We all have strengths and weaknesses to be aware of.
As for strengths, I remember folks in a fitness class I taught being delighted and telling me that I had a good sense of how fit they were: I had to know my own strength.
Once I was hiking as part of my role with an outdoor company’s board of directors. I advised an outdoor leader with tired followers: “When you are tired, they are very tired.” Because they’re not being buoyed up by the excitement of leadership.
In a science fiction novel a smart lady astronaut crashes, has amnesia, and finds a job in a hospital kitchen. When her memory returns she laments to someone that she feels so guilty that she has been trying to talk with her coworkers about ideas.
I can relate. At a certain nice job, every time I pulled up a chair in the director’s office I could switch to a bigger vocabulary. Then when I left the office I would go back to being careful to know my own strength.
As for weakness, I was a child when I read a novel with magic, pirates and a talking octopus. An old seaman explains to the kids how when one goes back to England, and tries to say that cannibals exist, people put their hands over their ears saying, “I can’t believe, too horrible.”
Today I didn’t exactly raise my hands to my ears, but I was a little weak: I caught myself only skimming—avoiding—three separate news stories. Maybe I was merely tired, having a bad day, and attention span challenged. More likely I was having trouble facing some specific bad news that saw my my world-view being contradicted.
At least I wasn’t as bad as the good Germans who, until February 24, 2022 discounted, perhaps as “too horrible to believe” the people of Eastern Europe who kept warning Germany that the Russians and their army of Orcs were bad. In fact, as far as I can tell, the Germans acted like “a perfect storm” in several ways to encourage the Orcs to invade. (See previous essays)
The Germans wouldn’t believe their neighbours who had put their actions where their mouth was: Easterners had fled their Warsaw Pact, for mutual defence against various nations of the west, to join the north Atlantic treaty, for defence against the East. Well, one nation in the east. Even if that one nation was no longer communist.
Last Sunday, at a writer’s convention, an expert told us people can’t handle the truth in essays, and so fiction is the way to “stealth deliver truth.” … Oh. Now I’m aware.
Maybe from respect for weakness, I guess, New York Times best seller Rita Mae Brown, in Writing From Scratch, said novels require a certain length before certain ideas can be properly sneaked up on. She explained the effect of television on attention spans and our subconscious need for commercial breaks. Shorter novels mean absent themes.
Yesterday I heard Philosopher Vlad Vexler’s latest video chat essay, Russian Parody App for Denunciations. It’s hearable, in Vlad’s gentle academic way, but the comments! They aren’t for everyone!
Before I paste any Youtube comments from under Vlad’s chat let me say with respect, “Dear reader, if you need to click away from this page now, I understand.”
QUOTE
@piccalillipit9211
RADICAL DE-POLITICAL-ISATION is quite difficult to explain to Western people, I live in Bulgaria and I see it among some of the older people, the bit you don’t get is it’s ACTIVE, not passive.
It’s like “Why are you involving ME in this? Is it MY job to worry about politics? You are the politicians, YOU get paid the big bucks to make the big decisions? You want my job? You want to make widgets, NO, so don’t involve me in your problems, I know nothing about this stuff, we have a deal, you stay out of MY business and I’ll stay out of yours, now you are breaking that deal. You want me to go and vote – why?
You are all liars, you want me to decide which one of you is best, you can’t decide that yourselves but you are the clever people who say you will make good decisions, but you can’t decide which one of you should be running things and you want me to decide, when I make widgets, so you are less capable than a widget maker??? Just do your job and run the country and leave me out of it!”
The argument is entirely circular as Vlad says. And the logic is kinda sound, its hard to argue with these people especially because they simply do NOT value the things we value and they wrap their inactivity in this iron-clad argument of radical depoliticisation that is really hard to penetrate.
Theirs is an ACTIVE rejection of politics. They are not like the Westerner who doesn’t bother to vote. These people vote [as far as I know] but they vote for the strongman who promises to leave them out of it in future.
…
@piccalillipit9211 Thank you. A lot to unpack as a ” westerner”, but I get a general impression that Russia is historically and culturally cynical. It’s probably simplistic, but striving for the “… better angels of our nature” has proven to be both positive and productive goals in the west.
UNQUOTE
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As birds chirp “Good evening,”
sneaking in some politics,
August,
2023
Sean Crawford
