I'm nearly 47 years old.  I've been living with chronic pain since at least 1995.  I question - on a daily, hourly basis - how much pain I'm in.  What can I do at the moment?  Do I need to rest?  Do I have the energy to talk, do a chore, play guitar, check emails, write a report, go in to work.

For the last 6 months I've been recording my AM/PM pain levels in a journal.  I use a standard 1-pain scale (1. least imaginable to 10. worst imaginable).  I've found I basically score myself as 5-7 on a daily basis:
5: Able to handle the pain and do regular activities
6: The pain is interfering with activities but can still work as needed
7: Work is really difficult - take day off or avoid if possible

I average maybe a full 7 every 1-2 weeks.  But it is subjective and I have maybe two or three 6/7's  every week,

The main stress, apart from the simple discomfort,  comes from duties and expectations - mostly my work.  If I don't do a good job, or take hybrid days, I feel I've let people down.  But I'm averaging 2 sick days a month (7's), and this creates considerable financial impact.  With a daughter going to college, and wanting to provide for vacations, etc., I've taken on some extra hours via remote work, which is much more manageable on bad days.

When I look back over the past year, the past five years, ten years - I find it hard to accurately assess how much pain I was in.  The depression has come and gone, and with it my ability to cope.  There have been times of considerable pain, but if my mood was good it didn't seem as bad.  And when my mood is down, the pain is always worse.

This has always been the fundamental predicament - not only having to assess my pain level at any moment, but how much it is affected by my mood..  What is my pain?  What is my mood?  

I referred to gaslighting in a recent post, and this gets at it: even in pain, voices (my own, as well as from society) tell me to cheer up, as this will reduce the pain.  When the pain doesn't reduce, then I'm not being cheery enough.  It literally feels as though someone is telling you to smile while the thumbscrew is tightening.  

I realize there is truth to this, and apparently research bears out mindfulness techniques.  But what is the ethically appropriate level of work one ought to be asked to do when in pain?  On one level, there is a preventative aspect to "pushing though it", in that find a way to engage in activities when in pain can ultimately be fulfilling and provide a happier life.  But the opposite can also be true: by forcing myself to work when I am in pain, and deal with the stress and anxiety about bills and social expectations on top of that, can make for an unhappier life.

I'm always interested in center-right perspectives on the mainstreaming of far-right extremism.  

But the self-analysis always seems to stop short of a deeper probe into what it is about the right wing, from a psycho-social perspective, that leads/has led to this.  In todays op-ed by the NY Times columnist David French, he starts off by noting:

It keeps happening. Since the ascendance of Donald Trump, with depressing regularity, right-wing men have been outed for using the most vile rhetoric.

He goes on to provide a litany of examples.  Then asks:
What is going on? Why are parts of the right — especially the young right — so infested with outright racists and bigots?

He then admits that there have always been bigots on the right, but goes on to claim that this is something new, and chalks it up to "hatred, combined with masculine insecurity and cowardice",  pointing to examples of how these have led to extremism, especially online.  He briefly argues the way back from here is real world experiences with the joy of family life.
It’s difficult to break the hold of bigotry and fury on the online right, but as is so often the case, the solution to online evil can be found in offline relationships, the family and friends who keep us grounded to the real.

Do they feel that it isn't inevitable?  That these are just extreme cases in an otherwise perfectly reasonable ideology -  that just as extreme leftists might embrace a violent, anti-democratic stalinism, but in general there is nothing particularly violent or anti-democratic about the left?

The problem with that framing is that anti-democratic communist left has essentially been non-existent for many  decades, while huge networks on the right, with hundreds of millions in funding, have only been building during that time and earlier.

The desire to carve a line between ideology and personal psychology is maybe comforting, but blinkers one to what drives mass movements.  There are clear lines to be drawn from basic right-wing ideological assumptions to its current extreme mainstream form.  Fundamental beliefs about  in- versus out- group circles of morality and appeal to traditional hierarchies inform deeply the MAGA phenomenon.  

I would like to see more - any - explorations of the ways in which these core beliefs of the right lead logically to where we now find ourselves.  French starts at hatred and toxic masculinity, but these should have been end points.  Of course those are bad things.  What's important is how we get to them.  

This allergy to look more deeply into why the right has always been fertile soil for bigotry - racism, sexism, homophobia, anti-immigrant hysteria - can partially be explained by a simple aversion by anyone to take personal responsibility for one's toxic baseline assumptions. 

But the more fundamental aversion to this line of inquiry is rooted in the right's epistemological embrace of the fallacy of appeal to tradition and its adherence to a limited moral circle.  If believes in the superiority of one's in-group, capacity for empathy for other perspectives is limited.  Other nations, religions and ethnicities are to a degree written out of moral consideration, while at the same time limiting one's ability to critically examine one's in-group.  The appeal to tradition then becomes a kind of self-preserving cocoon of ignorance in which progressive deconstruction and objective analysis of internal belief is waved away.  Existing hierarchies are in this way viewed, if not as beneficent, then at least as unimpeachable for fear of what may be worse to come.  Much right wing rhetoric is explicitly about this very anxiety: the left (in opposition to the right) is always seeking to "tear down" or "destroy" society.  At its best, conservatism cautions that change can lead to outcomes even worse than what they replaced.  (Stalinism and Maoism being the prime historical example).  But at its worst, conservatism serves to concretize hierarchies with great social harm - almost by definition to marginalized groups. 

But for the "best" version of the conservative impulse - a pointed reminder of unintended consequences - requires good-faith engagement with both the critiques and suggested solutions put  forward by progressive change.  The track record of conservatism on this front is dismal.  The  engines of progressive change can be found in three pillars of democratic society: the university, journalism, and worker unions.  These institutions are at their core instantiations of hierarchical deconstruction. 

