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17 Jul 20:48

Girl Genius for Friday, July 17, 2020

The Girl Genius comic for Friday, July 17, 2020 has been posted.
20 Dec 22:28

Girl Genius for Friday, December 20, 2019

The Girl Genius comic for Friday, December 20, 2019 has been posted.
14 May 20:38

Episode 205 of Speculate!–Eberron: Murder in Skyway, Discussion Episode!

by Rudy Basso

In Speculate 2.0’s fifteenth actual play episode, we conclude (for now) our time in Eberron by discussing the experience of playing together over this series of episodes, as Mike, Maurice Broaddus, Lauren Roy, and Marie Bilodeau chat about how the players and characters grew closer over their time playing and adventuring together. If you like what you hear, please tune in next week as we do a special episode discussing all of our adventures so far, and please spread the word about the show…and support our Patreon to get even more content (including special episodes, access to behind the scenes videos, and more!).

This episode was edited by the amazing Rudy Basso–find him at https://twitter.com/RudyBasso , and thanks as always for listening!

23 Nov 14:02

Girl Genius for Friday, November 23, 2018

The Girl Genius comic for Friday, November 23, 2018 has been posted.
10 Aug 15:08

Pluralistic distinctions in Hinduism

Hi everybody!  If you follow my personal blog, you may have noticed I’ve been busy becoming a doctor, which unfortunately meant I had to be effectively dead to the world for a couple of months.

But now that’s over, and I’d like to address a couple of points that have come across the WWC space in that time.  Some of these are unanswered questions on Indian history and Hinduism and some relate to questions that have been answered already that our followers have raised some commentary on, so if you asked a question about any of those topics, please read through this post as it’s going to cover a lot of ground.

One question (directed at me in particular), asked how it is possible for a person to be both a Hindu and an atheist.  Another raised some concerns about the view of the sacredness of cows in modern Hinduism, and the intersection of cow-veneration and caste.  I think both of these intertwine and ultimately come together in the same place.

To start, let me deconstruct the basic structure of a common or garden Hindu myth:

Indra and/or Brahma: *does something stupid*

Indra and/or Brahma: I screwed up.

Indra and/or Brahma: Halp.

Vishnu: *concocts elaborate plan to restore order to the world, usually involving shapeshifting, logical technicalities, and possibly orchestrating a war or two*

If that looks silly to you, compare it to the central story of Christianity:

Humanity: *does lots of stupid stuff*

God: Y'all are screwed up.

God. You need halp.

God: *concocts elaborate plan to save mankind, involving shapeshifting, logical technicalities, and ritually sacrificing himself to himself*

Please resist the temptation to come at me for this, literally everyone.  I’m casting everything in deliberately silly terms, because if the Hindu myth looks silly to you and the Christian myth does not, you’re merely getting a sense of what I did growing up, only in reverse.

Nontheistic Hinduism   

If you take the words of what we commonly call “religion” literally, you miss a great part of the picture, and I believe this is true for a literalist/fundamentalist and for a nonbeliever.  When we look at a religion, we must examine it as a historically-situated phenomenon, because that’s what it is.  A religion doesn’t just arrive one day fully-formed, even in the case of a single founder, which Hinduism doesn’t even have.

“Religion” comes from the Latin religio, meaning “bond” or “reverence.”  In a broader sense, it means “obligation,” “sense of right,” or “conscientiousness.”  Already it seems obvious how subjective those terms are.  You may have heard of the “Just World hypothesis,” which underpins most religious thinking, in that if we just do the right thing, destiny/fate/the world/the next world will naturally pan out in our favor.  The trouble with that, even if you believe it’s true, is that you’re still stuck trying to figure out what “the right thing” is.  Enter sacred texts, which seem to be formulas for the right behavior and belief, and it looks to many like we’ve got an answer to this problem.

If only it were that simple.  "The right thing" turns out to be different in every text you read, because these texts were written in different times and places by different people who, if they found some way of living that they thought was “the right thing,” found something that worked for them in that time and place, but wouldn’t necessarily function for anyone else anywhere or anywhen else.

Our ancestors may have promulgated a lot of BS that has since been proven wrong, but they weren’t stupid.  They at least tried to make sense of the world but due to environmental factors and limited horizons around the world, those explanations they came up with, in sacred texts and practices and rituals, differ from each other in crucial ways.

But they do say something about how humans have viewed the universe and our place in it over time.  That’s what I find compelling: the multitude of ways that our ancestors attempted to explain the workings of the universe.  I think the comparison and contrast tell us much more about ourselves, how we work, and our place in the world than any religious dogma.  What’s cool is the pluralistic thought and argumentation and attempts to analyze real phenomena that might just happen to be wrapped in a context that we in the modern world view as religious but in ancient times it was just how a given group of people lived.  Personally, I couldn’t care less about the specifics of salvation and divine grace and devotion.

So, yeah, I’m really not interested in hearing about how great and liberating your religion is.  That’s great and I’m happy for you, but I really want nothing less than to participate.  Stop trying to convert me, please.

People often argue that being confronted with death makes you religious.  I would beg to differ.  I’ve dealt with a lot of death, especially in recent years, and if anything it’s made me less theistic, not more, but also more thoughtful, more nuanced, and more appreciative of family and human connection.

With such an attitude, in a world constantly strained with tensions between different religions, and between the religious and non-religious, it’s difficult to sit comfortably in any single group identity.  So, yes, I very often feel like I have no spiritual and political bedfellows other than people who’ve been dead for 1300 years and will forever dwell in anonymity.

