About a week ago, my sister had her birthday. I called her, as a brother ought to do, to wish her well. She’s been having a rough go of it. She is depressed. And she is angry. But the precise nature of her anger was not immediately clear to me.
She had asked me about the latest Matrix film, and what I thought about it. I didn’t get much opportunity to express my feelings when she entered into a strange rant. She expressed great concern regarding the film, and how the creator was projecting their trans culture stereotypes upon the audience (these are her words, not mine). I asked her whether she’d seen the film (because before her rant, she suggested she had not), and she confirmed for me that she had not seen the film. My confusion began here.
I could not understand how she could have developed such a passionate, and critical, view without having seen the film. She indicated to me that she had read the reviews, and apparently that was enough for her to hold her incredibly scathing viewpoint. Having seen the film myself, I tried to argue that the film (at least from my viewpoint) was nothing of the sort. She refused to listen, moving the conversation elsewhere.
She started talking about how mass media was entirely untrustworthy. My viewpoint is complex in this regard, though I might sum it up by suggesting that all mass media needs to be taken with a grain of salt. That is, I believe that all mass media is biased and selectively presented, and so one ought to be critical in assessing anything presented before adopting the information into their world view. Not outright dismissal or rejection. Instead, I think one ought to think about it a bit before simply accepting what is presented. My sister’s perspective seemed to be strongly in favor of outright dismissal and contempt.
It was a difficult conversation. It was her birthday, and I wanted to be giving and compassionate and let her have her moment. But the whole conversation was steeped deeply in controversy, bigotry, and hate. While my sister has never been an angel, this was far more extreme than I had ever heard her talk.
She and my friends told me about a convoy travelling across Canada, from Alberta to Ontario. The convoy was a protest against vaccine mandates for truckers crossing the US/Canada border. Unfortunately, the convoy’s protesting mandate seemed to change significantly during the course of their journey.
Of interest to me, and to this post, were many of the expressed opinions of the participants of the convoy. Many seemed to be talking much as my sister had been talking. They expressed a hatred of mass media channels, becoming openly hostile to the news agents who were themselves simply recording these people for the media outlets. There were even a few individuals who suggested they hoped the convoy protest would result in something similar to the January 6 insurrection in the United States a year ago. So far, this has not been the case, but there is certainly still time for such things to develop if the will is there.
I’m not going to go into great detail regarding the convoy or its protest, nor much more into my sister’s ranting, but I think it is important to notice that this is happening at all. People are clearly tired of the pandemic, and they have become agitated. They seem to be looking for someone or something to blame for the various concerns they have, and without a clear target, they have started selecting targets they probably already felt rather strongly about at the outset.
The concern I wish to express here is that for all these people, their expressions are all outward facing. Their hate and vitriol is directed outside themselves toward whatever they can find outside themselves. Knowing my sister as well as I do, this has been a common trend in her life for as long as I can remember. I also know about this issue rather well, as it was my own viewpoint for a long time in my own youth.
I am reminded of a friend of mine who’s entire family has a strange relationship with luck. They are all very lucky people, constantly encountering situations of good fortune seemingly regularly. I spent years trying to understand what it was and how it worked. And after decades, I believed I had cracked that particular mystery. As it turned out, it related back to things my father had said to me in my youth.
My father taught me fear. He taught me to fear the world around me, and to make a concerted effort to avoid risk at all costs. I was paralyzed from travelling outside my home town for the longest time. Leaving the country wasn’t even a thought for me. When I dated a woman who really wanted me to travel with her, I had no idea what to do.
I did eventually learn to travel. My current partner has been instrumental in this regard. However, it is why I refused for so long that was the interesting part. And this is where understanding luck came in. Luck, for me, is about controlling one’s situation (thinking about Simone de Beauvoir’s understanding of situation). As a human, I don’t have a lot that I can control of this world, but what little I can control, I use to manage my risk through my circumstances.
Following from my father, I can control risk in my life by avoiding putting myself into situations that increase the probability of something bad happening. Like avoiding the “bad part of town.” The problem I encountered as a result of this was that I started avoiding everything. While this succeeded in reducing my risk of getting into trouble, it also had the side effect of reducing the opportunities for happiness. I was leading a rather boring and sad life up to that point.
This is about me. This is about me making choices and being accountable to myself for those choices. I may not control a lot in this world, but there are a few things I can control. I can control my body, and how I move my limbs. I can control where I walk to or drive to, choosing what locations I will be on this planet. I can control the words that come out of my mouth when I speak, and I can control the tone of my own voice at the same time. I can control the expressions of my face and my body. These are just some of the things within my control, and if it is not clear, just these things can have a very, very significant impact on the sort of world I live in and the life I will have.
