On Masculinity, Part Three: The Difference Between Being Strong and Being Mean

A few months ago I was thinking of buying my oldest daughter a Cricket Rifle. For those that don't know, Cricket Rifles are rifles designed explicitly for youth shooting. They're single shot rifles that have multiple safety mechanisms that prevent negligent discharges. I went on YouTube to see reviews of the rifle, and it led me down a rabbit hole of young girls shooting guns. There was one video where a teenage girl was doing an awesome job of hitting targets in a two gun competition. I would link it if I remembered the video, but this was around six months ago, so I don't. However, I do remember one of the smart-ass comments saying something to the effect of, "Where's all the feminists at on this one?"

I replied to that comment. "Feminist dad right here. What now?"

The guy that wrote the OC didn't respond, but hoo-boy, were there many others who did. One of the more laughable ones was some rando that said something to the effect of, "You're a male feminist. That's the weakest thing a man can be." I really don't remember the exact wording. It was something like that. Calling me some "weak pussy" because I have this weird idea that men and women should be treated equally.

I responded to that comment. Once again I'm paraphrasing, but said something to the effect of, "I think it's funny that you're saying I'm weak, when you think the height of masculinity is to insult someone from a keyboard. There's nothing brave or manly about what you're doing. There's nothing manly about insulting someone when you don't have to risk getting your jaw broken. So once again I ask, 'Feminist dad right here. What now?'"

A few weeks ago I wrote an unintended sequel to my post On Masculinity The first post talked about a need for the left to start having a conversation about masculinity. What it means to be a man without the "toxic masculinity". The sequel was just me ranting, more or less, because I found the right's champions of masculinity to be pretty lacking. I didn't plan on making that post. I just did because I saw all of these weak right-wing males having discussions on masculinity when they have no business calling themselves men. These "men" confuse being mean for being strong.

I probably wouldn't have written the sequel if it weren't for that YouTube discussion. All these right-wing champions of masculinity, and they're nothing but boys pretending to be men.

It's no wonder that Trump is their king. Trump will insult grown men all day on Twitter, but to their faces he kisses their ass. Just look at how he is with Kim Jung Un. Loved to insult the man on Twitter all day. When Trump met him, he was as nice as Mr. Rogers. Trump couldn't say to Un's face what he said to him all the time online. And the right thinks that's manly and strong, since they also think the height of strength is to insult people on social media where they don't have to face real world consequences for their actions.

Since writing my first post, I've done my best to research what masculinity means without "toxic masculinity", and I've come up with the conclusion that wholesome masculinity is broken down into two separate groups:

1. Strength
2. Things that are culturally "guy things"

Now before anyone tears me apart on mentioning this, let me tell you that I'm not saying that any of this is exclusive to men. Like I said in my first post on masculinity, this isn't about rigid gender roles. Wholesome masculinity is about how we can express ourselves as men without toxicity. I personally know professional strongwomen who can outlift me. My karate instructor is a woman with a fifth degree black belt that I wouldn't fuck with on my best day. I know that there are plenty of women that are into culturally "guy things" such as sports, guns, cars, and such. While these aren't exclusive to men, they are things that we men love to use to express our masculinity in a wholesome manner.

Let's go over those two groups.

The first one is strength. The right equates strength with meanness. And that's really sad, because being mean is far from being strong. Sure, you can be strong and mean, but you can also be strong and kind. You can bench press 500 pounds and tell people that equal rights is bullshit, that the poor are just lazy, or you can bench press 500 pounds and be a supporter of equal rights and the working class.

Wholesome masculinity says that we use our strength to protect. We are strong men, and we use our strength to protect people weaker than us. I lift weights. I do martial arts. I shoot guns. I use my strength to protect people, and there's nothing that makes me feel more manly than that.

The second is things that are culturally "guy things". Yes, women can also like these things, but we men like to use them to express our masculinity. Things like cars, sports, and such.

Truth is, I don't care much for team sports. I'll root for my local sports team when they make the playoffs and have a decent chance at winning the championship. Otherwise, I don't care much. I never got into cars. I like combat sports like the UFC, but that's about it.

But I have incredibly strong opinions on grills. INCREDIBLY STRONG OPINIONS ON GRILLS.

I could post several rants on gas vs. charcoal grills. Even typing that fills me with a sort of rage. The rage that a man understands. Gas grills are the tool of the bourgeoisie. Real men know how to light up that charcoal. We'll set them coals on fire, wait until the white appears in them, and then cook our meat to perfection! We don't need propane! Hank Hill can fuck all the way off! Fuck you and your "propane and propane accessories", Hank!

Like I said, incredibly strong opinions on grills. Probably sounds unreasonable to a lot of people, but I will die on that hill.

