Fringe Culture, Anger, and Maturity: Or, It's Okay To Be Cool Now. No, really. You just need to get the fuck over it.

Ashley F. Miller has a great post that on one level is about “geek culture,” but is really about any fringe culture going through a process of growth into mainstream culture. It is truly insightful and you should go read it. What I want to touch on here, though, is something that she doesn’t quite come out and say in her post. She quotes at length a commenter on her blog, who basically says that if a person has not earned the right to be called a geek, has not had to fight through the high school experience of being bullied and shunned, then they should not be allowed in the ranks of geekdom. And he is bitter about that, and angry. The hurt he went through is palpable in his screed comment. This is understandable, since the self-identification as geek was and still is, for many people, a sort of psychological defense mechanism, the badge of honor, that one wears in a community of only a very few. Military Vets can be that way, too. Even among ourselves, there can be other subdivision. Like, if you didn’t serve in combat, then you aren’t really a vet. Alcoholics can be that way, too, in some weird way. “Look, son, I drank more in a week than you have in your entire life.” (I even have to wonder if, perhaps, all communities have something like this. Even the “popular” peoples. “Look, you don’t know what hard is until you’ve done two-a-days in 100 degree heat all fucking summer to be on the football team.”) So I think that this line of thought is perfectly natural and allows people to make it through some very difficult things and in that way forge a place for themselves, a belonging to a community.

Geek Culture can be very... thorough

But you can’t stay there in that mind set. It will implode in a messy cloud of dust and noise, and you will be left with a complete lack of identity; just a hole where the structure of identity that you struggled to build once stood. There’s another line of thought among alcoholics that I think may be applicable here. They say that during your drinking/using time, you basically stop developing, emotionally and mentally. I don’t necessarily buy that wholesale, but nonetheless, I do think that there is some truth to it. I also think that the sort of anger grasped onto by the commenter and so many other bullied and fringe social groups is just as poisonous and stunting as any drug or alcohol. When nurtured like that, it excludes and inhibits all other possibilities for growth and development.

This is not to say that anger is not a healthy emotion. The whole idea of “healthy” vs. “unhealthy” emotions is completely overrated, to begin with. Emotions just are. They happen for perfectly valid reasons. Anger is just anger. It is useful. It serves a purpose. It can even, on occasion, be intensely satisfying. But when clutched to the breast and petted and fed and nurtured, it turns into something vile. It turns into hate, and turns from something that you clutch for survival into something that seemingly takes on its own vile life and claws through your ribcage to take possession of you.

Ashley Miller closes her blog with some truly good advice:

Being a geek shouldn’t be about a persecution complex.  It shouldn’t be about being better than other people.  It shouldn’t be about bullying people who want to be your friend now because of what you think they may have been like in high school.  It should be about embracing people for being themselves and being grateful that they can be themselves when they are with you.

In order to do that, one has to mature as a person. The immature anger that allowed for survival in high school or whatever other environment, must be released; if it is not released, it takes over. And then that poor demon-possessed person is stuck there, in high school, never progressing beyond those juvenile emotions, that juvenile intellect. No matter how many other bits of knowledge they collect and cobble together, they will be stuck in that tar pit of misery.

So, in order to truly open up and enjoy the community of Others, we have to let go of all of the anger and hatred from all of the bullying in our past or present. That anger has served its purpose, it has outlived its usefulness, and it’s okay to let it go. And, really, if you can’t find shit to get angry about in a much more positive and useful way these days, then you just aren’t paying attention.

I want to grow. It is never too late to grow. I think I’ve been stuck long enough in a lot of my own tar pits and sand traps. I’ll do whatever it takes to get out of those, and scour all of that poison off till my skin glows and breathes the fresh air. And then I’ll keep walking out into the world. Let that world be wide, not narrow, and let it be populated by whoever is there, and let me, for once, dance with them instead of holding myself back and just watching. (More on that in some other post down the line. I know, I say that a lot. I mean it every time.)

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Ranting to Myself: Self-Hate is Great

This is a great (and very self-conscious/aware) entry. I'm including this because the whole problem of self-esteem and being hyper-aware of what others think of me is something that I struggle with on a continual basis, and the author addresses some of this in a way that I found to be helpful and enlightening. As I have very often found conversations with this author to be.

