Offense

Practically everyone takes offense from time to time. I am not easily offended, but I have my limits. Others seem to be offended at the slightest transgression, like someone not moving fast enough in traffic, or the price of petrol going up by a penny. I find myself taking offense (or sometimes, offence), lately when hearing about politics. But I am not talking about the things that really get people’s ire up, particularly the big three: politics, sex, and religion. That said, I remember a business lunch where one of my co-workers opened the conversation with some one-liner about Hillary Clinton, a group of Catholic women, and some vibrators.

The remarkable thing about that moment was that I wasn’t offended in the least. I was embarrassed, because I knew he was trying to get some reaction from the stodgy audience. I imagine some of them were offended, not recognizing his effort at humor. Our manager kind of ignored that and began making introductions.

It’s kind of odd to me that sex, politics, religion, guns, and race are such taboo subjects for “polite company”, as they used to say. I understand the desire for such censure. But we all have these in common. All of us come from some ethnic and racial background of some sort. I went to Catholic school as a child, but I have begun learning more about Buddhism. And I vote for whomever I believe would be the better choice in elections, regardless of party affiliation. We all come from different places, and we have all had our own unique life experiences that have helped shape our perspectives.

But what is it about certain topics that makes us more defensive? Why are we angered more about one thing than another? For instance, some of us are affected by what others say about us. This was a real problem for me growing up, and when I was having trouble with a bully, people used to ask, “why do you let him get to you?” Well, I can say that at the time I wasn’t in control of my emotions. That takes discipline unless you have a natural tendency for being more regulated. It didn’t help that my parents divorced when I was quite young. Thus, there I was, being strongly affected by words spoken to and about me. You know, it’s not true what they say about sticks and stones. Words do hurt.

Sometimes people are offended by the strangest things. I have a friend who loves talking about the idea of a flat earth. He doesn’t really believe the conspiracy theories, but he enjoys reading about the outlandish concepts. When several of us get together he likes to bring up the latest in the ongoing, never-ending parade of anecdotes. One of the others in the group argues with him, but he gets visibly upset and flustered. It’s obvious that he is offended by such thinking. These discussions usually end in silence because we know how upset that friend can get. Lately we don’t talk about the flat earth, even though that first guy only enjoys exploring these ideas, and he doesn’t subscribe to their thinking. Why would the idea of a flat earth be so offensive to some? Well, I can understand that a little. To me it’s about feeling that someone is attacking us for our beliefs or something else we hold dear. For those who take offense about flat-earthers, it’s as if they are assaulting their village, coming in the night with torches. It can feel like a real, almost existential threat.

In reality some information would have little or no bearing on our lives. Whether or not the earth is round makes no difference to how we go about our daily existence. We are – most of us – all stuck here on this planet, until Elon Musk figures out how to send people to Mars. And even then, our individual perceptions of our universe will have no effect on anyone, unless you decide you want to teach children about how we all live on a disc at the center of the universe. That’s where it does get dangerous.

I had a teacher in religious classes – when I was impressionable but not so young that I was entirely naïve – who told our class that rock music was the devil. Any music, he maintained, that motivated you to tap your foot or make you want to dance was, well, evil. I went away from that particular lesson imagining how evil Handel’s Messiah was, considering I tapped my foot to it on occasion (I am a classical music nerd). I enjoyed a lot of different types of music, including big band and other instrumental music. How wicked could it be? Was my teacher therefore wrong about that, and thus perhaps wrong about other things? I started to question everything. And I became very skeptical by the time I graduated from high school.

I believe this was the beginning for me when I began learning how to not be offended by things. It has taken me decades to get where I am now, and the current pandemic, and its subsequent lock-down, has allowed me time to reflect. But somewhere along the way I know I changed. I remember when I stopped being affected by bad drivers and the insanity of freeway driving. Then I learned how to let things move past me like leaves drifting on the surface of a stream. A meditation app helped me to visualize myself in various scenarios like that. It’s hard to isolate any one moment when I might have shifted, or at least begun a transformation. I still get irate when I see stupidity in action. I’m still growing, apparently.

What is anger, anyway? Is this some remnant of our primitive ancestral DNA? Our caveman brains still at work fending off outsiders? What good is this ire? We saw angry protesters in the streets in 2020, many about police brutality and racial injustice. Anger also came from the counter-protesters, some of them looking for trouble. I admit I was offended by some of the scenes. I think it would be difficult to find someone who wasn’t affected.