In that sense, I’ve been lucky to have the background I do.  Although history is full of heterodox views springing up all over the world, in India many of them were recorded and never fully stamped out by political entities that favored the orthodox.  I have to chalk this up to the origins of the thing we call “Hinduism” being a very organic synthesis of elements from South, Southeast, East, and Central Eurasia, which all brewed together in the Indian subcontinent into a chaotic patchwork of tribal and communal distinctions in practice and belief that were, until about 1 CE, probably far more fluid than they were rigid.  It’s always been impossible to enforce a singular belief system in that part of the world, so in that mix, people believed in all sorts of gods, and some of them believed in none.

There have been codified schools of thought that explicitly denied the validity of established rituals, the existence of and even the human need for belief in gods.

I talk about a few of them here.

Some quotes:

There is no heaven, no final liberation, nor any soul in another world. Nor do the actions of the four castes, orders, and others, produce any real effect.

- a verse attributed to the Cārvāka school

God is unproved.

- Sāṁkhyapravacana Sūtra, 1.92

But, after all, who knows, and who can say

Whence it all came, and how creation happened?

- Nāsadiya Sūkta, verse 6 (Rig Veda, 10.129)

Yes, despite the stereotype of India as a land of spiritual supernaturalism, explicitly and implicitly nontheistic belief systems have existed there since nearly the beginning of recorded history.  Sanskrit has a larger non-theistic literature than Ancient Greek or Latin.  "Hinduism" became the catch-all term for the collective indigenous beliefs of the Indian subcontinent, regardless of particulars.  The terms  "Hindu" and “India” come from the same derivation (referring to the Sindhu, or Indus, River in the northwest—but I won’t assert that the two terms mean the same thing, as that is categorically untrue).  Therefore to claim that atheism is somehow “un-Hindu” is historically, anthropologically, and linguistically ignorant.  While perhaps unusual, disbelief in gods and the supernatural is as valid a position in “Hinduism” as any other.  It does mean, though, that it also coexists under the same label as its polar opposites—strong theism, superstition, and virulent fundamentalism.

Cows and Hinduism 

  This tension can be seen in some of the issues surrounding the position of the cow in modern Hinduism.  This potentially arose in the first place for secular reasons—it is true that cows probably acquired some status of reverence because of their utility in tilling fields, providing milk, dung for fertilizer, etc.  But meat is also a pretty useful product.  Did you know that modern India is the world’s 5th largest beef producer, 7th largest beef consumer, and largest beef exporter?  All this despite legislation against cow/bull/bullock slaughter in half the country.  Plenty of societies through history have both valued the cow’s utility while alive and dead.  Why the special status in Hinduism?

Cows have always been useful animals, but also more expensive to keep and maintain, compared to other herd animals such as sheep or goats, so they became a symbol of wealth in ancient Asia.  This association is thought to be very old, potentially dating to before the Indo-European expansion.  As they were expensive, only those at the top of the social heap could afford to keep many, and in ancient India, that was the Brahmin caste.  If you want to keep your cows, you can’t have the possibility that someone’s going to poach it for dinner, and so casting the cow as a respected or venerated creature is a pretty effective way to do that.  This also means that you get to keep your symbol of wealth and status and the poors don’t get to have any.

As cow sacrifice and beef consumption is actually very well-attested during the Vedic period, what probably happened is that around 800 BCE, with the ascendancy of the Kuru Kingdom and the codification of rituals at a state and urban level, beef-eating began to be disfavored by lawgivers.  Heterodox movements at the time, which would give rise to Buddhism and Jainism, also emphasized vegetarianism and as these were becoming popular among all social classes, the orthodox priesthood adopted certain hallmarks (like vegetarianism) which had the side effect (intentional or otherwise) of making avoidance of cow slaughter into a status symbol.  So previously enthusiastic meat-eaters became strict vegetarians.  Other non-Vedic elements made their way into the Brahminical religion around this time, such as the cycle of birth and death, and these ideas are regarded as a characteristic of Hinduism today.
However, as the influence Brahminical orthodoxy was limited to a core in north-central India, around the modern Delhi area, beef-eating continued as a practice on the frontier.  Today, Nepal, the most Hindu country in the world, consumes beef quite freely.

As mentioned before, you can argue that “Hinduism” isn’t really a single thing.  When someone says that Hindus don’t eat beef, what they mean is that certain varieties of Hindus don’t eat beef.  Some Hindus don’t out of religious reasons.  Some hold no religious belief against it but don’t do it out of habit or tradition or other ethical consideration.  Some religious Hindus thrive on beef.  Beef is typically a nutritionally-dense, readily-available food for poor and working class people, including those from disadvantaged caste groups.  The act of condemning them for their eating habits or taking away a primary source of nutrition using a religious excuse is an act that can’t be disconnected from its historical and sociocultural underpinnings discussed in the previous paragraphs.  An attitude toward the cow that may have started as an innocent economic consideration has become laden with a ton of cultural baggage about as complex as the history of the subcontinent itself.

I don’t eat beef myself.  I’ve eaten it before, and it usually made me feel a bit ill.  I guess descent from countless generations of vegetarian Brahmins left my gut unprepared for that particular kind of meat.  Beef production also uses too much carbon for my comfort and I once ate a hamburger in front of a cow and it turns out they have very judgey eyes.  I’m holding out for vat-grown meat, personally.

However, when states in India pass beef bans, they do it on the grounds that it’s an honored animal in Hinduism, and while that’s true, there’s a historical and social context behind that and not all varieties of “Hindu” actually observe that prohibition.  Politicians are doing it cynically to drum up support among a certain contingent of “values voters” so they can keep their jobs in the next election cycle.