What I have learned over the years is that I am personally responsible for far more than I might have originally believed. I contribute to the nature of this world. I decide, through my choices, how this world will be. In a fashion similar to how I can vote a particular government into power in a democracy. I am a part of this world. And I also choose how I will react to the world as time passes. I can decide if a particular event should be seen as positive (being optimistic) or as negative (being pessimistic).
When I started taking responsibility for my choices and actions in the world, my world improved. A lot. Much more than I had thought initially it would. There is a reason I finally finished a degree at a university, and why I now have the most amazing partner anyone could ever wish for. Why my life has improved so much from when I was young, despite the challenges I faced in my youth. It has been me. It has always been me.
My sister, unfortunately, is stuck in a rut (again, her own words). It is a rut of her own making. Through the choices and decisions she herself has made over the years, she has created an incredibly deep and treacherous groove that each passing year becomes that much harder to leave. She is angry because of events from her past, from her youth. I admit, I am not her, so I cannot speak to the level of severity of those events. I’m sure many were exceedingly traumatic. All I can say is that I have had my own traumatic events (including having been raped).
The point is not to dwell on those past events. Yes, they certainly shape us. I would not be who I am were it not for all those past events. Especially the traumatic ones. But I was also able to eventually claw my way out of my own rut. It took a while (years), but I eventually found my way out. And I have to keep myself out, because I find myself digging new ruts all the time as well. It isn’t easy. Struggle and sacrifice are not easy. But they really can’t be easy either.
Life is about effort. The more effort I put into it, the more I get out of it. This is what I’ve learned. This is how I try to approach everything. When I watch a film, like The Matrix Resurrections, I don’t expect the film to take care of me; I enter into it with the expectation that I’m going to have to put in some effort to get something out of it. And I did get something out of that film. It was not a waste of time. I do not feel like the creators were projecting some insidious agenda upon me. I see the commentary, but I see it simply as commentary alongside so much other commentary. The film is much larger than simply that.
The pandemic has been challenging for everyone. Each of us having to deal with it in our own unique ways. Admittedly, I think that anyone who was challenged in life before the beginning of this pandemic is finding their challenges have risen exponentially. If they were living paycheck to paycheck before, now they are on the brink of bankruptcy. But there is the other side that many seem to have dismissed as well. There are those who were fine before, and are doing even better now. How else did we end up with a space race between billionaires?
I am watching what I can about this “freedom convoy” to see what happens and what it is all about. I agree with a number of people that this event might possibly be significant to history, but I’m more inclined to think it is significant as a gauge of how people are doing at this point in the pandemic. It seems to me that, like my sister, the participants are a group of disenchanted individuals who believe they are also disenfranchised. Individuals who seem to be looking outwardly in order to direct their frustrations and anger. Individuals who cannot see the terrible damage they have already wrought simply driving their gas guzzling vehicles thousands of kilometres to make some sort of point. As my partner has already inquired to me, “don’t they have jobs and responsibilities back home?”
It is my belief that for a lot of people in this world, they need to look inward rather than outward to find the solutions to their various problems. Not that they cannot use help in rectifying their various situations, as we can always all use some help. But an awareness of ourselves and our choices, and how those choices affect our world, would be a good first step toward ending many of our challenges.
I am responsible for my situation. In making better choices for myself, I can adjust the risks in my life and make luck for myself. I would not suggest I ought to reduce risks entirely, but adjust them appropriately in order to continue to offer myself opportunities for happiness and growth. This is the heart of luck, as I see it. To put myself into the right places at the right times. To be open and available to those opportunities.
I am always left with the same question at the end of these sorts of reflections: how do I share my insights with others? Or more generally: how do you make someone understand something they cannot understand? Somehow, through my life’s experiences I figured all this out. And I can tell you about it, as much as I want. But I cannot make you understand. I cannot make you see what I can now see. And, most importantly, I cannot make you want to see at all. As my mother said to me in my youth, “you cannot make anyone do anything.”
That is what this blog is all about. Aside from being a conduit for myself to express my thoughts and ideas, this blog is my attempt at performing that ridiculous function. To somehow make people understand things they don’t understand. But this blog also cannot make anyone want to understand. For that, somehow, people simply have to come here and read, and want to understand. And you, dear reader, I hope are such a person.