These Are My Confessions

Every now and then I just really like something in spite of my better angels. I have some strange thing with Usher’s song, “Confessions (parts I and II).” I’m not a big Usher fan, but every time I hear “Confessions” I have to listen to it to get to the hook, which is so damn catchy I can’t stand it. Then I walk around all day singing it in my head.

The problem is I hate the guy in the song.

The whole song is utterly bizarre and the guy is the kind of person who just makes you want to whack him in the head with a heavy fish – or worse. He’s running around on his current girlfriend with his old girlfriend (does that technically mean he has two current girlfriends?). This is not endearing, but also is not what makes it especially heinous. Some version of this is the mainstay of an estimated 25% of popular music. (For the female version, nothing beats TLC’s “Creep,” which again, while I’m opposed to the behavior, damn it’s hard to stop singing. But I digress.)

What makes me want to whack him with the fish is his extreme ego, and his complete cluelessness about what his “confessions” are worth and how anyone could reasonably be expected to react to him. For example, check out this series of brilliant thoughts:

Everytime I was in L.A. I was with my ex-girlfriend

Everytime you called I told you,"Baby I'm workin." (No!)

I was out doin my dirt (Oh!)

Wasn't thinkin' 'bout you gettin' hurt
Brace yourself It ain't good

But it would be even worse if you heard this from somebody else (oh no)

(Blogger’s edit note: Would it? I think not.)

Now this gon' be the hardest thing I think I ever had to do

Got me talkin' to myself askin' how I'm gon' tell you

'bout that chick on part 1 I told ya'll I was creepin' with

Said she's 3 months pregnant and she's keepin' it

The first thing that came to mind was you

Second thing was how do I know if it's mine and is it true

Third thing was me wishin' that I never did what I did

How I ain't ready for no kid and bye bye to our relationship

Oh for God’s sake. I’ll spare you the rest but you get the idea. He goes on to talk about “being a man” and telling “the woman he loves” that he is “having a baby by a woman (he) hardly even knows.” So let’s summarize, young man. You deliberately misled your girlfriend for an extended period of time; you disregarded the impact of what you were doing until it affected YOU; you suggest the other woman is promiscuous; you’ve been getting it on without birth control with no intention of parenting; and you are all freaked out that your girlfriend is going to break up with you.

Yes. Yes she is, you idiot. And after that she’s invited to my place for a champagne toast. The girl you're ditching with the baby can come too.

Confessing – no matter what the situation -- isn’t something that makes you honourable. It’s something that unchains you from your own guilt or fear of discovery. But to expect to be revered or respected for confession on something like this story or perhaps any other issue hardly seems realistic. I think when you decide to confess something, it’s best to eradicate all notions that the person receiving the information is going to give you a gold star. You are deciding to end the suspense while waiting for a bad reaction, not to get rid of the bad reaction itself. By the time you have something to confess, you're pretty much already screwed.

So please, please..........no more self-love and expectation of reward for confession. It doesn’t make us a “man” or a “woman.” It just unburdens us. What happens after that is out of our hands.

And the Procession Continues

An emperor hires two swindlers who promise him the finest suit of clothes from the most beautiful cloth. This cloth, they tell him, is invisible to anyone who is either stupid or unfit for his or her position. The Emperor cannot see the (non-existent) cloth, but pretends that he can out of fear; his ministers do the same. When the swindlers report that the suit is finished, they dress him in mime. The Emperor then goes on a procession through the capitol showing off his new "clothes". During the course of the procession, a small child cries out, "But he has nothing on!" The crowd realizes the child is telling the truth. The Emperor, however, holds his head high and continues the procession. (adapted fromWikipedia)

Fortunately there is no quota on how many lessons and stories I can pass along to my child; but if there were, Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes” would shoot straight to the top of the short list.

I loved this story as a child, mostly because a grown up was prancing around naked and didn’t know it (hilarious), and because a kid schooled the grown ups (naturally). But good God, I had no idea back then how real this story was.

I’m still reeling from the Bayer explosion denouement. The New York Times editorial this weekend further pricked my feelings of WTH. (See “Chemical Plant Safety,” http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/17/opinion/17sun2.html?_r=1) I think it’s that bizarre phenomenon of thinking there is no way this many people are just going along with this, that would be insane, it must be me so I’ll try to keep my freak out to a dull roar. Then this editorial comes along, and I’m reminded all over again that YES, this very situation killed thousands of people; that YES, chemical plants are well known terrorist targets; that YES, the chemical industry is focused on profits above all else; and YES, the procession continues.

What good are jobs is we’re all dead, or in such bad shape that we wish we were dead?

Like the Andersen story, try this litmus test. It’s never let me down. Explain any given situation to a four year old and ask their opinion. They’ll tell you the truth.

