Pain Can Join or Separate Us - Part 1

Human existence brings many experiences. People feel joy, hope, gladness, and peace, but also sadness, fear, pain and death. In this we have a real commonality with each other, or at lest we should have. As we go through life, I believe that our common experience should draw us together not only in our joys and triumphs, but also in our shared pain and sorrow. Scripture commands us to "Rejoice with those who rejoice, and weep with those who weep." (Rom 12:15) There is great potential for love and unity in all of this. Who is not moved when seeing people pull together in tragedy or joyfully dance together when a great good is shared?

Unfortunately, there is a tendency in the human heart to relish pain, or to define ourselves by our pain. A sharing of personal tragedy with another person can easily become an exercise in one-upsmanship as each person starts playing the "oh yeah? My situation is worse than yours!" game.

Let's face it - many people like to identify with their pain and wear it as a badge. This is for many reasons. Identifying with my pain gives me bragging rights and makes me a victim who can go around demanding sympathy from others. Also, my pain gives me a free pass for bad behavior. In addition, I am freed from having to listen to your problems because of my own suffering. Being a victim in my pain makes it so that I don't have to work to fix my problems. Finally, my pain can make me part of a small exclusive club whose membership is not open to the general public but only to those who share my particular type of pain.

This last phenomenon is a result of a very pernicious human idea which says "you can't ever understand my pain because it is of a special type that who have not personally experienced". In my opinion, this is a really awful line of thinking because of its damaging effects in not only human relations in general but also in the way we view our world and deal with disappointments and tribulations in our own lives.

Am I saying that the idea totally untrue? No, it obviously has a basis in fact. Some will point out that in a very real sense what I experience is not what you experience, or even if it is, there is no perfect way to prove that it is. Even basic perception is communicated by faith, in a way. How can I know that what I perceive as "red" is not seen by you as what I would call "green"?? This becomes fodder for the deconstructionalist philosopher who takes reality apart and uses that as a club to destroy all meaning in life (or at least the parts they don't like). And yet, in countless ways we can experience our common humanity when enjoying a beautiful orange sunset, smelling a rose (which "by any other name would smell as sweet"), or enjoying a big bowl of ice cream or a hot shower on a cold morning. Whatever we argue intellectually, we certainly enjoy unity in practice, and an assumption of commonality seems to be much more practical than starting from nothing and trying to define reality with no footholds.

The reason I bring this up is not to discuss the nature of reality but to frame this premise: while people generally will agree philosophically that we have common perceptions and feelings, quite down-to-earth people will do the same thing as the philosophers, but with their emotions.

How? By using the argument at the start of this article: "my pain is unique and you will never understand what people like me are going through." I will say why this is bad in part 2.

Don't Dilute My Vote!

I think that it is time to make a short list of immediate conservative demands. Of course, there are a lot of things that we would like as conservatives: a balanced budget, tight borders, repeal of birthright citizenship as it currently is interpreted, ending government unions, etc., but each of these is a big fight and some, like balanced budgets, can't (IMHO) be solved by simply passing a law since there are already laws on the books that are ignored by our lawless leaders - for these we need better elections. I propose that we make a "short list" of things that need to be fixed "right now!" which could be achieved if we organized.

The first one that I would propose (which I believe would strongly affect the other ones) is Voter Verification. In other words, prove you are who you say you are when you vote or GO HOME. My vote should be worth enough to me to cause me to bring my ID. Sure, there are fake ID's, but right now the big problem is that we have a blatantly transparent attempt to institutionalize voter fraud by prohibiting verification at the polls (especially here in California). The reform I propose would have two steps: (1) immediately go back to forcing voters to prove their identity at the polling place with a legal picture ID, and (2) a big movement to purge the voter rolls of duplicates and outright fakes, with prosecution of fraud wherever it is found.

This is crucial - no election can be considered valid when fraud is institutionalized in the system, on purpose. I believe it is self-evident that more people are being disenfranchised by ineligible and fake voters than would be "disenfranchised" by having to provide ID at the polling place. Not only are we moving further and further from this, right now in California we are seeing legislation put forward by a Democrat to make all voting in California be done by mail. At that point, I believe democracy in California will be OVER - fraud will be so rampant that there will be no more reason to even have elections (that's my opinion at least). There is no more time to do this, we must strike now!

If we bring this up as a movement, there will be the "usual suspects" running around yelling "racism" and "disenfranchisement". That is to be expected. I think, though, that this is such a self-evident issue that if the general population was asked about it (outside MSM fake-polling) that they would answer "of course we should do that - duh!". Frankly, when it comes down to it, if someone doesn't consider it worth their time to bring ID to the polls, then I don't really care if they are turned away. The time is right - what should the rallying cry be? "How much is your vote worth to you?", "One citizen, one vote!", "Don't dilute my vote!"...

What do you think? I think we need to make this a nationwide movement while there is momentum in the House of Representatives and in so many states. If the tea parties took this up as a cry, the institutional left would be swept out of the way and the 2012 elections might actually be fair. This strikes me as an achievable (and necessary) goal.