My therapist has me make a list of my achievements; today’s is registering for NERFA. Now I have to find a roommate. Registering is difficult for me, it’s an anxiety trigger; most monetary transactions are. I rarely get a roommate and registered with much time to spare. Fortunately, NERFA is understanding of my problems and makes allowances. That is so much of my life there, a bundle of nerves holding me back and puppy dog eyes that people find hard to resist helping. I have no idea where the eyes come from, it’s not a trait I had much of my life. My second therapist, someone I had no confidence in, thought I didn’t relate well to people. That was never true but it was not as obviously true as it is now. Part of me is still the teen that had no friends in high school. It’s odd but true but the way that I’m most useful to other people now is that I very often know a guy, the guy the person needs. The guy is very often a woman. Doesn’t make a different. You always know a guy. That usage of guy is gender-free.
Ferb I know what we’re going to do today. I didn’t till I wrote the last sentence of the previous paragraph. This is going to be serious so I’ll start with the silly reason I started thinking about it. One of my “rules” is that I won’t get engaged to a woman if I like her husband. Coming out of the shower I had an imaginary conversation with a real friend. Some people have imaginary friends, I have imaginary conversations. In the course of the conversation I told her that she’s lucky because she’s safe from my proposals as I like her husband. I hate to have to say this but this is all done in jest. Then I realized that I like the husbands of most of my female friends, more so than I like the wives of my male friends; my female friends have better taste. Most people might leave it at that, but not me. I doubted my own observation. I realized that it was very much dominated by the wife of one friend that I didn’t like. On further review I thought of many husbands of friends that I don’t like and many wives that I do. This then strayed into thinking about my gay and transgender friends. My realization was that my initial thoughts were nothing but prejudices that I didn’t want to harden.
There’s a bigger realization, is that this fits into a core belief of mine; that putting people in classes, men, women, whites, blacks, Hispanics, Jews, Christians, Muslims, etc., is of very little practical use when it comes to judging individuals. This sounds boilerplate and common liberal dogma, but it’s not. I see progressives regularly bashing the privileged groups. How many times have you heard people say, “toxic masculinity?” People justify it, they say it isn’t the same as members of the group in power lumping those out of power together. That’s not morality, that’s just self-interest. Sure those in power can do more damage. Whites can inflict more harm on blacks, men can inflict more harm on women, and straights can inflict more harm on LGBTQs, than the other way around. But it’s using the same false thought process as I used when thinking about the spouses of my friends. It’s still prejudice. It’s not a valid way of understanding reality. If you are a doctor, male vs female is an important distinction. Men and women have different parts and different hormones. In any social realm, not so much. When you say [members of empowered group] are [bad thing], you are giving justification for those in power to say, [members of disadvantaged group] are [different bad thing]. You are validating that kind of thinking. Then you have a huge burden of proof to say that your statement is true and theirs is false, a burden you’ll never be up to carrying. Social research is even more difficult than nutritional research. Small differences in experimental design can lead to very different results. No, it’s far better to say, “Judging people by their membership in a class is wrong! Objective studies are almost impossible so people end up believing their prejudices.”
I will often call people on this; they are hurting the cause we both believe in. The truth has a well-known liberal bias. I depend on that. That just opened and an entirely different can of worms in my head, the hostility of the right towards intellectuals. I’ll save that for another time. Not tomorrow.
Tonight I’m going to see Courtney Harman & Taylor Ashton, they are having a CD release show at Rockwood 2; Stephanie Jenkins is opening. Steph has a new EP, I hope it’s available too. I have a new mission, as John Platt’s Sunday Supper is on hiatus I want to be a conduit for my kind of music to the person filling in for him. I’m not sure I’m at liberty to say who it is. It’s someone else from WFUV and a friend. I live near the station now so my plan is to bring over music and pitch it to the replacement host. See how circumspect I am? I didn’t use a single gendered pronoun. That’s not easy. Now to eat. I have a doctor’s appointment in an hour and a half.
Wise Madness 