Telling Words

Heard these somewhere and scribbled them down. Very telling words.

"Reality is that which, even if you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."

This one sparked thoughts about belief and faith as opposed to truly knowing. Some people mistakenly speak of things they believe in as if they are absolute fact. It's hard for me to trust people who speak in this way. I wonder if they really mean what they say, or are they trying to delude others, or are they just need to believe what they say is true. I guess I'm mainly speaking of religious and political talk. There's so much "I'm right and anything else is wrong" talk that is disturbing to me. How do they know? I don't get how they can be so sure of what they speak about. And the inability to back up what they say makes it impossible for me to take them seriously. You can say that this is what you believe in or how you see things, but don't present it as absolute when you have nothing to substantiate that claim. Well, you can do that if you want, but it undermines your integrity in my eyes.

"Whoever gossips to you—will gossip about you."

This quote expresses something I've considered and am cautious about. I've been around folk who blast on with racial and ethnic invective against other peoples. Foul nasty comments that speak strong of us being better than them. But I am not part of this person's us. It seems these people just note that I am not part of the them they are speaking of with condescension. What they don't consider is that I might find such discrimination offensive (which I do). I don't say anything against them because I don't want them to censor themselves. I know that chastising does nothing to change people views, so I use the exerience to find out what these people are really about, and the best way to do that is to let them speak freely.

The other aspect to this is concern in sharing personal things about myself. Can I trust this person I'm talking to? When people I'm conversing with devote much time to talking about the personal lives of others (which tends to be about the personal, sensational, and intimate), I become very cautious and less revealing because I fear that if they can talk so freely about others to me, they are probably free to talk to others about me.

We See Ourselves In Everything

Perceive with the Eyes of Love

"We see things not as they are, but as we are."

I heard this said on the radio, on streaming audio. Was it an episode of Humankind? I'm thinking that it was said by a guest on Coast to Coast AM.

I do remember that the person who said it was referring to the fact that perception is a singular thing, it is unique to the individual. There is no one truth. There is no one reality. All that we perceive is really an illusion. It is all just what our senses pick up and our brain interprets.

Sense of Sight

Proof of this is that we don't all see colors the same. There are even some folk who can't differentiate between certain colors. I had a personal experience with this. Someone I knew would see things as green that I saw as blue. In my mind, it was clearly blue. A warm blue maybe, but it was blue. She insisted that it was green.

I've seen folk who would just dismiss the other person as totally buggin' and absolutely wrong. I try to cut myself short when I find I'm heading that way, but usually I don't have to. I was fortunate to have come across things in my reading that helps explain what was going on. Things like the quote above which struck me because it was both familiar and fresh. It's an old concept to me, but the economy of the words appealed to me as a good way to express this familiar idea. It was a great way to be reminded of something I already knew. It was great to remember it and to have another way to keep it in the front of my memory.

This is something useful to always keep in mind. It explains a lot of things when interacting with people. It is right in line with the understanding that when people make a judgment about you, it reveals nothing about you and everything about them.

That's a tricky one to actually practice. Got to work on that one. This quote helps.

The Misnomer of WASP

Here's more evidence that race is mostly a social construct. And that the way we've been divvied up as groups of people has no scientific bearing whatsoever. Geneticists have known this for years and have spoken up about it, but few have listened.

This latest proof came from a story on NPR's Weekend Edition titled, Tracing Human Migration Through DNA. The story revealed the ancient heritage of a particular person, but the real revelation, in my eyes was the finding that most Brits aren't of Anglo-Saxon descent. No. They have Celtic origins through migrations from the south, specifically, the Iberian Peninsula, which in modern day is Spain, Portugal, Andorra and Gibraltar.


Listen now.

What's the point of pointing this out? It is a reminder not to let others define you. These definitions are arbitrarily made to suit the ones doing the defining. They are done to suit a self-serving purpose. And often, they are based on questionable evidence claimed to be facts.

The message is loud and clear, and simple: Define yourself!

I find it very peculiar that the story is not about this. This is big stuff. It makes the term WASP defunct. And it brings to light the fact that we've been misled on a grand scale.

This brings to mind the quote gotten from long ago -

"I must create my own system; or be defined by anothers."

I choose the former.

We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about.

Real Contact - The Good Old-Fashioned Way

This was on WETS.org, the Public Radio for East Tennessee, Southwest Virginia, and Western North Carolina:

Why Local Radio Is Vital
In 2002, a train carrying hazardous chemicals derailed just outside Minot, N.D., spilling roughly 240,000 gallons of anhydrous ammonia. The resulting toxic cloud enveloped the homes of approximately 15,000 people. Thousands of Minot residents turned on their radios to get public warnings and instructions on how to stay safe. Yet no such information was available. Minot’s six nonreligious commercial stations, all of which were owned and operated by the nation’s largest radio company, Clear Channel Communications, were broadcasting prerecorded programs engineered in remote studios. Police dispatchers couldn’t reach anyone in Clear Channel’s local offices: the town’s new emergency-communications system failed to automatically issue an alert, and no one answered the phones at the stations. What ensued was horrific: as one man died and hundreds became ill from inhaling the poisonous gas, the airwaves were filled with canned music and smooth-talking D.J.’s.

From WETS station's main page

It was part of a longer article in the NY Times which refers to that fact that all modern forms of communication are useless during a power failure. The best source of information in such instances is a battery powered radio. Old technology, but the best for such circumstsances.

It also stressed that live communication is important to have at all times for those moments when sudden emergency arises.

Real contact with real people. Old-fashioned, but the most reliable.

NY Times article (requires free log-in)

We Did Contribute To This Nation. And Still Do...

"If it weren't for the Chinese we could not be building this railroad."
I have heard too many times to ignore European-Americans voicing that Asian-Americans aren't really American because they didn't contribute to the building of this country.

Here's just one piece of evidence that this is a mistaken assumption ingrained from lies presented as truth seeped in insidiously by self-serving propagandists.


Here's is evidence of Asian-American contribution in the building of America:

The Transcontinental Railroad. Starting around 1865, approximately 11,000 Chinese men were recruited in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong, mustered into work-gangs at the docks, and then ferried to the California Sierras to shovel and haul away dirt and rock. As the railroad magnate Leland Stanford wrote at the time, "If it weren't for the Chinese we could not be building this railroad."

From the PBS special Becoming American: The Chinese Experience

Words from a key maker of the railroad that connected the expanse of this nation. This is just the broad sweep of it. To know the details of the brutal conditions of this work is to really know just how much of a contribution was made. An intimate story of one of these individuals needs to be told.