A Few Words on Atheism, Religion, Secular Politics and Spirituality

 This is another one of those "the person you meet today is at a certain point in a long journey that started before you met him and is not yet over" posts. That thing I just put in quotes is the sort of thing we generally should assume about other people. I have met very few "flat characters" in my life.

But I have met some. More than I wish I could say. I feel pity for someone who is trapped in themselves and unable to grow but I think I feel more sympathy with everyone else in that person's life who has to deal with them.

I would say I know a lot about the way people work, what maintains behaviors, especially harmful or socially disruptive behaviors, and for most people, what motivates change. This is a large part of the work that I do as a social worker, with clients in various stages of change.

On that, before I get to the meat of this post, I want to point out that I do think people are accountable to themselves and others and responsible for change. That includes people who are also, at the same time, systematically oppressed. It includes many people who do not benefit from my combination of racial, sexual and educational privilege. I am responsible for holding people accountable. And every single one of my clients is part of more than one type of underclass. I hold people accountable for change and I do not feel conflicted about this in the slightest. The reason I bring this up is because conservatives love to trumpet about "personal responsibility" but have no appreciation for "personal context," whereas Leftist social workers kind of have to deal in both worlds, so we are naturally more tolerant of contradictions and ambiguity.

And contradictions and ambiguity are a big part of what I want to use this post to address. They are part of the Fifth Stage.

James Fowler was a theologian and student of human development who proposed six stages of spiritual development. Fowler's stages apply to basically everyone (maybe excepting sociopaths), and that includes materialist atheists like myself.

I supposed technically I was born an atheist. Technically everyone is born an atheist. But I was raised with a moderate degree of religion in my life. My family for most of my childhood until my mid-adolescence were "High Holidays Jews." We didn't identify really with any of the Sects like Orthodox, or Conservative, or Reform or Reconstructionist, from my earliest memories until sometime after my Bar Mitzvah, I would say my family tried to integrate religion and make it meaningful for us. My mother was not Jewish by birth. She converted when she married my father and this was done partly because she genuinely identified with the religion and culture but also because, at the time, their views on Israel were significantly less critical and in their early religious experimentation (their Stage 4), they wished for me and my siblings to be able to become Israeli citizens if we wanted, later in life.

Like I said, their views on Israel have changed.

Their views on religion also changed. And the change was in parallel but not in conjunction with my own.

I would say that I spent a lot of time as a kid trying to "find myself" and one of the ways I tried to do this was with intense spirituality.

Recalling this as an adult, it feels like a very inauthentic time for me, similar to when I was in the closet and trying to live life as a heterosexual or primarily heterosexual man. I remember being impatient with traditional religious instruction, and I had some pretty traumatizing experiences in Hebrew Sunday School (the story of the Binding of Isaac comes to mind, but also, the casual and bloodless fiction of Israel that the teachers presented, an extreme and distasteful nationalism, possibly fascism).

So, I never saw religion and politics as separate and as a religious minority as a child, I developed a very strong belief in the Separation of Church and State, in secular national discourse and justice, in secular public services and civic life. This concern of late has been subordinated by a more general hatred of both Capital and the State that protects it, and a feeling that much of the apparent "conflict" between "church and state" (what a predictably Christian-centric kind of term!)  has to do with funding and tax codes and other aspects of capitalism which would be rendered irrelevant with the obsolescence of the system that maintains it. It is just another way that our ruling elites and bourgeois culture divides the working class. I always knew there was a problematic relationship between government authority and the authority of religious leaders and that the line had to be thickly drawn or it would be weaponized against minorities and used in the service of suppressing class struggle. This had literally nothing to do with "atheism." I was not an atheist at that time. I believed very strongly in something, some mystical element to reality, that could be called God.

After our Bar Mitzvahs, my friend Judah (who later became known to us as Paz) broke from his equally confusing religious home life (his mother was Christian, father was Jewish, and they celebrated both traditions) and he devoted himself to the practice of Wicca. Because I admired Paz's spirituality, I did the same. I learned about Wiccan theology and and ritual and I spent a good deal of time fashioning items for use in those rituals and writing spells and drawing runes in my Book of Shadows. I think this was even less authentic for me than Judaism. And I was ostracized and ridiculed for it, including by members of my own family, who already thought I was weird. These family members are conservative Christians and my experience with them is feeling like they are nice to my face but have fascist politics and would vote for Hitler if Hitler said he was against abortions and his opponent was not. And a certain traumatic childhood memory involves my judgmental, right-wing Christian aunt mouthsoaping my brother and I without my parents' knowledge in a restaurant bathroom for using mild swears in context, something which in my family was normalized, unlike the child abuse she subjected me too, not to mention, legal and ethical between consenting family members, and not abusive. I remember thinking "I know this isn't fair but I have to put up with it because she's an adult." I didn't know it was abuse. I didn't know my parents didn't know about it. I assumed they did because it did not occur to me that someone who was not my parent would discipline me without a parents' consent.

