One of the ways to make sense of an unfathomable truth, one which does not makes sense with the world as we understand it, is to blame that unfathomable truth on something or someone else.
Well, hey there!
I know I’m supposed to be talking about the Just World Hypothesis and Trump’s border wall, per the title and my previous article on this topic. But, first I have to lay some additional groundwork.
You see, last week I looked at the Just World Fallacy in general terms. I outlined how the belief that the world is a fundamentally Just and Fair place can (key word there) lead to victim-blaming mentalities and behavior. In order to accurately capture how this leads to the rhetorical power of the idea of a border wall (all Trump really needs is the idea and to appear to be fighting for it after all), I need to first spend some time talking about the economy, which will be something of a theme for these articles.
That’s the thing about Ideals, they are almost always out of reach. We will, in all likelihood, always be working them. We’ve got a good way to go yet.
Hey there!
The world isn’t fair. It isn’t nice. It isn’t particularly Just.
I want to believe that it is, or that it could be, because a Just world makes so much more sense. A Just World gives us (humans) some control. We can enter into a transactional sphere where our actions have real and understandable consequences, good and bad, and those consequences make sense. Hard work = good job / successful life, etc. Unfortunately, it just doesn’t work that way.
It’s 2019. The American Government is still in partial shutdown, Trump is still President, Nancy Pelosi is, once again, the Speaker of the House. I’m back in school, one semester away from graduating with my undergrad degree. As I write this I am listening to Robert Reich’s Inequality For All, on Netflix. Wonderful film, by the way.
Oh. And it’s snowing. Winter wonderland. The roads are shit.
It’s so pretty though, right?
Like most years I have been struck, this last month, with a sense of wonder and estrangement from the fact that we have completed another year. A year is both an incredibly long period of time, and a strangely short one. In 2018 the expected lifespan of the U.S. adult was approximately 80 years. So a year is roughly 1/80th of my (and possibly your) expected life, barring unexpected luck and health or unexpected misfortune and ill-health. So, really think about this and sit with it for a moment: Between the turning of the year from 2018 to 2019, you have used 1/80th of your life. The numbers are arbitrary, but our experience of the concept of time is very very real.
First of all, congratulations. You made it. Don’t care if it was a good year, a bad year, the best year, you made it. And that’s something to be proud of. Glory in the little things.
Ah, Zombieland. Good Movie.
At the same time, a year is deceptive. This last year, in the United States at least, has been a tumultuous one. I imagine that it has been similar elsewhere in the world. The U.K. is grappling with Brexit negotiations and seems closer than ever to staring down the face of a no-deal exit. President Trump has arranged a second meeting with North Korean Dictator Kim Jong Un, meanwhile his lawyers, family, and self constantly contradict themselves on policy issues, the Mueller Investigation, and even basic issues of honesty and empathy. China and the U.S. are both dealing with the results of the Trump tariffs, which have drastically changed the landscape in the seemingly unconnected landscapes of steel and soy in both countries. Japan and South Korea are both relying on a famously inconsistent President to provide the diplomatic and military might to keep North Korea in check.
But the passage of a year is complicated in other ways, unrelated to the newsworthy events of the year. Recently I have been seeing more and more memes concerning reaching adulthood as a person who, for reasons of mental illness, never really planned for it because you never really thought you’d get there. I can empathize with that idea. As someone with PTSD, which I have had since I was a child, a year, much less the larger concept of adulthood and life-planning, is huge. It doesn’t feel real to have made it so far. That’s a huge part of my disconnect from the new year.
I also get the sense that as a collective, not just individuals to struggle with mental health, we’re a little surprised to have made it this far. Between economic crises and climate change and the general instability of the political sphere, well, I won’t go so far as to say that we’re surprised to have made it another day, but it might be accurate to say that we’re for the shoe to drop. I know a lot of people who keep large amounts of food in the house, not because they need it, but because they worry about the snow storm, the missed paycheck, the unexpected bill, that means they can’t get groceries. My mom keeps more than a month’s worth of food in my childhood home. Some of that is a love of variety which is deeply ingrained into my family, some of it is to satisfy an anxiety about being able to provide enough food to live on. We’re middle class. It shouldn’t be this way, but that, my friends, is a discussion for another day.
On the drive to campus today I was listening to The Martian by Andy Weir and narrated by R.C. Bray. At one point while I was listening the main character described his labelling system for the last food rations he had and how he had designated when he would get to enjoy them. One was labelled, “I survived something that should have killed me”, the thinking being that some shit was going to happen. He doesn’t know what, or when. But presuming he survives it whenever it does, he gets to eat that ration as a reward for surviving some crazy shit. That’s us. I was listening to this with my partner and one of my roommates, and out of a highly humorous and wry book, that was the only section that got all three of us to laugh at the same time. Why? Because we could empathize with Watney, the main character, on a deep level in that moment. All three of us, going through life, are somewhat waiting for the next pile of unexpected bullshit. We don’t know if we’re going to make it, but for damn sure we’re going to celebrate if we do.
So that’s what I’m hoping to connect with this new year. It’s not a resolution-partly because I know myself and commitment is an… issue, partly because I celebrate new year on Halloween (we’ll talk about that later), and partly because damn it but resolutions feel lame as hell. But I want to concentrate less of the scary BS parts of being a human being, and more on the victories of having survived. The BS will always be there, and boy is there a lot of it in the world right now, but every little victory overcoming it is worth some kind of celebration.
IlluminatedChaos 