Tunnel Vision

This isn't news, but we live in a world full of opinions. Everyone's got one. That's always been the case, but these days, with the proliferation of unchecked egotism, as manifested by the careful treatment of our young ones (no more spanking, no more losing, everyone's a winner!), narcissistic Facebook and Myspace profiles, and yes, blogs like this one, where every jamoke with an attitude and a computer can spew his thoughts onto a webpage, people, at least in my part of the world, now have an unfettered ability to disseminate an unsolicited opinion for posterity to examine and consider. I'm not sure if it's a good or bad thing. It just is. And when firmly-held opinions collide, the results can be interesting, to say the least.

I started this blog for my own reasons, to have my own place to vent, write, and present my own opinions and attitudes on life, in the context of my own experience and hopefully with as much humor as possible. To me, humor is one of the greatest things we have in a world that is chock-full of reasons to feel like shit. Yes, blogs, like opinions, are egotistical and self-indulgent. They're also fun. And if you like to write like me, they're a good way to hone your skills. One thing I try not to do on here and in life in general, though, is assume that I'm right about everything. It probably doesn't come across that way on some of these entries (or maybe all of them), but I really don't think I know it all. Of course I don't. I feel like I know more about some things than others, and will usually take a stronger position on subjects on which I have more experience and understanding. On politics, for example, I have some pretty strong opinions. But at the end of it all, I do at least try to LISTEN to what the other person is saying and try to understand where they're coming from. (No, it doesn't always work.) Like everyone else, I believe what I believe. If you believe something else, great. If you want to talk about it in a sensible, mutually-respectful way, even better.

I wasn't always this way. In college, I became exposed to new things, things I didn't know before. I learned that the United States doesn't always do the right thing in the world. That it's a self-interested country just like any other, and the results of the manifestation of that self-interest can cause a lot of suffering. I woke up to this in the 1980s, while President Reagan was illegally funding "freedom-fighting" contras in Nicaragua, using money he obtained by selling arms to Iran, the same country who took Americans hostage only a few years before. The same country whose democratically-elected leader the CIA helped overthrow in the 1950s, eventually leading to the revolution that came back to bite us in the ass twenty years later. I learned about our provision of millions of dollars to the right-wing government and military in El Salvador, who were responsible for assassinating Catholic Archbishop Oscar Romero and four American nuns in 1980. On November 16, 1989, the same military forces brazenly murdered six Jesuit priests and two domestic workers at the University of Central America. The priests had been loud critics of the Salvadoran Army and advocates for human rights in El Salvador. Nineteen of the military officers suspected of the massacre were trained at the U.S. Army School of the Americas. I learned about Augusto Pinochet. I learned about Jacobo Arbenz. I learned a lot of things. And it pissed me off.

I traveled to Kentucky and to Cuernevaca, Mexico, and saw firsthand the squalor and poverty that a great many of the world's people live in, even in this wealthy country. I assimilated the anger and injustice I felt about all of these things and it became a part of who I am and how I defined myself. This process felt comfortable and familiar, like putting on a warm coat. It's nice to suddenly feel sure about who you are and what you believe about something. It's even nicer to surround yourself with people who think like you do. I formed a Central American awareness group on campus. We joined another group affiliated with Harvard University, who taught us how to "raise consciousness" on campus. We held meetings. We chalked our campus with protest symbols. We got in trouble with the Dean. We got criticized in the campus newspaper for "defacing" the campus, which had won awards for its beauty. I attended a really conservative school. We were definitely in the minority.

After the Jesuit priests were murdered in El Salvador -- their brains scooped out onto the university grass as a symbol to all the students that all the education and knowledge in the world wouldn't change a fucking thing for them -- friend J. and I met with the college President, told him that at a Jesuit college like ours, we needed to show solidarity with the University in El Salvador and protest this grotesque atrocity. Miraculously, the President, who was as far from a liberal as you could get, and who primarily occupied himself with fundraising on the college's behalf, agreed. We held a protest on the steps of the dining hall, where we read the names of the priests who were murdered and voiced our objection to American policy in El Salvador and Nicaragua. The school then held a special Mass in their honor. Today, there is a metal plaque containing all the names of the murdered priests and their two workers embedded in the cobblestones in front of the campus church.

All this protest and self-identification made me feel warm and fuzzy inside. I felt like I was on the side of justice and the true American way. Twenty years later, I still feel like I was. I haven't changed my opinion about these issues, or what I did to express them. I would do it again. But... there was a downside to it too. The anger, indignation, and self-righteousness I felt drove into me so deeply that they gave me tunnel vision. It got so that I couldn't hear anyone out about anything I disagreed with. My views were so firmly held, that no one else could possibly have anything to the contrary to say that made any sense to me. It wasn't my opinions that were the problem. It was how I handled them. I stopped listening. Some rightwing prick would try to justify our idiotic foreign policy and I'd be thinking of ten talking points to rebut his argument before he even finished. It's the same problem American politics has today. No one is hearing anything from the other side. I went home one summer and had the gall to tell my parents that yeah, growing up in New Hampshire was nice and all, but where's the damn diversity? Where are all the black people and Latinos? Couldn't they have picked a more representative place to live? They looked at me like I had three heads. Writing this now makes me cringe. Who the fuck did I think I was?