But right-wing Christians feel they need to take ownership of other people's morality, and when I came to understand how deeply my aunt has internalized a narrative of Secular America being crueler and more awful to (white) Christians than any other group, her boundary violations made sense, because as a secular person of a scientific worldviews, I feel my boundaries are constantly tested by a pervasive national narrative that we are a Christian Nation (hard variant) and that this should be reflected in public by government institutions, or (soft variant) that government institutions are not prohibited from endorsing religion in general over nonreligion. But again, I felt this way before I considered myself an atheist, and before I considered myself a philosophical materialist. It had nothing to do with atheism. It had to do with feeling threatened by assimilation and by assaults on the secular character of public institutions that were humiliating and invalidating of me, personally.

I would say I became a Seeker. That is Fowler's 4th Stage, after the 3rd Stage, which is characterized by conformity to a religious ideal. This was, at first, Judaism, and then, Wicca, which was more syncretic and led to explorations of other faiths and practices (these are not always the same thing, for example, some religious, like Judaism, are more practice-oriented than oriented to what most American Christians would consider "faith," and for many "practicing" Jews, faith doesn't really enter into it much. But in Stage 4 I was a seeker and I began to integrate knowledge into a novel synthesis.

I graduated slowly from that to agnosticism and then atheism because I became fascinated by human evolution and read everything I could about evolution and the beginning of the universe and paleohistory and prehistory and cultural anthropology and sociology and biology, and after absorbing all that information I concluded that God was a failed hypothesis and ceased to believe in the "spiritual." The reason that word is in scare quotes is because I don't actually mean "concerning the human spirit" but rather the "immaterial" which is what most modern Americans take that word to mean. I think more religious people than myself have ruined that word, which is why I am using it, in this context, in scare quotes. I would say that as a materialist with a background in cultural and biological anthropology, I have a spiritual life (no scare quotes) that involves writing and hearing and reading and telling stories. My spiritual life is "narrative." But I don't use that word a lot because it's been robbed of its semantic utility. Similarly, I prefer to describe myself as a "philosophical materialist" than an "atheist" because while I am an atheist, atheism as a label isn't very useful. It only says that I disbelieve in one particular thing. But I am many things. I am a scientifically informed skeptic, with a philosophically materialist metaphysical worldview. These are things I actually do believe in.

I am also an organizer and while I think there is some utility to organizing around certain church-state separation issues, I don't think that alone can created a broad enough coalition around it without also adopting and aligning with the economic critique of the Left.

My experiences with "Organized Atheism" were brief and dramatic and traumatic and disappointing and many other regrettable things. I very briefly watched Richard Dawkins videos and posted on "Rational Response Squad" and I loathe to admit these things, but it was only for a few months when I and some online friends tired of what we were seeing and instead attending a conference for a group called CFI (Center for Inquiry) that promotes science, secular humanism, and church-state separation. They were not explicitly an atheist group although the majority of the people there were atheists and that was primarily who attended the student conferences. This was in college, I was a super senior, a stoner and a drunkard, and probably had a bit of acquired situational narcissism at the time. I was also neurologically speaking, at age 23, still bascially an adolescent (a point I will continue to harp on, as I think this aspect is lost and ignored in public discourse surrounding student activism). At 23, one tends to be an extremist. But I was uncomfortable with a lot of groupthink and quasi-cultish behavior I witnessed in "Organized Atheism" and by other aspects of the whole thing that were, frankly, alienating to a lot of more Leftist-minded people in that milieu, who later left and ceded that fetid sewer to the Dawkinites. CFI later merged with his Richard Dawkins' Foundation, and that was the point I left, because I wasn't a fan and I disliked the cult of personality surrounding him. At the time I was involved, regrettably, from 2008-2011, the general political biases of the student wing were somewhere on the centrist-liberal spectrum with a few oddball socialists like I was.

