Who's your daddy?

Yesterday, while browsing through my friend, Vikki's, blog, I saw that someone none of us knew, yes, a stranger, had posted a comment. Suddenly my world shifted. Oh, you mean random people, folks from OUT THERE, might actually read these things. People who don't know Luca, Stella, Miguel, Augie and the host of other small fry that I refer to?

What does that do to this whole blogging thing?

I'm reading a book called Us and Them. It's part of my current obsession: a rash of books on brain chemistry and the neurochemical background to emotion, thought and culture. Us and Them examines how each of us is constantly continually unceasingly responding to our environment by figuring out who is like us - at least at this moment - and who isn't. It describes this not through an analysis of culture and society - my usual path - but through looking at what goes on in your brain in these moments. And how, bottom line, this is something we all do, across culture, across nation, across age.

And then came the blog. After seeing this "post by a stranger," all of us - the Vikki community - went running to see his blog. Who is this interloper? Is he like us? Do we like what he has to say? Because this will, of course, determine whether or not we hold any stock in his comments.

Yes, it's true, if said Empty Man were a rabid right winger crying for the death and destruction of homosekshality (many although not all of Vikki's community are of some form of queer expression), well, his words would be read through that lens. Instead, he was this incredibly thoughtful and creative thinker. So suddenly, his words take on a different slant. Hey Mikey, we like him.

If there's a sign of maturity that I am aspiring to gain, it's the ability to really hear what an individual says for the specificity of that moment and not by hearing said person and looking for clues, hints as to whether or not I am going to agree with the words before I even hear them. The whole left/right thing feels generally more problematic to me, in terms of leading to change that makes sense. There are plenty of closed minded lefties and open minded righties. I guess if I had to pick a closed minded person, I'd pick a leftie any day. But if I'm hoping for real change - something that really exists to discover some kind of functional democracy - then the willingness to think outside of what we currently know seems like a great benefit. Especially since all that we know - left and right - are failed democracies that only privilege whoever is currently in power. And while I would prefer the lefties were in power, once we're in power within this profoundly flawed system, the seconds are ticking until we get too glamoured by the power and then, yes, fuck up.

Left and right rhetoric usually exists within the current system - the system whose linear landscape gave birth to the two directions.