Regarding the place of religion and cows in modern India, many people, intimately familiar with the realities on the ground, have written on the topic better than I ever could.  With the arrival of a new wave of invaders and colonizers, Europeans and the British in particular, identities shifted yet again, and those echoes are felt all over the modern republic.  Here’s a good read

Hinduism and Pluralism   

When we take care to not drop all adherents of a particular religion into a sack with the worst ones, we need to remember to extend that courtesy to all religions, because all religions have assholes trying to make everyone around them think like them, and those are the people we usually end up hearing about on the news.  The choice to eat or not eat beef (or anything) is a personal one that, while informed by society and background and culture, isn’t solely determined by it.  A claim, by a Hindu or non-Hindu, that any particular thing is “the Hindu way” is to fundamentally misunderstand the history of the thing that we’ve come to call “Hinduism.”

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that societies like the Gupta Empire, the Tang Dynasty, the Abbasid Caliphate, and the Italian Renaissance are regarded as “Golden Ages” and were also more open to pluralism and heterodoxy than the societies before and after them.  Scholarship, philosophy, and science always flower when different views speak to and challenge each other freely and openly, and when they challenge the established power structure, even unsuccessfully.  If you can’t withstand a robust challenge to your worldview, then you’re not growing, and if you’re not growing, you’re failing.  If you have an allegiance or affection to a particular identity, then you owe it to yourself and those like you not to let the ones you call your own succumb to the worst among them.

So, I’m happy, comfortable, and proud to claim the label of Hindu even if I believe humans made demons and humans made gods, and that the stories I grew up with are just (really cool) fantasy.  I do it because the Hindu right would like everyone to believe that there is a single, homogenous Hinduism that never actually existed, and that is a view that I find at best impoverished and at worst geopolitically dangerous.  By claiming the label “Hindu” when I refuse supernaturalism and pseudohistory, I am able to do a small part to render that worldview false.

–Mod Nikhil

05 Jul 23:00

Good Book Thursday 6-29-2017

by Jenny

Give us some good book, please.

The post Good Book Thursday 6-29-2017 appeared first on Argh Ink.

25 Jul 17:07

MLK Would Never Shut Down a Freeway, and 6 Other Myths About the Civil Rights Movement and Black Lives Matter

by Stephen Crockett
Kyla.galbraith

"As King wrote from a Birmingham jail in 1963, 'I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens’ Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice […] who constantly says: ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action.’”

On Saturday, as protests mounted across the country following the police killings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed explained the large police presence at downtown protests to reporters: “Dr. King would never take a freeway.”

Reed’s claim was historically absurd. Martin Luther King Jr. took many a highway—most famously, perhaps, in the Selma-to-Montgomery march.

Reed is not the only one trafficking in dangerous and distorted ideas of the civil rights movement. Across the political spectrum over the past two years, as Black Lives Matter burst into national consciousness, many commentators—from former Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee (who said that King would be appalled by BLM) to Oprah Winfrey (who told young activists “to take note of the strategic, peaceful intention if you want real change” ) and the Rev. Barbara Reynolds (“We were nonviolent activists who won hearts by conveying respectability and changed laws by delivering a message of love and unity”)—have invoked the history of the civil rights movement to chastise Black Lives Matter. They and many others have cast today’s protesters as dangerous and reckless and not living up to the peaceful, respectable, unified legacy of the civil rights movement.

These framings misrepresent the movements that BLM activists are building across the country and the history of the civil rights movement. Such historical revisionism is both dangerous and comfortable—dangerous because it grossly distorts how the civil rights movement actually proceeded, and comfortable because it allows many Americans to keep today’s movement at arm’s length. This repeated comparison has become one of the ways that many justify hand-wringing on the sidelines—as if they would act, given a righteous movement like King’s, but today’s activists are simply too excessive, too disruptive and too unrespectable.

Calling out these myths is more than setting the historical record straight. The “propaganda of history,” as W.E.B. Du Bois reminded us a century ago, becomes a way of “giving us a false but pleasurable sense of accomplishment”—for soothing and justifying inaction in the face of persistent racial inequality.

Myth 1: The civil rights movement wasn’t disruptive.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott was a disruptive consumer boycott that sought to use the power of black consumers to hurt the bus company and force the city to address black demands. The Birmingham, Ala., campaign that King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference waged in 1963 was a campaign of mass civil disobedience designed to overflow the jails and cripple downtown businesses and city function. Key to the work of many civil rights organizations, from SCLC to the Congress of Racial Equality and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, was mass civil disobedience because they understood that injustice would not be changed without disrupting civic and commercial life.

Myth 2: The movement’s righteousness was apparent.

The civil rights movement made most Americans uncomfortable. From presidents to ordinary citizens, many regarded it as “extremism.” People regularly called MLK and Rosa Parks communists and traitors, not just in the South but also in the “liberal” North, for their critiques of police brutality and their support of housing and school desegregation. Although our public imagination focuses on Southern-redneck racism, both Parks and King came to see the white “moderate” as key to the problem. As King wrote from a Birmingham jail in 1963, “I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens’ Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice […] who constantly says: ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action.’”

Myth 3: “Respectable” activists like Rosa Parks were publicly appreciated.

Parks spent many decades grappling with how hard it was to be a “troublemaker,” and with the stigmatization and punishment of black people who dissented endured. She noted how those who challenged the racial order as she did were labeled “radicals, soreheads, agitators, troublemakers.” Politically active for two decades before her bus stand (and four decades afterward), Parks despaired for years before the boycott that no mass movement was emerging.