I wish I could live my life never having to be offended by anything. I wonder what that would be like. Would humans lose something if we abandoned our sensibilities? Are we human because of this, what I consider a flaw? Becoming upset about something we have no control over seems futile, but that’s the thing. We have such little control over anything that we’re bound to bring psychology into the mix. We’ll take all the angst about our inability to get what we need or where we want our lives to go, and we’ll turn it against the guy in front of us in traffic, who is, by the way, travelling only as fast as the car in front of him. Passing the next car doesn’t improve things. We get angry about huge geopolitical forces we can’t possible control. We’re angry about people’s sexuality. The way people worship is repugnant to us. We have no say in these matters, so why are we so obsessed with them? And, yes, we can vote, but that really doesn’t change things in the short term.

It’s okay to let go of your anger. We can allow ourselves to not be offended. I have learned to take a breath after being insulted, then come back to the conversation calm and collected. Granted, I still have to hang up on the call sometimes. I’m getting there. After all, I am still a human animal, a victim of my nature. I don’t have the time to study psychology; I feel like that field isn’t quite adequate right now, anyway. I mean, we can label things, behaviors, disorders, etc. But what is anyone doing to really manage the complexity of the human mind? It seems we can’t even agree on whether expressing emotions is healthy. One thing I do know: life is difficult no matter who you are. We’re all susceptible to suffering, and we all want to experience joy. Knowing that, why would anyone wish to deprive a person of happiness? And yet that happens quite a lot.

Who’s in Charge Around Here?

Is it possible there is a world where dogs are in charge? What about cats, too? Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home posited that humpback whales are aliens visiting from another world. Actually I think jellyfish are more alien than anything science fiction has dreamed up.

Whales and other cetaceans are believed to be highly intelligent. That’s probably hard to measure. In fact I’m not sure if we can know when a human being is intelligent. I’m half-serious about that. But if there is a spectrum of human intelligence, I’m sure the same exists for other organisms. Are there some pigeons that are smarter than the rest? Probably not, now that I think about it.

Intelligence doesn’t seem to have anything to do with dominance. Humans appear to dominate this planet, until you consider the effectiveness of insects and microorganisms. Bacteria are very successful in many respects. And they outnumber us significantly. But we don’t communicate with them. Nor they with us. Meanwhile, I have begun to understand the language of cats. (Please don’t judge.)

Communication perhaps is not the hallmark of intelligence. It has been used in defining human smarts for millennia, at least for as long as people have mastered the ability of conversing in whatever way was deemed acceptable. Signing has been used in many countries over several centuries, mostly among deaf communities, but it has also been used by people who are unable to speak otherwise, with or without the ability to hear.

If we can measure intelligence by way of communicating with other species, or by observing their behavior, then we might be able to prove we are intelligent, tangentially at least. But humans have fully owned arrogance in declaring we are alone in our level of consciousness. How can we say other creatures do not possess that glimmer? Maybe horses and horseshoe crabs are wise in their ways. Or perhaps not.

But I am confident that human beings are both fully capable of evolving to a higher plane of existence or destroying ourselves. In my country there appears to be a widening rift between two camps of ideology. We don’t seem to be very good at making life better for everyone. Herd animals make better choices than we do, global pandemic notwithstanding.

If there is a world where life evolved from non-apes, maybe they will have made it all work. Perhaps because they couldn’t make or hold weapons. I think, therefore, primates were doomed from the beginning.

Democracy?

Here in the United States there has been a lot of discussion lately – both before and since the election – about protecting American democracy. We Americans (the US type) talk a lot about democracy, so much so that you’d think we know everything about it. Maybe we should base our own government on its principles. The thing is, democracy is more of an ideal than an actual form of government. Furthermore, the United States does not choose its president democratically. And that’s something not many voters understand.

One of the pillars of democracy is the idea that everyone’s vote counts. This is a noble sentiment, and it might actually have some basis in fact, albeit anecdotal. In the case of US presidential elections it is far from reality. The recent 2020 election on 3 November brought out a record number of voters, and they are still counting the ballots. So far about 160 million votes were cast across 50 states and the District of Columbia, the highest number ever in the US. This is partly due to an increase in the number of those eligible to vote, and the motivation many had to make their voices heard, as it were. For local elections and US House and Senate seats, one can truly say their vote mattered. But it is harder to see it that clearly when you explore what happens when we vote for president.

The Electoral College is a system whereby designated electors, who are chosen as proxies by us, the voters, and by their respective parties, cast the real ballot for president and vice president. It is a uniquely American setup. In every state, and D.C. (excluding Maine and Nebraska), the number of electoral votes is awarded to the winner of the state based on a determination of who won the popular vote. Maine and Nebraska split them up, with four and five electors, respectively. But for Texas, for example, whomever comes out ahead in the vote count, that party’s electors will be chosen to cast their vote in January. Texas has 38 electors in 2020, and their winner-takes-all approach means if candidate A gets 50.1% of the vote, that candidate will receive all 38 electoral votes, regardless of the number of actual ballots for him or her.