Grilling and barbecuing is one of the ways that I like to express my masculinity. Since learning how to cook a few years back, I bought a couple of charcoal grills. There's something about firing up that charcoal, tossing on a set of baby back ribs, or some burgers, or hell, even hot dogs, that makes me feel manly af. After barbecuing a rack of ribs, I feel like Ozymandias. Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair!

I really think that most of the "men" on the right are a bunch of tryhards that are desperately seeking to compensate for their lack of masculinity. We on the left have a bit of an advantage there, because we're secure enough in our manhood to not be scared of doing or feeling things that might be perceived as feminine. As men, we're human beings, and there are times that we feel vulnerable. We get sad and depressed. We need help sometimes. Sometimes we like things that aren't considered masculine. It's okay to admit that. We on the left have the advantage of being able to admit that.

For example, my love for barbecuing is built out of my love for cooking. Cooking in the kitchen. You know, that thing that's traditionally considered "women's work". Well, my wife is a middle school teacher so she usually gets home late. So when she sees a new recipe she likes, she'll usually show it to me and I'll just tell her, "Just send the recipe to me on messenger. I'll try it out." She does, and I do.

I spent most of my twenties in the military, where we were taught that masculinity meant suppressing our emotions. Now that I'm damn near forty, being able to express my emotions, even the sad, cry-baby ones, feels fucking liberating. I'm a strong man who lifts weights, shoots guns, does martial arts, and can barbecue the fuck out of a rack of ribs. I'm also secure enough in my masculinity to take pride in my abilities as a chef, to admit when I'm not strong enough on my own, and brave enough to admit when I feel weak and need help.

The right doesn't know the difference between being strong and being mean. Between having wholesome masculinity and toxic masculinity. We on the left need to seize the opportunity to teach the difference. We know how to be strong without being mean. We know how to be men without being toxic. And we need to start teaching it.

My New Workout Plan, and Some Criticism of Starting Strength

Well, let me start this entry off by saying that I thought I was supposed to go into work tonight. Turns out that wasn't the case, so after I drove my ass home, I decided I'd get to work on a post about my new workout plan.

You'll probably notice that I haven't written much about fitness lately, and there's a reason for that. A few months ago, I broke one of my big toes in a stress fracture. I could barely walk without intense pain because of it, so I wasn't hitting the gym. I wasn't doing much of anything. Just laying around, waiting for my broken toe to heal up so I could be active again.

Some of you might laugh and say, "Oh, you broke your big toe? How tragic!" Yeah, you can fuck off. I'm not 17 anymore, and I don't heal from a broken toe after a few days. Hell, it still hasn't healed fully and I'm hitting the gym anyway.

Anyway, after sitting on my ass for two months I finally decided to hit the gym again. I also started doing karate again before the injury, so I started going back to the dojo, too. I went back on my old reliable Starting Strength routine to create a baseline for strength before I ended up on my current workout, which I had planned on starting long before my injury.

After about six weeks of being on Starting Strength, I felt like I was starting to max out on the plan well below my previous best lifts. I'm not entirely sure why that happened. I'm guessing that it's because I'm getting older. After being about thirty pounds below each of my best lifts, I started to plateau. Instead of being stubborn and trying to push through until I reached maybe another ten pounds on each lift, I cut my losses and began the new workout routine.

Enter Functional Fitness!

I had heard about functional fitness about two years ago, when Alan Thrall, a YouTube strongman, thoroughly had his ass kicked while trying to do one of those types of workouts with a gym called Real World Tactical. Here's the video on that:

The title says it all. The workout nearly killed him.

So I had wanted to do a functional fitness workout for a while after seeing that, and after doing some searches on The Google, I found this one to be the most gym friendly. It has four days of full body workouts, but the goal is different on each one. The first day is strength, the second is hypertrophy, the third is power, and the fourth is speed.

On week one, I finished day one without much difficulty. The strength workout sort of mirrors what you'd do in Starting Strength. Mostly sets of five reps, although more sets than the average Starting Strength routine. I was sore as fuck afterward, but not more than usual after a good workout.

It was after that that I saw the Hypertrophy plan and said to myself, "Dear God, what have I done?"

I know that screenshot is posting a little light, so if you're having trouble seeing it, hit the link above (it's hyperlinked as "this one") and look at Day Two.

I posted that screenshot to Facebook and my friends were pretty much a big collective of "lol, nope!" on that routine. I don't blame them. I was dreading it myself.

Still, I managed to finish it against all odds, and finished the rest of the workouts during the rest of the week.