“Such a good job of brainwashing was done on the Negro,” Parks observed, “that a militant Negro was almost a freak of nature to them, many times ridiculed by others of his own group.” She struggled with feeling isolated and crazy, writing how she felt “completely alone and desolate, as if I was descending in a black and bottomless chasm.”

Myth 4: Most well-meaning Americans supported the civil rights movement.

The majority of the American public did not support the civil rights movement while it was happening. In May 1961, in a Gallup survey, only 22 percent of Americans approved of what the Freedom Riders were doing, and 57 percent of Americans said that the sit-ins at lunch counters, freedom buses and other demonstrations by Negroes were hurting the Negro’s chances of being integrated in the South.

Lest we see this as Southerners skewing the national sample, in 1964, a year before the passage of the Voting Rights Act, in a poll conducted by the New York Times, a majority of white people in New York City said the civil rights movement had gone too far: “While denying any deepseated prejudice, a large number of those questioned used the same terms to express their feelings. They spoke of Negroes’ receiving ‘everything on a silver platter’ and of ‘reverse discrimination’ against whites.” Nearly half said that picketing and demonstrations hurt black people’s cause. In 1966, a year after Selma and the passage of the Voting Rights Act, 85 percent of white people and 30 percent of black people nationally believed that demonstrations by black people on civil rights hurt the advancement of civil rights.

Myth 5: The federal government was a key supporter.

The history of the March on Washington is revealing of the federal government’s approach to the movement. Now celebrated as one of the most American events of the 20th century, the march was feared at the time. In a poll a few days before the march, 63 percent of Americans surveyed had an unfavorable opinion, and numerous congressmen denounced the march as decidedly “un-American.”

The FBI surveilled the march’s organization for many months preceding the event. The march was policed like a military battle; in Operation Steep Hill, the Pentagon put 19,000 troops on standby. Five thousand local and suburban police, National Guard troops and Army rangers were given riot-control training and were on duty that day. The Kennedy administration had rigged the microphone so that it could be turned off if that was deemed necessary. In the wake of the march’s success and King’s galvanizing influence, the FBI, with the Kennedy administration’s approval, expanded its surveillance of King.

Myth 6: The movement focused on the South.

Forced to leave Montgomery for Detroit in 1957, Rosa Parks found Detroit the “Northern promised land that wasn’t” and continued her activism fighting the racism of the Jim Crow North till her death in 2005. She repeatedly lamented how black movements challenging school and housing segregation, urban renewal, economic injustice and police brutality were opposed in the 1950s and 1960s, and this “resistance to change long beforehand” laid the groundwork for the uprisings of the mid-1960s.

Following the 1965 Watts uprising, King took to the pages of the Saturday Review to criticize the “surprise” evinced by California officials, given long-standing movements in their own backyards. “In my travels in the North,” King said, he had grown “increasingly … disillusioned with the power structures there … [who] showered praise on the heroism of Southern Negroes. Yet when the issues were joined concerning local conditions only the language was polite; the rejection was firm and unequivocal.”

So let’s be clear: Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks and their many comrades were persevering, courageous and disruptive, and they made America uncomfortable—just like many people engaging in BLM movements across the country today. But we have stripped them of this history. By turning civil rights heroes like King and Parks into Thanksgiving Day parade balloons—happy, larger than life and stripped of their substance—we make them “unavailable for where we are now,” as the late Vincent Harding put it, “so we can keep ourselves comfortably distant from the realities [they were] trying to grapple with.”

King certainly did take a freeway. What are we doing?

22 Jul 16:15

Racism Is Not Hate

by Yesha Callahan

I have a cousin named Jerry*.

He is 10 years older than me. He was a virtuoso drummer who you would have been willing to swear had four arms and three feet if you had ever heard him play. He became a prodigy on the piano even though he never owned a keyboard. He is so charismatic I once watched him jokingly talk a group of women into believing there was a piece of muscle near a pig’s hind legs that was not pork. He is shockingly handsome, and when he takes his shirt off, he looks as if he were chiseled from a slab of chocolate marble. Everyone who meets Jerry (both men and women) immediately falls in unshakeable love with him, partly because he has been seemingly bequeathed every talent that God could bestow on a human being.

He also smokes crack.

One of his most endearing qualities is that he is openly honest about his struggles with addiction. He is willing to tell you stories about how he bamboozled innocent people for money to buy narcotics. He will share the intimate details about the infinite numbers of drug programs he’s tried.

Jerry is not shy about telling his story, but as he regales spellbound listeners with the story of his lifelong fight with addiction, replete with sordid tales and sprinkled-in cuss words, he never mentions the specific drug he uses. There is something about the notion of  smoking crack that bothers him. It rips him apart when someone says it aloud. He will admit to all his flaws, willingly offer that he is an addict, but he will not say that he smokes crack.

Jerry’s unwillingness to acknowledge his crack addiction is similar to that of white America’s unwillingness to acknowledge racism. As black America attempts to shed the remnants of oppression that has bound us for all of our existence in this country, perhaps the biggest barrier we face is the resistance by a large number of white Americans to even accept the premise that racism is even a problem.

Even in the face of hard numbers—like the fact that black teens are 21 times more likely to be shot dead by a police officer than their white counterparts. Even in the shadow of the mountainous pile of video footage showing police using Tasers on and choking and shooting unarmed black men and women to death. Even with the voluminous stack of numbers showing that black people are hired less often, earn less money and are fired more frequently than whites with equal education and qualifications. A large number of white Americans won’t accept that there might be a scintilla of racism inside the borders of the beloved country. It must be a lack of work ethic. It must be the “gimme culture” black people buy into. It must be happenstance. It can’t be racism. They will not say it. They will not admit to it.

