BS

On Unpopular Love

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Oprah ruined love.  Hallmark delivered several death blows, but Oprah (and through her, Dr. Phil) killed it.

Love yourself.  It’s a pop psychology mantra that we hear everywhere.  But who can really qualify what that means?  It’s a concept that’s been broken down into 15-second sound bites for commercials.  “Next on Tyra/Oprah/Dr. Phil…  Love yourself in time for dinner.”

But our whole concept of love is completely fucked up.  We think it is what we see on TV or read about in trashy romance novels.  A proud broken man, a woman with a secret.  They fall in love but their differences tear them apart.  All until the man realizes that he doesn’t have to be broken any more and the woman shares her secret and then they stay married and have loads of babies and wedded bliss.

We think we can do the hard stuff once and be done with it.  You can’t.  The hard stuff has to be done over and over and over again.  It’s like going to the gym.  Or staying away from the FroYo.

We think love is roses and chocolate and bubble baths and sunset walks on the beach and Paris and diamond rings.  And all of these ideas came from people who wanted to sell us shit.  People that wanted our money in exchange for the accessories that they told us were associated with love.  We gave up the real thing for the “as seen on TV” version.

So now we’re supposed to love ourselves.  With the diamond rings for our right hands since the left hand is reserved for Prince Charming?  Let’s face it, some of us take the TV version of “love yourself” a little too far.  It’s called narcissism, and I promise you, it doesn’t make for good partnerships.  All this love yourself nonsense starts to look like it belongs nestled up to our notions of “deserve.”  We know how I feel about that, and if you don’t, I’ll summarize: deserve is the wrong damn question.

Love yourself is not about looking yourself in the mirror deeply and saying “I love myself” over and over again.  It isn’t about justifying a Mercedes Benz.  It isn’t about justifying a new piece of jewelry, or a new house, or a long vacation.  It isn’t approving of everything about yourself unconditionally.  Loving yourself along the lines of Hallmark and Oprah hasn’t gotten us very far.

Let me tell you what I know about love.

Love sees clearly.  Even more important, love is willing to look.  Love doesn’t gloss over faults or pretend that they don’t exist.  Love is willing to acknowledge the parts that are ugly and selfish and mean-spirited and arrogant and lazy and fragile.  Love sees all of those things and doesn’t flinch and doesn’t condemn.

Love gets out of the way of the consequences.  Love doesn’t deprive the beloved of the benefit of their failures.  Love lets the beloved fail because any meaningful success is nourished by the shit that didn’t work.

Love doesn’t have the answers; love sits with you while you ask the questions.

Love doesn’t save you; it stands next to you as you save yourself.

Love is pragmatic.  It acknowledges reality and adjusts accordingly.  It is more interested in what works than it is in being right or preserving its ego or defending its opinions.

Love takes the long view.  It looks at the aggregate, not the last five minutes.

Love is supple.  Flexible.  Adaptable.  Resilient.  It can be okay in a variety of situations.  It might grumble a little, but it will find a way to make it work.  It’s strong that way.

Love is loyalty.  It is trusting someone even when you don’t understand what’s happening or why.  It is speaking kindly of someone to the external world when you really want to smack them in the face.  It’s keeping the personal between you and the beloved.  It believes in someone when the evidence points in other direction.  It acknowledges their imperfections even as it acknowledges that your place is next to this flawed individual.  Hell, it might find those flaws endearing in the right light.

Love shows up.

Love finds reasons to laugh, even on the most miserable of days.  Gallows humor counts, and if you’re going to go down, you might as well go down laughing.

So what does it mean to love yourself?  Own everything, your good and bad qualities equally.  Acknowledge that perfect isn’t possible, but that trying is well within your capacity.  Have a sense of humor, risk failure, show up relentlessly, tell yourself the truth, do what you can from where you are, and forgive yourself for being a bloody idiot.  Because we’re all bloody idiots in one way or another.

If you can do that for someone else, you can do it for yourself.  And if you can do it for yourself, you can do it for someone else.