I'm now on the fourth week of the program. The program is supposed to last ten weeks. So here's the results so far:

As far as strength goes, I'm not certain as to whether or not that's improved. Because I knew I'd be lifting more reps than the Starting Strength plan, I started off lifting fairly light. I started doing 185 pound squats and 185 pound Romanian deadlifts. I'm now up to 205 on each, even though I've squatted 235 and deadlifted 265 before I began the program.

The biggest results I've seen so far are in my muscular endurance. I've written very briefly on muscular endurance in my post Achieving Greatness (on a Budget). Basically, muscular endurance is your body's ability to take a beating and drive on. On that note, I've improved greatly.

So yeah, my muscular endurance has improved, so where's my criticism of Starting Strength?

Starting Strength has its name for a reason. It's not called "Starting Endurance" or "Starting Speed" for a reason. It's not meant to improve any of those. It's meant to improve your strength.

And for that reason, I'm thankful for the program. Without it, my lifts would all still be in the high 100s and not the 200s or even the 300s (like my best squat and deadlift). I found new strength because of this program.

But as I did that program, I noticed that the other parts of my fitness began to wane. I wasn't able to run as fast I used to. I certainly didn't have the endurance that I once had. I was able to lift more weight in five rep sets, but that was about the only physical improvement I felt.

Starting Strength is called "Starting Strength" for a reason. It's a beginner program, meant to get you to a certain level of strength that you didn't know you were capable of, before you move onto better things. It will make you damn strong. Like, really strong. Stronger than you'd be able to do with your average bodybuilding or weightlifting plan. But it's not good for building any other type of athleticism.

So if you're new or relatively new to the weightlifting game, Starting Strength is fantastic. Once you plateau on that, you'll want to decide where you want your fitness journey to go.

On Masculinity, Part 2

In my last post about masculinity, I warned about the left's reluctance to have a conversation on masculinity, saying:

 This needs to be said, because the right is having this conversation, and if I, a 37 year old feminist man is wondering what it means to be a man without toxic masculinity, I can guarantee that there's 17 year old boys that are asking themselves that. And if Roosh V, Jordan Peterson, and the Proud Boys are the only ones willing to have this conversation, we're going to have another generation of misogynistic, angry, and mentally unhealthy men to contend with.

I said that nearly a year ago, and since then, I've seen the right all too willing to have that conversation. Except, something has changed in that time. And I'm downright mad about it.

A little over a week ago, this pic of a right-wing nutjob by the name of Jacob Wohl started making the rounds on Leftbook:

I think a certain part of me snapped while reading that. Here I am, a 38 year old veteran of two wars, a past member of the United States Army, a man who lifts weights and shoots guns on the regular, who can pound back any liquor that you put in front of him, and this 90 pound pipsqueak has the fucking nerve to lecture me on masculinity?!

Hello, all of the right! Is this your champion? Come pick up your kid from the Wal-Mart service desk!

I did some research on Wohl, and it turns out that he just turned 21 this year. That means that he was just 11 years old in 2009 when I just started facing the Great Recession, and only 8 years old when I returned from Iraq. This fucking child is going to try to lecture me on manliness? LOL!

I know I posted an entry on the need for the left to start talking about masculinity or the right will, but so far the right's champions are fucking lacking in masculinity. I'm mad as hell about this, so I'm going to drag a few of the right's leaders on the subject.

This leads me to the right's next two heroes of masculinity, Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro. Let's start with the first guy.

Are you kidding me? This is the guy that became famous because he was scared of transgender people, who wrote a book telling boys how to act like men, and he sounds like Ned fucking Flanders when he speaks:

I don't need to take lessons on masculinity from Ned Flanders.

Recently, it became revealed that Peterson had started a diet in which he only eats meat to prove his manliness. For most of us, we know that that's just compensating. Really masculine guys don't need to say that we only eat meat (we don't, vegetables are plenty healthy). Those that claim to do so, we know that they're just scared of us seeing them for the lack of masculinity that they have.

That leaves us with this last asshole. Ben fucking Shapiro.

Look, if I'm ever going to take lessons on masculinity from someone, it's not going to be from someone that argues for a living, and then cries when someone tries to get physical with them. Ben Shapiro wrote an article in 2017 on masculinity in which he said:

But in their effort to eradicate the destructive male tendency, the Left has pushed emasculation as a solution. While they champion the notion that women can do anything they set their minds to (true!), they simultaneously castigate men as the barriers to progress and masculinity as a condition to be avoided. The goal of the Left, therefore, becomes to train boys not to become men. Instead, boys should be feminized; they should never be encouraged to “be a man.” That’s too pressure-filled, too nasty, too mean.

We really haven't. Seriously. I'm a male strong af feminist. AMA, and I'll tell you that I don't push emasculation on anyone.

