When I told my parents I'd be making the trip back from southern California to Oregon by ridesharing with a fire-eating juggler I'd bumped into at a recent renfaire, they said, "Okay. Have fun!"
My best friend's dad, on the other hand, sat me down and told me very somberly, "I'd rather pay for you to have a plane ticket home, than let you do this. I don't want to have to read in the paper about you being found dead in a ditch."
I smiled, startled and a bit amused, and replied, "I appreciate your concern, but I am very comfortable traveling this way."
I later texted my bestie, "Tell your dad I've been abducted to Lake Tahoe, and they won't stop feeding me."
My parents used to take me to hostels when we would travel. I consider this a KEY part of my upbringing, as I experienced communal environments with delightful strangers. Nobody messed with me. Nobody messed with my stuff. It was LOVELY. I got to hang out with people from all over the planet, people with fascinating life stories. Hotels are downright spooky and depressing by comparison.
Somebody who grew up xenophobic and/or paranoid about crime has a totally different outlook. They don't think experiences like mine are even possible in the real world-- at best, it was a lucky fluke I wasn't cannibalized or robbed, and these tiny naive pockets of niceness can't be considered realistic or normal.
Granted, there will always be assholes. Lest we fucking forget. Somebody will show up to steal your phone or attack you or just ruin things for everybody-- but honestly there are A LOT OF PEOPLE WHO AREN'T ASSHOLES. It's possible to gather enough of them together to normalize being friendly in communal ways, and even keep it up long enough for everyone to enjoy themselves for a whole five goddamn minutes at a time without anything bursting into flames. But I get it, that sounds really goofy and privileged and Pollyanna for people who've lived through rough places and rough shit.
I can understand being afraid to trust. Trauma is enormous. That's what it is, this isolation-- trauma, folks unable to access the safe and social circuitry in their brains because they never learned how to use that shit since everyone around them is dangerous. Some people CAN unlearn that, but it's not easy, and every betrayal and incident of abuse puts another weight on the scales for the forces of fascism. Cowardice urges us to lash out and help our worst fears turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy, rather than take the risk of hoping it could go well for once.
That's the core of the fight. Building trust and community vs violence and fear tearing us down.
Building is much harder than tearing down. But the builders greatly outnumber the breakers, or we never would have made it this far.
Sorry that turned into a philosophical ramble, there. I just spend a lot of time thinking about this, every day.
@thepoliticalcat@DrALJONES I didn't realize just how white most of the spaces I grew up in really were until later on. I thought everybody got to go camping and hiking. I was sheltered in many ways.
Wow, thank you so much! It's so good to find a place online where I can talk and actually find some people who actually understand, instead of just getting yelled at all the time. Gawd, reddit was awful.
Yes, the fascists are definitely a tiny minority. The problem is that they've organised to the point where their power is way out of proportion to their numbers. There's never been such a global existential threat before.
Just by the way, while environmental factors such as trauma, etc clearly affect people's attitudes, in the case of conservative thinkers, physical structures in the brain literally make for more fear and less analysis (cf the brain structures of progressives).
Builders don't like breaking, which unfortunately too often leads to us getting walked on past the time to fight back. If only we could agree more readily on when that time is, exactly-- too soon is entirely too damned close to too late. And this time, the stakes are so high much of the planet will be unrecognizable by the time the damage stops.
I ponder the brain differences caused by trauma, and also differences potentially caused by epigenetics, how much gets passed down along with cultures vs how much is just overall variation. I figure there may be asshole genes-- the people who survived by knocking everybody else down to escape first, that sort of thing-- and empathetic genes, but even if we could identify such traits what would we do with that information??
builders like to hope for the best, but, in life-determining decisions, they often forget to also prepare for the worst
There's no doubt anymore that biology & culture interact in development. Probability is at work:
"A genetic predisposition (sometimes also called genetic susceptibility) is an increased likelihood of developing a particular disease based on a person's genetic makeup" https://medlineplus.gov/genetics/understanding/mutationsanddisorders/predisposition/
@DrALJONES I seem to recall hearing that it may be possible to identify this sort of thing with a brain scan, and as tempting as that sounds I have a nasty feeling it would get applied in some kind of eugenics-y manner that would go all wrong somehow.
Hell, as a person with major depression and loads of anxiety since I was a kid, my amygdala is probably extra swole too.
It's cyberpunk, in a near future where they built a system that can scan people's brains and score their mental health. If you're too unstable you're assigned mandatory therapy. Past a certain point you become a "latent criminal" and get locked up-- pre-emptive enforcement, shades of Minority Report. The police carry weapons equipped with scanners that decide automatically what level of lethality is applied when the trigger is pulled. A machine as judge, jury, and executioner.
The best kind of scifi, digging into deep questions about how society works and what it might do to us to hand over moral adjudication (and job placement and more) to a machine, while keeping most of the populace almost entirely insulated from stress and dangerous ideas. (And just how does the damn thing actually work, anyway?? When they get to THAT part, I had to get up and walk it off...)
It's very dark and graphic, lots of content warnings.
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