Last week, I watched a group of white men and women sit around MSNBC’s Morning Joe roundtable during this segment and pontificate about how they’ve known Donald Trump for years and have never seen or heard the presumptive GOP presidential nominee do anything racist. They said they believed he had a good heart. They even pointed to how he had hired minorities and how he had a Jewish son-in-law. They were genuinely perplexed about his constant use of racial undertones. Even though they had seen and heard the man who is percentage points away from being the leader of the free world repeatedly offer—not just thoughts—but proposed policies designed to target and exclude people because of their race, they still would not call him a racist.

Then it hit me:

Maybe they don’t understand what racism is.

When confronted with charges of racism, many offenders will issue the defensive retort that “there’s not a racist bone in their body.” They offer apologies with the caveat that others don’t know what’s “in their heart.” They believe they are good, fair-minded Americans who don’t hate black people or want them wiped from the face of the earth, and therefore, they can’t be racist. After all, racism must be hate. They simply misunderstand the definition of racism, so they absolve themselves of all responsibility.

Let’s start with Merriam-Webster’s two definitions of racism:

Racism is: 1) a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race; 2) racial prejudice or discrimination.

We will dispense with the first definition quickly. There is no way to concretely know what anyone believes. Contrary to popular sentiment, black people do not care what is buried inside white hearts. It is the actions that affect us.

The second definition is the key. When stripped of all prerequisites and dressings, prejudice and discrimination can still exist without animus or intent. Racism has nothing to do with hate. It just is. Whether I hatch an intricate plot to kill another human being or take a life in a drunken driving accident, I have still committed homicide.

The suggestion that the United States stop people from entering the country based on ethnicity and religion is inherently discriminatory. According to the dictionary of the language we all speak, that is a definition of racism.

Therefore, by definition, Donald Trump is a racist.

27 Jan 23:21

Establishing a Peace Accord Between Parents and Their Childless Friends

by Everywhereist

When you are my age, everyone starts caring about your uterus. Not in a fun way, where they send it text messages or memes featuring shirtless Jeff Goldblum circa Jurassic Park, but in a very critical, “what the fuck is wrong with your downstairs human factory and, by extension, you” kind of way.

Because if you are a 35-year-old woman without children, they assume that something is, in fact, wrong.

Gratuitous photo of me and my nephew because it’s my blog.

And maybe something is wrong. Maybe you aren’t talking about it because you can’t have biological children. Maybe you are secretly undergoing IVF and it doesn’t seem to be working and the discussion is too painful. Maybe you are in the process of navigating the sea of bureaucracy that is adoption and you don’t want to discuss it. Maybe you aren’t having them for a host of reasons big and small. Or maybe you just don’t want them.

Maybe that’s a big deal. Maybe it isn’t.

I haven’t written about this on the blog – the issue of what it’s like to be 35 and childless – because I don’t find there to be all that much to discuss. It’s a fact about who we are. George Harrison would always get asked what it was like to a Beatle. His response was, “I don’t know. What’s it like not being one?”

I always loved that, because it suggested that every experience is valuable. But it seems like all I read about is the unresolvable conflict between parents and their childless friends. It’s as though at some point, we all stopped being people with feelings, and just started being pawns in some weird culture war.

If you do any analysis of search patterns around this matter, you’ll find they tell an ugly history.

“childless friends don’t get it”

“why can’t childless people understand”

“when do children suck the life out of you”

“why do our friends who had a baby now suck”

I might be embellishing some of those. The point is, I feel like we’re constantly getting bombarded with messages that suggest there is an inherent rift between people who have children and people who don’t, and you are automatically on one side of that debate or the other.

Personally, I don’t think that’s true. I’m not going to stand up and be an advocate for not having children, nor am I going to tell you to have them. I love children. I think they are wonderful and often sticky and an entire lifetime of work and you will NEVER SLEEP PAST 8AM EVER AGAIN. I like spending time with kids because they usually they know all the good gossip and where the grown-ups hid the candy and how to work the TV. But when 7pm rolls around they turn in the Tasmanian Devil and I have no idea what the fuck that is about. I find them exhausting and agonizing and annoying and heart-breaking and kind and brutal and beautiful.

I think they make life fantastic and endlessly complicated. I wouldn’t even begin to tell you what you should do when it comes to having children because I cannot imagine a more personal thing than that. We’d never tell someone how to chew their food, or how to poop, or how to comb their hair, but for some reason, we feel it’s okay to weigh in on whether or not they should make themselves responsible for another sentient human being. And then, if they chose to have that sentient human being, we somehow feel that we have the right to weigh on how they should raise them EVEN IF WE ARE WHOLLY UNQUALIFIED TO DO SO.

The only thing that I truly feel strongly about is that if you really want kids, and for some reason can’t have them, then that fucking sucks. And I am so, so sorry. I wish I could hug you and then we could have a good cry and eat ice cream out of the container and watch old episodes of Star Trek until you feel better (wait, do other people watch Star Trek when they’re sad? Yes, they must).

And that when my friends do have children and still manage to hang out once every six months or so, or return an email, or are able to get the grocery shopping done and maybe take a shower over the course of several days, I’m damn impressed, because I can barely do any of that and I don’t have a tiny demanding roommate who wakes up screaming in my face several times over the course of a night.

But there is a small percentage of people on either side of the debate who are basically being dickbags about this whole thing, and I feel like they’re ruining things for the rest of us.  I would like to address those folks now.

