Vic

"Dice" rolls out and "Tars" rolls in. Yesterday, at the Salvation Army, the guy who cut my hair when I was a boy, "Vic," was spewing hate speech about Blacks, Mexicans, Muslims, and just about anybody else who didn't look like him. The cashier, a white woman who always seemed nice enough, was agreeing with him. "I'm never coming to this Starvation Army again," I said to myself, and walked out the door. On the drive home, I had fantasies about all the cool, intense things I could have said to them. But words fail me in the heat of intensity. I guess I'm at my best about a half hour after any kind of confrontation...

When I was younger and fairly vitriolic about my own beliefs, I coulda sparred pretty well with them and taken them down a few notches, ultimately achieving not much at all besides a little bloodletting. But something weird happens whenever I get that involved in attempting to change people, which is that I notice my ego getting puffed-up and righteous in these really covert ways that end up doing damage to myself and others on down the line...There's gotta be a middle ground, though, that would allow me to protect the right ideals, but not get into it for the ego puffery and righteousness of it all. I guess finding that middle ground is what I'm working at these days. My art has something to do with it...

It's hard, though, to stick up for an ideal, yet remain egoless about it. Because of the mysterious forces governing projection and duality, it's easy to become as combative and bloodthirsty as yr worst enemy in the blink of an eye. And then there you are. You & yr enemy are convinced you both have God on yr side. You're both convinced the other person is wrong and just shy of pure evil. You've both furthered your own argument about how this world is plummeting into chaos. Nothing changes. Nothing shifts. Egos inflate. Damage is done. How many people have I met in my life who thought that their ideals were more important than being kind and respectful to actual human beings? A few.

Sometimes, you dig, I have been that person, and I regret it. I don't want to be that person. But the fact is, none of us get to choose who we are. We are who we are. We can change our behaviors, but we gotta watch out, lest we become actors playing roles instead of congruent people living life. And me - I feel like I have more than my share of contradictions. In a world of lines in the sand and words carved in stone, sometimes I just get a headache from all the worn-out, obvious arguments. I mean, can we move the discussion forward a little bit?