In academia, subject matter expertise is fostered via robust collaboration within and across fields in the form of research and peer-review.  In journalism, power is held to account when sectors of power in society are examined in current events and historical context is provided.  In unions, workers come together to create power in solidarity in a context in which capital would otherwise hold  absolute power.  While not perfect, they are integral to maintaining a healthy opportunity not only of equitable power relations in society but also an expansive epistemology that maintains avenues for multivalent discourse through pluralistic empowerment.

The absence of conservative support for these three institutions speaks volumes.  Conservatives have no real presence in academia or journalism, aside from the more apolitical fields where critical discourse is most infrequent, and conservatives are essentially opposed the very concept of unionization.  Instead, what we have are a smattering of token conservative academic thought that trots into the discourse almost exclusively in reactionary form, without good-faith conversation with progressive thought, and seemingly existing only to brandish credentials instead of serious arguments.   Conservative journalism is even worse.  With almost no investigative reporting, reactionary articles provide cherry-picked anecdotes designed not to explore uncomfortable realities and critically dissect social systems and and their actors, but principally to justify the current status quo or attack ideas or actors that have already been assumed to be malevolent.  

The result is a conservative movement that has become ever more isolated from critical thought and ultimately even ideological coherence.  Having given up on basic tools of objective analysis, it exists in a self-contained vacuum.

  Must have been 1991, a sophomore at Summit K12 in Seattle, WA.  My parents had moved up to Washington from Santa Cruz, CA two years earlier in 1989.

The year of the move had been eventful.  The school year had started out at Branciforte Junior High, where my father had attended as a boy.  We had even shared the same math teacher, Mr. Loudermilk.  I remember his algebra classes as stiff and I probably goofed around too much.  I was goofing off everywhere.  I look back on this time as a sort of upwards peak from the "dark" days of upper-elementary school.  From 2nd grade standing in a trash-can with pencils in my nose and getting detention from the teacher, only to walk out into the rain.  I remember looking back at Ms. Winterly yelling at me to "come back inside" and the wet rush of anger and power as I just continued on towards home. 

I was starting to skateboard and follow my brother around to various backyard ramps.  There was Catshit - the funky mini-ramp Ian Cuthbertson and Tosh knew about on Cayuga, where I first learned to drop in.  Then the Watsonville ramp - some 9', nearly vert thing with a tube of bright orange plastic coping.  Noah and I hitchhiked out there, sometimes grabbing apples from an orchard. 

Fruit was always there, in the background.  My home garage had dark purple, heavily seeded grapes.  Up the driveway were Loquat trees which I would climb into and sit, speeding their big brown seeds like a monkey.  Across the yard was a large Avocado tree.  If you turned right at the mailbox, then turned left down the alley towards King's Chair you'd find a tall shrub row with a type of red berry I cannot place, that delivered a sweet juice when crushed in your teeth.  You just had to be sure to spit out its mesocarp.  If you turned left, a few houses up there was a line of plum trees in the sidewalk buffer.  I would sit in these too.  Continuing further towards Broadway on the left you would pass Sourgrass.  I'd grab bunches of it, careful not to reach too close to the pavement or they might have been spritzed with dog piss.  Here and there along the way were juicy Fennel.  Turning back around, on the way to Cory Cuthbertson's house there was an apple tree I'd hop the fence and climb into.  When Josh and I began to burgle into backyards at night, searching for pot plants to pilfer, it became a game to travel between the backyards of house and garages, balancing on narrow fences.  

I was a sort of Switzerland between my "bad" friends and "good" friends.  This represented a dichotomy within myself.  The "bad" Eli, and the "good" Eli who Pine Sol'ed the kitchen table when baby sitting for my parents.  I giggled and tickled with baby Josiah, Tessa, and little Gideon.  I invented a game called "Come and Get Me", where I challenged them from the center of my parents bed and threw them off to the carpet as they laughed in fright of my superior muscles.  But mom was screaming at dad downstairs, throwing dishes at him.  He was always forgetting things - like his wallet on top of the car, But I have no memory of what else there could have been.  Along with my fisher price record player they had also given me a fisher price portable cassette deck.   I didn't like it when they fought.  It was scary.  During one of their many fights, I snuck into the kitchen behind them and hid the cassette recorder with the pots and pans.  I'm not sure what it had recorded as it is lost to time.

"Bad" Eli got sent to the principal for drawing nazi dogfighters I had learned from Rawley after being so impressed with his cartooning skills.  I believe Mr. John also sent me to the office in fourth grade for making some sort of disruptive racist comment to an invited Japanese-American speaker on WWII.  This was Eli of the dark days.  Mom screamed at Noah too when she wasn't screaming at dad, with whom Noah had an incessantly negative relationship.  To this day Noah refers to him as "Dale".  Dad seemed to have a Manichean view of parenting, demanding total obedience of Noah, who in turn questioned his authority at every step.   Justice was meted out harshly, with Noah telling mom and dad to Fuck Off and getting thrown out for the night, exiting through the back door of the laundry room, past the glass bottles bagged for recycling.  Dale was his stepfather, and the roots of that dark fairytale went deep.  To Grandma Carol, his mother, who seemed to me nothing short of Hoban's Aunt Bundlejoycozysweet, provider of comical pantyhose, the Dukes of Hazard, and special orders of Smurf Berry Crunch while watching Saturday morning cartoons, I was her angel.  But between her and Noah there seemed a coldness, he didn't feel she really loved him as she did her blood.  Dad was her baby, and she allowed him to smoke cigarettes at home before the war.  His father, Harry, had died of Cancer after a career working for Standard Oil in the fields of Southern California.  He was thirteen and she spoiled him.  When stuffing himself during his lonely shifts at Polar Bear ice cream didn't fill the void, he signed up to go to Vietnam.  He described to me the way an M16 bullet spins in the air, and so tore up his right arm at the bicep.  He came home with a renewed sense of self, went to Cabrillo Community College and began hanging around with hippies. 

