Nonjudgment

I don't learn of anyone like me in history books, but I'm told that's all who is in them. I'll link to a bunch of articles that history books are filled with dead white men. I'm told the best I can do is "shut up and listen." Why do people who don't know me tell me who I am? Should I think I'm represented because Hitler, Stalin, and Columbus were straight white men? I don't find people like me in history books. I see people today who aren't white men who seem more like white men in history books than I do. Why should people having the same skin color and sex mean that they represent me? Society hasn't treated me like them. We don't…

Talk to people about sustainability and they'll say "stop judging me" or that you're making them feel guilty. If someone tries to judge me for something I don't have a problem with, I don't feel judged. When I lived in Paris and people tried to judge or make fun of me for being American, I didn't have a problem with it. If they judged me simply for being American, I saw it as their problem, not mine. The reason you feel judged isn't because environmentalists are judging you, nor anyone else. It's because you have a conscience. You'd do well to listen to it. Abraham Lincoln's quote remains my most relevant to sustainability: "Nothing is more damaging to you than to do something you believe…

I didn't pay attention to it, but now that I do, people who pollute judge nonstop on sustainability issues. They also defend themselves even when the issue has nothing to do with them. I think they feel judged, which tells me they know they are doing something they believe is wrong. They can't resolve this internal conflict so suppress and deny it. Then when the issue comes up, they feel judgment and blame whoever brought it up for their feeling guilt and shame. They call me extreme for living as sustainably as all humans did until about a century ago, but it seems easier to me to resolve the inner conflict by not doing what I believe is wrong so I don't cause my own…

I can't believe I haven't posted this topic before. I say this phrase nearly every day: Living in the 21st century means there are a million ways to connect and they all break. Everyone agrees. No one even hints otherwise. On the contrary, they share stories. [EDIT: After posting this post I see I did post this topic before: The 21st Century: dozens of ways to communicate . . . and all of them break. Sorry to repeat myself, though it's been over two years since that post and I still hit bugs in media almost daily.]

There are two types of political revolution, at least. One changes the type of government. The American Revolution replaced a monarchy with a democracy. The other changes the person in charge but keeps the system. Many coups result in the second type. I'm not sure they qualify as revolutions, but people call them revolutions. What does James Bond have to do with revolutions? I recently saw the last James Bond movie, No Time to Die. I counted six bad guys, or five bad ones and one would-be good guy whose hubris caused the big problem. The main bad guy is Lyutsifer Safin, who kills people left and right, builds the lair Bond has to infiltrate, and so on. He even engineers killing the second bad…

I can't stand when people interrupt me. I don't like myself when I do it either. But there is at least one time when I would consider you my friend for interrupting me. More than interruptions, I can't stand when someone who can do something and believes they should but has filled their head and heart with some cockamamie limiting belief. They say they can't get in shape, get promoted, learn some skill, save money, eat healthy, stop polluting, and so on for reasons if they looked in their hearts they'd know where lies, but palliative, comfortable lies. They don't say them for others to believe them. They say them for themselves to sleep at night. Since they don't even say them out loud to…

I think both the political left and right want to end racism and sexism, but as best I can tell, each considers the other as racist and sexist to the core, while they see their own movement as maybe having had some of each in its past, but it's made them less so for the lessons. Can you tell which group seems more racist and sexist from the other's perspective? I'd guess they see the other nearly how the other sees them. If I didn't see it, I can't imagine dreaming such a situation, yet it permeates this country. I wish people could rise above misunderstanding the side they aren't so much.

You've likely read that many places are taking down statues of Columbus. Here's a CBS News story from 2020, Dozens of Christopher Columbus statues have been removed since June. There are plenty of stories explaining why. The story above says, Protests have targeted Columbus because he is accused of the genocide of indigenous people. A 2019 study published in the journal Quaternary Science Review estimated that between 1492 and 1600, about 55 million people in the Americas died. The Taíno people were virtually wiped out in the decades after Columbus first arrived on the island of Hispaniola, where Haiti and the Dominican Republic sit today.  55 million people in over a century is a lot. Columbus didn't kill all of them. He was part of…