I was wondering if I was too outspokenly harsh, but still, I feel this way.

Anyways, the traditional response to posts like little light is “and I’d like a pony, too”.

There is just a *very* rich philosophical tradition of attacking this sort of idea, mostly because the desires and ends are decoupled from the situational context, means, and genuine knowing of ends.

For instance, I’ve got to get out of this town is often the only thing that matter for the people who flee a place. Where-ever they’d like to be is utterly irrelevant to the now, and often, being away is a precondition for knowing where you’d truly want to be. A great many jewish people died in the Holocaust for exactly this kind of reasoning. The lucky ones left however they could, and then decided they’d go to America, or Israel, or wherever.

In another vein, Ida B. Wells would have as strong a negative reaction as Emmanuel Kant. In the context of violent miasma, placing a priority to keep on dreaming of a better world is despicable lotus eating. Someone has to go out and stop these people.

We have so many wishgranter stories that illustrate just how dangerous monkey’s paws are in terms of just individuals. And applied to societies, such wishes are almost uniformly malignant–because usually, some other group of people suffer and die for your ideals. Because when the means, history, and context are left vacant, people place their worst traits there. Universal education? Underpaid, brilliant women structurally coerced to provide that labor. Democratic yeomanry? Native Americans gets treated like varmints lowering the value of land and exterminated. The monsters of human crafting gets pushed into the closet and under the bed during the daylight, and let free to terrorize the night shadows of morality.

In fact, most public religions and state moralities encourage this sort of gap thinking. It’s easier to provide something if no one is concerned with how. It’s also easier to fundamentally isolate people in their little quantized shells when they are forced to imagine something they’ve never imagined before, and so must project a vague image of immediate dubiousness.

I think I will stop here.

I’ve been thinking on ideas that go in this general direction. I’m on the autistic spectrum, and lately I’ve been trying to get past “I am disabled in X ways because of my neurology due to society” and try to imagine what a society where I am /not/ disabled would look like-

and coming up utterly blank.

So I can’t phrase it in a positive way yet. I try and wrap my mind around it, but it’s just too big, too different. I can’t say what I’m looking for without using the words “not” or “without”. I want to not be… I want this to stop… I want to live a full life without… not, not, not. It seems so incredibly limited, so sad, so doomed to failure to only be able to wish for things to go away but not to imagine what I want to replace it.

I want… I want… I want a world where difference is celebrated, is seen as that which makes us unique people in our own right whatever shape the difference takes, where support when those differences cause pain is matter-of-fact and considered the only moral thing to do.

Anything more specific than that? Not a clue.

I am not a buddhist, but this sort of post is, to me, precisely what is meant by the malevolence of desire, because it’s fundamentally rooted in a sort of willful ignorance and denial of what is. The belief that we can craft all of the sets of things and beings to our imagination, when they belong to themselves, even if they love you, even if they serve you, even if they are inanimate to your vision.

So I refuse to write down these sorts of words, because I already suffer enough.

p.s.
Not to mention this little fact:

If we’re just a little to obvious about dropping out (and inviting others to do so), we’ll invite our own destruction, same as the Albisengians, Canudos, any place where a minority is visibly successful, or even hippies now.

I want a world where I can be human without labels or judgments.

I want a world where quality education is available to everyone.

I want a world where people are the decision makers in their own lives.

There’s a start…and I also have something to add – this truly isn’t meant to be petty or snarky – but why use the phrase “unpoor” when referring to socioeconomic status? We are so afraid of class that we even have trouble naming it. Or maybe we just aren’t sure where we stand between “rich” and “poor”. I am also middle class (wealthy by the standards of most people on earth) and white. I suppose privilege might have a lot to do with my conviction that good things can happen. Then again, I’ve seen a lot of apathy from privileged people (since the system benefits them) and a lot more hope from those less privileged by sex/race/class/etc. Hope is nonexclusive; I laud your conviction that we can change things.

The advice I got was to ACCEPT a compliment with a simple “Thank you” instead of downplaying whatever I had been complimented on.

It may be considered a trite or simple thing to “think positive” but in reality we are very strongly conditioned against it. And thinking of something in terms of its positivie, constructive aspects instead of its negative aspects (even though, as someone pointed out, they are but two sides to the same coin) results in a profoundly different way of looking at things, and devising strategies to cope with or fix things.