Last night, while on my way home from a staff Christmas party, I was thinking of some of the many clashes I used to have with my father because of his stupid, racist and bigoted opinions. Then I remembered the saying, "Opinions are like assholes. Everybody has one." This also led me to ponder a challenge I read recently in a book, about trying to hear a news item or an opinion I strongly disagree with, without judging. Hmm...A tall order, this. I have tried doing this and with absolute zero success. I doesn't worry me terribly.
I judge everything, and I won't even try not to anymore and please don't hand me any Buddha babble crap about mindfulness. I have a mind, therefore I use it. Judging, or evaluating happens to be part of the mind's natural process. Especially if you happen to have a busy and highly functioning brain. An analytical brain.
What I do instead is I accept that from the get-go I am going to evaluate and judge everything that crosses my desk, so to speak. But I am not going to leave it there. I am also going to question and challenge my reasons for making such judgements and evaluations and I am going to analyze and examine the root causes of my opinion making. If you don`t have a hyper, busy and analytical mind then that`s okay, but if you do, then please cut yourself a little slack: judge, evaluate and analyze to your heart`s content, but also challenge your evaluations. Explore them and be prepared to unlearn some of them.
Now back to my father and his opinions. Even though it is now forty-six years since I was fourteen and first argued with him about ethics and politics and social values, to this day I still disagree with him and for many of the same reasons. This alone has changed, besides his death seven years ago: I have made what I believe to be a reasonable effort to understand why he held these opinions and why we disagreed.
He grew up during the Depression and the War and left school with less than a grade nine education in order to make a living and help support his family. This was common practice in that era. I don't think he was ever particularly intelligent, and just like most not very intelligent, not very well-educated persons, his values were socially conservative. He was not given to asking questions and was so caught up in the business of daily survival that most of his inquiries would likely be around the day's work, his pay, if he can pay the bills and still have beer money left. Canada in those days was a post-colonial conservative backwater, almost exclusively white. Women had only recently got the vote and nonwhite Canadians and Aboriginals did not enjoy full citizenship. People with disabilities were kept out of sight and out of mind. Same sex love was deeply stigmatized and never even mentioned. Women were treated like second class citizens. It was considered appropriate to beat your children and even at times your wife into submission. There was still capital punishment.
All these factors helped shape my father and his opinions.
I really wasted my breath trying to argue with him and only helped further worsen things between us. This doesn't justify some of his horrible positions and it probably was the right thing to do to challenge him on his right-wing idiocy. (I am also aware that because he sexually abused me when I was a child that I might have been jumping at any opportunity to distance myself from him, hence our many pointless arguments and disputes.) Where I failed both of us was in my inability to understand why he thought that way nor to appreciate the power of his life circumstances in molding and shaping his mind and positions on things, as well as the effects of his mistreatment of me on my own way of thinking.
Our opinions in many ways express who and what we are. It isn't in our words so much as in what they suggest about us as people: our social class, upbringing, education, opportunities, family background, experience of childhood abuse and neglect, our social connections and friendships, our level of intelligence and curiosity, our religious and faith affiliations, our sense of spirituality, our gender, gender and sexual identity, our ethnicity, the country we live in, the climate and geography, the political system, the freedom or lack of freedom and human rights,the zeitgeist we are living in, our health, mental and physical, our belief systems. our general upbringing, our era and generation, our age and stage of life, poverty and more.
All of these elements mingle and distill with our DNA to form us and our worldview. I think this is why it is so difficult for many of us to change the way we think and believe. These things all come from such a deep place that we are naturally going to hold these things sacred, for which reason often great offence is taken when our opinions are threatened and challenged, especially when there is compelling evidence to the contrary.
As for myself, I am beginning to wonder if maybe I need to spend less time dissecting and dismissing opinions that are different from my own, and devote a little more energy to understanding why I believe some of the things that I hold sacred. This is not going to be easy, but I think my own future growth and personal development might depend on my doing this.
We'll just have to wait and see.
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