From outside the box

People tend to fear what they do not understand, and the less they understand it, the more they fear it, and the more they fear it, the more they hate it, and the more they hate it, the more they will fight to keep it out of mainstream culture.

This has always been my biggest beef with religion, and I mean most religions....they perpetuate this ignorant hypocritical viewpoint that they are right and everybody else is wrong. It's one thing to say that I feel I am right and I feel that you are wrong, but it's another thing to try to tell others what they can and cannot do, how they should live their lives, based on your own religious or bigoted beliefs. I don't know of one religion that doesn't believe, and teach, that the whole world should be living according to their beliefs.

I cannot imagine what it feels like to be a gay person, to have been born gay and to have been attracted to the same sex for most of your life and then be told by others that what you feel is a perversion or that God does not want you to be who you are. When you tell somebody they are wrong for being who they are, you are not making a statement about their morality, you are making a statement about your own ignorance.

Those who supported the civil rights movement, and continue to fight for equal rights for all regardless of their color, understand one thing....until we are all free, we are not really a free country. It's the same issue today with supporting gay rights. As a straight person I will always speak out in favor of gay marriage and gay rights because I understand that unless we all enjoy the same rights and same freedoms, none of us deserve to have them. And no, I am not talking about those who would use their freedom to harm another individual.

"If you have to make a law that hurts a number of people, just to prove your morals or faith, then you have no true morals or faith to prove"~~~~author unknown

Sometimes I feel like I'm sitting here in a time machine watching the world change around me as the years fly by at the speed of light. Although one part of me, the player, is participating in the changes and engaged in the game, another part of me, the watcher, just sits here....watching, absorbing, and learning. But the big question is, what am I learning? What is life really teaching me?

If I look out at the world through the filter of my ego, or minds eye, I think of myself as accumulating knowledge and wisdom about how the world works by way of personal experience. When I do that, I start thinking that I have things figured out, and when I figure things out, my perspective on reality and what is happening becomes the right perspective. And when I'm right, anybody who does not agree with my perspective is wrong. However, if I step back a little further and take a wider view of things, I see that often what I once thought was true, either changes or is not really true at all. So again, the question becomes....what am I really learning?

For one thing I'm learning that if you really pay attention, the more you think you know, the less you really know. I'm learning that every answer leads to a bigger question, and therefore there really aren't too many ultimate answers to anything. And I'm learning that it's not really that important to be right, because every time you think you're right, even when you are, from another perspective you're wrong, and that often the things we know, apply to us and not anybody else.

It seems that as we age, we tend to get a little softer around the edges. For most of us, life is hard. Even when it's fun, even when there is joy and love in our life, it's still hard. I think it's the hard times that soften us. If we're lucky, pain teaches us empathy and compassion. If we're stubborn or if we buy into the victim role, we might harden instead of soften, and that is sad.

When I was young, I loved to hunt and kill innocent animals. If I knew of somebody going through a difficult experience, I would just shrug my shoulders and say, "Better them than me". Because of so much pain in my earlier childhood, I built a tough exterior around me. I was never a mean person, I was just an angry young man who channeled his childhood pain in destructive ways. There were so many times I should have died, that in time, I came to truly believe in spiritual guidance and protection. I'm sure there were many times that my spiritual guide (or guardian angels) must have questioned what they got themselves into taking on the responsibility of a lost soul like me.

I think we all have that spiritual protection and guidance, weather we believe in it or not. But we also have free will, which means we can chose to learn from our experiences, to get something good from every hardship that we go through, or just ignore them and be destined to repeat the same kinds of experiences over and over until we get it. If not in this life, then maybe in another.

"I've been thinking it over, and it seems so clear. Every road that I've traveled, only left me standing here."....from a song

For me, the anger began to subside in my early twenties when I discovered sex, drugs, and rock and roll. I'm not saying these were all healthy things, I'm just saying that they were the catalyst (or a catalyst)I needed to channel my energy into another direction. Chasing women was self indulgent and using drugs was self destructive, but in the midst of all of this I also discovered creativity through song writing. I don't know if it was the wise guidance of spiritual counsel, the dormant determination of my spirit to rise above, or simply the passing of time, but I was able to eventually work through most of my bad habits before they killed me.

But when I look back on those things in my life that truly changed me for the better, I have to say it was physical and emotional pain more than anything else that made a better man out of me. The funny thing is, pain hardened me and made me angry as a child, but as an adult, it softened me and taught me compassion and empathy. Am I a compassionate and empathetic man now? Not even close, but I've come a long way. Life will give me every experience I need to get to where I want to be. And no, these lessons do not have to come from pain and stupid mistakes, at least not for everybody, but for me they do.... because I am a stubborn man. I need to learn everything the hard way, from direct experience, never from other peoples stories. Maybe that's why religion never worked for me.

I guess I'm rambling on about these things because I recently experienced a terrible loss in my life. It was not a person but a dog. It wasn't even my dog but he was family, he belonged to my step son. I loved that little guy so much and the thought of not having him around anymore has been very tough on all of us who were close to him. Now I've experienced death, I've lost parents and friends over the years, and death is always hard to deal with. But it has been the death of this little dog that has made me realize what an emotional softy I've become in my older age. I think I cried more tears the last few days than I have since my childhood.