My new knowledge became a part of my identity, to the point that I literally wore it on my sleeve. At my summer supermarket job, I'd get into foreign policy debates with good friend P., who, back then, was a conservative. It would escalate to the point that we'd literally be screaming at each other over aisles of avocados and papayas. It's amazing we didn't get fired. He'd get the last word by paging Daniel Ortega and Fidel Castro on the supermarket intercom, telling them there was a breakage in aisle 9 and they had to report there right away with a mop and sawdust.

I could have handled all this better, of course. I was young. Age has mellowed me out. Now I realize that we're all a product of our life experience, education, parents, socio-economic status, upbringing, and curiosity, among other things. People come to things from different perspectives. There's nothing wrong with protest and expressing an opinion, but you have to know your audience. There comes a point when you realize with certain people that there is no talking to them, there is no possibility of a dialogue, for you have encountered a person with tunnel vision, someone who is more concerned about defending his or her beliefs than learning about yours and having an interesting exchange with you. Life's too short to waste time with these people. Am I one of them occasionally? Sure. Ask KLB, who would point this out in a comment if I didn't front it here. But the point is, I'm aware of it now, and I consciously try to avoid it.

Tunnel vision is never more prevalent than when it comes to discussing religion. Listening to someone talk about their religion is like hearing a child talk about his imaginary friend. They describe a reality loaded with personal assumptions, assumptions they often know very little about. And it's funny how they attempt to differentiate their own religion from every one else's and pretend that theirs is "the way." What way? I've said it before and I'll say it again. If you were born into a family of Orthodox Jews in Israel, there's a pretty good chance you'll be an Orthodox Jew for the rest of your life. Same for Muslim, same for Catholic, same for Buddhist, blah, blah, and blah. Unless you make a decision at some point in your life to explore other beliefs, or non-belief, or agnosticism, or atheism, or Scientology, or whatever, you're probably going to die with the beliefs inculcated to you by your parents. And I find it hard to believe that if there is a God or creator or whatever you want to call it, it only gave us puny humans one way to find enlightenment. I'd personally think the path would be more like an umbrella with several strands leading to one point at the top.

No, what seems to be going on here with religious folk is an attempt to be special, an attempt to raise oneself up to the exclusion of others. The more fervent members of any particular religion try to convert "non-believers" to their way of thinking because they see conversion as their religious duty, a demonstration of their devotion and faith. (Aside: try being a Mormon missionary in New York City for a week. Talk about lost causes.) Some keep their religion to themselves and pursue it with a sincerity and purity that puts others to shame. They move to Calcutta or Sudan to cater to the poor. They teach in a madrassa. They give to charities until it hurts, without a word of publicity. Other religious people don't care about these things at all. They proceed through life by going through the religious motions a couple of times a year, picking the beliefs they like and discarding those they don't. If they or someone they love gets sick, or they're facing a dangerous situation, they start praying again, with surprising intensity, making promises they'll never keep. That's basically where I was before I surrendered my Catholicism. And finally, there are the diehards. Those whose religion drives them to pick up a gun, wear a suicide belt, or blow up an abortion center. Thou shalt not kill, a tenet in most monotheistic religions, goes out the window. It's discarded for a "larger purpose," doing God's work, as interpreted by human beings. See, e.g., the Crusades, Al Qaeda, 9/11, jihad.

Tunnel vision.

