Tag: George Santos

Anomie

I first heard the word anomie in a sociology lecture. Anomie means: “social instability caused by erosion of standards and values, or, alienation and purposelessness experienced by a person or a class as a result of a lack of standards, values, or ideals.”

We are living in a state of anomie. I don’t know about anyone else but general consensus on just about everything is in short supply and a hard commodity to come by lately. I used to know what to focus on and give attention to. And I used to know why what I did was important to me.

I have memories of periods of intense focus. Spending a whole weekend (or a few) surrounded by books and papers doing research for an essay. Playing some sport that kept me outdoors and running around for hours. Either at a beach or maybe on a mountain.

A full evening of social time with friends may have started at 8 in the evening and could go on into the wee small hours of the morning. Not a cellphone in sight or in our imaginations.

There wasn’t another single activity that was more important than doing what we were doing in that moment. I’m not naive. There was plenty of “zoning out” in those days, too, but generally.

What’s missing today, I find, is global “permission” to carve out those unfettered blocks of time without feeling some sort of guilt or FOMO – fear of missing out. We don’t even agree anymore about where and what it is important to focus on.

I am way too susceptible to distractions. And there are plenty of distractions these days. We all know what they are and I know I am not alone. I believe we are all feeling it.

I am reading more and more articles about putting a label on these crazy times and collectively pray it is only a phase. A phase that has been ongoing for a good decade or more.

The world is grotesquely out of balance and that is not sustainable. I will not watch news coverage about Gaza. I cannot handle that level of inhumanity and insanity. Yet, clearly many do.

Watch it and shudder or sigh or inhale a half a cheesecake. These are very bad times for the easily triggered.

We can’t always see ahead to when and how things might slip off the rails. In our lives, for example. There are indicators. And if we don’t see them and pay attention, there will be consequences. Ignore them at our peril.

That cavity you avoid getting filled. That bank balance consistently slipping into overdraft. The credit card statements that “somehow” keep getting bigger and bigger. You’ll experience the consequences soon enough.

Consequences today seem haphazardly dispensed. Shady politicians and career criminals carry on blithely with minimal fear of paying any price for their actions.

That George Santos was expelled from Congress was a minor miracle that occurred this week. My question has been: how did he get as far as he did in Congress in the first place? Where is our system of checks and balances?

Sadly, the answer seems to be that it has eroded dramatically.

An insane system is kept relevant by enablers who either allow or participate in letting the insanity continue. Personally, I haven’t got the stomach for it.

So I am in full retreat. I am most reluctant to put myself on the line publicly for my beliefs. It has become a more private occupation contained within a circle of people I trust and like. That is where I choose to put my focus these days.

I have been testing society’s floorboards of late and find them a little spongy. If that were to happen in a real house, I would slowly withdraw from the room and back away to prevent being hurt.

I no longer have term papers to write but there are other activities that can absorb my attention. Books are always available. As is “me-time.” In a world where the rules have gone out the window and everyone seems to be in survival mode, it seems the most reasonable option.

Lived Experience

Does anyone else have the same problem I have? I am dumbstruck by the number of people who have lived and died on Planet Earth. Neil deGrasse Tyson says approximately 10,000,000,000 (that’s 10 billion for those of you who, like me, are numerically challenged.) Given the world population is hovering around 7 billion. or so, that represents some intense population growth in the past couple of hundred years.

All we can ever know of people who went before us are what we hear about them or stories we read about them. We make huge assumptions about who they were based on hearsay and material artifacts and what people of an earlier time wrote. Our imagination of the lives of our forebears is largely apocryphal.

Understanding how others live today is a lot like that, too. We make assumptions about people that are based on scant and usually superficial information. Or more likely, curated information. I have seen resumes that are the greatest works of fiction ever published. Scandal du jour joker and “alleged” felon George Santos is only the most recent public offender.

I often wonder what daily life must have been like in the old days. Television and movies are great for filling in holes in our imagination. In movies and on TV, we are served curated scenarios that allow us to imagine the lives and lifestyles of those who lived long before we did or very differently. And in astonishing variety. Courtiers, family farmers, aristocrats, or maybe the occasional itinerant pastor who roamed the countryside with his horse and buggy spreading the word of the lord.

What fascinates me are the assumptions we make from what we observe. We can only speculate what is going on intellectually or emotionally inside other people. Past and present. I sometimes feel this frustration watching Holocaust footage. It is not only what you see, that is horrifying, but what you can’t see. Broken, skeletal, barely-clinging-to-life bodies twisted in pain convey some of their reality. But not everything.

One can only imagine the terror and humiliation of young Jewish females shaved bald and stripped naked before being paraded in front of leering Nazi camp guards. What must those young women have been thinking? What questions must they have asked themselves? What panicky racing thoughts did they have? Was their imminent demise clear in their minds or were they actually lulled into the delusion of the gas chambers as showers?

In the Steven Spielberg movie Schindler’s List, there is a particularly poignant scene – among many – where an elegant and clearly wealthy young woman disembarks from one of the trains at a camp. She dismissively gives a healthy handful of Reichsmarks as a tip. Her Jewish compatriot is already wearing the trademark black and grey striped pajamas and humbly takes away her bag. We have only the sad look on his pained face by which to gauge his reaction.

