Understanding

This is a difficult thing for me given my age and history, and it's difficult to speak frankly of it here. I will preface this by saying that a while ago I thought about the way I should try to conduct myself in the world and how I think it might be best for nations to conduct themselves too, and it boiled down to one thing: Always try to do the kind and respectful thing. I really try hard and it isn't easy. I believe that when things arise that make me uncomfortable it's because that's an area I will benefit from investigating. I'm a human being with all the attendant weaknesses including those easy slides into lazy behavior and prejudice.

I met a nice new person who is humorous and kind to me, but beyond that, is obviously an intelligent and honest person. I told him we needed him in the vaudeville troupe, and he joined up. He's from Austria. He has volunteered his expertise in sound engineering to advise the actors, who need to record their voices for the machinima.

Today I was building at Burning Life and got interrupted over and over again. Then the new friend map-tracked me, and almost the first thing he said was that he'd been called a Nazi. I thought he seemed upset. Then I said that some people liked to stir up trouble - he could hang out with friends and build. He said if that's what they wanted he would get an SS tattoo and fight them, that he's a man and likes a scrap now and then. I said labels stick and one needed to choose labels with care. I said I was just being honest, and he said he was, too. I was lost in horror at that point - I'm not sure if he was joking but for me, there's no joking about Nazis.

I suppose what's going to happen for me is that I'll just continue on as usual. I don't quite understand why he would react the way he seems to be reacting, however, I wasn't there at the name-calling, and his reaction, if serious, might quickly be mitigated by his sense of humor. Obviously my own emotions have colored the way I saw this, and I could easily have everything mixed up. It could be that what he was saying was motivated by silliness. Everyone has a history, and mine has made me quite discomfited.

I think often about how my theoretical view of life is not always easy to carry forth into day-to-day exchanges with people. I see in my own life how I try to knit together the unrelated pieces of my life - how I don't like fragmentation. It's past time for us, as a huge number of humans alive on the planet Earth, to act in concert. We don't need to be homogenous, but we need to stop letting groups use up and destroy things because they don't need to take responsibility. Yes, I realise I'm in a bad group. It occured to me the other day that perhaps it requires a vision of the future in order for us to feel a responsibility for what goes on after our deaths. A great part of that, one would imagine, would be children. Dunno.