He met my mother, Melinda, in a bar downtown.  She had graduated from Goddard with a liberal arts degree, after having become radicalized left much earlier.  She grew up in Palo Alto, the daughter of Betty, the college-educated descendant of the Clarke, family, land-owning ranchers in Northern California.  Her childhood memories included playing in hay bales and watching her brother get thrown off his horse into the creek.  But her father, Ben, was conservative and spoke with unforgiving politics at the dinner table.  So she wore mismatched tights and flew to the East Coast, participating in southern Freedom Rides over the summer.  She introduced my father to Noah and her student housing home on the University of California Santa Cruz campus up the hill.  Noah was three, and remembers the weight of a new power triangle that never seemed to fade.  My mother's intense self-interest must have felt comfort in my father's attention-adled avoidance.  In many ways after his dad died he seemed to remain a boy.  But he adored her, his mustache, leather jacket, motorcycle , Pentax camera and its bag of negatives.  He taught foreign languages at Harbor High School, and seemed to spend all his time grading papers when he came back from work on his 10 speed.  With more and more babies appearing, home life became overwhelming for her, as she had no time for herself, and began to crack under the pressure.

These were the dark days, in which good and bad Eli spun, starved for attention yet pushed away by the commotion and yelling.  I found escape where I could, riding my little bicycles around town, skim and boogie boarding, and eventually committing to skateboarding as a sport.  If that is what you would call it.  There were contests here and there, but it was ultimately an individual, cultural practice.  There was a progression of expertise to follow.  In the early eighties it was all about transitions: dropping in, grinding, doing rock and rolls and little airs.  But street-skating became popular as older mega-parks like Upland and the Pipeline were shuttered and skaters had to create their own backyard ramps.  This was a serious commitment.  You needed to space, the wood, and the knowledge.  Many smaller mini-ramps were created from salvaged lumber.  We sometimes stole plywood from job-sites in the dark of night.  But by the late Eighties, as long as the sidewalk was smooth, and there were  painted curbs and curb cuts, loading docks and concrete walls, videos of young skaters like Tommy Guerrero and Ray Barbee eventually began showing what could be done without ramps.

Noah was ahead of me in his skills on a ramp.  I came to view him as a refuge from the storm, spending hours with him in his bedroom above the kitchen listening to the Dead Kennedys, .  Five years my elder, I pestered him to include me when he friends played dungeons and dragons, to let me ride on the handlebars when he rode to the local arcade to play Gauntlet, when he hitch-hiked to a local vert ramp. He challenged me, insulted me, he tolerated me.  Once, in anger, I disparaged the fact that he had a different dad and he punched me in the gut.  He was weird and pissed, feeling unloved at home and resentful of everything.  He began smoking pot and taking LSD.  I begged him to share.  We got high and burned Mosquito Hawks with a lighter and a can of hair spray.   Once,  I spotted a swarm of them in old abandoned aquarium sitting on his floor.  I emptied half a can into the glass box but my head was too close and it blew up in my face, singing my hair badly.  I hid my hair under a skull cap and rode immediately to the barber across town, Friendly Ed.  

I prided myself on my ability to slip out of trouble, whether it was sneaking puffs of a joint in the downstairs bathroom, shimmying down the gutter to sneak out at night, or telling my parents I was too tired to wash the dishes high on LSD.  I'm not really sure how much of this was my creative stealth, or just the fact that my parents always seemed pre-occupied by my young siblings.  

Good Eli was always there to help, too.  I was funny, friendly, and probably handsome when I cleaned up.  I impressed with my writing and wit, even through my school disruptions, completing my chore chart diligently, and watching the kids on my parents' date nights.  I had watched each of their home-births and knew how to change diapers.  This Eli had a close-knit group of friends at school - Luke Anderton, Cory Cuthbertson and Patrick Winters.  Luke lived up in the Santa Cruz mountains and we would run around in the woods on his family's 80 acres, swim in his pool, and build tree forts.  His father owned a wood-burning stove shop in town, and his mother was studying to be a lawyer who would eventually work as Santa Cruz Assistant Attorney.  Cory Cuthbertson lived a few blocks away with his older brother Cory.  His father, the lovable Tom, wrote the mildly famous Everybody's Bike Book and his mother, Pat, was maybe also a writer but seemed quiet, severe, and generally unfriendly.  Tom had a penny farthing bicycle in his garage which I tried to ride once but put the brake on too hard and went over the handlebars.  Tom came into our classroom and read to us from Daniel Pinkwater's Lizard Music.  Patrick Winters' father and grandfather were firemen.  His mother taught junior high.  He was sweet and fun and my closest friend.  

Bad Eli, when not with his brother, spent his time with Josh and Barry.  We threw rocks, smoked pot and dropped acid.  We skipped school and did our paper routes drunk.  We listened to the Sex Pistols, Black Sabbath and Depeche Mode.  We got high at reggae concerts and skanked.  Josh's parents had divorced and Barry never knew his dad.  He eventually killed himself, last I heard.  We rode out bikes far up the Santa Cruz coast and surfed waves that formed past the shorebreak, above the deep kelp.

I had traveled between these groups, these identities.  But into Junior High, I seemed to have aged out.  I was a middling student but in some ways more mellow.  I felt as if sneaking out and getting into trouble was in the past.  I was skateboarding full time, and met a skater girl, Tanya in seventh grade who I french kissed by the creek behind Chris Atkinson's ramp that the Santa Cruz pros and amateurs rode.  I could drop in on it and even do little backside airs.  This, I knew would impress her, but I fell in the flat when I dropped in, and was mortified.  But the relationship didn't last as Barry and Josh, who were two years older than me and could be abusive when I acted silly for their attention, liked messing with me.  I invited Tanya over to Barry's house one after noon and we made out in his bedroom.  When they begged me for details, I told them I touched her beneath her underwear and they demands to smell my fingers.  When I resisted Barry hit me over the head with a wooden mixing spoon.  Overcome with a probable mixture of jealousy and interpersonal demotion, they insisted she was a slut and goaded me into breaking up with her.  I did and she cried.