But it's all good because I feel blessed to have felt so deeply for another life. When I hear about grown men, especially men my age, who still enjoy going out and killing innocent living creatures just for sport, I feel like they have missed many opportunities life has given them to soften up, to empathize with life, to understand the beauty that is within all of Gods creatures. They still don't get it. Some never will in this life. Life, or God if you will, is speaking to us with every experience we have. It's our choice, we have the free will.....to listen or not, to move forward or not, to be a better person or not. It's up to us.

When I was a child I had a lot of fear. I feared neighborhood bullies, my father, nuns and priests, what might be under my bed or lurking in the closet at night, one of my parents dying, pretty girls, God, scary movies, snakes, yard work, liver, being laughed at in school, and the list goes on. The funny thing is, although I no longer have any of those childhood fears, I have developed new fears as an adult I never had as a child....public speaking, not being able to pay the bills, something harmful happening to one of my kids, flying in airplanes, cars breaking down when your traveling, and yada, yada, yada. Although most of these have been downgraded from fear to "major concerns", I still feel a lot of fear, and I don't like being afraid.

If I had to chose a time in my life when I experienced the least amount of fear, I think it would be my later teen years into early adulthood. That is a period where you feel invincible, you think you can do anything and get away with it. I guess that's why it's also a good time to be in school learning because you still think you can learn new things. It's also the reason girls get pregnant and why we send young men off to fight our wars, because young people don't think much about consequences. I had this fearless time in my life until I was 24 and my first child was born. Then the new fears settled in.

The thought occurred to me the other day, what if I quit allowing fear into my life? What would happen if I just refuse to be afraid of anything? Do we need fear to survive? Is fear ever a healthy thing? It seems that fear is a great motivator to get you to escape from, or even avoid, dangerous situations. When your life is in danger, you're probably going to feel a lot of fear. But here's the thing, most of the time that we feel that kind of life threatening fear, our life isn't really in danger at all. Weather you're on an airplane, speaking to a large crowd, hearing something outside your window late at night, getting audited, being approached by a large strange dog, getting panhandled by an aggressive bum, almost stepping on a large snake, or completely out of work and money, we're not really facing a life threatening situation. Our minds might interpret that we are, but our minds are often wrong! When you really are about to be killed, go ahead and be afraid. All other times, don't. Is it really that simple?

Mr. Spock would say that fear is illogical, we can use "fight or flight" to survive because we chose to survive, and therefore we don't need to feel anything at all, just go through a chosen course of action to get the required result we want to have. But I am not a Vulcan, I am a human, and humans get afraid. Besides, how do you change eons of conditioning? I have evolved to be afraid, right? Maybe it was because of fear that homo sapiens survived and the Neanderthal did not! How many young people die doing something dangerous or stupid because they are not afraid? Maybe I'm old because of all the fear in my life? Maybe I have survived in part because of fear but maybe that same fear has kept me from experiencing a richer and more meaningful life?

When I look back over my life and think about every decision I ever made out of fear, I see that I experienced a whole lot of unnecessary stress and worry....and fear. I could have made the same decisions and had the same results without ever being afraid of anything at the time. Not only that, I would have had a lot of experiences that silly fears kept me from having, experiences that were never dangerous but I allowed my mind to convince me that they were at the time. So how do I change all of this?

I have decided to change one word in my thinking. I am going to change the word "fear" to the word "concern". When I am concerned about something it will merit my weighing out options but from a more logical point of view. For example, many years ago, I got over my fear of snakes simply by forcing myself to handle a snake. Now when I see a snake in the wild, I don't feel fear, but I do feel concerned. When I find myself around an aggressive man, because of my 10 years of martial arts sparring and training, I no longer feel fear, but I do feel concern, and I react accordingly. If I can change fear into concern when it comes to snakes and bullies, I can surely do it when it comes to money issues or anything else in my life that might cause me to be afraid. Fear or concern? It's really up to me.

Since the dawn of man we have existed and survived as communities. From grouping together in caves to small villages to large cities we have always found strength in numbers. The pioneering spirit, the creativity, the courage, the genius, and the compassion of the individual has been forged in communities. From the family unit to the whole of mankind on planet earth, we are all a part of a community and communities within communities.

History has shown that whenever wealth is produced in a country or a region, the wealth quickly becomes concentrated to a minority of individuals. It can come from hard work, birthright, superior intelligence, just plain stealing it, or a little of all of the above. But one thing that always seems to happen when the majority of wealth is concentrated to a small portion of the population, the rights of the few become more important than the rights of the many. Those who control the wealth use any means necessary to promote the concept of individualism. When you need the community to survive, you support "spreading the wealth" (or whatever there is to go around). When you have enough to take care of yourself, you suddenly become "every man for himself".

It's no surprise in America today to see the concept of individualism being supported and propagated by those who control the wealth and the power. What is surprising is how easily so many who don't really have much wealth are being duped into supporting the few who do. I heard somebody say the other day that if the conservatives had their way, all taxes would be for fighting wars. The majority of conservatives in this country are hard working individuals who are not wealthy by any means. And yet they have been supporting their party leaders in taking ideas that have made our country a strong community and making them sound like they are a bad thing. By ideas, I'm talking about programs and institutions like entitlements, unions, health care, social security, and social programs, things that have long served the community.