On Unpopular Love

Deserve

entrope, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

de·serve[dih-zurv]  de·served,de·serv·ing

verb (used with object)
1. to merit, be qualified for, or have a claim to (reward,assistance, punishment, etc.)
because of actions, qualities,or situation: to deserve exile; to deserve charity;
a theory that deserves consideration.

verb (used without object)
2. to be worthy of, qualified for, or have a claim to reward,punishment,
recompense, etc.: to reward him as he deserves;an idea deserving of study.

Origin: 1250–1300; Middle English deserven; Anglo-French, Old French deservir,
Latin dēservīre:  to devote oneself to the service of, equivalent to dē- + servīre

(thanks to Dictionary.com)

Deserve is one of those words that I’d ban entirely from our language. In common usage, there’s no hit of service in it, unless we are talking about the service of other’s owed to ourselves.  Marketers love the word, though.

  • You deserve a break, have chocolate mousse.
  • You’ve worked hard all day, you deserve another beer.
  • You’re special just by the very nature of being you, you deserve a new car, a new house, a new life.

In the context of relationships, you hear it in the pop psychology that we repeat to ourselves and our friends.  You deserve better, we say.  You don’t deserve to be treated like this.    Or after the other person has messed up, I don’t deserve you.  As in I haven’t earned your patience.

Oh, like I’ve never effed something up royally.

It’s a divisive word, fracturing the world into the worthy and the unworthy when, as far as I can tell, we all just are.  We give what we want to give because we want to give it.  You don’t earn love, you don’t earn forgiveness, you don’t earn patience.  And you sure as shit don’t deserve diamonds just because your parents genetics spit you out instead of someone who was almost you but not quite.

What should automatically come along with being human? What does every human have the right to?

  1. The boundaries defined by the edges of their skin.
  2. Absolute governance of the territory between their ears.
  3. A world where “first do no harm” is the first litmus test of every action.
  4. The ability to pick a course of action and pursue it so long as it more or less fits into #3.
  5. A world where one’s dignity is only ever compromised by one’s self.

Maybe more, but those are the big ones.  That is the full extent of what is your birthright as a human.  Everything else?  Take with a whopping big dose of gratitude.  When everything goes your way, be thankful and generous with it because you never know when that’s going to change.  And when it doesn’t?  Roll with the punches and for the love of all that is good in the world, don’t waste time thinking about what you deserve.

Because as soon as “deserve” becomes a regular part of your vocabulary, all you are going to see is what you lack, not what you have.  Deserve is rooted in fear.  Deserve is for the sheep.  Stop worrying about who deserves what. If you really want to hang on to the word, remind yourself that you deserve a perspective on the world that isn’t clouded by blind, stupid fear.

Deserve

Napkin Calculations

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Ok, I know it is more complicated than this, but let’s consider a hypothetical ship that the US Government buys from Northrop Grumman.  Say they pay $10,000,000 for it, but it only costs them $9,500,000 to make.  The government gets back 35% of that 500,000, or $175,000.  That remaining $425,000 goes to shareholders who also have to pay their own taxes on it…  another 15%.  Giving the Government $48,750

If 60% of the costs are in materials and there’s a 6% sales tax on that, the government gets $342,000 in sales tax.  I think it is fair to guess that a large part of the cost to produce those components that get bought also gets eaten up in salaries, so let’s assume that these people are making money in the 28% tax bracket.  That’s another $1,276,800 that goes back to the government.

The remaining 30% goes to salaries and 10% to facilities.  (Yes, I’m pulling these numbers out of the air, but it’s a thought exercise.  I am hoping that Freakanomics will take on this question and address it for real.)  There has got to be some taxes associated with running the facilities, but I don’t know what they are, so we’ll stick to the salaries.  Assuming that these people make a little more than the poor suckers producing the steel that makes up the ship, we’ll tax them at 30%.  That’s $840,000.

So for every $10,000,000 the government spends, it gets $2,633,800 back in first-degree taxes.  Take it down another level and contemplate what the salaries are associated with what the people who are getting that first-degree salary are buying…  House and pedicures and grocery stores and malls and so on.  Because we know we aren’t putting that money into savings.

Does it change anyone’s view of government spending knowing that, at least roughly, for every $1.00 spent, $.30 comes back to it?

Napkin Calculations

Brave Enough to Lose

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Listening to NPR this morning with Newt Gingrich talking about how corporate bailouts didn’t do much good to the families that are underwater on their mortgages.