In eighth grade, Barry told us about Traveling School, a chartered class of 25-30 junior and high schoolers that met in a room at Mission High.  It was run by former Branciforte Elementary principal Steve Myers, who later was discovered to be a pedophile.  The focus was to be intensive academics, and then 1-2 bus trips to various locations in and out of state, during which academic study would continue that tied into the local region.  During these trips an additional component was introduced that involved personal growth.  Day-long workshops on focused topics such as trust, or body image were explored with an almost cult-like intensity.  They would take place in hotel conference rooms where we would sit for six, to 12 to 16 hours at a time where we were encouraged to open up to raw emotions.  Crying and break downs were to be expected.  Much of it was positive - why do you behave the way you do?  What is your motivation?  What is your fear?  During one workshop I broke down and admitted to all the drugs I had been taking.  I was encouraged to write this all down in a letter which was sent to my parents, who were promised to have been meeting on their own back at home, in preparation for the letters they would be receiving from their children.  I later discovered much of the process had been informed by the Ernhard Seminar Training, or EST.  Warner Erhard is described as believing:
According to est, beings begin as pure space or context and manifest themselves through content. Every being is coextensive with all existence and therefore has created everything else. This means that individuals are the creators of their own universes and that everything that exists arises from the self. Est also asserts that individuals ultimately choose the conditions of their existence and therefore are responsible for them. However, individuals have lost touch with true reality, which is experiential, and mistakenly accept ordinary reality, which is illusory and involves concepts (e.g., beliefs, values, attitudes, and rules). This occurs because the ego (the mind identified with the being) operates through concepts and develops an investment in them, treating concepts as true reality. As a result, individuals routinely fail to assume responsibility for their own choices, and life does not work because they fail to keep their agreements.

Steve always seemed like a nice, well-intentioned man.  But he could be very strict, and his school was run by former students would seemed to all be united both in their devotion to Steve, and as well a strict authoritarianism.  As the semester wore on, and the emotional growth seminars intensified, Steve took a special interest in some of the students.  He invited them up to his house in the Santa Cruz mountains to take walks.  He invited me to go but something felt off about nit.  It felt forced, and I didn't particularly want to go spend time with an older man who was also the principal of my school.  But he buttered me up to my parents and they dropped me off one day.  I lunched with him and we talked, and walked on a trial behind his house.  He never tried anything with me, but I never went back.

According to a timeline at Infostevemyersjackson.org, five years after I attended, in 1994:
Parents file a Police Report with Santa Cruz P.D. Complaints include photos of nearly-nude boys taken by Myers and used in school workbooks, wrestling with a boy in a g-string, having boys sit on his lap, sharing a bed in motel rooms with individual boys, and spending long periods of time with boys behind closed doors, or in his tent. An investigation ensues; no charges are filed. (1994 Police Report) In addition, a photo-developing shop employee alerts authorities to photos of nearly-nude boys in film being developed for Myers.

During the body image seminar we were required to strip down into our bathing suits - speedos for the boys, bikinis for the girls.  While we were somewhat dubious, by this point we were accustomed to being vulnerable and it seemed above board - if less comfortable for the fat kids or those with bad skin.  So, was Steve watching these videos in secret and masturbating?

In 1996, after his adoption of a Romanian orphan boy, the police investigated an allegation by a man concerned with Steve's relationship with the child.  During the investigation, Steve admitted to being attracted to 14 and 16 year olds.  Apparently he left the state, worked in various school districts, always dogged by new molestation scandals.  He then began changing his name and working at schools internationally.  He remains free to this day.

During my semester at Traveling School in the spring of 1989, I began getting a stiff neck in class. That winter, I had been in a terrible surfboard accident at Pleasure Point.  I was boogie boarding and a surfer lost control of his board coming down a wave towards me.  A two-inch wound was cut in the right side of my neck just below the base of my skull.  The doctors stitched it up and I seemed to have recovered fully. 

But the aches soon crept in.  Memory is a funny thing, and as I reflect upon the severity of the pain I had begun to experience in my neck and back, I find it hard to grasp now how much of a presence it had in my life over the decade to follow.  I suppose my budding teenage consciousness - with so many new social and personal narratives developing within me - wasn't able to fully account for the pain I was experiencing.  It was certainly there, as were the treatments.  My mother and father, children of the new age, had always eschewed modern medicine (when I received stitches for head wound at age 10, the nurses were shocked to discover I was (almost?) completely unvaccinated).  So instead of receiving standard medical care, which no doubt would have involved physical therapy, I was taken to a series of chiropractors, which - no surprise - did little for me.

I continued to skateboard, but had days of badly stiff necks, and recall having trouble sleeping due to discomfort.  My mother would have me lay down on the couch and she would massage my neck.  Her friend had training in Rolphing (a sort of extreme form of targeted massage), and I remember experiencing some relief when I would go straight from sessions with her to a chiropractor would would do his manipulations.  But it was expensive and after graduating from high school I moved back to California and the therapy ended.