Later, so I hear, it got taken over by neoliberalism and the early stages of the Alt Right development.

I'm not surprised. The whole thing was a house of cards. Like I said, certain church-state issues are worth organizing around, but there's no real unity in atheism or even scientific skepticism. There's just not enough there and it's not inclusive enough. It's an oblique and off-centered analysis of fundamental social problems, a wrong analysis that doesn't address the inequalities that create those problems.

I regret my involvement from 2008 to 2011, but I don't beat myself up over it. I left. I'm not one of those people.

I'm in Stage 5: the "Conjunctive" Stage. At this stage I tolerate ambiguities and contradictions as a matter of maintaining a healthy mind and healthy relationships. I don't really trouble myself with people who persist in boundary violations or are unwilling to grow with me. I just don't have the emotional capacity left to deal with that. I cut them off, and I focus on the healthy relationships. I'm very satisfied with my life and if I seem like I'm not, you're not hearing my critique. I am extremely dissatisfied with our socioeconomic order. I love life. I (mostly) love people. I have a lot of faith in people. I've talked about this before, I think libertarians, and liberals, and theocrats, and fascists, and centrists and conservatives lack faith in people. They see themselves as part of a tribe or as individuals unconnected with the class struggle. I think this is incorrect but I don't think it's a moral flaw. It's a flaw of ignorance. But persistent ignorance is design. Design is agenda, and agenda is bias.

And there is nothing inherently wrong with agendas. But there is something wrong with the pretension that one has no bias.

I'm not sure Stage 6, the Universalizing Stage, really exists except in theory.

And not everyone gets through every stage. Some people never leave Stage 2 or 3. That describes most fundamentalists and conservative evangelicals, unfortunately.

But I'm glad to know that there is forward movement.

It is 12:42 AM.

Good morning.

 

 

Key phrases in the Lexicon of the American Liberal-Centrist (Part I)

 "Red states." (they seem to think these are geographic realities and not statistical abstractions)

"The masses." (they never see themselves as part of this, always separate, distinct, apart, but this is not a pretension they extend to people they don't think are intellectually worthy of being treated like equals)

"Pennsyltucky" (this is specific to my region, it's a way of dismissing the entire state except the two largest and most liberal cities, as a bunch of inbred hicks who don't know what's good for them)

"Inbred hicks" (this is what they call people they want you to dismiss and hate instead of organize)

"Hicks" (same thing)

"Bunch of rednecks" (same thing... it's to dismiss their alienation, and obfuscate the difference between sympathy and empathy)

"Idealist." (This is what they call anyone who disagrees with them, as though ideals are inherently a bad or impractical thing, and not values one should fight for against whatever constitutes "reality" in that moment... notably, they use against Leftists, but not against fascists or theocrats, they tend to think of those tendencies as "legitimate modes of politics in a democracy")

"But that would be anarchy!" (GOOD.)

"Adult in the room." (What they expect you to be, and what they think they are)

"Bipartisan consensus" (this conveniently ignores the many horrible things that have been at one time or another a matter of bipartisan consensus)

"Both sides" (this is a form of positionality, where the centrist or moderate casts himself as somehow ideologically neutral with respect to power)

My Enemy, the Liberal, Who Underestimates My Alienation, and Who Underestimates My Solidarity with the Alienated

 My enemy wants to be my friend.

My enemy wants me to think I am like him.

He appeals to my intelligence, my education, my privilege, to warn me about the "unwashed masses," of which I consider myself a part. He doesn't accept the validity of that sentiment. But he wants me to validate him, to tell him he's doing good. He wants me to help him feel alright with himself and the world.

He doesn't want to believe he's a bad person. But the problem is, he still thinks it's personal.

It's really not, though.

What happens is, he flatters me. Tells me I'm smart. That I'm a leader.

I hear between his words, an exasperation with "the unwashed masses," a frustration with the inconvenience of more direct, participatory modes of democracy, and a belief that nothing positive can come of deconstructing power too consistently except "anarchy," by which he means "lawless violence."

But that is not what "anarchy" means. And I think Law is quite violent, in its way, not more or less so than lawlessness. He confuses peace with order.

And I don't have as much in common with my Enemy as he would like me to believe I do.

He underestimates my alienation, and he underestimates my solidarity with the alienated.

So, he flatters, praises, and chides me, like a knowing friend. But he is not my friend.

