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2020-11-04. holding

I've been thinking about redesigning my website lately. I'm bought a new VPS, slapped this gemini server on it, and I've been thinking about what else I can do with it. So I've been thinking about changing my website up.

I even went so far as to post a topic in a semi-popular forum I frequent¹ to encourage others to post their webpages, as a ruse for inspiration. Everyone's webpages are so cool, and mine feels old and dusty by comparison. I know that part of that is because it's mine, and I've seen it a lot, whereas everyone else's is new, at least to me. I know that many other people experience similar feelings. This knowledge does nothing to help displace or otherwise mollify the feelings of inadequacy I feel.

¹ "Rate my homepage!" on Tildes.net

(contact me if you want an invite)

Of course, while visiting Tildes in order to link to the thread above, I saw I had two notifications. I clicked them and found two replies to a comment I made about judging Trump supporters *a priori* regarding possible racism and xenophobia, on a thread that has since been locked and removed. I read through the rest of the comments, and a few were maybe trending toward flamewar, but I disagree with the site admin's decision to pull the plug on the discussion. However, it's not my site, I suppose, and so it goes.

So again, the election has entered my life. It's all encompassing at this point, this sick American political machine; I think of those videos that show the Moon at the distance of the ISS, or the funnier one with a giant banana at the same distance. It covers the whole sky; we bathe in its light whether we want to or not.

Ironically, I suppose (though didn't Morrisette strip that concept of all meaning in '96?), the sky outside my window has been a perfect, unbroken blue for the past few days, with that perfect fall weather that is crisp but not cold in the sunshine. I've been riding my bike to work and it's been making me very happy.

You know what? I'm going to quote the *a priori* comment and my response here, to make a point, I think.

The original post:

After reading the election thread, I don't personally see how admitting to being a Trump supporter would be productive for anyone on Tildes. Without citing specific comments, you'd just be copping to being a bigot and racist a priori in eyes of folks here.

My response:

I want to just ... push a little bit on this, especially the a priori part. With all the stuff the Trump administration has said and done over the past four years, can we really argue that someone isn't at least okay with racism and bigotry if they support Trump? I do agree that admitting to supporting him wouldn't win you many friends on this site, but ... I don't know, it seems like leading with Trump support isn't the best way to win friends in like, real life either. At least in a lot of the country.

And here's part of a response to me:

It's bad to villainize someone for voting for Trump (or anyone for that matter). It's also terrible to make assumptions that someone is a racist or is sympathetic to racist sentiment just because they cast a vote. This is something I see in my left-leaning friends that I wish would stop. I'll take it a step further and say it's even bad to assume someone is a bad person just because they seem racist. My great aunt -- who is not even that old, in her late 50s -- espouses some particularly racist ideas sometimes. And yet she still imparts some wisdom to me from time to time, and I know she loves her kids and grandkids, and I know she's a good person because I grew up with her. Humans aren't as one-dimensional as modern social media would like you to believe. I don't like that she might've voted for Trump, but I still would respect her decision if she did.

I find myself reeling more and more about how everything happens all of the time. I can almost physically feel the weight of all of our collective sociopoliticoeconomic problems piling on this country and the world, I can see fires burning in the distance; but I can enjoy the autumn breeze and birdsong. I know that if it comes to self-sufficiency and tattered towns barely subsisting, there will still be singing and games on the weekends. People can commit great atrocities and still be good to those they wish to.

People can be good people and be racist at the same time. We contain multitudes. The BTK killer was a family man who loved his daughters. Stalin was known to be generous with his family. George Washington owned slaves, and persecuted escaped ones for years, and Jefferson famously raped many of his slaves. I feel like education should do a better job of preparing us to accept this reality, and to figure out how to change it when we can.

I keep not knowing where to put things. I've stopped listening to the news because I don't know how to hold it in my head. I remember Keats, explaining "Negative Capability:"

when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason

I've used this phrase as a guide for much of my adult life. With recent events, I find it harder to live by, because it's somehow related to Doublethink:

To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself--that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word--doublethink--involved the use of doublethink.

I find it impossible to tell, when I'm at my least sure, whether I or those I disagree with -- for these are ultimately disagreements -- are participating in Negative Capability, or Doublethink. And though these are but disagreements, they precipitate into action in the world, and people live and die by these disagreements. Is this how it's always been?

I suppose I'm saying that, the older I become, the smaller I find myself to be. When I was a child I was my whole world, and then my siblings and me, my parents, my friends, my school, my town, my state, another state, the country, the world. I feel at times as though I have nothing to say to anyone, because what is my voice against the tide of humanity?

And at the same time, I have a completeness in my family, my new one, with my wife and my dogs. At some point, we'll have children, and they'll be my whole world: a return, through stepping down the generations. And at the still same time, the world will be burning itself, or won't be, at any rate I can't control what it does.

I feel as though I was promised I could do anything if only I put my mind to it. I feel as though that promise has been proven to be a lie -- a kind lie, like Santa Claus, but a much more damaging one.

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