In my early twenties, I finally saw a primary care physician, who diagnosed me with MPS, or "Muscle Pain Syndrome", which seemed a somewhat humorously obvious label.  He sent me to physical therapy, which had little effect.  The pain was centered directly in the spot where the surfboard had cut into me, where a hard lump of scar tissue had formed.  From this spot seemed to emanate a constant, chronic tightness which spread out around the base and temples of my scull, down over my shoulders, elbows, and into my upper back.  I had a job delivering meals to people with AIDS in San Francisco, and lifting bags of groceries and heavy insulated cases filed with individual meals took its toll.  I moved to Portland, OR in 1998, and began paying for a weekly massage out of my meager earnings working at a group home for people with traumatic brain injuries.

When I met Andria, whom I married in 2000, I tried various other treatments: cranial sacral, Feldenkrais, steroid injections from an Osteopath, and more rounds of physical therapy.  All to little relief.  Long holding out hope that some therapy must exist that would end my suffering, I finally resigned myself to the seeming reality that the pain would never end, and that I would simply have to manage it.  Observing that after skateboarding I would often feel worse, I gave it up as a serious hobby.  Playing my guitar would take its place, even as that too made me sore.  But it was something I could not bear to give up.

In Portland's gloomy dampness, I came to grapple with something that had always been lurking in the shadows of my days - depression.  I was training to be a school teacher, and I began to wonder if the stress involved in managing large classrooms of children would be too much for me whilst dealing with chronic pain.  But Andria helped me through my darkest thoughts and I received my degree.

Shortly after we moved to Reading, PA, Lulu was born, in 2005.  Andria was teaching at Kutztown University, and I was subbing, so I took on more responsibilities with caring for the baby.  She was colicky, and I wasn't sleeping well, and becoming depressed.  I read Sarte's Existentialism and the depression deepened, finding myself getting lost in his philosophical tapestries.  Dark thoughts of death and suicide began to come.  One morning, while Andria was at work, and Lulu was in her play pen, I resolved that she and Lulu would be better off without me, that with me gone they would be able to move on and create some new happy family.  It was of course a death fantasy, a tale in which I could rationalize a suicidal escape.  By this time I had been taking antidepressants, and had a bottle of sedatives as well.  I remember pouring them out onto the bed and making the final decision.  I swallowed a handful and laid down on the couch next to Lulu, who may or may not have been crying as I drifted into unconsciousness.

I awoke in a hospital bed, with Andria and my mother there.  They wheeled my into the psych ward, where I spent the next week with a schizophrenic roommate, attending mindfulness, talk therapy and painting groups.  Apparently when Andria had returned home to find me, she called the ambulance and they gave me charcoal treatment.  I nearly died.

Coming to my senses in the hospital, I immediately faced the magnitude of what I had done, what I had almost lost, what my family had almost lost.  I wanted nothing more than to leave the hospital, to be with them, to learn to love life again and devote myself to recovery.  We decided we needed a change.  We had purchased and renovated an old farmhouse in Bernville, PA, in the country 30 minutes north of Reading.  It was isolating and culturally at odds with what we wanted out of life.  Job prospects were slim, and so we packed up, sold the house, and moved back (with our three cats) to Palm Desert, CA, where Andria's mother lived.

Since then, suicidal ideation has mostly stayed away, aside from one or two dark periods over the years.  Tilda was born in 2007, and the next decade I taught Kindergarten, then high school science.  But teaching was incredibly stressful and I wasn't hired back at two schools - first at a continuation school where the principal wasn't satisfied with my my ability to manage my classroom of troubled children, then at Yucca Valley high school, where the students were ostensibly better equipped academically, but were hardly more manageable.  In 2013, I barely survived the final semester, coming home in tears and finding myself almost considering driving my car into on-coming traffic.

But the mother of a kindergarten friend of Lulu's was the director of a local clinic where they provided Applied Behavior Analytic (ABA) services to children with Autism and other developmental disorders.  I decided to give up on teaching and took a job as a direct therapist.  The work was difficult (my first client was extremely aggressive and with spit and urinate on me), but I began taking courses in ABA and fell in love.  It was a rigorous, scientific and deterministic discipline.  Where my education training had always felt squishy and lacking in rigor, ABA was a sophisticated application of the fundamental principles of learning.  Through operant conditioning, I learned to manipulate variables in the learner's environment to an exquisitely precise - and effective - degree.  Children who were unable to speak, or engaged in severe behaviors could be taught to communicate and live independent and safe lives.  And it paid much better than teaching.

Lulu, outgoing and headstrong, is moving next week to Poughkeepsie, NY to attend Vassar.  She has been writing a column she landed entirely on her own for the local paper, the Desert Sun.  She interned with a congressman, and worked at a frozen yogurt shop.  She wants to explore politics and journalism, her dream internship being at NBC news in NYC.

Tilda, quiet and wise, will be a junior next year.  She has been volunteering at the local zoo, managing the petting zoo.  She wants to explore the natural world - plants and animals and ecosystems.  

I keep a pain journal, and do my little artistic hobbies.  I have 1-2 bad days per week, when the pain goes from manageable to unmanageable - at least not if I have to go in to work.  But I can do remote work. and I'm taking on some extra hours via telemedicine with an ABA company in New Jersey.  I worry that I don't put enough face-time in with the clinic I am currently at, and hope my coworkers and management understand the nature of my disability well enough to cut me slack.  I'm seeing a pain specialist but so far the round of injections haven't had any effect.

The pain is hardest to manage in the context of having to work and provide for the family - taking a day off impact our budget and I feel guilty as I navigate "pushing through" versus self-care.  I tend to isolate - sitting her on the computer is a place I can push the world and the pain away and distract myself with activities that feel productive, despite the distance it creates with my family.  Since Lulu and Tillie grew into their teenage years, I've struggled to know how to relate as a father - how close or how far to include myself in their lives.  I'm sure I could do better, but my days are confusing, my emotions and physical limitations blur.  I sit on the couch playing videogames and try to at the very least provide them all with kindness and attention as I see fit.

