Making Me Think

This being a good thing.

There are a couple people who’ve recently written tremendous, thoughtful, trenchant posts. They've sparked my sleeping bean.
Beach Bum over at Random Brain Droppings of a Carolina Parrothead has a post up about Ursula Le Guin’s The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas. The story, about an apparent Utopia, was and is an incisive parable, an illustration of who we are as a nation.
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In what seems a well established ritual, once the inhabitants of Omelas reach a certain age, between eight and twelve, they are brought to see this child who has to pay the price for their society. The narrator explains that those being exposed to the child are at first shocked and sickened by what they see. They want to help the child but the city elders explain that the minute that happens all the beauty and abundance of Omelas would “whether and be destroyed.”

Over time the vast majority of these new initiates accept that their happiness rests on the continued misery of that child. So they accept the injustice and go on dancing in the streets smoking drooz, drinking beer, and slinking off for those rumored orgies. However, a few both young and old can't bear the weight of this sin and leave the city, never to return. The narrator describes them going towards the mountains to a place even less imaginable than Omelas.
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It took me time to climb off my liberal high horse and realize that everyone in the United States and even all the inhabitants of the posh and overweight First World nations have accepted an Omelas-like deal to keep our way of life. 

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Could any of us be like the Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas? Could we, should we walk away?

I know a few people who have, at least, walked away from the current shit show that is America. One set, lucky enough to have dual citizenship (and money), left this Republican kleptocratic oligarchy for Switzerland. Another financially lucky couple, moved to a rural corner of upstate Vermont. They've begun growing their own food and are otherwise prepping for the Republican ignited end of it all.

If I had the resources,  if I had a choice, would I walk away or would I stay and fight for democracy? I don’t know.

Go read Beach Bum’s full post – it’s lyrical and thought provoking.

Infidel over at Infidel753 talks about GLAAD’s fourth annual Accelerating Acceptance report which shows there’s been a drop in acceptance for LGBTQ people.
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Confronted with evidence of inexorable social progress, the enemy likes to use the metaphor of the pendulum – claiming that while attitudes may move in one direction for a while, they inevitably "swing back" to the more conservative position, and the midpoint of the swings doesn't really move.  

However, there's no evidence that changes in public attitudes on social issues really work like that.  The success of the Nineteenth Amendment was not followed a few decades later by a mass shift of public opinion back toward the view that women shouldn't be allowed to vote after all, much less repeal of the Amendment.  The Civil Rights movement wasn't followed by a "swing back" to majority support for the KKK and Jim Crow laws, much less reinstatement of those laws.  The sexual revolution didn't end in a full-scale return to the values and behaviors of the fifties.  In each case there was some degree of backlash, yes, but except among lunatic-fringe elements, it never resulted in a full return to the attitudes of the previous status quo, much less actual reinstatement of the previous customs and laws.  Not even close.   There really is such a thing as a continuing trend of progress, even if temporary setbacks occur.

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Is the relatively small decline in sanity a statistical fluke or the effect of Trump’s disgusting, bullying, misanthropic hate mongering?

Go read Infidel’s full post – it’s intriguing, judicious and (BONUS!) calming.

That's what/who I'm reading lately – what about you?