But Ben Shapiro really isn't someone that should be pushing the ideas of masculinity on anyone. He's a tiny, weak man who writes articles and gives arguments instead of providing examples of what a masculine man would look like. He can't do it because he's a tiny candy ass that doesn't lift. I bet he doesn't even know how to use a charcoal grill. He's not a man. He's a boy in his 30s.

I will write another article on masculinity eventually in which I talk about wholesome masculinity; what it means to be a strong "manly man" without having to be an asshole. But for now, I just really had to call this bullshit out. I'm damn tired of the right raising up as their champions of masculinity those that I can rip apart like paper. If I can tear you in two, I sure as fuck don't want to hear your definitions on masculinity and manliness. Join a gym, assholes.

This Post Talks About Kids and Psychedelic Drugs

Well, we're just about wrapped up on discussing Johann Hari's book, Lost Connections. I still strongly encourage anyone that's been following this series to get the book. If you don't have enough money to buy it, hit up your local library. It's a very good book.

Chapters 13 and 20 will be discussed here. In chapter 13, Hari put two reasons for depression in one chapter. Genetics, and changes in the brain.

If you suffer from depression and anxiety, you've probably asked yourself, "Am I broken?" I've often asked myself that when wondering why I was depressed. I've had friends and family members talk to me about their depression and ask that. What we really mean is, "Am I just genetically predisposed to suffer from depression and anxiety?" And the answer is, well, kind of.

We're not actually broken. As I've written already and as Hari's book discusses in detail, we have perfectly good reasons for being depressed. Very legitimate reasons. Yet there is two factors that can make us more predispositioned for depression and anxiety.

The beginning of Chapter 13 discusses a concept called "neuroplasticity". Neuroplasticity is the brain changing over time as new experiences happen. Hari interviewed a neuroscientist named Marc Lewis about the concept. To quote:

If you look at a brain scan of a depressed or highly anxious person, Marc explained to me, it will look different from the brain scan of somebody without these problems. The areas that relate to feeling unhappy, or to being aware of risk, will be lit up like Christmas tree lights. They will be bigger, and more active.

Basically, if you do suffer from depression and anxiety, your brain is wired for it.

I can relate to this big time. I once told my therapist, "One of the perks of having General Anxiety Disorder is that you're always preparing for the worst case scenario." I said that completely unironically. My wife and I had signed up to National Debt Relief about six months prior because we were in debt up to our eyeballs, and they asked us if we wanted to pay an upcharge to keep a lawyer on retainer in case one of our creditors decided to sue us. Of course I did. I prepared for the worst case scenario. And then one of the creditors did. Good thing we paid for that lawyer, as he got that shit settled quick.

I'm always preparing for the worst case scenario, because having depression and anxiety has my brain hard wired to always be scoping out threats. When you suffer from those, your brain is in constant survival mode. Detect the threat. Prepare to defend against the threat.

It's kind of ironic that in those moments, anxiety feels less like a burden and more like a warm blanket.

The other part of chapter 13 talks about the genetic component of depression. When I saw that there was a genetic link to depression and anxiety, I was, to put it mildly, alarmed. My oldest daughter has shown symptoms of extreme anxiety, and not just in a "kids being kids" way. There's times when she expresses fear in a "this is not normal, even for a six year old" manner. And come to think of it, my parents have suffered from depression. My dad's medicine cabinet is full of pretty much every anti-depressant on the map. From what my parents have told me, my grandparents likely suffered from depression. But it's not that simple. A group of scientists did study the genetic component of depression and anxiety and, to quote:

Years into their work, they found something striking. They discovered that having a variant of a gene called 5-HTT does relate to becoming depressed.                                                                                                                                                                                   Yet there was a catch. We are all born with a genetic inheritance-but your genes are activated by your environment. They can be switched on, or off, by what happens to you. And Avshalom [the leader of the team of scientific researchers conducting the study] discovered-as Professor Robert Sapolsky explains-"that if you have a particular flavor of 5-HTT, you have a greatly increased risk of depression, but only in a certain environment." If you carried this gene, the study showed, you were more likely to become depressed-but only if you have experienced a terribly stressful event, or a great deal of childhood trauma.

So there is a mental component to depression, but it's only activated as a result of the perfectly good reasons why you're depressed or anxious.

So how do we deal with this? Well, according to the book, by doing lots and lots of drugs!

I'm kidding, but not really.