Purposeful Honesty

Nietzche once said, “I’m not upset that you lied to me, I’m upset that from now on I can’t believe you.”

Amen, brother!

Often we are so focused on the fact-based realities of whether or not we have “lied,” as if that is itself the arbiter of right and wrong, of positive or negative consequences. Isn’t the real issue whether or not we have nurtured trust with other people?

There is a lot going around about the technical aspects of truth in some local community dealings. And it really seems to miss the point by a wide, wide margin. The point is that in order to continue to function as organizations, as government, as friends and neighbors and lovers and the rest, we have to have a bedrock belief that the information we exchange with one another is not only technically correct but that it comes from a place of purposeful honesty, not evasion.

Sadly, it is so easy to take for granted the good will and belief in us that most people offer up front; you only internalize what you have lost when you realize that gift is gone once you’ve treated it too casually. Getting it back can be a long road.

What holds you back from purposeful honesty, in personal as well as public life?

Convince Me

Last week, a member of the WV Congressional delegation publicly announced that she was “not convinced” that human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide are leading to global climate change.

Huh.

This was one of the stranger public statements I’d seen from a member of Congress in a long time, and that’s saying something. I’ve been unable to shake how incredibly irritated I am by this “not convinced” claim. It is so anti-intellectual and insulting to her constituency and frankly, to the rest of the world.

Climate change is no longer something we can just say we believe or don’t believe. It’s crazy to me in the face of all of the best science and the wide variety of studies and interpretations from hundreds of professionals the world over to uphold your personal doubt as a reason for opposing policy change. Anyone can see, it’s not doubt, it’s fear and denial. And no plan.

An honest approach to the situation would be to acknowledge that the policy changes required by pollution will, in the short run, pose threats to the old economy. I could get behind a press release acknowledging that reality. But to forestall real issues with claims of needing to be “convinced” is just ridiculous. It’s a fine example of not pursing truth at the highest level.

We need to talk about the profound truth of what we are doing to our world, as well as the profound truth of how long undoing it will take and what the very real consequences of those changes will be on many people. Anyone willing to have that conversation is a real leader. Anyone diverting attention onto false debates is only out for themselves.

The Nature of Science

For someone without any formal training or practice in science, I usually don’t do too badly when reading science and/or medical journal articles. That said, I really had a hard time with this recent piece on the ethical issues and evidence surrounding public campaigns to promote breastfeeding as superior to formula. http://jhppl.dukejournals.org/cgi/reprint/32/4/637 For some reason my comprehension was just not strong on this one.

About the time I gave up, my eyes landed on these sentences: “It is all too true that the American public does not understand the concept of risk. They also do not understand the nature of science. Science does not answer questions, in the simple sense of the phrase – it refines them incrementally in its approach toward understanding natural processes.”

Now the study author had my attention!

I love the idea of the refined, incremental approach to understanding something. It seems so important to internalize the idea that we are always in the process of understanding something, and that complete understanding is an unrealistic goal. It’s this kind of thing that illustrates the relationship of faith and science and their overlapping dimensions, not their stark opposition in every case. I can switch a word or two and get another sentence that works for me, “Faith does not answer questions, it refines them incrementally in its approach toward understanding spiritual processes.”

It seems to me Bohr’s principle of profound truths applies. It is not faith or science, it is elements of each that illustrate the best, most comprehensive version of understanding our world. To view them as always in opposition reduces them to trivial truths or just plain false statements.

Which does lead me to just plain false statements, of which plenty exist in any realm of human endeavor……more on that soon.

Truths, Both Trivial and Profound

My life changed when I first heard the famous quote from physicist Niels Bohr, “The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.”

I’ve also heard this translated as the difference between trivial and profound truths.

So often we are pushed to choose sides in this life around issues that don’t really lend themselves to black and white “sided” decisions. When profound issues are reduced to the dynamics of trivial issues, I think we lose out as individuals and as a community of human beings when we accept the pressure to name one thing completely right and the other completely wrong. There are elements of rightness and wrongness in all the decisions we make about profound issues, though you might never know it the way our culture demands allegiance to extreme ideas.

Bohr developed the theory that explains the structure and action of complex atoms. During World War II, Bohr fled his native Denmark to escape the Nazis. He travelled to Los Alamos, New Mexico, to advise the scientists developing the first atomic bomb. He returned to Copenhagen after the war and later promoted the peaceful use of atomic energy.

This week I’ll be blogging about the challenges of finding the authentic path through profound truths. I’m thinking a lot about science, no doubt in part because a physicist developed this concept of profound truths sometimes opposing one another. What examples do you have from your own experience? I hope to see your comments.