2005 January archive at Raven's Rants

RavenSpeak Revisited

1 Comment

The RavenSpeak column has become one of the most popular sections of Raven's Rants. Despite initial fears of not "fitting in" with the rest of the site, the column has gained a great deal of popularity and sparked some powerful and interesting debates.

In that regard, I consider it a smashing success.

However, what I've found most interesting is watching how people respond to my opinions. Through comments and email, I hear, pretty much every day, what others think about my work and my opinions. I hear the good, the bad and the ugly loud and clear.

Some of the comments praise my thoughts, others criticize them, some defend me, and some threaten to kill me. However, a select few point out issues that I missed or make me realize that there's a need for clarification on a point.

Though, to date, I haven't reversed my opinion on any of the subjects, there have been a few I wish I could revisit in light of the feedback I've gotten. So, rather than create a series of sequel columns, I'm answering some of the charges and questions here.

So, with no further ado, I'll get into the columns in question.

No "Fat Chicks" Allowed (link)

I've heard more back about this column than any other. Though it lags way behind in terms of comments, the bevy of email I've gotten regarding it has blown me away.

However, there's been a constant criticism based on the theory that I'm completely ignoring America's obesity problem and that I am somehow encouraging unhealthy behavior.

I grant, I didn't make this very clear and I didn't come right out and say as such (I didn't think it was needed) but I do believe that obesity is a major problem, especially in the United States.

However, look at the very first sentence of the piece, the average dress size, pretty much all over the industrialized world, including nations without major obesity problems, is fourteen.

That's a bitter pill to swallow, especially for people who have starved themselves and worked out to fit the American standard of beauty, which is in the low single digits, but it is true and it's a figure that stands in nations that are practically devoid of obesity AND eating disorders.

The truth is that, by birth, every woman is different and some women, no matter what, will never be "thin". Medicine is growing to accept the idea of different body types; it's the world that lags behind.

If you need proof, someone very close to me had a battle with anorexia when she was a teenager. She starved herself so much she made herself ill and was almost put into a hospital. It's one of the saddest stories I know, but even at the lowest point in her disease, she never dropped below a size 12.

Now, are you going to tell this girl that she should aspire to be "thin"? That she's not healthier at a size fourteen or sixteen than she would be at an eight or a six?

If I'm insensitive to the obesity problem it's because I'm very sensitive to the psychological and physical damage a bad body image can do to someone. Yes, obesity comes with medical problems, but so do depression, anorexia, bulimia, social anxiety and all of the other side effects from a negative self image.

Yes, everyone should strive to be healthy, but some women will never be thin and telling everyone that they should aspire to be as such nothing short of a psychological browbeating on a nation-wide scale. These women need to know the truth that they are beautiful and society needs to accept that.

Because, until it does, we're not going to fix ANY of our weight problems…

The Legalization of Marijuana (link)

Very few people have said anything negative about this piece.

However, those who have have never been able to attack my logic. My fundamental argument, which is that keeping marijuana illegal while cigarettes and alcohol remain available is hypocritical, has never been attacked.

Instead, in my opinion, the biggest threat to my argument has come from my fellow supporters. One of the biggest problems the marijuana community faces is a public perception that it's filled stupid, disrespectful and foul-mouthed youths who lack morals, ambition or intellect.

Yet, if you read the comments to the piece, they go to great lengths to further that image. A vast majority offer little of value, many contain obscenities and several promote risky or just plain asinine behavior. Though there are many great and thought-provoking comments to the piece there, they are drowned quickly in a sea of all caps and obscenities.

In the end, I feel as if I've done the marijuana community a great disservice. Though my arguments are valid and I stand by them, I also gave a forum that furthered the negative images others have of pot smokers. Though I initially deleted these comments, I realized that it violated my own TOS to do so and now no comment that doesn't outright violate my TOS isn't removed, even if drives another nail into my argument.

Still though, I always cringe when I get another comment for this piece in my inbox. It's rarely pretty and even now, following my TOS strictly, I have to delete many of them.

Sometimes, what you see is only the tip of the iceberg.

Why Telemarketers Are Evil… (link)

This one hasn't generated a lot of comments nor has it carried much weight in my inbox. However, it did get me the one letter that has stood out in my mind the most.

Many weeks after posting it and just a few days before the do not call list was to take effect. I got a scathing three-page letter from the wife of an owner of a major telemarketing company.

The letter, by in large, failed to address my arguments at all. Instead, the main thrust of her letter was spent accusing me of taking food off her family's table and detailing her celebration for when the "Do Not Call" list was stricken down in court.

Luckily, she was very wrong.

The one comment she did make that stuck was her accusation that I was betraying the notion of free speech. In her mind, my support of this restriction was tantamount to treason against free press.

I do have to admit that, as a Libertarian, this is a bit against my principles. After all, I consider myself a true freedom fighter and I oppose government regulation whenever it can be avoided.

However, a free society depends on personal responsibility. Telemarketers have shown a great deal of irresponsibility not only to their advertisers by wasting precious dollars on people who don't want to hear any messages from them, but also to the populace.

Furthermore, where we can avoid other forms of advertising by not picking up the magazine, driving a different way to work or turning off the TV, telemarketing calls are intrusive, reaching into our homes, and can not be avoided.

