fragility

"how do you keep from being preachy?" - rolling stone

"the key is not to contrive it - don't bring the same level of indignation to things you don't feel. as long as you keep it as honest as you can to your own feeling, then you hope it doesn't become a pure parlor trick" - jon stewart

it's hard to be loving towards people when you are very concerned with your own identity. in particular when you are keeping careful track of what offends you, so that you can be offended at the right time and show everyone how clever and deep you are. you can be offended about equal rights or discrimination or animal rights or logging or pot legislation or actually pretty much anything.

so then you are offended, and get to defend something, and feel really good about how indignant you are. but everyone sees that you aren't really indignant, and everyone knows you're just being self-righteous (or at least, everyone that matters).

the alternative sometimes feels like being not human. the alternative means only being indignant when you actually are indignant (i got this from jon stewart so it must be true), which means that you only get to be righteously angry when you actually feel angry, righteously, not just when you know you ought to feel angry because this is a righteous cause. so if you aren't a very nice person, or a very righteous person in general, nothing evil will make you indignant. but if you're also a smart person, this will make you veeeeery uncomfortable, because you'll realize holy crap evil doesn't make me angry i must be evil too. so rather than live honestly with your own emotions, you cue yourself up to be offended when you know you should be offended.

everyone (me) is very fragile it seems like. easily breakable, easily offended, easily induced into a coma of apoplectic indignation. this makes it very complicated to love people, because people that we're supposed to love end up saying things, accidently, that cause us to be offended, and then we chose our own identity (as a righteous condemnationer) over being nice to a nice person.

danny-from-l'abri said that "growing up" meant being more solid and less fragile. this is hard.