And when I reject his attempt to make of me, conspiratorially, with him, in his alliance, an "adult in the room," I see how he turns and declares me a naive, idealistic, woeful child.

Because, to a liberal, there are only two kinds of people: adults and children, and children do as they are told.

It is when I reject his first premise, these appeals to likeness with me, that he turns passive aggressive, and tries to project his spinelessness on me. He asks me "Don't I like my smartphone?" He has failed to appeal with reason, so he appeals now, instead, with toys. Bright, flashy, shiny things. This, he calls "progress."

But he fails to judge that I may yet define progress differently. That my vision of a more ideal society is not that we all become like him- elitists. I seek an end to elitism. I don't want to be like him. I want to drag him down to my level. I want the other people, the ones he dismissively ignores because he thinks they won't understand him, to hear his words, and for him to know he is understood as someone who sees himself as better than they are, as wiser, and more deserving of authority.

This Enemy is called the Liberal. Every thing he says today about Black Lives Matter, his forebears said about MLK, Jr. Everything he says about trans rights, has already been said about other groups he used to concern-troll into accepting their subordination.

He is not to be trusted.

He thinks he would make a good cop. A good politician. A good judge. He believes so much in his education and apartness that he thinks he is immune to bias or groupthink. He weaponizes rationality in service of the unreasonable. He weaponizes pity in service of the status quo, and he calls it Love.

But this is not the Love of equals. It is the love of a master for a pet. It is the love of a self-absorbed parent for the child whose autonomy and dignity they neglect. It is the love of the owner for the slave.

And when you lay this bare, when you point it out in no uncertain terms, this infantilizing paternalism, you can hear him turn on you. When you refuse to repay the flattering, when you do not give his intellectual and cultural elitism the due he thinks he deserves, he snaps. And he reveals himself as who he truly is: the self-proclaimed "adult in the room."

We need fewer people like that. As few as possible. Zero, preferably.

I have no patience for them anymore. I cut them from my life like thread. Every time I have let my guard down and ignored the yellow flags and let someone like this into my life, I have regretted it. And there are people I've known for a long time, who I respect much less, now, that I see him in them.

The next time someone tries to appeal to you as though you are the "adults in the room," figure out that person's sacred Bourgeois cultural cow. Find it,  torch it, and watch how they react. That sacred cow might be aesthetic or it might be practical, but whatever it turns out to be, believe me, it is there. Waiting. And it's fucking ugly in the face. Set it on fire.

Then you will know where they truly stand. Then, you will know your Enemy.

Nothing Important Happened Today (January 6th, 2021)

 January 6th, 2021:

"Nothing important happened today."

That doesn't mean nothing happened. This is not a statement of denial. Merely of importance.

I understand that some people were violent.

But violence happens every day. That's just the reality of capitalism.

That doesn't make violence good or bad. It just means I don't want to believe capitalism is the Only Reality.

And I have yet to find a persuasive argument that it is. All pro-capitalist arguments seem to rely on fundamental assumptions about the world that I do not share and that I do not think are scientifically credible.

So, as a matter of being a science-based person, I believe in less violent alternatives.

But I don't think the "Capital Protests" or "Coup" (if that's what we're calling it, it's debatable how much that word actually applies in context) was on 9/11 levels of importance as our hysterical, neoliberal-biased media, or our newest dystopian neoliberal regime, is spinning it. I suspect that want to increase surveillance and make America safe for Normies and Centrists, because that's "Real America, the Red, White and Blue" and all that shit I just don't believe.

But, other than an excuse to ramp up domestic surveillance (which would have happened under Biden, anyway), "Nothing important happened today."

I don't think a building or a symbol of government is sacred and I actually share in common with many conservatives the belief that the Federal Government should not exist. Where I differ with the conservatives what I think should exist instead (mutually associating confederations of worker-governed industrial syndicates), but I am probably even more anti-statist than they are (because I recognize the state is complicit in capitalism, not opposed to it, as the Hayek-holics and the neoliberals of the Austrian School frame it).

I don't feel anything I particularly value was threatened. I have very little emotional connection to this at all. It's like watching a football game between two teams, neither of them from Philly, and I don't even follow football in the first place.

This theatric collective catharsis we call "politics" merely masks power. It is a distraction. It is not real. There is no such thing as a "neutral moderate" or "neutral centrism" because there is no such thing as neutrality. How could neutrality exist in the same physical universe as one in which Net Effects exist? These are not existentially compatible concepts, and logically one of them must be a falsehood. Since we can demonstrate the existence of Net Effects of public policy, logically, rationally then, there is no such thing as a neutral policy.