The problem with this system is that it makes it possible for a candidate to receive more of the popular vote and still lose the election. This happened in the 2000 presidential election when former Vice President Al Gore wound up with 48.4% of the popular vote, and George W. Bush with only 47.9%. Bush came away with 271 electoral votes in spite of Gore earning more than half a million more votes than Bush. In 2016 Hillary Clinton lost the election to Donald Trump but had nearly 3 million more votes. The reason this is possible – and more probable these days – is because the number of votes doesn’t really correspond to the number of electors in each state. That number is based on the population. So California with 39.5 million residents has 55 electoral votes. In addition to this, after the threshold is reached to secure a win in any state the number of electors remains fixed. That means that California will award its 55 electoral votes to a candidate who wins 50.1% or 85% of the popular vote.

The idea of the Electoral College was augmented in 1803 with the ratification of the 12th Amendment, then again with the adoption of the 23rd Amendment in 1961. None of the reading is very interesting, but it is important. Suffice it to say that it would take more than an act of Congress to get rid of this thing. Many voters have expressed their desire to abolish the Electoral College. But it is baked into the US Constitution, so it would require some major finagling to just ditch it altogether. Instead, there is a strange law, the The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which would effectively cancel out the EC. Colorado voters recently voted to remain in the Compact. The agreement among the 15 states that have signed on have agreed to pledge their electoral votes – again, winner-take-all – to the candidate who wins the popular vote. But this only takes effect when and if the number of electoral votes for the states that have enacted the law equals 270, which is the number of votes required to win a presidential election. The Compact currently needs enough states to equal 74 more EC votes to go into effect, because those states will then decide the election, awarding the minimum 270 electoral votes to the candidate with the most popular votes.

The weirdest thing about this system is that the electors are chosen differently depending on the state. It may not be known who they are until after the election. And it’s the states that get to decide this. Thus, what we really have in this country are 51 separate presidential elections. On election night we don’t watch who has more votes according to the number of ballots cast by the people. Instead we are fixated on the “magic” number of 270. Once a candidate reaches that projection, it’s decided. But then, it really isn’t. That’s because the electors don’t meet until the middle of December to vote certify their ballots. The final list is sent to the “President of the US Senate”, who is the Vice President. Another copy is sent to each state, the National Archives, and other offices. Then the votes are counted in a special session of the Congress on 6 January. This is all spelled out in US law 3 US Code, Chapter 1. If you want to get deep into Constitutional law and all that stuff, have at it. But for the average voter, we can barely keep up with polling locations and which documents to bring, the list of candidates, the propositions, the deadlines, and the misinformation swirling around to further confuse us.

Voting truly shouldn’t be this hard. India has 900 million voters, and they seem to pull it off. Florida, this is for you. As for the idea of democracy, where everyone’s vote counts, I still believe in it, even though my vision of democracy is likely affected by my experience. I have multiple forms of ID, and I have a car. Voting is so easy for me, I don’t even think much about it. But there are places in the US where polling places are very far from where people live, and public transportation may not be dependable.

I don’t know what a “true democracy” looks like, because there are so many forms of it on the planet. The US can do a better job making sure everyone has a chance to vote. We can also improve the flow of information, helping people make informed decisions instead of getting confused about which “truth” to turn to. It has occurred to me that social media platforms are not the place to get news and information. In the old days journalists were trusted, but now everyone can be an authority, it seems. Look at me. I’m publishing my views and my interpretation of the US Constitution, and I don’t have a law degree, and I am not a legal scholar. I don’t pretend to be. And I think this is something we all have to learn here in the 21st century: check the source. When you hear or read some information that seems crucial, look it up further. Double-check the information before making a decision. Don’t get everything from one news source. And never listen to anyone on Facebook or Twitter. My nitwit cousins are always sharing and re-tweeting all kinds of bullshit. And they’re college grads.

It’s a good feeling to vote. Maybe it will make you feel better knowing how the Electoral College works. Maybe it won’t. It’s kind of like browsing WebMD. After combing through the descriptions of diseases and their symptoms, you might start developing an itch or a sore throat. Soon you are convinced you have Dengue Fever. It’s best to just leave it alone in that case. Perhaps ignorance is bliss with respect to the Electoral College and how a US president is really elected.