Ranting to Myself: Self-Hate is Great: I was listening to the "WTF" Podcast by Marc Maron today, a common source of inspiration for me. Marc chose to repeat the 100th episode in ...

Hate, Choice, and Identity. Or, Bigotry Makes My Head Explodey

That right there is a fucking fact. People CHOOSE to be bigots, to do violence to another person, to hate. And it does not actually much matter where one comes down on the nature/nurture debate as it relates to being gay, hating someone and carving that hatred into another human being’s skin is FAR MORE OF A CHOICE.

Think about it, though. Why would someone choose to be a person who can be hated to such an extreme, so much so that they know that there are people out there who want nothing more than to carve “dyke” into her skin with a knife? No one chooses that! It just doesn’t happen. But the hatred does happen. And it is chosen. It is latched onto. Just at this very moment, I have no desire to try to delve into that mind and understand it. I will, eventually, in my private thoughts, try to understand what could possibly have brought someone to that level of hatred, and to empathize to some extent. But right now, I need the anger. (And oh my, yes, I see the dangerous line of potential hypocrisy looming up ahead as I stride that fine line bordering towards cognitive dissonance.)

Yesterday, very, very early in the morning, three men broke into the home of an openly lesbian woman in Lincoln, NE. Read the story here. Now imagine that you are her. Find something about yourself that is not part of your privilege, something about you that places you as a part of some sort of a minority population (nearly everyone has something about themselves that is like that).[1] Now imagine that three masked men, screaming obscenities and waving weapons around, shock you into consciousness; you’re confused, not quite aware yet of what is going on. You suddenly find that in the midst of their guttural slurs and threats, your hands and feet have been bound. It hurts. They cut your clothes off. You can’t tell, but the knives in their hands look dull and rusty to you. Their breath reeks, the rot in their brains apparently making its way down to their lungs and out of their open and panting mouths. They begin to carve the slurs of your minority status onto your face, your arms, your chest, your belly. The pain begins to take on an unreal, distant sort of quality, but full on shock won’t set in, yet, you won’t let it, because you know you have to escape. Maybe after that. Maybe not.

Alright, I think that’s enough of that exercise. The point is to empathize with the terror, the panic, the horror, the fucked-up-edness. And realize that someone is doing that to you because of WHO YOU ARE. And because you are willing and able to say aloud to the whoever is listening, whether they agree with you or not, This is who I am. I am who I am. Someone out there is apparently so uncomfortable with the fact that you are who you are, that they CHOSE to take a knife and carve the fact of who you are, the fact of their hatred of who you are, into your very body. It doesn’t matter what it is, at that point in the game; whatever it is, it should not be hard to see that they chose their hate far more than you ever chose whatever-it-is.

Hate is far more of a choice than ANY IDENTITY ever was or will be.

What has been beautiful to see is the response from the communities in both Lincoln and Omaha. That gives me hope that all of these beautiful people will rally to give this woman the strength to bear what she has born, to bear what she will have to bear. So that in the midst of hate that pushes back, pushes down, shoves, and tears, she will have the strength of beautiful people to take the next step forward for all of us. So that the children that see us doing this don’t have to suffer the same things. So that she can heal. This community will link arms and push back against the hate to ensure that she and so many others have a safe space to heal in. They will also push out, push up, push forward against hate.

Hate is far more of a choice than ANY IDENTITY ever was or will be. I do not, even from within the chaotic heat of my anger, choose hate. I choose love. I choose beauty.

I will choose beauty, along with a whole mess of other beautiful people, here. Join if you can, in your thoughts if nothing else, because that does make a difference.[2]


EDIT: I should also add that there is a fund set up to help out the woman, who has no insurance. http://starcitypride.org/victim-recovery-fund/

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[1] I know, right? It’s no fun, and requires that you recognize and acknowledge those parts of yourself that *are* part of your privilege.

[2] Not in some woo-woo pseudo-spiritual way, either. I think it is consciousness-raising, something that you take back out into the world later, and it affects not only the way that you think and behave, but also, through that, the way that other people behave around you.