As a democrat who supports every one of these things, I can agree that every one of these "ideas" has been broken or abused in one way or another. That means they need fixed, not thrown out. But in order to fix them, we need to support them. And in order to support them the conservative half of this country needs to quit listening to the fear mongers and the propagandists who control their followers with bumper sticker slogans.

Somebody once said that they would not want to live in a country where you have a small minority of wealthy living in gated and guarded communities and the rest of the population in poverty. Well, that's called a 3rd world country and that's where we seem to be headed. The distribution of wealth has been happening from the bottom up. When 10% of the people own 90% of the wealth, maybe those 10% should be paying 90% of the taxes! Better yet, 10% of the people should never own 90% of the wealth!

Does that mean I am against wealth and the individual being free to climb as high as he/she can on the economic scale? Hell no! Does it mean that I think that those who are capable and refuse to help themselves and want to live out their lives on government hand outs should be left to fall by the wayside? Yes I do! However, I do not believe that anybody in this country should go hungry, regardless if they are a criminal or a lazy bum.

The privileged few at the top who have been accumulating the vast majority of the wealth of this nation need to put a little more into the kitty. They need to help the community that has helped to make them wealthy! And by help, I mean help others to help themselves. That means that the rich and powerful also need to stop influencing Washington to pass laws that only benefit the rich and powerful. Ah, but they're never going to do that on their own, so we the people need to do it for them. We do that by stronger campaign finance reform and that starts with getting rid of the super PAC'S that are influencing the outcome of elections. Yes, even the PAC'S supported by unions and rich left wing donators. And then we need a complete overhaul of the lobbying system. We do this by voting for candidates who are willing to "just say no" to super PAC'S and corporate money. Those candidates have always been there, we just have a bad habit of ignoring them.

As a progressive and democrat, I stand for the individual as well as the community. Communism does not work. Socialism, in small doses is necessary. Capitalism works when it serves the individual, not just the corporations. I am all for individualism, I want to be part of a country where the individual can reach as high and as far as his dreams, hard work, and ingenuity can take him. But the higher the individual climbs, the more responsibility he must have towards community. We can't loose that. Corporations don't have that sense of responsibility, people do, the individual does. And it is individuals who make up the community. We should never forget that.

I guess letter writer David Walton pressed a couple of my buttons in his letter to the editor in this mornings paper. He tries to make me out to be a typical liberal, and although I have no shame in being called a liberal, I think a closer look at the issue is in order.....

Although I have at times called myself a liberal, I have more often tried to make the case that in reality, I am a progressive and not a true liberal. Most democrats that I know of, I tend to think of as progressives rather than liberals. To me a liberal is one who follows democratic issues rather than values. A progressive aligns him/herself with values more so than issues. Progressive values have to do with moving (progressing) forward and not getting stuck in old values that no longer serve the greater good. A conservative might say that if it's not broke, don't fix it! A progressive might say that if it no longer works to serve our greater good, then we need to change it.

Here are a few examples of why I do not consider myself a true liberal. I believe in the right to own a gun. I think that we need tort reform. I do not subscribe to open boarders. I am against affirmative action. I believe that unions (along with corporate greed as well as shear necessity) are equally to blame for jobs being shipped over seas. I think that small businesses are over regulated (especially in the area of Cal OSHA rules and regulations). I am 100% against quieting (in any way) the conservative talk show personalities that are dominating the air waves. I don't believe addicts should be getting social security just because they have rendered themselves incapable of functioning. I do not subscribe to big government. I have spoken out against raising sales tax on either a state or city level. Bad teachers should be able to be fired. English should always remain our official language (and no, we shouldn't have to press 1 for English). We should never have to apologize for anything our ancestors have done. No form of Sharia law should ever be tolerated in our country regardless of ones religious beliefs. And Christmas music should always be allowed to penetrate our air waves! Does this sound like a liberal?

On the other hand, according to my progressive values, I believe in gay rights, animal rights, women's rights, raising taxes on higher incomes (over $250), evolution, global warming, getting rid of GMO's, supporting organic farming, disemboweling Monsanto, exploiting green energy and doing whatever we have to do to wean ourselves from oil, and most importantly, the right to practice any personal freedoms that do not harm anybody else. These include legalizing marijuana, euthanasia, prostitution, all forms of gambling, and anything else I might chose to do that is nobody else's business but my own.

So call me what you want....progressive, liberal, moderate, but I tell you one thing, whatever I am, there are a lot of us!

One of the things I appreciate about Bill Maher is that he's the only person I've heard on television or the radio that is willing to say the obvious....that the average American voter is an idiot! I believe this to be true, not because of how they vote, but the manner in which they're swayed to vote. Politicians spend millions on campaigns. Most of these millions are spent on TV advertising. TV advertising is nothing more than talking points, personal attacks, and outright lies. Many voters decide who they are going to vote for based on these ads....and that makes them an idiot!