will go and the things I will see and how much I will learn without ever leaving my home. I’ve always loved learning; it’s one of my personality traits, but lifelong learning is important for everyone who wants to maintain a healthy brain and thrive in the modern world, especially financially.

I’m a finance buff who made it a habit early in life to read books and to attend financial literacy seminars as a means to learn how to become financially secure. Putting those many lessons into practice really paid off and I am comfortably retired. Since the pandemic, I have subscribed to various financial planning channels on YouTube to keep me up to date on wise investment strategies, retirement distributions, tax strategies for retirees and Medicare. I will say that as a frequent YouTube watcher, I find it well worth the $15.99 per month premium subscription. I’m convinced that the lack of knowledge in areas of consequence cause real life pain. For example, on C-Spann this morning, I was disappointed to hear a 70-year old retired woman with a PhD in Cultural Anthropology decry her inability to survive on Social Security alone. I lamented that she never learned about savings and investments, despite her academic acuity. She is looking for a new job, but no one is willing to hire her. My guess is that her age and outdated skill set are the problem.

Knowledge is the foundation of good decision making. I believe we must know better to do better and as technology advances, exploration expands, science learns new things, and creativity blossoms, the need to continually learn has never been more imperative. It seems that so many problems in our society stem from the lack of knowledge. But today, an unwillingness to learn new things is simply asking to be left behind. Better humans are lifelong learners.

In closing, I am reminded of the day my husband got a cut and asked for the iodine. I laughed because we haven’t swabbed iodine on cuts in years. In this world, knowledge becomes obsolete. In fact, realizing how things change, I watched hospital infant care videos for new parents on YouTube before visiting my new grandson to take care of him this past summer. And sure enough, things have changed since 1985 when my youngest child was born. I’ll say it again, better humans are lifelong learners.

Being truthful is not always easy, especially when there are so many tempting reasons to be untruthful. Before I turned eleven, I told a lot of lies. I told them because I liked a good story and enjoyed seeing my friends react to my tall tales. Later, I occasionally lied to protect myself or others from certain punishment for a broken rule. I lied to enhance my image in front of peers I wanted to impress. I lied to protect someone else’s feelings. But the biggest lie I ever told cured me from lying as a “go to” strategy to get what I wanted.

When I was in the seventh grade, 12 years old, a group of my friends were plagued by a girl in our group who wouldn’t keep our secrets and who constantly talked negatively behind our backs. Her malicious gossiping was out of control and I decided to teach her a lesson by creating a very convincing lie that an unknown girl was going to beat her up after school for talking about that person behind her back. In absolute terror, my gossiping friend went to the office and reported the threat. Because I was the messenger of doom, the Vice Principle summoned me to the office. In the presence of my anxious friend, I confessed to the Vice Principle that I had fabricated the threat as an intervention to try to end my friend’s malicious gossiping. I got off with a stern warning and a phone call to my mother, but I also lost my friend in the process. That situation made a truth teller out of me. I learned that while lying may be the easy route, it is often a cowardly and unethical route to a desired end. And worse, lies can have devastating unintended consequences for oneself and others.

In reality, telling the truth when the stakes seem high can be difficult. For me personally, self-preservation and empathy remained my biggest obstacles to telling the truth for most of my adult life. I didn’t want others to think ill of me and I still don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. As I’ve grown older, I care less about what others think about me and so truth-telling about myself has become much easier. But when it comes to the feelings of others, I admit that I’ve developed some work arounds. For example, when a singer asks me how he did, and I felt the performance was sub-par, I’ll say something like, “I really liked your energy or that was a great song.” Admittedly, I do feel a bit of guilt about that kind of obfuscation. I still have a ways to go when it comes to providing truthful, but hurtful feedback. Another challenge was convincing my children to be truthful. One child was naturally very honest and another was the polar opposite.