In Zelda, the character explores a world filled with monsters, caves, and secret puzzles that unlock special weapons, armor and magical powers.  I maneuver my little protagonist around, climbing trees and collecting various fruits and meats.  It brings me joy to escape into that little digital world, alone as I am, but soothed and rewarded by distracting tasks.  The world is manageable, and thus so is mine for a time.  Away from the couch, I have my podcasts, and real-world tasks such as washing the dishes, taking out the garbage, changing the air filters, tending to yardwork, or folding laundry.  I eat lunch while watching a TV show or movie, and after Andria cooks dinner we sit together and watch comedies.  At 9:30pm Andria sit on the couch again and watch European detective shows.  I have a special set of headphones designed to be worn in bed, so I kiss Andria goodnight and set my podcast timer to shut off after 30 minutes.  It has been strikingly effective at allowing me to fall asleep without being kept awake in the dark silence by the pain in my neck.

​My father called two nights ago in tears, informing me that my teenage nephew had just drowned during their lake vacation in Minnesota.  Suddenly, without warning, unimaginable tragedy.  Life is rich with love and and so many ways I am fortunate.  The pain is a tragedy for sure - I as I age I worry increasingly how much worse it might get.  But between the distractions, the work, the tasks required to keep the household running, I have angels.  

I often think of the pain as Sysiphian, always there, adding great weight to everything else I must face in life.  We ultimately design our values around what we are able to give to the world, and it isn't fair that I must do all of that with such a heavy, uncomfortable burden.  I compare myself to my fellow man, and judge my actions relative to what he ought to be able to achieve.  But I do this with a largely invisible weight pressing down upon my shoulders (almost literally), and curse silently.  Most people with whom I interact in life will never know how hard it is to live with what I have to live with.  If they did, I lament, they would be more forgiving of what I can or cannot do.  But I say this even as I, who hear these lamentations and curses, have a hard time forgiving myself.

Yesterday was a bad pain day.  Often, even as my neck is aching, extending down from the base of my cranium through the front of my neck, my arms, my upper back and around my temples, the real discomfort is the sense of guilt and dread I have either because if it is the weekend I am losing a day of relaxation or a during the week, a day of work and income.  I have this voice in my head that asks me, "Is the pain really that bad, or are you just avoiding life/being depressed?"  This voice is strengthen by the reading I have done over the years from perspectives on pain management which emphasize the subjectivity of pain and its existence as a behavioral response.  Maybe the pain isn't so bad?  Maybe it is my reaction to it that needs to change?

I lie in bed, or sit on the couch, breathing, trying to think good thoughts, trying to distract myself, but when the pain comes into consciousness, it is accompanied by a chorus of voices chastising me for being "weak" or "lazy" or "selfish".  I certainly have days where I push through the pain, and find a balance between being active in life and being in pain.  But on hard days, the pain is so present that even engaging in fulfilling hobbies (making music, being social, going places) is too burdensome.  The voices berate me for this response, accusing me of not living up to my values.

It feels like gaslighting.

This morning, after waking early because the pain made it too uncomfortable to sleep, I got my coffee and sat down at the computer.  I found this article by Alana Saltz at the Disability Visibility project.  It was very eye-opening.  Here is my response:

----
Update.  There appears to be no response.  Or rather, my response is gone.  After working on it for an hours, when I hit post it disappeared before I could copy it here.

I find this ironic given my recent post about the motivations of creativity.  Anyway, maybe it will reappear.  Until then, I went into my mixed feelings about CBT/CFT/ACT, and the ways it seems to fit nicely with a neoliberal agenda of allowing market forces to dictate the morality of work.  Or, OK, I have to work through the pain but don't sell me some shit about ignoring it while saying nothing of the unreasonable expectations of having to make an income while in pain.  Sure, I could do deep breaths and mindfulness but when I don't have to worry about work I'm 50% more pain free because I'm not having to work through it.  Smile through it.  Focus my attention on the task at hand through it.  Be polite through it.  

That was basically the post, with a lot more behavior analysis and therapeutic ethics.
​
​

A common refrain on the right is that the groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) or the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) are illegitimate because of their overly broad use of the term "hate".  Many feel these groups have loosened their standards to the point where anything on the right is labeled hate, and thus conservative organizations that are not promoting hate are getting classified as hate groups.

This is part of a broader trend on the right to ever more heightened reactionary sensitivities.  The current ultra-popular phrase on the right is to term almost any generally left wing concept as "woke".  While the term originated in the black community to refer to someone with an awakened political consciousness as "woke".  While I would say this was generally left politics, there is a long history of more right-wing political consciousness movements in the black community - the Nation of Islam being a prime example, with its authoritarian, sexist, homophobia and anti-semitic conspiracy theorizing, not to mention a black nationalist capitalist orientation.  But the common core is an awakened consciousness of political struggle in general militating towards black liberation.

In the late 2010's it became increasingly a multi-ethnic descriptor of militancy within left wing politics.  The right caught on to this and took the term up as a pejorative.  The criticism was nothing new, having to do with the old claim that progressivism is prone to "groupthink", often specifically found on college campuses, and has a tendency to sort of burble out from there into government, newsrooms, Hollywood, and eventually the workplace.  The dark version of this has roots in very old anti-semitic conspiracy theories about "Cultural Marxism".  From Wikipedia:

Cultural Marxism is a far-right antisemitic conspiracy theory which misrepresents the Frankfurt School as being responsible for modern progressive movements, identity politics, and political correctness. The conspiracy theory posits that there is an ongoing and intentional academic and intellectual effort to subvert Western society via a planned culture war that undermines the Christian values of traditionalist conservatism and seeks to replace them with culturally liberal values.

