[Dragaera] Not unthinkable

[David Dyer-Bennet via Dragaera]

On 8/26/2015 18:54, Howard Brazee via Dragaera wrote:
>
> There are some things that seem unthinkable until we see them long enough to think they may even be normal.
>
> Sometimes I applaud the changes, sometimes I don’t.
>
> When prime time TV introduced non-threatening gay characters into our homes, we started to accept them as such to such an extent that we are seeing real changes in attitudes.
>
> But when prime time TV shows mass shooting - it also becomes “normal”, or at least thinkable.   And when people preach the need to arm ourselves while blaming all our failures upon others, “defending” ourselves from those who we blame becomes thinkable as well.

Late warning: we're not going to have a political discussion about guns 
here.  Since nobody jumped on this in nearly a week, maybe it won't be a 
problem.  However, the previous paragraph contains a claim about those 
who exercise their second amendment rights that takes a strong political 
position.  Letting it go by unchallenged is acceptance, and it's 
unlikely we all accept it.  Therefore it's important that we *not post 
such things* here, okay?

> Sometimes we believe in peaceful change - sometimes we don’t.    And often we don’t even think about it.

I'm very much a peaceful change person myself.  Similarly, I favor 
incremental rather than revolutionary change.

> It’s very easy for soldiers or cops or revolutionaries to watch their peers to figure out what’s “normal”, and emulate what they are doing and saying - especially when they are obviously different from what we were taught.

This last is what I think of as "living in a bubble". We all do.  My 
bubble is gay-accepting (first friend to come out to me was in 1973), 
trans-accepting, basically peaceful but with rather a lot of people who 
choose to arm themselves quietly, *very* smart (key components of my 
bubble have MENSA-qualifying levels of smart as the base for being taken 
seriously), poly-friendly (we once assembled a team to work on a 
project, and noticed a few weeks in that we'd just added our first and 
hence "token" monogamous person; we were around a dozen people at that 
point, and the project had nothing to do with poly or any alternate 
sexuality topic), etc. And we help each other move.

Similarly, nobody I know voted for Nixon or Reagan and we have no idea 
how they got elected (but it also doesn't occur to us that it was 
widespread fraud that did it).


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David Dyer-Bennet, dd-b at dd-b.net; http://dd-b.net/
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