My youngest daughter was a lot like me. She enjoyed making up stories, however, her lies were bigger and more prolific than mine ever were. When she was five, she made up this story about me accidentally running over my father with the car. Her teacher was so unsettled by the tale that she called to see if my father was okay. She said she even looked for the story in the local newspaper for details before calling me. I explained that my daughter liked to make things up. To try to dissuade her from lying, I repeatedly shared the story of the boy who cried wolf, but it didn’t work. The lying became a constant issue in our relationship and trust was damaged as a result. Too many lies, half-truths, omissions, and exaggerations erode the trust in personal relationships and corrupts communication and interactions. Her imagination was so taken in that to this day she sometimes has to ask me if a childhood memory is actually true. Which brings me to another, more important point about being truthful. We have to know the truth in order to be truthful.

With each passing day it becomes more difficult to know the truth. We now live in a society where the knowing the truth in order to speak the truth is itself a challenge. Greedy doctors pushing quick fix weight loss diets and quack medicine are all over the internet. On two separate occasions, I was photo-shopped into group pictures because I couldn’t make the actual shoots. This should be worrying because it means that others can be photo-shopped to appear to be somewhere they are not and with dire consequences. We now look at magazine photos where the model has been made to appear to have slimmer hips, thicker lips, or airbrushed perfected skin. We know that these images create feelings of inferiority among young women. Even more worrisome, the technology now exists to replicate a person’s voice, image, and mannerisms so well as to make that person appear to say or do anything. We also have the ability at our fingertips to remove people and objects from our photos, creating an alternate if not impossible reality.

Couple new technology with how our society has become accustomed to being lied to by greedy corporations, ambitious politicians, and unprincipled media outlets, and I’m afraid the public trust will only be further eroded. Conspiracy theories are already thriving because the public trust has been destroyed by too many lies, omissions, silence, and cover ups. People are willing to believe whatever suits them because they don’t know who to believe or how to find the truth. As a result, COVID-19 has killed more than 750,000 people. Some people believe even that is a lie. And worse, people are still refusing to get vaccinated based on a plethora of lies that feed into their worse fears. I’ve heard of conspiracies that link the vaccine to mass murder for population control to sterilization to mind control to tracking implants. A few greedy anti-vaccine doctors are even pushing their own quack remedies for the disease.

It is a sad reality that people with varying motives are happy to make stuff up for fame, money, or power. They willingly take advantage of the least educated, the most gullible, and the fearful among us. It was actually bizarre to hear about the hundreds of QAnon members who flocked to Dallas, Texas this past week believing the lie that dead Kennedys were going to appear and reinstate Trump as president. How disappointed they must be that it didn’t happen. Others believe Trump is still the president and is running the government while flying around on Air Force One.

But perhaps the most dangerous lie to our country’s future is the one that is having an adverse effect on election laws in Republican states. Based on Trump lies about voter fraud and a stolen election and fears of a violent Republican base who support him, cowardly Republicans are working to suppress the vote of minorities, urban dwellers, and younger voters while at the same time giving themselves the authority to overturn election results. Every American should be vehemently countering this lie and demanding voter protection laws from Congress right now.

The reality is that what comes out of our mouths has consequences. The people buying into the big 2020 election lie now actually believe they are telling the truth and they have shown that they are willing to use threats and violence to push a false agenda based on it. They have literally traded a factual truth for a debunked, but more desirable lie. The problem is that too many people in authority are speaking lies with impunity. However, Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani were sued for billions for defamation by Dominion over election fraud claims involving Dominion’s voting machines. Powell’s defense was that her lies were too outrageous for any reasonable person to take seriously. But they did.

The time has come for laws to be enacted that make it a crime for public officials to knowingly lie about issues of public welfare. It is good that Rudy Giuliani’s license to practice law was suspended for his lies about the election. Doctors should also lose their license to practice medicine for spreading false claims; surprisingly they aren’t right now. It should become law that media and photos that are doctored have a disclaimer that they have been doctored and do not fully represent reality.

The fact is that it is becoming too difficult to distinguish between truth and lies and without a swift intervention, the truth will be completely elusive and bad decisions with life and death consequences will ultimately destroy our society and the world. We see the slow walking of climate change mitigation because of people who claim it is a hoax. This is why better humans must first be truth seekers and then truth tellers.

Final note: Sources for the truth matter and education combined with critical thinking are a must.