And then there's the flip side to the religious believers. A self-elevated class of person who believes all religion is bunk and loves to share this opinion with anyone who will listen. He'll tell you that religion is the opiate of the masses, the product of a weak, immature mind that relies on a silly fantasy to give life a purpose, to make sense of the unknown, to minimize a fear of death. This unique category of individual views religion -- and spirituality generally -- as an anachronism. He or she chooses to believe instead only on what has been tested and proven by the scientific method. If it hasn't been proven by science, it doesn't exist, or at least, it shouldn't be considered until there is proof of its existence. To the atheist, there is no scientific evidence of a God or creator. Accordingly, there is no God or creator. If you're going to say there is, if you're going to proffer a religious belief or a spiritual idea, you'd better have the solid evidence to back it up. And it better be in the form of an ironclad thesis, worthy of a Ph.D., because you will need to explain yourself to them in painstaking, well-supported detail, my sorry friend. The atheistic belief system -- and it IS a belief system, though atheists try to claim otherwise -- is straightforward, logical, and easily defended. It frames the debate favorably to itself by shifting the burden of proof to anyone who would raise anything that isn't provable by science. Quite circular, to say the least. Prove the unprovable, they say. Prove the unknown. Leave alone that the science that some of them defend to the point of worship is constantly evolving and correcting its own mistakes as the real "truth" is tested and verified. Leave alone that the "real" truth is already out there, floating around in the ether of the unknown, and doesn't become truth simply when it's learned by human beings with a test tube and a microscope. Leave alone that science is proven wrong all the time, and for hundreds of years, human beings, relying on science, were led to believe that the world was flat, the sun revolved around the earth, and leeches were a good way to get rid of the vapors. Leave alone that it's questioning and wondering by human beings about the unknown that moves science forward. Leave alone the billions of questions that science is still unable to answer, including how our own brains and thoughts work. To fervent atheists, these questions are irrelevant until explained by science. And to the most arrogant atheist, just like the blindest born-again Christian, raising such questions and theorizing about possibilities that are currently unprovable, warrants the most condescending form of mockery. You believe in a sixth sense? That your thoughts can impact your reality? Reincarnation? That everything is connected? Universal consciousness? That it's possible that the universe is a sophisticated, complex holograph? That our perceptions about it are inherently flawed because we're living in it? Hahahaha! Oh me, oh my. That is funny! What's the name of your cult again?

The name of my cult is Human Curiosity. The same cult that has driven science to provide us with the limited knowledge that we have today. To me, the self-righteous and arrogant mentality of close-minded atheists and religious fundamentalists are two sides of the same tunnel vision coin. If there's one thing I can't stand -- whether it's from a born-again Christian whose eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord, or an atheist who knows no more than I do about the nature of reality but still pretends that his scientific belief system is more valid than mine -- it's a person who thinks they have all the answers. To me, people who think they know everything and see this enormously complex universe and existence in black and white terms, are like ants on a beach arguing over the meaning of a single grain of sand. Atheism can sound as blind, close-minded, fundamentalist -- and, dare I say cultish (though that silly word only gets thrown around to denigrate when someone has nothing better to say) -- as any religion. There's no room for questioning the unexplained, no room for theorizing about the supernatural, no room for theorizing on the reliability of our five senses and the possibility of flawed perception. Don't ask, don't tell.

Unfortunately, the questions don't disappear just because they're not currently answerable by science. In fact, the opposite happens. They become more persistent. And those questions fascinate me. I don't stop thinking about them just because there's no answer right now, or because someone tells me I'm a fool for considering "crazy" possibilities. I could easily contend that they are fools for only believing and considering what human beings -- a flawed species to say the least (men wrote the Bible, after all) -- have told them is the truth. Personally, I'm more interested in spending my time considering what we don't know, rather than what we know already.

This isn't to demean the importance of science at all. To the contrary. Science is helping provide the answers. Science is mankind's best hope to uncover the truth of things. It's crucial to our survival and enlightenment. Never more so than now, when we are busy choking ourselves off the planet and putting politics and money ahead of the human good. Science keeps religious and spiritual belief honest. It demands more than pleasant stories and allegories about forgiving your neighbor, stories that are forgotten as soon your typical churchgoer gets cut off in the church parking lot. My entire life, I've always been fascinated by science and what it tells us, particularly about the brain and human thought. I've occasionally written about it on here. Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac Newton, and Galileo are heroes of mine. Astronomy in particular is something I might have pursued if I didn't suck so bad at math growing up. And the debate over stem cell research in this country is maddening to me. There should be no debate. Misguided religious belief -- by a born-again President in particular -- is holding us back and causing needless suffering by people who need it. Scientific ethicists are important too, as cloning evolves in an already overpopulated world with limited resources.

Science doesn't concern itself with the silly debates I'm describing. It's too busy trying to find answers. But science leaves itself open to possibilities, until they are disproven. Try telling that to an atheist. All that science has accomplished for us does not mean we should stop questioning and theorizing about the nature of reality. Even an atheist would concede that we've only scratched the surface of knowledge. Personally, I don't think we've even gone that far. To me, science and spiritual exploration are not, and should not be considered, mutually exclusive. They are complimentary and mutually verifying (or non-verifying). Unfortunately, too many people on both sides of this false equation identify so much with one or the other belief system that they leave no room for anything else. There's no room for middle ground. It's one or the other. Rather than explore alternatives to their own way of thinking, or open their mind to other possibilities or explanations for this reality we're living in, these people spend most of their time defending and fighting and arguing and debating and debunking and criticizing and mocking and attacking and blowing shit up. And ohhhh, how they love to find and congregate with their own kind!

Somewhere God is laughing.

I kid, I kid.