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Grief in Aurora: or Being Useless Over Here In My Little Corner of Headspace

Whenever something happens that is as stupid, as senseless, as horrifying, as crushing, as violent as someone walking calmly into a theatre in Aurora, CO and murdering as many other fellow human beings as he possibly can, it seems perfectly natural to me to cycle, both personally and as a collective sort of public conscious, through the various stages of grief. Right now I'm vacillating between anger and a melancholic sadness.

I’m even allowing myself to wonder occasionally at the differences between the public reaction and attention to something like this and the deaths of military members in the sandboxes overseas. Or the rate of suicide in the military, which comes at me by way of getting angry over some stupid Texan senator’s statements about the Moviehouse Slaughters. And, of course, anxiety over whether anyone that I have a connection to was there, was hurt, knows the murderer, knows the victims, etc., no matter that the chances of that are slim. The chances of anyone going to see a movie at midnight last night walking into the stuff of decades of nightmares was pretty slim, too. Slim chances mean next to nothing taken in context.

And then I return to that deep, energy draining sadness. I feel a hopelessness. But the odd thing (and I think that I may be about to make myself look like a shit, here) is that it is a very personal sort of hopelessness, rather than the empathetic grief for others’ anguish. It’s possible that I just feel useless? Once upon a time, I’d have gladly clutched onto the idea that I can pray for them, that praying would help these aching people through their grief. But prayer is a useless homeopathic salve for a railing conscience, a water pill against a raging cancer in my head. To a certain extent, I can only accept this discomfort for what it is, hold it and name it.

This learning how to simply let emotions lay down and take up space inside my head does not come easily. It’s far too easy for me to say, “I don’t like the way that I feel, I am going to change it. I don’t know how to change it other than with booze, so I’m going to do that.” Calm down, I’m not going to. But I know that I could. Instead, I am going to accept the discomfort for what it is. It is part of the grieving process that we all go through, and I am thankful that there are internet spaces like this one that can help me learn the tools to grieve for myself and for others without the salve of prayer or of an afterlife to make even the worst of things alright, because they are not alright, they are the opposite of alright. And it’s okay to acknowledge that and allow space for that, both in my own consciousness and the public consciousness.



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Midwest Freethought Conference - coming up all too quickly

The Midwest Freethought Conference is coming up (all too quickly) on August 3-5 in Omaha, NE. We have a GREAT lineup of speakers, and, due to the OmahaCoR’s billboard invitation to non-believers (the first atheistic billboard in Nebraska), a huge amount of publicity. The speakers are, in (more or less) order of appearance: Brian Dunning, Adam Brown, Dave Muscato, Amanda Knief, PZ Myers, Amanda Brown, Hemant Mehta, Jerry deWitt, Sarah Morehead, AJ Johnson, Dan Barker, and Fred Edwords.

It promises to be a fantastic weekend full of great presentations, great conversations, and great fun! These sorts of gatherings are perhaps particularly important in the traditionally staid and conservative religious Midwest area, where being religious is more or less assumed, and the opportunity to gather and build community among nontheists is rare. The billboard and its reactions have proved this to us, with everything from people telling us to read Lee Strobel to notes from closet atheists thanking us for putting up the billboard, for letting them know that there is a community out there for non-believers.

A quote from someone who walked out of the restaurant that the billboard is located near: “Thank you so much for the billboard! My fiance and I have always wanted to be a part of an organization that supports our beliefs. We walked out of HuHot, I looked up and almost started crying. It really was a 'beacon of hope' for us. We're really excited to become a part of this community!! THANK YOU!!!!”

If you need or would like more information, please contact me at josiah.mannion5@gmail.com , or Sheila Cole at Sheila@OmahaAtheists.org, or William ‘Danger’ Newman at omahacor@gmail.com.

Also, here's a link to a short blog post from a friend that summarizes and provides most of the relevant links for all of the media response (both positive and negative) up to the date that it was written.

http://aparticularblogbyaparticularatheist.blogspot.com/2012/07/uncontroversial-billboard-is.html

And also, the link for conference:

http://midwestfreethought.org/index.html



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