Ronald Griffith is a man that rose through the ranks of psychology and has become a veritable god in the field. After trying to find studies on meditation (more on that later), he found that there were studies done in the 50s and 60s on the effect of hallucinogens that caused people to not only be less depressed, but also quit smoking and drinking. The studies ceased after that, because, well, President Nixon. But in the 1990s, Dr. Griffith had enough political clout to try it again. He decided to do experiments with patients under the influence of psilocybin, the chemical in magic mushrooms. The patients were placed in a room under the supervision of a medical professional, and given the drug. The effects were magical.

Like I keep saying, get the fucking book and read it (Lost Connections by Johann Hari, at your local library if you can't afford to buy it, otherwise it's literally anywhere books are sold), because the results were spectacular, and the experiences detailed in the book are far too long for me to quote. Yet the patients had their anxiety replaced by a feeling of deep connection to people and their emotions.

When I read about this, I did look into where I could have this same treatment. Do drugs, end your depression. I found one retreat out in California that cost thousands of dollars to attend, not including travel costs. So that's out.

So what can we do? That's where meditation comes in.

Or I should say, real meditation. Meditation exercises are pretty much everywhere these days, and a lot of it is just bullshit made to collect your money. Back when I worked at the oil refinery, I would listen to a meditation app on my phone that did nothing but have me doing some breathing exercises. For $5.99 a month, some asshole told me to "breathe in, breathe out" for ten minutes a day and it didn't do a thing. I was still depressed and hated my job.

Hari's book mentions two types of meditation. The first is "loving-kindness meditation". If you're the type of person that hates people out of envy, this is a good exercise for you. Just close your eyes, think of someone that you're envious of, and instead of thinking hateful thoughts, focus on thinking positive thoughts about the person. Do it for five minutes at a time, every day. After a while, you'll notice that not only are you happier, but you're also liking people a lot more.

The other is deep meditation, which does mimic the effects of being on magic mushrooms. One of the patients that had taken shrooms in the experiment given by Dr. Griffith ended up becoming a meditation coach because he knew that the psychological effects of taking the drug were temporary, and he wanted to continue having the mental state that he had after doing the experiment.

I've been trying to find a deep meditation coach ever since reading Hari's book, and it's not an easy task. I live in Southeast Michigan, where 2/3rds of the population lives, and finding pretty much any other thing is easy to find here. Yet finding an actual deep meditation coach, as opposed to a bunch of con artists, is hard. I'll still keep looking, though.

Well, this wraps up my series on Lost Connections. I might do a conclusion post in the days ahead to sum up everything in his book and my last few posts. There's also a lot of stuff I really want to write about if I can get the time. Either way, thanks for reading!

One Thing We Can Do For Ourselves

This post is going to be discussing chapter 11 of Lost Connections. Cause Six: Disconnection from the Natural World.

A little over a year ago, I got sacked from my job working security at an oil refinery in Southwest Detroit. I didn't know it at the time, but it was one of the best things that ever happened to me. Getting fired sucks, and I didn't take it well even though I hated the job. The main reason why I hated the job was the area itself. For miles around, all you saw was urban decay. The heavy industrialization of the area took its toll on the environment. You saw nothing but concrete, and the nearby River Rouge was so polluted that it didn't even look appealing. You certainly couldn't swim in it. Not unless you wanted to die a horrible death from cancer.

That environment took a toll on the employees of the refinery. Everyone was miserable there (I imagine they still are). That made management hard to deal with. Much of middle management would take their hatred of the area out on the workers. So the combination of a shit environment with shit bosses made the whole job a shit job.

Thinking back on how awful that job was, I'm tempted to ramble on about it. But this is about Johann Hari's book, and not my old shit job.

In this chapter, Hari interviews Isabel Behncke, an evolutionary biologist. In order to get the interview, Isabel made Hari climb a mountain with her. Hari did not want to climb a mountain-he's a city boy through and through-but he wanted the interview, so off he went. The chapter ends when they've finished climbing the mountain:

The cruelest thing about depression, she said, is that it drains of you the desire to be fully alive as this-to swallow experience whole. "We want to feel alive," she said. We want it, and need it, so badly. Later, she said: "Obviously, we were facing death, but you felt alive, right? You might have been horrified-but you were not depressed."                           No. I was not depressed.

Isabel studied bonobos for many years. She first studied them in zoos, and realized she'd have to go to a war-torn part of the Congo to study them outside of captivity. She found that when the bonobos were not in captivity, they sometimes would get depression. Like many primate societies, there's always a few members of the tribe that face ostracization, and those would show signs of depression. Yet, they only showed depression to a certain point.

In the wild, for bonobos, there's a limit to how far this depression goes. It's there-especially for the low-status ones-but there is a floor below which the animals won't sink. Yet in zoos, it seemed the bonobos would slip further and further down, in a way they never would in the wild. They would scratch until they bled. They would howl. They would develop tics, or start rocking obsessively. In their natural habitat, she [Isabel] never saw the bonobos develop this "full-blown, chronic depression," she says, but in zoos, it was quite common.