Policy is about power. It is about who has it and who doesn't. It is about who benefits first, and who does not benefit at all. These questions are fundamental. They are NOT trivial, niche, "cultural" concerns without an economic reality attached.

Dialectical Materialism, unlike pro-capitalist ideologies, doesn't deny that capitalism exists, it offers an explanation for how it works, and why it leads to significant enough alienation of the working class that violence is inevitable. It doesn't deny reality in the way that alternative ideological systems do. It just reflects the same social science underlying the Functionalist School of cultural anthropology on our own culture and forces us to ask hard questions about how we define things like "progress," how we define our values, and how we prioritize those values, collectively, as a society. Do we do this through coercion and competition like a bunch of impulsive, rash Social Darwinists with no self control (the terrible, horrible truth of humanity, in conservative, liberal and neoliberal ideology)? Do we throw up our hands at the prospect of change and align with a status quo that works for an increasingly fewer number of people? Or do we this cooperatively like adults who are capable of reflecting on our own behaviors and the harm those behaviors cause (as socialists and anarchists believe most people, if adequately supported and nurtured, are capable of doing?)

"Realism" in the neoliberal framework and "pragmatism" and "rationality" are weaponized against hope, change and optimism. But these do not have to be opposites. There is no consistent dialectical analysis  here, like there is between oppressed and oppressor. That dialectic exists. The same cannot be said for these false binaries.

"Nothing important happened today."

See, logic and rationality can also be weaponized by the Left.

We believe in a more humane and rational way of structuring society. 

It is a better kind of world we believe in than the one we have, and the one fascists, libertarians and theocrats want to create.

I would rather fight and die for that world than live one more moment in this one. I would rather dedicate every moment of my life to that struggle than breathe one moment in denial of myself and my relationships.

I meet a lot of well intentioned people who tell me to moderate these positions, that I am "too radical" or "too divisive." I think they valuing order over justice when they say this, even if they do not realize it. And they seem to think I was born thinking this way, that it wasn't a long and laborious process of unlearning certain falsehoods, certain untruths, that caused me to move further away from the centrist-liberal domain of the spectrum. I would have to unlearn 35 years of personal and institutional experiences to change my mind. I would have to be convinced of a great many things. And I would need a very, very persuasive argument. I have yet to encounter one. So, logically, I do not support capitalism. No one has ever given me a logical reason. I understand it has an internal logic and I understand how it works. That's not the issue. Like I said, dialectical materialism doesn't deny reality in the way that alternatives do. It doesn't pretend things work a certain way when they don't. But it doesn't prescribe "the way things are" as ideal. And this distinction needs to be more remarked upon as we engage those who may be swayed. But that argument, if it exists, the one that would persuade me to moderate my views... I haven't found it yet. I'm open to hearing it. But I'm not particularly worried about it because I have no reason at this time to believe such a persuasive argument exists that would cause me to unlearn those 35 years of experiences. The chances of that don't strike me as very high.

I'll let you know if and when that changes.

"Nothing important happened today."

Be well, comrades, and fellow travelers. Stay safe and don't let anyone presume to lecture or browbeat you into accepting their definition of "enemy."

There is only one enemy, and it is power. And power does not reside in a building. It is not contained in whole by any ceremony or ritual or document. These things, more often than not, mask the actual mechanisms of power. And they must be deconstructed. By any means necessary.

"Nothing important happened today."

Asshole With An Open Secret : bonus story :

 

Asshole With an Open Secret

Sometime in the 427^th century…

Assholes are very good at making other people feel like assholes. I know this because I do it all the time. These people should know not to give me a podium or put me on camera. But they just never learn. They think they can make an example of me. I guess, in a way, they’re right, but it never goes like they expect it to.

Which is why I said to the Grand Inquisitor: “My secret is, I’m an asshole.”

He said, “That’s not a secret. You’re a public asshole.”

I said, “The secret is that it works.”

He said, “Fair enough. You’re still going to tried for obstruction of justice.”

I said, “I wouldn’t expect it any other way.”

What’s that quote about doing the same thing every time and expecting different results?

Can’t remember how it goes or who said, but basically, politics.

Here’s how it works: keep listening.

He said, “Will you answer my questions?”