Ahem …

—————

TO THE SMALL PERCENTAGE OF PEOPLE WITH CHILDREN WHO THINK THAT EVERYONE – ME INCLUDED – ABSOLUTELY FUCKING NEEDS TO HAVE THEM:

Firstly, my uterus would like to note that she appreciates all of your concern. She’s doing just dandy, except for when she decides to slough her inner lining monthly (which tends to coincide with any number of important events in my life) in what can best be described as an outtake from a particularly gory episode of Dexter.

And she would like to humbly request that you stop directing certain comments to us. I’m sure that none of these were meant maliciously (she is undecided on the matter), but they are not making us feel great about ourselves. Here is a brief sample:

“You’ll never understand love until you have kids.” Holy shit. This is poetically condescending. It’s also profoundly hurtful to tell someone that the depths of your emotions are far deeper than anything they’ve ever felt. Is every childless person just a sociopath, then? OH, AND ALSO, IT’S LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE TO DETERMINE IF YOU HAVE A GREATER CAPACITY FOR LOVE THAN I DO. I love my husband, I love my nephews and nieces, and I would fucking open my own veins for any one them if I thought it would make their lives better. I even love you, you belittling asshole, despite the fact that you say shit like this to me. So don’t tell me I don’t understand love, because the fact that you still have your head attached to your neck says otherwise.

“You don’t know what real stress is.” Yeah, you’re right. My paralyzing anxiety and history of depression are probably just me being self-centered. Thanks!

“You have got to have kids.” I’m always amused when people say this, as though it’s a novel idea and not something that society has been hurtling at me since those tender years before I even menstruated. This notion circles in my head on a daily basis. But you know what? I don’t, under any circumstances, have to do anything. It’s 4pm and I HAVEN’T YET SHOWERED TODAY.

“Well, some of us have children.” Someone said this as a means of shooting down my opinion. That person is an asshole.

“You and Rand would make great parents.” Thank you. Seriously. This is a sweet and kind thing to say. There are many other things I think I would be good at (a brief list: professional cake eater; kitten masseuse; mistress to Daveed Diggs), but likewise, these are skills that will go unrealized.

“You might not want them now, but just you wait!” Thanks for your insight on huge life decisions. You’re right. At the age of 35, I probably just don’t know myself well enough.

“How could you do that to your husband?” or “You just haven’t met the right guy.” The number of women who told me they got comments like this is ASTONISHING. Apparently, if we don’t want kids, it’s 1.) something that we are depriving our partners of and 2.) because of problems we’ve had dating. I can’t even imagine what my gay friends must hear.

“I wish I had your life” or “Must be nice” or basically anything that sort of passive aggressively says that my life is a cake walk. You know what? I could say the exact same things about your life, and your kid. So I guess we’re even.

“Don’t adopt.” Here is what happens: I will be made aware, by some generous soul who thinks that I don’t know rudimentary human biology, that my “time to have a baby is running out.” OH MY GOD THANK YOU FOR REMINDING ME THAT MY INSIDES ARE SLOWLY TURNING TO DUST. Awesome. (Also? My time may already be up, assholes.) And when I note that we can always adopt if we decide we want to become parents, I have actually been told that I shouldn’t because “it’s not the same.” Fuck these people to the darkest corners of hell.

“Have you thought about freezing your eggs?” Have you thought about not vocalizing every thought that enters your mind?

“When you guys have kids …” Nope. Nope. Stop making it sound like a given.

“You wouldn’t understand. You don’t have kids.” A while back, someone close to us was describing a cancer scare they had. They were telling us about those few scary days when they were waiting to find out their results, and I replied that was something that Rand and I knew well. “Oh, no,” they said. “No. It’s totally different when you are a parent.” And I sat there, stunned. I was so overcome with anger, I could barely speak. Dismissing your friend’s hardships and cancer scares because they don’t have kids? That’s a really shitty thing to do. And when does it end? Are the emotions of a father of four more important than a mother of two? Are my opinion and my feelings and my experiences so entirely different because I don’t have children? Fuck anyone that creates a hierarchy based on shit like this.

“You’re being selfish.” Huh. Yeah. I’m a selfish jerk. I guess I should have kids. Wait, NO.

“Who will take care of you when you’re older?” Seriously? That’s your healthcare plan for your golden years? Considering that I just saw your toddler bite the head off a Barbie, you might want to rethink that.

“So … are you guys even able to have kids?” I don’t know – maybe we’re doing it wrong? I’ll send you a few videos and you can critique our form.

—————

Now, I understand that the flip side of this is that there are plenty of people who don’t have kids who are complete and utter assholes towards people who do. And I would like to speak to them, now.

ATTENTION, MY BARREN BROTHERS AND SISTERS!

KIDDING! KIDDING! Please put down that blunt object. Instead, how about we collectively make the following promises to our friends who have children:

We will not dispense parenting advice unless it is explicitly asked for. And guess what? IT WILL NOT BE ASKED FOR. Because the vast majority of us don’t actually have a FUCKING CLUE what we are talking about. Likewise, we are not allowed to give astronauts advice about what they should do in space because we “read an article about it” or watched Interstellar a dozen times. Nor can you perform surgery because you’ve seen every episode of ER. Just sit back and be quiet while your pals are trying to calm a raging human who may be covered in poo, BECAUSE YOU ARE NOT HELPING.