Like all conspiracy theories, there is kernel of truth to it.  Critical theory was developed at the Frankfurt school, and it does call into question traditional power structures, such as those of the hegemonic West, Christianity, Patriarchy, Heteronormativity, Class and Race.  But there is no conspiracy among professors to subvert any specific power structure.  Unless by "conspiracy" you mean publishing books and academic papers with peer review.  By that standard, a "conspiracy" exists just as much on the right to uphold these power structures (maybe without many peer reviewed papers because the right has never had enough to say or been that interested in having robust academic expert debates on its core theories, preferring instead to rely on appeals to tradition).

Yet, as today the conspiratorial far-right has taken over the mainstream of conservatism, what was seen as silly is now taken as common sense, promoted on vast propaganda networks from Fox on down the line.   And since conspiratorial ideas become incoherent and fall apart under even basic scrutiny, measures have been taken to sort of mass-wash the ideas into hand-wavy stories that only need to feel right, as longer as they are never questioned.  

Terms like Political Correctness, the short-lived early-Oughts "Social Justice Warrior", and now "Woke" serve as catch-all thought-terminating cliches.  From Wikipedia again:
A thought-terminating cliché (also known as a semantic stop-sign, a thought-stopper, bumper sticker logic, or cliché thinking) is a form of loaded language, often passing as folk wisdom, intended to end an argument and quell cognitive dissonance.Its function is to stop an argument from proceeding further, ending the debate with a cliché rather than a point.

The usefulness of this type of TTC against is twofold.  It plants a sort of signifier of a larger, vague story about dangerous, mindless leftism (see Woke Mind Virus) , as well as a sort of dismissive flag-planting that says to the audience "I'm not going to give your ideas the benefit of doubt or even consideration".  It is thus powerful both at reinforcing in-group right wing identities and their sense of grievance/persecution by "defining" (although ironically doing anything but) a common enemy, as well as shutting down discussion.  In this way there is a fascism to it - ultimately the time for cooperation and debate is over and power will now only be established by brute force via either vapid propaganda or violence if necessary.

And so Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs are dismissed as woke.  Discussions of climate Change are woke.  Discussion of human rights for gays and transgender individuals is woke.  So too, now, is the SPLC and the ADL.

The SPLC, like any organization, isn't above criticism.  But it deserves its fair share.  In a New Yorker article by Bob Moser, the SPLC is portrayed hypocritical in its lavish spending(its headquarters dubbed the "poverty palace" and papering over of racial and sex discrimination within the workplace - especially troubling considering its supposed anti-poverty and anti-racism posture.  Moser writes:

For those of us who’ve worked in the Poverty Palace, putting it all into perspective isn’t easy, even to ourselves. We were working with a group of dedicated and talented people, fighting all kinds of good fights, making life miserable for the bad guys. And yet, all the time, dark shadows hung over everything: the racial and gender disparities, the whispers about sexual harassment, the abuses that stemmed from the top-down management, and the guilt you couldn’t help feeling about the legions of donors who believed that their money was being used, faithfully and well, to do the Lord’s work in the heart of Dixie. 

That's not good at all.  But the claim conservatives seem to make the most - that many groups identified by the SPLC as hate groups, is harder to justify.  The SLPC has been challenged in court for its designation of anti-LGBT groups as purveying hate. It has labeled the Family Research Council (FRC) , and the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) as hate groups.  The SLPC classifies hate groups as having
"beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics."    

 The FRC, vice president Rob Schwarzwalder, in 2013 stated,
"The reality is, homosexuals have entered the Scouts in the past for predatory purposes."  
Its current president, Tony Perkins, recently said,
"I know they’ll mock at that idea, but look, if you are a male – genetically you are a male, biologically you’re a male – and you say, ‘Well, I’m not a male. I’m a female.’ I mean, what’s to keep you from saying that you’re an animal?”  

If a group is anti-LGBT, then that definition certainly fits. 

Groups opposed to illegal immigration is a bit trickier, as citizenship status is not an immutable characteristic.  However, hate is not always explicit, and a tendency towards inflammatory rhetoric - especially if it demonizes or dehumanizes a group with slurs that have a history rooted in bigotry - is a pretty good indication of hate. The CIS was founded by the White nationalist John Tanton, who once said
"I’ve come to the point of view that for European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority, and a clear one at that." 

Another classification the SPLC is gives is to "Antigovernmental Groups".  These it considers
"part of the antidemocratic hard-right movement. They believe the federal government is tyrannical, and they traffic in conspiracy theories about an illegitimate government of leftist elites seeking a “New World Order.”

I couldn't tell from the website if the SLPC also categorizes these has hate groups, however there is often considerable overlap between them and overtly bigoted groups.  I could make a case that groups with anti-government attitudes this extreme are indeed taking part in a type of hatred, but I'm open to the idea that this may be pushing the term too far.  Despite considerable legitimate criticisms of the SLPC, I see no issue with their current designations.

The ADL is considerably more above-board, and their hate classifications seem even less questionable. 

​The question conservatives are asking is, "What is hate?  But how many really want to know the answer to that question?  I've often said that if you don't want to understand where racism comes from, or how it is perpetuates, how can you possibly define it?   Hate is a complex force in social relations, involving historical treatment, attitudes and assumptions.  It can be explicit, but is usually implicit in actions and words that amount to treating a member of a marginalized class differently.  A group is assumed to be more violent, more lazy, more cunning, more prone to immoral acts.  A group is given less of the benefit of the doubt.  If one's behavior or ideas would change positively based on the group in question, then it is likely there is a form of hatred involved. 

Interesting blogging here from a psychological perspective.  What is my purpose?  I supposed I like the idea of other people reading my ideas years ago when I blogged regularly on Supervidoqo.  But when that ran dry and I ended up worming myself pretty deeply in the short but highly interactive twitter space, I realized the toxicity of its anonymous and algorithmic hysteria was too much and pulled the plug. I've now just recently crept back on - in search of more interesting takes than I find in the New York Times and Yahoo aggregator and their commentariat.  But so now with the creation of this site as a digital repository of all my drawings, writings, photos, videos and music, the blogging template has rekindled my spirit to write.  I suppose the idea that no one really knows about it makes it feel more private and there is an allure there. 