This chapter of Hari's book cites several studies that show the link between being away from nature and depression. One that really captured my attention was one that wasn't discussed very much, but gave a shout out to Michigan. Namely, the Jackson State Prison. Those of us that live in Michigan know that if you done fucked up bad, that's the prison you're going to. It's underdone different names and rebuilding over the years, yet it houses Michigan's most violent offenders. One thing that was noticed in a study done on mental health in that prison was that on one side of the prison, inmates can look outside of their cells and see farmland. On the other side of the prison, inmates see a concrete wall. When all other factors were accounted for, those that were on the side that saw the farmland had a 25% rate of decrease in mental and physical health problems.

One of the things I noticed about Hari's book is that there is no chapter on reconnection associated with this. Probably because the solution to this is simple: Get your ass outside. It would be hard to write a whole chapter just telling people to get their ass outside. While most of the problems with depression outlined in Lost Connections talks about a need for a collective solution, this is one that we can handle on an individual level. Go outside. Get in touch with nature.

One of the perks of my new job is that it has an impressive amount of vacation pay, and unlike every other job I've had that promised vacation pay, you don't have to wait a year to get it. A certain amount of hours are accumulated in every paycheck. So next month, I'll be going camping with my family in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. My wife and I love going up there. We've taken three vacations up there, including our honeymoon. Because of how security companies have done me in past employment, this will be our first vacation in six years. And like I said in my post Wanting Stuff Makes us Depressed, we really miss tent camping, so instead of taking the camper, we're taking a tent. I was discussing the UP with one of my coworkers who had never been up there and asked, "You know what's in the UP that makes it so great?" He answered no and I responded, "NOTHING! THERE'S NOTHING UP THERE, AND THAT'S WHAT MAKES IT SO GREAT! It's nothing but trees! You go up there, you unplug, and you enjoy yourself!" My wife and I are geeking out about our vacation next month where we'll see a whole bunch of nothing. Nothing but nature. We're going to see the Painted Rocks, make our third trip to Tahquamenon Falls, and visit a bear sanctuary. A whole bunch of nothing but nature, and we're thrilled about it.

One of the few things we can do for ourselves to fight depression is to get back in touch with nature. Get your ass outside. Go hiking. Go camping. Go ice fishing if it's cold. Or ice skating if that's your thing. Just get your ass outside.

Why Fixing this Shit Will be Hard

This latest post is going to be discussing chapters 10, 15 and 16 of Johann Hari's book, Lost Connections.

In chapter 10, Hari talks to a scientist named Robert Sapolski, who studied baboons in their natural habitat. Baboons have a hierarchical structure, and for the males, the strongest is on top. At the top of the troop of baboons he studied, there was Solomon.

Solomon was allowed to do whatever he pleased. He could take food from the other baboons, kick them out of the shade when it was hot and take the spot for himself, etc. At the bottom of the troop was Job. Job would have stress related seizures. His hair would fall out from stress. And as Solomon was allowed to do whatever he wanted to any baboon, it was permitted that the baboons could do anything they wanted to Job. And they did.

One of the tasks Dr. Sapolski had to do for his research was hit a baboon with a tranquilizer dart and draw their blood. The blood was tested for many things, including cortisol, the stress hormone. Solomon rarely had high levels of cortisol, while Job was filled with it.

Humans are the same way. To quote the book:

Some human cultures (like the United States) have very large gaps between the people at the top and the people at the bottom. In thos places, there is a small number of Solomons at the top, and most people are left like Job at the bottom. But other human cultures (like Norway) are quite different-with highly equal ways of living, where the top and bottom are close together. In those cultures, there are hardly any Solomon and hardly any Jobs-most people live in a middle zone, like Numbers 10 to 13 in the baboon hierarchy

And when sociologists did similar research on human societies, the results were similar to the study of baboons. When there's a high amount of inequality, there's a high amount of anxiety and depression. Lower amounts of inequality lead to less amount of anxiety and depression. The book states, "When the status gap is too big, it creates 'a sense of defeat that you can't escape from.'"

The book (and my previous posts) have discussed the solutions to this problem. Destroy the hierarchies. Create a system where all people have their basic economic needs met. Democratize the workplace. It should be easy to create this system, but it's not. Why? Well, that's where Solomon comes in.

Solomon rarely had high levels of cortisol when his blood was tested. Rarely. But when he did, it was when another baboon went gunnin' for that #1 spot. "It turned out-when his blood samples were tested-that when there is a war on for the position of alpha male, the most stressed baboons are the ones at the top", the book states.

