The Silence

Maybe it’s the neuroses talking, but I worry about crossing “the line” with regard to comfort.  It worries me when I’m talking to someone and for no apparent reason, they go silent.  I don’t mean when I’m talking to someone in person, then it might just be awkward, or I can just ask them.  I mean when I’m talking to someone in a chat program or via text message.  And they just stop responding.  And, do you ask if they are still there, if they are ok, or maybe they just don’t have a response to what you said?  So, what do you do?  It just seems a very unnatural end to a conversation.  It’s akin to talking to someone in person and then just turning around midsentence and walking away.  No “goodbye” no “see you later” or anything of the sort.

To belong

There have always been cliques. 

When I went to school, there were jocks and brains and artsy types and nobodys.  In my school, at least, the different groups interacted well.  It was usually pretty obvious to what group someone belonged, but this belonging did not include complete, overt exclusion.  The brains played sports with the jocks and invited the artists to parties.  The cheerleaders, though very sporty, sat next to and studied with the brains in Calculus and Spanish 4.  Sure there was teasing and rumors, but that’s just part of coming of age, right?

I think the tide has changed.  With the emergence of social networking and cellular communications and skype, just to name a few, everyone has to strive a little bit harder to find that place where they belong, the group of people with whom they feel they fit in. 

This is just another example of the cable phenomenon.  I can’t recall the number of times I’ve had this conversation.  When I was a child, we had 5 or 6 channels.  There was an ABC, NBC, CBS, and FOX affiliate, along with PBS and maybe one other channel.  Needless to say, flipping through the channels offered few possibilities and took very little time.  Yet, rarely did I find myself at a loss for something to watch.  Today, the average American has over 200 channels.  Research shows that a normal family watches shows on around 50 different channels over the course of a week.  And how many times have I sat in front of my television wonder why I can’t find anything to watch.  With an increased number of options, I have set my standards somewhat ridiculously high and now I find myself clicking away, unsatisfied.

People often find the same situation when they go off to college or move to a new town.  They find that a lot of their friends, the people they were close to, they don’t really keep in touch with once there is distance.  It leaves you wondering, was I only friends with them because we were close?  Do we choose many of our friends by proximity? 

This process, of choosing our friends, has also been affected by mass media.  Why be friends with those around you when you can have friends so much more like you on MySpace or Facebook or wherever.  But, then a new problem arises: if I have 12000 friends online, how good of friends can they be?  Thus a new set of echelons of friendship were born.  On a daily basis, I hear students in my school calling someone their son or daughter, mother, father, aunt, uncle, whatever, to describe their friendships. 

As has been said over many a generation, blood is thicker than water.  So, with the creation of these new “families,” we been excluding individuals that are our close friends, because they are not part of the “family.”  Beyond this, with the great number of friends that we could have, we expect more and more from someone that we call friend, or “family.”  Instead of acknowledging that everyone is a little different and relishing these differences, we start alienating anyone who rubs us the wrong way in any way.  We start becoming more extreme versions of ourselves and getting angry and irate when when people don’t respond in a good way to our new “personality,” the caricature we put on as a mask.  

Also, with all the different ways we communicated, we have become lonelier as people.  I’ve become so good at texting, that my face-to-face conversation skills are diminishing.  I’m so used to being able to talk to someone through chat, or fb comment, or text, that when I’m not talking to someone, there’s an emptiness, a vacant feeling.

With everything we have set up to be stacked against us, it’s no wonder that so many people feel alone.

Fear and morality

There are sects of religious peoples who all believe the same idea.  Man is small; man is frail; man is beset upon by fears.  Mostly, man has darkness inside him. born of the original sin.  Many would delve into the meaning of this: darkness; how does it present itself; how do we rid ourselves of it.  Most turn to God, hoping his eternal light will drive the darkness away.  

I think I know what the darkness is.  It is akin to a tiny walkie-talkie in your brain.  In religious terms, it’s the Devil, tempting you, constantly, with promises of pleasure, and happiness, and love.  In Genesis he took the form of a snake.  In these, much more technological, times, he’s got the walkie-talkie.  And religion, predicated on the ideas of man’s weakness, came up with the grand, and ever-evolving idea of hell.  Originally, hell was absence from God.  Then, hell became a place of fire and brimstone with little demons with horns running around poking souls with pitchforks.  Next, came the idea that it was your worst fears played out over an eternity (think Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey).  And finally we have come to hell as a reflection of the sin that brought us there (If you’ve ever watched the show Reaper, you’ll know what I mean), reflected back upon us.

This is the basis of morality.  Turn away from the darkness, the desires, the impulses, the temptations of the devil (if you will) or face an eternity somewhere, that by any definition, is bad.  How much easier is it to live a moral life for 70 years than to suffer for an eternity.  And we’ve built our legal system on these same ideas.

So why have I spent so much time thinking about these things, especially as someone who is not religious?  As someone who is not religious, I consider myself without the church’s ideas of morality.  In the place of their morality, I have a bit of my own, mostly framed by ethics.  Ethics and morality are the same thing, you say?  Definitely not.  Ethics are based on group acceptance of right and wrong, which may change as times change.  Morality is based on much more strict guidelines and never change.  I think if most people really looked into their lives, they aren’t nearly as moral as they think they are.  How many of you “moral” people find a way to cheat on your taxes (just a little, I’m not talking about saving millions) or won’t correct a cashier if he gives you a little too much back in change.  How many of you support war, or murder for “self defense,” or the death penalty, or abortion (in some situations).  Religious morality doesn’t give you the option of “well, in this case it would be acceptable.”  Morality is absolute. 

But, that’s not the point of this rant.  I have darkness.  I fear the darkness in me.  I fear that one day I will act on that darkness, let just a little bit of it out, and it will consume me.  As someone who doesn’t adhere to religion, I don’t fear going to hell.  The idea doesn’t even enter my mind.  What I fear is losing control and ultimately hurting others.  Many of you know me well enough to know that there are aspects of my being which some would say are bad or evil.  Though, on the surface, I wouldn’t believe those people, I fear in some respects they may be right.  All humans are capable of terrible things.  I am capable of terrible things.  And these things are in my mind, in my thoughts.  And I guess what bothers me most about it, is that I don’t have a “baseline comparison” to say, oh, that’s normal, most people have those thoughts.  At what point have I crossed that line?  At what point have I truly lost control?

And it is said that the truth shall set you free.  But, to whom do you tell this truth?  There are some things that I think, some things that compel me that I can’t even tell those people to whom I am closest.  I must keep them locked away, afraid and ashamed.  I am afraid and ashamed.

A feeling of nostalgia

Was talking to a friend today, and we shared a nostalgia for the days before social networking sites had reduced us to "likes" and 255 character feelings.  I think I might be a little more complex than that.  And Notes, though an ok tool, is a bit much to get into (I mean that in the clicking to open it) and lacks a lot of formatting tools, but has the capability of importing blog posts.... so we'll see how that works.