I said, “No.”

He said, “Will you cooperate with the investigation?”

I said, “No.”

He said, “Were you not shot while counter-protesting at a political rally?”

I said, “I refuse to answer that question.”

He said, “You have a hole in your chest.”

I said, “You have holes in your head. More than you need.”

He said, “The investigation concerns the person who shot you.”

I said, “I will not cooperate.”

He said, “You refused to testify.”

I said, “I will neither confirm nor deny that allegation.”

He said, “You were subpoenaed.”

I said, “I check my mail.”

He said, “Why won’t you cooperate in the prosecution of your shooter?”

I said, “I have moral objections to your system of justice.”

I was still very much in pain.

He said, “You could be held in contempt of court.”

I said, “That would be in character.”

He said, “What character is that?”

I said, “A character with nothing but contempt for your court.”

He said, “Your refusal puts us in a difficult position. We could be your advocates if you’d let us. But if you refuse, we will have to conclude you were a provocateur in the matter of your shooting. You were shot by a rally attendee whose stated goal is to crush people like you.”

I said, “What kind of people am I?”

He said, “Are you now, or have you ever been…”

I said, “I refuse to answer that question.”

He finished, “…A member of the organization Grey Moment?”

I said, “I have already refused to answer that question.”

He said, “You didn’t let me finish.”

I said, “I didn’t need to. Can I ask you a question?”

He said, “It’s not procedure, but I can’t stop you.”

I said, “Are you really a Grand Inquisitor? Or are you a spook?”

He said, “I can show you my credentials.”

I said, “I’d like your badge number, please.”

He said, “C18-187-216.” He tapped his badge and the number flashed on its tiny screen.

I said, “Now we’re getting somewhere.”

He said, “Only place you’re getting is National Prison. For a long time. Unless you cooperate.”

I said, “I will not. I’d rather have free healthcare.”

He said, “You’re a free rider?”

I said, “No, just an opportunist. Like you.”

He said, “I question that.”

I said, “You question everything. Take this at face value: I will not cooperate with the justice system. It’s about mutualism. You would never cooperate with me. I have no quarrel with an exploited man. I have quarrel with you.”

He said, “I understand.”

And then his boys hauled me away.

But he was the one who felt like an asshole.

Better him than the shooter!

How Neoliberal Paternalism Works : A Scene

The following dialog is (unfortunately) based on real life. It is based on literally every conversation I've had with a neoliberal, centrist, or moderate Democrat in the past couple of years about "incremental progress." The names have been changed to protect the aggrieved (and for rhetorical effect).

Adult Sibling to Minor Child: "How's things at mom and dad's?"

Minor Child to Adult Sibling: "They fight all the time, and then I'm supposed to be grateful whenever they manage to get along for two minutes, even if the thing that they manage to stop fighting over is of literally zero interest to me."

Adult Sibling to Minor Child: "Well, you're your own person. You don't have to get drawn into their fights."

Minor Child to Adult Sibling: "Easy for you to say. You have your own apartment and a car. There's this thing called "allowance," remember?

Adult Sibling to Minor Child: "Then get a job!"

Minor Child to Adult Sibling: "I'm a kid. I'm only allowed to work up to 15 hours per week. Minimum wage. And if I work, they'll take away my allowance, and 15 hours of minimum wage work isn't enough to emancipate myself on."

Adult Sibling to Minor Child: "Well, don't worry, some day you'll be out there on your own."

Minor Child to Adult Sibling: "But that's not for years, and I hate it now. They expect me to be happy when they agree on some little thing like movie night or takeout, but they don't listen to my opinions, or they tell me I'm just a kid and I'll grow out of it."

Adult Sibling to Minor Child: "I used to have my own opinions, too, but I grew out of it and got a job and stopped whining about how life is so hard."

Minor Child: "Because the laws of our country said you could."

Adult Sibling: "Well, then you'll just have to wait until the laws say you can, too."

---

Replace "Mom" and "Dad" with "Democrats" and Republicans." Replace "Minor Child" with radical, or millennial, and adult sibling with Democrat/liberal/boomer/gen-exer." Replace "allowance" with "public benefits," too. Or the adult sibling is the moderate and the child is the radical.

Or the adult sibling is white and the child is black. Or straight/queer. See how it works?

Centrists and liberals always think they're the "rational adult" and anyone more "extreme" is a petulant child.