Solomon's power was eventually challenged by a young baboon named Uriah. It took almost a year, but eventually Uriah took the top spot and Solomon ended up being number 9 in the hierarchy. All the other baboons that he had spent years fucking over enjoyed their sweet revenge until Solomon left the troop and never came back.

Just like the study with baboons, humans are the same way. Those on top get very, very stressed at the thought of losing their position within the hierarchy. And they're very, very invested in keeping their spot at the top of it. So much so, that according to the book, the thought of losing their spot in the hierarchy creates even higher levels of cortisol than those who live at the bottom of it.

We're a nation of hierarchies. Class hierarchies, racial hierarchies, patriarchal hierarchies, and so on. And people are scared of giving up their spot in one of those hierarchies, even if it'll make their life better. LBJ said it best when he said, "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."

So what can we do about that? Well, chapters 15 and 16 help to give an answer.

Chapter 15 tells a story about a housing project in Berlin in 2011. Gentrification had raised the rents in the area, and one elderly woman was about to face eviction. Knowing she'd be homeless, she decided she would commit suicide. She posted a sign on her window saying she would.

This gave the community the kick start they needed to organize. The community didn't get along very well. It was filled with the outcasts of society-Turks, gay people, leftists, Muslims, etc. And they all had mostly segregated themselves in that neighborhood because of prejudice.

And I really hope that those reading my post get this book (even if you don't have money to buy it, find a local library and check it out), because I can't quote this chapter enough to explain how goddamn glorious this protest is. I can only sum it up by saying that all these people that had long been suspicious of each other, started not only working together, but liking each other. To quote:

"It wasn't a straight line toward greater tolerance. It had zigs and zags. 'Everyone should do what they want, so long as they don't try to convert me' Nuriye [the woman who posted the sign] told me. 'I'm not sure how I'd react if my children said they were gay-I don't know.' Sudblock [the local gay bar] offered to sponsor the Turkish teenage girls' soccer team. Their parents said it was a step too far-to put the name of this gay club on their daughters' jerseys.

One day, long into the protest, Richard Stein [the owner of Sudblock] was in his bar when one of the conservative Turkish residents-a woman who wears the full niqab-gave him some cakes. He opened the box. Out of icing, on top of one of them, she had made a little rainbow flag.

Chapter 16 follows up on this story. Reconnection One: To Other People, is the title of the chapter. The opening chapter says in part:

 In most parts of the Western world, Nuriye would have been told there was something wrong with her brain chemistry. So would everyone else in Kotti. They would have taken their pills and stayed alone in their little apartments until they were thrown out and scattered. I never felt more keenly that this story was wrong than at Kotti. They taught me that when people rediscover each other, problems that previously seemed insoluble start to look soluble....

What solved their problems? It seemed to me it was other people standing by their side, committed to walking on the path with them, finding collective solutions to their problems. They didn't need to be drugged. They needed to be together.

Fixing this shit will be hard, but if we're to do so, we need to find common ground by going out and talking to people. Not on Facebook, or other social media platforms, because we're at our worst there. We need to actually go out, and talk to people.

I work in private security. It's the only civilian job I've had in two decades. I didn't really choose this to be my career, but it was more or less forced on me. I started doing the job because they offered $7 an hour when the minimum wage was $4.25. Then I got home from Iraq in 2006 when we were just about to hit another recession and the only industry that would take me in was private security once again. I was unemployed by 2009 and in 2012, the only job I could get was, once again, private security. I've been doing that ever since. I make this point because private security isn't exactly a career path that one chooses if they're a leftist. My profession is filled with, to put it lightly, those right of center. Or, to put it more accurately, filled with reactionary assholes.

At my current job, that's not any different. I'd really like my current job if many of my coworkers weren't reactionary shitbags. But it's actually forced me to talk to these reactionaries in real life, instead of arguing them on social media. And that's where everything above that I've talked about comes in.

One of my co-workers is Pat. I argue politics with Pat on a regular basis. I have to keep it civil when I argue with Pat, because he's a Sergeant, so I have to tread very carefully with my words. He is, after all, middle management, so I can't insult him directly when we debate. He really likes Trump. He's also dropped the occasional racist or homophobic remark that I've called him out on. He's in his late 50's, so his casually racist and homophobic remarks are that of the stereotypical boomer. I imagine that if we were strangers on Facebook in a comment section, I'd find one of his comments towards minorities and proceed to rip him to shreds. But this isn't Facebook. This is real life. And despite his occasional comments, he's also very compassionate and professional in his dealings with minority patients.

And here's the real kicker: Like many in my profession, he's a retired cop. Not just a retired cop, but he was the president of his local police union when he was a cop.