When we want to see our friends with kids, we realize that means bringing over take-out at some ungodly early hour, that the meal might be interrupted by a tornado of crazy toddlering, and that we should get the hell out by 9:45 because that kid wakes up at the ass crack of dawn and doesn’t give a shit as to whether or not Mommy and Daddy are hungover. We acknowledge that any time spent with our friends might be squeezed between naps, interrupted by a torrent of “why” questions, and may involve a lot of bodily fluids. And we will do it anyway because in some disturbing way it makes us nostalgic for college.

When we have our friends over, we will not get upset when their kids touch/drool on/destroy things, because honestly, if we didn’t want it to get touched/drooled on/destroyed we should have put it away before they came over.

We will not compare parenthood to owning a pet. (I didn’t actually even know this was a thing.  SERIOUSLY, PEOPLE? NO.) As my friend Sara put it, “I don’t know too many babies that can be left in a crate all day.” Also, puppies don’t wear diapers and are WAY easier to feed.

Although, admittedly, I laughed so hard at this I nearly peed:

We will not highlight all the wonderful things that our friends used to do that are now more difficult or exhausting or flat out impossible because they are at the mercy of a wee diapered dictator.

We will babysit when they are in a bind. They, in turn, agree to be cool with us feeding their children candy and teaching them how to swear in other languages.

Later, I taught him how to say obscene things in Italian. It was real cute.

We will offer to help. Sometimes we will achieve this simply by shutting up. Other times, we will ask what we can do, or grab one of the twins before she turns completely feral in the grocery store or help put the lid on a sippy cup while they are trying to hold a toddler because THEY DON’T HAVE THREE HANDS.

We will ask to see photos of the wee ones and squeal about how goddamn cute they are.

“Well, you’re the one who decided to have kids.” Nope. No. No. We won’t even think about saying this.

We will absolutely not get weirded out when, after decades of friendship, we see our friend’s boobs doing what boobs are supposed to do. And if we are in public we will shoot eye daggers at anyone who gives a breastfeeding mother a dirty look.

We will never tell our friends to “sleep when the baby sleeps.” Because we know that 1.) it’s not that simple and 2.) THE BABY DOESN’T ACTUALLY SLEEP.

We will not judge our parent-friends for: using formula/breastfeeding/buying disposable diapers/having food on their clothes/being unwashed/letting their kid use an iPad for several dozen hours/forgetting their child’s name/forgetting our name. (Actually, this is just a good rule for everyone, everywhere.)

“Was he/she planned?” Again, I didn’t even know this was a thing, but sweet Jesus, do not ask your friends if their child was conceived intentionally or not. At the point where the baby is a real live person, I can assure you, it does not fucking matter. (Ditto with the whole “Did you have IVF?” “Do twins run in your family?” Did you mean to space them so far apart?”)

“Are you having more?” Remember how annoying it was when we were badgered about not having children? Congratulations. You’ve become everything you hate.

—————

As I was working on this post, I sent out a couple of tweets and started a Facebook discussion about the topic. The experiences relayed to me from both sides made me a little stabby.

Most of us, I found, were told the same thing over and over again.

 

The one thing that bonded us all together was this: nearly all of us had had our opinions disparaged or our feelings dismissed. Nearly all of us had people who were entirely unempathetic to our situation. Sometimes, the ramifications of this were devastating.

And that’s when I realized something: the line of demarcation in this supposed conflict isn’t between parents and the childless people. It’s a result of people on both sides of the issue being insensitive to others.

In our diametric culture of good and bad, us vs. them, it’s much easier to look at it as two warring factions. I’m guilty of this as well – in creating this post, I divided everyone into two groups and addressed them separately.

The root of this problem isn’t about whether or not you have kids. It’s about being decent to one another, and respecting someone else’s life and the choices that they’ve made (or the ones they’ve been unable to make), even when they are radically different from your own. There’s no war. There’s just people being shitty to one another because they’re looking for external validation for really big life questions that don’t have a clear answer.

But putting down someone else’s choices won’t legitimize yours. Telling someone that they have to live their lives in the exact same way as you have won’t eliminate your doubts.

Instead, what we need to do is be empathetic to one another. To remember that we aren’t all the same, and that what’s good for one person isn’t necessarily right for another. It’s why we have different television channels and ice cream flavors and why everyone has a different favorite Beatle, even though George is obviously the best one.

It’s why some of us have children and some of us have pets and some of us have miniature York peppermint patties in the freezer. It’s why we all we need to be respectful of the opinions of others, and kind to those we care about, no matter how different they or their lives are.

I hope you join me in this effort to be less of an insensitive dipshit when it comes to the topic of having kids.

Do it for the children.

And my uterus.

—————

P.S. – Thank you to everyone who helped out on this post. I am so angry by some of the b.s. you have to put up with (seriously, what the hell is wrong with speaking to a child in multiple languages?!). You are all wonderful.

12 Feb 22:11

Girls with Slingshots - GWS #1796

by girlswithslingshots@gmail.com (Danielle Corsetto)
New comic!
Today's News:
23 Jan 22:06

Hooray For The Nurses!

by ohboymom

Interplast Nurses in DhakaI’ve spent A LOT of time in hospitals over the past year, which means I’ve spent a lot of time around nurses. Of course the doctors are crucial to my son’s care, but when it comes down to who is spending the most time with Little Dude and me, it’s the nurses without a doubt. […]

The post Hooray For The Nurses! appeared first on OhBoyMom.

08 Jan 22:16

Girl Genius for Wednesday, January 08, 2014

The Girl Genius comic for Wednesday, January 08, 2014 has been posted.
11 Oct 17:47

California Trains Helpers To Meet Demand For Health Insurance

The California health exchange has focused on drumming up interest in coverage during the first month of operation. Certified enrollment counselors can barely keep up with the requests for assistance that are rolling in.