Nonetheless, if telemarketers would have honored their own lists, like the one published by the DMA, I never would have supported this initiative. But despite being on the DMA’s list for years, I still received telemarketing calls almost daily and it was painfully clear that self-regulation wasn't going to be enough.

Because when you're dealing with an industry that has no respect for the advertisers it serves or the populace it's trying to reach, government interaction becomes a necessary evil. All I'm doing is choosing the lesser of the two injustices.

There's nothing complicated about that.

Codes

5 Comments

A code, in the moral sense of the word, is a simple thing. It's a series of laws and rules written by human beings to set down a series of beliefs, a pattern of conduct or a collection of ideals. It is as tangible as the paper it's written on and it's easy to read, understand and, supposedly, follow. It's as real and as solid as the people who believe in it.

But codes, all codes, are held hostage by their solid nature. For though they are tangible, they are not rigid and are prone to being twisted and bent. Even though the words themselves are simple and pure, no code is so perfect as to withstand the interpretations of mortal men and the actions of souls living in an increasingly complicated world.

It's in that complicated world that codes find themselves pitted against themselves, one line against another, one paragraph against the next. Even a code with only two ideals will find itself in a civil war, Line A against Line B, faster than you and I can comprehend.

It's when these civil wars erupt that codes becomes something other than a rigid set of rules for us to follow. They become almost spiritual in nature as flawed human beings try to understand the "meanings" and "intents" of what was often written thousands of years before. We try to look past the simple words and find deeper meanings, meanings that we hope will guide us as we try to decide which part of the code to violate.

These battles can tear codes apart. Even the most useful systems and most heartfelt ideas can be ripped apart by internal struggles, struggles caused by a world that it couldn't have possibly forseen. Once-proud ideals are rendered useless and tossed aside, grand visions are lost and marvelous dreams are crushed simply because one sentence and another found themselves at odds and no reconciliation could be found.

That's why the written codes, though often good in intentions and wonderful in nature, can never be our sole guiding force. Not for our lives, not for our government, not for our world. Any code written by man to be tangible and solid will never withstand the shifting landscape of the earth. Without flexibility, without some means of resolving conflict, even the simplest of laws and ideals crumble before the forces of time.

The only code that can hope to survive is the code within each of us. The code we teach ourselves through our morality and our ideals. Even though we need laws as a society and the codes of paper have their place, any set of rules written by another will falter and any code interpreted by another will fail to represent us.

But in a day and age where every code is made of the shattered pieces of the countless ones before, finding our own ideals is difficult. But if we don't, we find ourselves either locked into a system that's doomed to fail or floating in the winds of the interpretation other mortals, most likely less qualified than us to tell right from wrong.

That's what makes it so important to try and to wrestle with the tough decisions ourselves. To shun outside influence and to think with our own minds and hearts.

For everything else is doomed to mediocrity and, in the sands of time, mediocrity is doomed to turn to dust.

Perspective

6 Comments

There comes a time in all of our lives when we need to go away, when we need to leave behind where we are, who we are and what we are in order to find some perspective on our lives.

In the muddled world we live in, we often get so enwrapped in our day-to-day existences that we find ourselves adrift and lost. We become machines, punching out days as if they were cogs, interlocking, driving one another, but hopelessly insignificant in both form and function.

That's why we have to leave, to step outside the machine, to gaze back at it and see what it is we're constructing with the days of our lives and figure out how it fits into the larger machine of the world around us. Like carpenters building a house, we only see one small piece of the puzzle at a time with no clue what the bigger picture is.

Worse yet, as challenges mount and petty problems become major strains, our willpower fades. As we forget why we do the things we do, the drive to succeed at them wanes. We find ourselves robbed of our will to fight on and tired in every possible sense of the word.

That makes it critical, to the highest degree, that we set down the tools of our trade from time to time, put our hands in our pockets, brave the cold world, and trek to the top of the tallest mountain we can find. From there we can look back at what we've done and what we're doing, we can see where it fits and where we can change and, most importantly, we can go back with new knowledge and new vigor, working harder and smarter than ever before.

Simply put, a carpenter who doesn't take time to reflect on his work will build a stairway to nowhere and a machinist without purpose will quit at the first small problem. We can neither afford the futility of a life without perspective nor can we bear the weight of an existence without purpose.

However, without perspective or some understanding of what it's all for, we are merely blind men toiling away in a dark room, hoping something comes together.

We can't live that life, as humans, we need to know that every day, every moment, has purpose and that every action we take, from the stroke of a key to a cross-country trek, has meaning. Even if it requires stepping away from everything for a time in order to gain a new viewpoint on life.

Because even though time away to reflect might seem like time wasted, it's truly the most important time spent of all. It's the time spent on us, shoring ourselves up for the battle that always looms on the horizon, the time where we learn and hone our crafts and, most importantly and the time that makes us happy with what we do.

Because, we all understand on some level, that nothing is worth doing if it fails to make us or our loved ones happier.

The gift of life, if you see it as such, is too precious to waste being miserable, squandering precious time with no sense of direction. Perhaps it's time we all took a moment to reflect, to gain that sense of perspective.

Even if it's just a moment or a day, it could be the best time any person has every spent.

Raven's Rants

RavenSpeak Revisited

Codes

Perspective

Categories

Order The Book

Creative Commons