Not sure why, but lately I've been interested in being unconcerned with who ingests my stuff.  When I finished the DOZ album I brought a few copies to Dales Records up the street.  I put out album QR code cards around the College of the Desert.  To be honest I'm not interested in acknowledgement as much as just the idea that someone besides me might be enjoying my creations.  I would certainly like to experience more interesting things.  So many things are not interesting to my rather specific tastes.  
---
Speaking of which, Meat Flowers is done.  The hard copy final proof came and it looks great.  I'll put a link up here.  Andria things I should promote it.  She convinced me to send out some digital packets to children's book publishing companies and I didn't really hear back (a few were out of business, one said it wasn't their thing).  But she thinks Amazon might get some interest.  Meh.  It's pretty good, but will mostly go out to friends and family, per usual.

In 1901, a cache of papyrus fragments were found in Hermopolis in Egypt.  They were discovered to be the pieces of the book Elements of Ethics, by the 2nd century stoic Hierocles.   In a portion of this book, titled Appropriate Acts, Hierocles wrote of what has been described as the circles of morality, that is, the concentric circles defining man's obligations to act towards God, fellow man, family, and self.  

I've often wondered how moral principals align with one's politics.  Sociologists have found that indeed partisanship  correlates with one's emphasis on certain principals over others.  But moral principals are broad, and can be applied differently depending on one's assumptions about the world.  For instance, compassion to a liberal might mean something different to a conservative.  But I an underlying consideration here is to what group, or moral "circle" one is applying their ethic.  IN the chart below, I've grouped 24 common moral principals according to whether they generally apply to one's past, present and future notions of self.  This might also be postulated as the ways in which one's beliefs and values are examined as to how they have been experienced in the past, present, or future.  I've also created categories of how they might be applied to either one's self, one's in-group, and one's out-group.   For example, the moral principal of humility is defined by a limited sense of one's importance over others.  This requires a backwards looking stance in which actions and beliefs are only ever imperfect, and always allowing for the possibility of error.  Humility requires an openness to the idea that what may be good for one person, in one situation, may not be good in every situation or for every person.  It includes a sort of vigilance towards skeptical analysis of the truth in one's actions.  Towards the self, humility involves the capacity to see one's faults or limitations.  Towards one's in-group, humility involves being alert to possible flaws of the group.  And finally, towards the out-group, the perspective flips and involves recognizing the possibility of flaws and limitations in perceptions towards the out-group. 

A crucial component in examining what Hierocles framed as how we ought to appropriately act towards these social circles, or groups, is having a robust epistemology.  That is, one's ability to act according to a given moral principal is constrained by the objective assessment of what it means to act in that way, and whether we have, we are, or we plan to act in such a manner.  In order to act with humility, I must have an objective understanding of my own limitations and faults, as well as those of my in-group.  Yet because recognizing the flaws in an out-group is not humility (rather, the opposite), a humble stance towards the out-group is to recognize the flaws and limitations in my perceptions of the out-group.  

In partisanship, there seems a clear emphasis for liberals on flattening, or broadening moral circles.  A liberal is always trying to extend the circle beyond self and in-group to include ever-widening out-groups with regard to nationalities, religions, ethnicities, and even species.  Conservatives, on the other hand, tend to be wary of extending the moral circle beyond the in-group.  One caveat here might be the case of unborn humans, where many conservatives find themselves increasing the moral circle to the fetus at earlier and earlier stages of development.  However, the reasons for this seeming reversal point to the importance of epistemology underlying not just how the moral principals are acted on, but as well to whom they are enacted towards.

On the issue of abortion, there are numerous epistemological framings, including but not limited to both one's valuation of female bodily autonomy as well as one's valuation of what makes life itself sacred.  It has often been said that if men, within patriarchy, bore children, abortion would be more likely to be seen as a highly valued right.  Yet if women are seen (either explicitly or implicitly) as lesser-status, then their rights might be weighed less against the life of a fetus.  In this sense, patriarchy, by definition a systemic devaluation of women (and a traditionally conservative sentiment) , designates them as an out-group in many ways, thus making anti-abortion conservatism understandable in part as rooted in this instance in not wishing to extend the circle to women.  Furthermore, to the extent that raising the status of the fetus lowers the status of women, it reinforces the conservative tendency to limit the application of moral principals to out-groups.  

Epistemological framing can also be seen in the determination of the sacredness of a fetus.  Here, we must consider upon what basis we determine that life is sacred.  That is, why is human life sacred at all?  Certain religious dogma are clear on this point, in that, say, all human life is sacred, per the authority of God.  The complexities that might arrive in more nuanced cases, such as when a human is a mortal danger to others and thus be removed from sanctity if their murder is thus justified, can similarly be simplified by following dogmatic authority.  For those who do not find a particular religious dogma authoritative, other frameworks must be relied upon such as a belief in limiting suffering of an individual or their family.  With regard to the fetus, this might mean determining how much suffering might be felt by the fetus or their immediate family in its death.  Other, less direct frameworks might include an appeal to law and order in maintenance of an orderly state in which, while there is an arbitrariness in drawing a line past which the murder of a fetus is unacceptable, some line must be drawn and for some this is at a certain stage of embryonic development (e.g., a baby's ability to survive outside the womb) while for others this is at the moment of birth.

In examining how our epistemologies define our application of moral principals across groups, we can better understand why partisanship correlates both with emphasis on certain moral principals, as well as with how far one's moral circle extends in various contexts.