I do not understand evil very well. I do not understand what causes a teenager to walk into a building full of precious human beings with a semi-automatic weapon and deliberately start spraying bullets. Worse, I do not understand how a creature like Alex Jones who identifies as a “broadcaster” could consistently call the Sandy Hook massacre of innocent children a hoax, let alone have anyone believe him. I cannot imagine being a bereaved parent of a child victim futilely defending against that level of evil insanity. Those parents were bullied by people who believed Jones! I often wonder how those parents have made sense of their lives.

The only explanation I can come up with is that when nature is out of balance, life goes out of balance. We are a society wildly out of balance. Important institutions that were nurseries for human souls like communities or churches or extended families and even steady consistent parenting or any kind of certainty have broken down. Combining that with the information overload of our current epoch and mass breakdown was all but certain.

How is anyone supposed to internalize enough sense of self to navigate the exceptionally murky water and future that is presented to young people today? My daughter tells me that is why “mid-century” chic is so popular. People are looking backward more than forward. She also says it is why young people spend sinful amounts of money on gaudy self-care such as colored hair and three-inch acrylic nails. It is a world of “Why not?” and “What does it matter?” It is also a world of addiction. a teen suicide epidemic, easy divorces. All are indicative of a nationwide – even global – and communal loss of direction and purpose.

All of this external frazzle puts the onus back on us to create a better way of being for ourselves and our loved ones. Find a healthy and productive path and walk it with like-minded individuals who want to live better, richer, saner lives. I have a mountaineer friend who cured her booze addiction by climbing on rock and ice faces. I saw many brave if tremulous individuals surrender their to take the white chip in AA meetings as a first step toward sobriety. I know single mothers who go without to give their children everything they can give them.

Pain and obstacles are part of life. But so are joy and love. At an earlier time and maybe still in some places in the world, the interwebs of love in which people live function well enough to hold communities and each other together.

It wasn’t so long ago that a sense of community was widespread and dependable. Not without their own issues or problems to be sure. Where they don’t exist today, it behooves us to keep our counsel and to keep looking for one or create one that works for us.

The Four Agreements: 1/4

The first agreement in Don Miguel Ruiz’s book is: Be Impeccable with Your Word

So many people aren’t. Lying is commonplace and accepted these days. Expected even. People “exaggerate for effect” and “tell white lies” to gloss over deficiencies in themselves or some product they are selling. Politicians are among the least trusted professionals on the planet. The whole smarmy George Santos fiasco (is he gone yet?) took the falsification of credentials to despicable new heights.

Ruiz examines the power of the word, how it’s misunderstood, and how most people use it to spread emotional poison. Being impeccable with one’s word means taking responsibility for their own integrity. But he advises against judging or blaming oneself when we fall short. Life is a marathon after all, not a sprint.

Following this agreement faithfully, Ruiz claims clears emotional poison from one’s life by building immunity to the negative words of others, leading eventually to a place of peace and joy. Being honest and truthful can also neutralize emotional poison in oneself by saying only what is true for us – to ourselves and to others.

I don’t know about you, but I hate hurting people. I had been badly hurt in the past by words and the bad behavior that accompanied them. I know how that pain feels and don’t want to inflict it on others. For the longest time, I had no sense of my personal power so had no sense of how my words were taken by other people. Especially those close to me. In my youth, I said the words “I love you” too often and too casually, without considering their impact.

Worse, I had no clear concept of what “Love” actually meant. The recipient wasn’t getting much value from my declaration, to begin with. But neither I nor they realized how flakey my words were until it was too late. They became emotionally involved with me as one might expectedly do when they believe someone loves them.

If I eventually withdrew my “love,” (attention, support, time, benefits), both me and my erstwhile “lover” suffered. They suffered for the loss of someone they had come to believe loved them. I suffered for having spoken important words without full respect for another’s feelings.

There was a time when words were so respected in society that “a man’s word was his bond.” Contracts were made on a handshake after a discussion where terms were mutually agreed. Was that a perfect system? By no means. But it does speak to a time when words were valued more highly than they are now? It does.

Contracts are a lawyer’s mainstay and an anchor for the involved parties to cling to when dealings go awry. But even the most well-written contract provisions can be woefully inadequate to the business at hand. In family law, court orders can do more harm than good. A judge may order a mother and father to “co-parent.” But if they have what it takes to do that successfully, they likely could have made the marriage work.

So much which is sacred has been cheapened and derogated. Sexuality. Spirituality. Life itself. And even words. I have come to see words as delicate threads like spiderwebs that keep us attached to each other within our communities. But spiderwebs are very easy to destroy. So we live in a world where cynicism and pessimism rule. We expect people to lie to us. We expect them to let us down.

Ruiz shows us that we don’t have to do that. We can train ourselves to only say what we believe to be true. We can suppress words we don’t feel will help someone. We can keep our thoughts and opinions to ourselves until they are solicited. That may be easier said than done. But I can say from personal experience, that doing so leaves a lot less hurt feelings in your wake and gives you a lot less to regret in your life. For those reasons alone, it has been an “agreement” I have happily tried to pursue.