Fairness - The Commentary

  “I know this one thing to be true: You do not need to forgive a person who has hurt you in order to free yourself from the pain of negative emotions. You can even reach a place of love and compassion for the wrongdoer without forgiving a particular action or inaction. You are not a less loving or whole person if there are certain things you do not forgive, and certain people whom you choose not to see. Perhaps you are even a stronger or more courageous person if you have leftover anger, whether from one violation or countless little micro-violations, even as you move on. More importantly, it is no one else’s job – not that of your therapist, mother, teacher, spiritual guide, best friend, or relationship expert - to tell you to forgive – or not to.” Those are some of the eye-opening insights author and therapist Harriet Lerner included in her 2017 book: Why Won’t You Apologize? – Healing Big Betrayals and Everyday Hurts as she analyzes what makes a real and healthy apology. And ...

There’s an old saying: “There’s nothing as beautiful as gray hair and a long beard.” It comes from traditional China, not twenty-first century America. You would have guessed that, right? It’s definitely not an expression out of American pop culture. In the US, our view of what is beautiful, especially for women, is a twenty-something-year-old or a “young-looking” thirty-something. Imagine those thirty-somethings worried that they don’t look young anymore! We’re conditioned to be attracted to youthful looks from our first exposure to our culture, and to criticize ourselves as we show the natural results of aging. If we’ve been thoroughly conditioned, we even feel that wrinkles, gray hair, “age spots,” sagging, and drooping are like diseases to fight. That’s good news for the bottom-line of so many of the distributors of the products they want to sell us. Like most views of beauty that have existed in history, definitions of what is attractive are dominated by current economics. Queen E...

There are a number of reasons why Republican “culture wars” today are targeting transgender people (along with people of color in general). The right-wing, egged on by its radical right Christian adherents, is showing us how it’s fixated on transgender people as it struggles to hold onto the power it thought was assured with the election of the former president to protect itself from the progress of larger cultural forces. Hundreds of anti-transgender bills are appearing in state houses around the country because national right-wing think tanks are feeding them to Republican state legislators who’ve hitched their wagons to a regressive, radical, White, heterosexual male-supremacy agenda tied to the former president. And these bills aren’t going away because their assumption is that a radical right-wing Supreme Court Democrats won’t have the will or power to change will uphold anti-transgender laws. Their anti-transgender culture war agenda is, first of all , pretty much all that Repub...

This past month we’ve seen that while the Democrats debate policies, how they reflect their inclusive values, and how best to enact them, the Republican Party is obsessing about Dr. Seuss, Pepe LePue, the Potato Heads, discrimination against transgender people, preventing people who disagree with them from voting, demonizing immigration on the southern border, and locking in government control over women’s reproductive choices. They’re still trying, as well, to figure out ways they can demonize and marginalize all LGBTQ people after all those Court decisions that rejected such discrimination. The previous president was a useable egotist for the Republican Party “culture war,” and demonizing President Biden has become a centerpiece because he refuses to play their game of “Calvinball” with Republican spokespeople constantly and hypocritically changing the rules and moving the goalposts to appeal to their supporters. By his executive actions and appointments, Biden has defied their defi...

Let’s review what we’ve learned as we face 2021. The moveable middle is shrinking. This is both good and bad news. It means that more people are sympathetic with causes for equality, while it also means that others are stuck in the extremist right-wing and more immovable. We thus must recognize that there are some we cannot reach and that it’s not our fault or personal responsibility when we don’t.   For most of these, the best we can do is marginalize them societally by laws and practices that support the world as we want it to be and live our lives as models of what should be. For many nice people that’s a hard lesson to accept. It also means that we need to encourage and strengthen those who are already with us. As the old preacher said, “We’ve got to preach to the choir because so many of them aren’t singing.” There is little need to listen more closely to right-wingers (especially members of the previous president’s cult). It is more often a waste of time that keeps us from ...

T here’s something human beings possess that’s proven awfully important for progress in science and technology, and even for advancing human cultures. It’s the need to understand, to discover answers to the questions we ask, and to continue to ferret them out in the belief that if we can just understand, then our species will be able to conquer everything that confronts us. If it weren’t for that impulse - maybe an innate need - to understand, who knows where we’d be? It’s taken generations of people who’ve sought answers, after all, to get where we are today. Often that’s fueled by a basic desire to survive - to preserve our species by finding a new vaccine or cure for a deadly disease, for example. At times it’s led us to new and improved ideas that fuel more inclusive ways to understand societal concepts such as equality. At other times it’s made our war machines more deadly. But the results of those attempts to understand have also taken longer to gain wide acceptance because new u...