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05 Aug 03:54

Why Not to Say “What Not to Say”: In Support of Asking Questions

by Five Kids Is A Lot Of Kids

It was the great American philosopher, Cookie Monster, who once said, “Asking questions is good way to find out about things.”

Although I agree with Mr. Monster on this one, I always giggled when teachers said a similar thing, “Ask questions. And remember, there are no stupid questions.” Because there are stupid questions, of course. And rude questions. And thoughtless questions. And nosy questions. And ignorant questions, too.

I’ve asked them. I’ve been asked them.

When I had my first miscarriage, for example, a loss that blindsided me like a Mack truck in the night, a church lady asked me if I’d considered examining my life for sin or cutting aspartame from my diet. No kidding. All at once. Like miscarriage by sin and diet soda is a thing. I didn’t respond because I didn’t know what to say, but I have fantasized about a do-over in which I look Church Lady kindly in the eye, and say, “What the hell, friend?”

When Greg and I adopted our three-month-old daughter from Vietnam a year later, a stranger stopped me at the grocery store to ask how I’d tackle the uphill battle of teaching my baby girl to speak English. After cocking my head to the side, baffled, I replied, “I imagine she’ll just pick it up from listening to me.” The woman walked away, shaking her head at my pathetic lack of a plan.

When we brought our son home from Guatemala a few years later and his speech and development delays became apparent, we fielded loads of questions, usually from kids but not as exclusively as one would hope, about what was “wrong” with him. “Some of us wear our differences on the inside,” I’d say, “And some of us wear them on the outside. He gets to keep his on the outside where he can be loud and proud. That’s the way our family rolls.” And then I’d bite my tongue so I didn’t follow up with the question I longed to ask the grown-ups, “Why? What’s wrong with you?”

And when our biological twins arrived a few years later, we got to dispel the notion that we “finally managed to have kids of our own.” “No,” we said again and again, “they’re all our own. That’s what adoption means. That’s what birthing them means. They’re our own.”

So believe me when I say I know about the questions. The well-meaning ones. The heartfelt but poorly-worded ones. The stupid ones. I’ve heard them a thousand times in a million ways.

  • About having an only child. We had one for five years and one kid is a lot of kids, man.
  • About being a stay-at-home mom and a works-outside-the-home mom. I’ve been both. Both are awesome, and both suck hard.
  • About infertility.
  • About adoption.
  • About pregnancy.
  • About bottle feeding and breastfeeding.
  • About how to get kids to sleep. (Sleep? Ha!)
  • About developmental delay.
  • About twins.
  • About having five kids. “You have five?!” they ask, stunned. And I like to reply, “Yes, just the five.”

Sure enough, I know about the questions. I do. And I understand the special kind of crazy they can make us.

But there’s a writing trend lately that concerns me which I’ll call the “What Not to Say’s.”

  • What not to say to a mom of an only.
  • What not to say to a mom of many.
  • What not to say to a mom of none.
  • What not to say to adoptive parents.
  • What not to say to parents of kids with special needs.
  • What not to say when mom heads back to work.
  • What not to say when mom stays home.

I don’t know about you, but WHEW! Even though I’ve been all these moms, I can’t keep track of all the things I’m not supposed to say. And I realized these articles have made me afraid. Afraid to engage with my fellow moms. Afraid to take risks in relationships. Afraid to ask questions to find common ground. Afraid I’ll hurt a mama friend even with the best of intentions if I don’t word a question the way she’d like to hear it.

ID-10032700It’s not that I disagree with each What Not to Say specifically. When I read them, I nod in sympathy and chuckle in understanding. But I do disagree with these articles cumulatively because, while it’s a good idea to educate the public to respect our family make-ups, the myriad lists of Questions to Avoid risk shutting down conversations entirely. Instead of teaching people to use discretion or find compassionate language in general, the What Not to Say specifics silence well-intentioned, kind-hearted folks who’d rather say nothing than say it wrong.

Now of course there are people who ask questions for intrusive reasons. Or selfish reasons. And there are people with a poor sense of boundaries. But I’ve found over time that most people who ask questions are looking for a deeper connection. Or are trying to find answers for their pain. Or want to know how to better relate to someone in their life who seems to have a situation similar to mine. Or are trying to understand this shifting world. And, while I can’t always answer the questions, nor should anyone have to, I don’t want people who need answers to stop asking for them.

What’s more, even if we can somehow keep track of all the What Not to Says, silencing the questions will harm my children. My kids are going to have to deal with questions constantly, partly because of our family make-up and partly because they interact with other kids who, you know, ask questions.

I won’t always be there to coach my kids through responses like “I don’t want to talk about that right now. Let’s play.” Or “I have a hard time with words. Will you be my friend and help me?” Or “All the kinds of moms are real.”

When I engage with people out in the world — people who ask gentle questions, people who ask cruel questions, people who ask kindly-meant questions in a wonky way — my kids watch me model appropriate responses. They learn both how to engage and how not to engage as needed. And they learn I’ve got their backs. Always.

At the end of the day, I’d rather field the tough questions than shut down the conversation.

Turns out Cookie Monster was right. “Asking questions is good way to find out about things.”

Even if the questions sometimes suck.

photo 3 (48)BethAbby3

……….

I’m very curious what you think.
Do you agree? Bring on the questions? Or are you, like, No way! There should totally be a list of What Not to Say!

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3D Character With Question Mark image credit to renjith krishnan via freedigitalimages.net