Pat's right-wing on most issues, but when you bring up the topic of labor unions, he is Che Guevara. He is Walter Reuther. He is Bill Heywood. He is so goddamn leftist that during one of his rants on the need for labor unions, I held out a fist and said, "Are you ready to join me in the revolution, comrade?!" Of course he responded in the negative.

The security personnel in my company aren't unionized. And I haven't made any attempt to change that because my experience with organizing workers is, well, horrid (in this month of Facebook memories, I've seen my past attempts to organize get completely steamrolled while my fellow workers had been intimidated into voting no on a union through straight out illegal intimidation by management). But should we ever decide to change our minds on organizing, I know that Pat would be one of the fiercest soldiers in the effort to join a union. Capitalism be damned, Pat wants the right to collective bargaining.

Fixing this shit really will be hard. But the solution is to get out and talk to people, in the real world. When you do that, you'll find that we all have more in common than one might think. And when we find that common ground, we'll be more ready to do away with our previous prejudices.

I just realized that this is the end of this post, and I haven't posted any picture to bring in people on social media. Well, here's a picture of Bill Haywood I guess.

When Therapy Helps

My apologies to those following this series for going so long without writing. It's been a very busy few weeks for me. I got hired full time at my job, had to deal with a kid with a flu, got sick myself, got injured, and just had a broken tooth removed. Haven't had much time for writing.

So let's get started. This post discusses chapters 9 and 21 of Johann Hari's book Lost Connections. These chapters discuss childhood trauma. And let me do the content warning that we leftists like to do: Child abuse, rape (although if you're a victim of either, this post might help as well. Feel free to make your own decision on reading).

I don't know too many people without childhood trauma. The world is fucked up like that I guess.

Johann Hari was abused by an adult in his life that wasn't his parents. He names one example of the abuse. He was strangled with an electrical cord. And for most of his life, he thought it was his fault. He was being punished for being bad, and he went most of his life thinking it was his fault that a grown ass adult strangled him. To quote:

Why do so many people who experience violence in childhood feel the same way? Why does it lead many of them to self-destructive behavior, like obesity, or hardcore addiction, or suicide? I have spent a lot of time thinking about this. When you're a child, you have very little power to change your environment. You can't move away, or force somebody to stop hurting you. So you have two choices. You can admit to yourself that you're powerless-that at any moment, you could be badly hurt, and there's simply nothing you can do about it. Or you can tell yourself it's your fault. If you do that, you actually gain some power-at least in your own mind. If it's your fault, then there's something you can do that might make it different. You aren't a pinball being smacked around a pinball machine. You're the person controlling the machine."

When I decided to start this series, I mentioned that I stopped seeing a therapist because they couldn't help me. Even they knew it. I went through two therapists in a year, and after a few months, both of them asked me point blank, "What do you get out of this?" Which is therapist speak for, "Why are you still coming here? I can't fix you." And they were right. They couldn't fix me because I had very good reasons for being depressed. I had real world problems that they weren't capable of solving.

But this is one of those times when therapy actually does help.

Studies were done on the subject, and it was found that when you talk about childhood trauma with a therapist, it definitely helps. Therapists are trained to be kind and compassionate when you talk about trauma, and that's what helps to make things better. To quote the book again:

"In a smaller pilot study, after being asked these questions [about childhood trauma], the patients were given the options of discussing what had happened in a session with a psychoanalyst. Those patients were 50 percent less likely to come back to the doctor saying they felt physically ill, or seeking drugs, in the following year.

So it appeared that they were visiting the doctor less because they were actually getting less anxious, and less unwell. These were startling results. How could that be? The answer, Vincent [the doctor that performed the experiment on talking about trauma] suspects, has to do with shame. "In that very brief process," he told me, "one person tells somebody else who's important to them...something (they regard as) deeply shameful about themselves, typically for the first time in their life. And they come out of that with the realization-"I still seems to be accepted by this person". It's potentially transformative.

What this suggests is it's not just the childhood trauma in itself that causes these problems, including depression and anxiety-it's hiding away the childhood trauma. It's not telling anyone because you're ashamed. When you lock it away in your mind, it festers, and the sense of shame grows. As a doctor, Vincent can't (alas) invent time machines to go back and prevent the abuse. But he can help his patients to stop hiding, and to stop feeling ashamed."

So therapy helps if you have childhood trauma. Speaking to someone who is kind and empathetic to what happened to you helps to alleviate your depression.

If you have past trauma in this matter, please make an appointment to see a therapist. They can help you.

I still have to put up a photo to draw in folks on my Facebook feed. So here's someone that faced some hardcore childhood depression. Motherfucking Arya Stark!