contemplating chicken: various thoughts

more thoughts

I am not naturally a “tolerant” person. I was raised in a judge-y house and I remain judge-y to this day.

However, while I routinely judge other people’s choices (though I try very hard to not say that out loud, cough), I’m trying to not be un-thoughtful about how I do so. (Not saying other people are un-thoughtful, just that I have held a lot of opinions based on very shallow understandings of other people’s lives and choices in my life, and I am trying to politely avoid Past Sharon’s fallacies.)

So, in my previous entry, I used meth as an example of a drug where my understanding of bodily autonomy conflicts with … my understanding that meth is pretty uniformly not good for you and my desire to not be around meth addicts. Sort of. I used meth specifically! Not, say, pot. Because, seriously, maybe when I am old I will care about pot. Or maybe if I had kids I would be all, “Think carefully before smoking pot, because some people have bad reactions to it, and also we could have addictive tendencies in our family (my great-grandfather was an alcoholic, and then my family sort of stopped drinking entirely, so I’m not sure), and also think about whether that’s what you want to spend your money on and/or if that’s what you want to get in trouble for having.” More or less the same thing I would say about alcohol. But re: other people smoking pot: don’t care. Whatever. Your time, your money. (To extend my previous example, I wouldn’t hire someone who came to an interview stoned, but if I found out after they interviewed well and performed well in the job that they regularly smoked pot on the weekends, I would file that in my “enh, whatever” mental file.) So what I’m trying to figure out is whether that attitude changes by drug, or depth of addiction, or what. 

And, while I didn’t talk about race/class issues in the first post — they matter. If something is normalized, even it’s harmful, if people are pressuring young kids or teenagers into trying stuff — that’s not a choice made with full information. That’s not, “I understand the rest of my life could be fucked up, and I am choosing to do this even so,” it’s, “I’m doing this just once to get you off my back and oh shit now I’m stuck.”

Besides that — oy. I think of the kids I graduated with. Some of them, admittedly, I feel, and have always felt, real contempt for, because they didn’t seem to try or care about anything. But — to try to take myself out of myself for a minute — if you’re poor, and for whatever reason school isn’t easy or enjoyable for you, and you don’t have a lot of family support, you don’t have a lot of prospects in my area. You could drive into Omaha or move down there, but if you can’t manage that, you’re pretty much screwed for decent job opportunities, mental health care, etc. in my town. So yeah, drug use is a choice, but it’s not … a real choice-y choice. It’s a choice between “My life sucks, and no one’s going to help me make it better” and getting to be absent from your life for a while. 

So, what I’m saying is, um… I don’t want to judge when I don’t know. I need to learn more, and then maybe I can develop a better framework for thinking about these things.