Daily Archives: October 28, 2007

Oct 28

Just Saying

I make a mean chili.  In fact, if I knew someone who made chili as well as me, I would give her smooches whenever I saw her.

You know, just so she’d be predisposed to making me chili.

Oct 28

Freedom and the Alleviation of Suffering

Yesterday I watched Trudell, and I have to say that it’s had me thinking since then about just what it is that I’m working to accomplish, if anything.  I mean, what is it exactly that I want from the world, what am I working towards?

I think what I want is freedom and the alleviation of suffering.  It irritates the fuck out of me about the Democrats that they so often just get hung up on the alleviation of suffering–they’ll tell us what and where to eat and where and whether to smoke and if and when we can own guns and such–and they lose sight of the necessity of also advancing freedom.

Still, isn’t that better than giving up both in order to feel safe?

Anyway, I liked Trudell a great deal and also felt like it was not enough, that it was more infomercial than gripping documentary.  I felt like I came away from it knowing something about Trudell, but really nothing about Trudell; what I mean is that I feel like I learned some facts, very thought-provoking facts, but not much about him as a person.

It also got me thinking, though, that there’s a certain strand of Christian thought that just drives me crazy, the outlook that teaches people to think of this world as, at worst, evil and at best, somewhat meaningless overall, and teaches them to only focus on what comes after this.

Clearly, this is not endemic to all Christianity, and I hope you see that I’m trying to make a specific criticism about a kind of mindset that allows us to assume that suffering is not something we can really do anything about and so why bother?  I wish, instead, that those folks saw that their god loves this earth and the people in it (deservedly or not) and so we should treat this world and each other like things god loves.