Except that it shouldn't make as much sense as it does in context unless we are in a child-like, paternalistic relationship with the political class!

Don't believe me? Try it yourself. Argue with them about "incremental reform." Torch a couple of their sacred cows. 

Quote a Dr. King line they don't know, because it wasn't covered in their high school history class. I'll give you one that is just as true today as it was in 1963:

"First, I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to 'order' than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says 'I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can't agree with your methods of direct action;' who paternalistically feels he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by the myth of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a 'more convenient season.'"

- Letter from a Birmingham Jail

And guess what? The same rhetorical substitution trick works on those capitalized nouns, too. I wouldn't have much room to complain if it didn't. But not much has really changed since 1963.

Dear Jerry Springer (from Raven Green, and his sexually questioning eleven-year old self)

 Dear Jerry Springer,

Back in the day, before Netflix, DVD and [redacted internet activity], I used to spend a lot of time between finishing my homework and watching Star Trek The Next Generation in syndication on UPN with not much to do. I was a very creative child, but even creative kids run out of steam sometimes, and we just want Star Trek to come on, damnit!

What I learned while waiting for Star Trek to come on was that there was other awesomeness to behold on UPN in [year redacted, it was sometime in the 90s, but that information could be used to identify me]. Much as several years later, I would fall in love with M*A*S*H while waiting for Seinfeld and Third Rock from the Sun, at eleven, while waiting for Star Trek, I fell in love with one particular series of seminal (heh heh, he said "seminal") Trash TV.

It was your show.

First, let me say, as a disclaimer, that at eleven, I missed the early seasons when I started watching, but in researching you as a nuanced adult, I was surprised and enheartened to learn that you were once a very serious journalist. You tackled real social issues and spent nights camped out with runaway kids to show America what was happening in their own backyard, beneath their noses, and you actually maybe made a difference to a lot of people.

You made a difference to me.

I don't love or even like "celebrity culture." But you, Jerry Springer, deserve your celebrity.

You want to know what I loved about your show?

In the Wasteland of Mostly Formulaic and Mainstream Societally-Reinforcing Television that dominated the Networks in the 90s, your show was the one island of representation for gender-nonconforming people outside of Cable TV.

Sure, you can find isolated examples to counter that exact wording, but you have got to understand how critical it was to my channel-surfing, sexually questioning, eleven-year old self to find a show that acknowledged that not all people were "just straight or gay" and that transgender and transvestite were not the same. I learned a lot about the world from watching you, Jerry, as you navigated the complex dynamics of families around identity and society.

Jerry, you ensured that I didn't waste my time between getting bored of books, drawing and Legos for that afternoon, and the Star Trek reruns.

I didn't pick up then, as a child, on your generosity of spirit, your compassion, your humanism, your consistent anti-racism and willingness to listen and negotiate from the heart and the head at the same time. I wish I had. I would have been a much better advocate for your wisdom. I only knew what a "guilty pleasure" was and I guess I didn't realize there was more to it than that. But looking back, an [exact age redacted]-year old adult, I see that now.

A few months ago, in a work capacity, I spent a harrowing night and the early morning hours accompanying a pregnant teenager to the Emergency Room. The girl had gone AWOL (left her out-of-home placement) but availed herself to my agency, so we were trying to place her in a mother-baby program, and not long after I arrived, she began bleeding and I needed to take to the ER. Keeping a traumatized teenager calm and thinking positively in these circumstances is difficult, so I did my "tech support" trick. I asked her for help with my phone. If you give kids something to teach you (even if you already know it) it helps them feel confident and it shows them vulnerability they can't exploit but will help them start to trust you. So I did that, and when we got YouTube working I asked if there something she enjoyed watching on YouTube that she could focus on.

And she said, "Judge Jerry."

And I said, "Jerry Springer?"

And she said, "Yeah, they made a him judge and he's got a judge show!"

Granted, most of the hosts of courtroom TV are not actually judges. Judge Judy, for example (whom I also adore). I think she has a mediator's license or something, but she's not a judge. But Jerry actually has a J.D., and did serve in a public office, albeit in different branches of government, as a member of City Council and later mayor of Cincinnati. So he's at least got some legislative experience.

But that's not important in that moment. What is important is "They made him a judge and he's a judge show!"

And we watched Judge Jerry on YouTube while we waited for the doctor.

And that got me thinking.

So, I wrote this letter.

That is all.

Thanks.

- Raven Green