I need to apologize for neglecting those of you who look to this space each day for your trusted connection with the Obvious. As I’ve stated, and as you know, I’m been working very hard trying to complete my Novel, ‘Wilderness’. I’m making good progress, and am enjoying the process, but I understand that my recent neglect of ‘Coyote Tracks’ has been leaving each of you bereft of your best reason to go on living. I kid. Did I really need to say that? Well, you never know, people can be pretty sensitive these days. And that brings me to the point of this discussion.
I grew up being very sensitive. I was sensitive to other people’s feelings, and I was sensitive about my own. Shoot, (can I even say that?). OK, ‘Shoot’, I was sensitive to religion, to ideology, and to politics. I was sensitive to race, to sexuality, and to cultural differences. In short, I was sensitive to all of the things a person is supposed to be sensitive about. I was sensitive to insensitivity, even.
But y’know, it doesn’t stop there. It was never going to stop at the obvious. Now you’re expected to be sensitive to peoples psyche’s, even though a person’s psyche is invisible. It is obscure. It is unknowable. It is elusive, vague, indefinable, indescribable, and, anyway, it changes with the weather. The psyche is born of a person’s entire life experience. A person lives in different elements of the psyche at different times of their life, different days, even. It is the weakness in a person, at times, and it is the strength at other times. But we are required to protect it, always, in everyone, as if it were a three-month-premature infant in a Maternity ward. No wonder people are so weak.
There is nothing left that we are not required to be sensitive about. Besides the obvious, we are now, also, tasked to intuit what a persons psyche is, and then we are required to tip-toe, and tap-dance around it. We are required to assuage it, and to feed it pabulum for fear it could not digest solid food. It is a large part of what is weakening the lives, and resolve, of the American people.
It is not our commission in life to protect each other’s psyche’s. It is our commission in life to be honest about life. Honesty will mold the psyche naturally, to be well balanced, and of service to the person it is connected to. You don’t prepare a person for life by protecting him from the weather, from the truth, or from himself.
People will think whatever they want, about anything they want. And nobody can take that from us. But, when people begin insisting on what we are supposed to think, how we are supposed to think, and what we are supposed to be sensitive about, well, I begin to become very insensitive about that. C’mon, people. We can’t live that way. People will be as fragile as we require them to be. They will shrink to that level of expectation.
People are allowed to feel today, they are just not allowed to think . . . . . out loud, that is, or for themselves. Thinking for one’s self is the prelude to rebellion. Why are we so afraid of that? Thinking out loud is what gets us in trouble. Somehow, feelings are acceptable, even though they are the primary, and operative, domain of adolescents. Feelings are encouraged. Thinking is not.
And again, I say, “C’mon, people, we can’t live that way.
If somebody says something that you don’t agree with, it’s just somebody’s opinion!” Don’t be so frigging offended by somebody’s opinion. So what if somebody thinks make-up is dishonest (as I heard in a movie recently), and you wear make-up. That doesn’t mean the person thinks you’re a no good, dishonest, shallow bitch. It doesn’t mean the person is trying to hurt you. Stop looking to be hurt by everybody. It just means that the person thinks the idea of using make-up is dishonest. So what? He’s allowed to think that. You think differently. Does that make him a no-good, shallow, idiotic bastard? Does that mean that you must separate yourself from that person so you can feel morally superior to him. Let’s everybody get a grip. Everybody, really.
The things that people say are created by the lives and experiences those people have. Everybody has a different life, and experience. Everybody has a different way of looking at, and interpreting, the world. Why are we so afraid of, or threatened by, that?
Let’s stop pretending that someone else’s experience should bring them to the same conclusions in life that ours have brought us to.