What.  The.  F*ck.

Correct me if I am wrong, but weren’t the first round of bailouts conceived and executed under Bush?  Not that it makes me particularly pleased to say this, but Obama just did more of what Bush did.  Imagine the GOP outcry if all that money had been divvied up and given to each American homeowner.  We would have all collectively paid down our morgatges and you would have gotten a twofer…  more stable American families and the banks would have gotten their money.  But no.  We didn’t do that.  We don’t give money away to American families!  We’re independent!  We are a country of bootstrappers!  We only like welfare when it is corporate welfare!

What the hell is wrong with expecting our companies to be functional adults as our citizens are, especially considering that the companies have fought long and hard to enjoy the rights of personhood.  You can’t have the good without the bad, @sshole.

And now Newt wants to posture like he’s for the little people?  That he would have done anything different?  Hell yes, he would have done things different.  He would have made it possible for more companies to make more money.  The only reason why he’s mad at Romney is because Romney made so much more money than he did.  After all, Romney’s made tens of millions, while Newt only made millions working for Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac.

This whole group of GOP candidates is going to convince a whole slew of people that they are true fiscal conservatives.  Some of them are going to convince some of those same people that they are true social conservatives.  (Thank God for Christianity.  Jesus wipes your slate clean and all of a sudden two adulterous divorces just magically disappear.  Well listen buddy.  It’s Jesus’s job to forgive and far be it from me to stand between anyone and their true calling.  It’s my job to remember that past behavior is the best predictor of the future we’ve got and I don’t trust you….  well, I don’t trust any of them, GOP or Dem, but that is a different story.)

Why can’t we call it as it is?  Bullshit is bullshit, and I’m tired of people trying to tell me that the shit sandwich they’re serving up is really a BLT.  What’s done is done.  They gave the corporations a shit-ton of money and the corporations didn’t save the economy.  They’ve given corporations a lot of tax loopholes and breaks and all the privileged of person-hood, and the corporations have literally shit all over the country that enables them with pollution, discrimination, downsizing, fostering an ugly us vs. them mentality, and finally taking those crappy jobs overseas where they can’t be held accountable for labor conditions or acts of egregious pollution.  We’ve racked up a huge debt on foreign wars and then blamed Obama for the deficits.  Well no shit Sherlock.  War costs money.  And as previously pointed out, that money bought goods and services that employed a bunch of people at Lockheed Martin and other defense contractors.  Meanwhile Americans sit around and bitch mightily at the money spent and the deficit never recognizing that we have all profited from the money spent on the wars.  You want a trickle down economy?  The government buys a big ass boat and the systems to run that boat and suddenly a bevy of engineers, computer geeks, writers, accountants, factory workers, factory managers, proposal writers, middle managers, HR professionals, machinists, and janitors have a job to go to.  Which they pay taxes on, incidentally.

Anyway, it’s done.  Can’t go back, can’t undo it.  So what are any of these political criminals going to do differently?  Why are they all looking backwards for solutions instead of forwards.  “I’m a Reagan Republican.”  Really?  That was 30 years ago.  Before the internet.  Before terrorism.  Before bad mortgages that corporate America put in a blender and resold as solid gold like a mom putting spinach in a milkshake.  I hate to break the bad news but Reagan is dead.  Now what are you going to do?

Can any of these idiots think their way out of a paper bag?  Are any of them capable of a thought no one has had before?  Of ditching their ideology for long enough to see the world clearly, not as they want it to be?  I haven’t seen it yet…  have you?

What I meant to say when I started this rant was that it’s disingenuous for any of the Republicans to be complaining about Romney making money or bankrupting companies.  And it is total nonsense for any of them to be trying to make the differentiation between vulture and venture capitalism.  Furthermore, Newt Gingrich is a very smart man full of a great deal of BS.  At least Perry isn’t bright enough to know better.  Gingrich *could* distinguish himself as the realpolitik genius that he is.  If they weren’t all so afraid of losing, then someone might get brave enough to think an original thought.

Show me the politician – Dem or GOP – that is brave enough to lose and that’s the one I’ll vote for.   (P.S.  Sweet Pomegranate-scented Jesus, please let Obama get brave enough to lose.)

 

Brave Enough to Lose