2006-10-27

What we feed on seems very important. not physically like what you eat, but what you take into your life. What information you surround yourself with. Stimuli, friendships, loves. You search these things out, and they maybe search you out too. But they also effect a perspective shift in your way of seeing the world. when you feed on something, it becomes you. Like nutrients that compose your living tissue, muscles, and refresh your organs, like mineral deposits and toxins from the environment that end up in your body, so too do things that you read, watch, accept, over time.
We all have habits that help to dictate this. Surely a one time encounter with an ugly fact of life may be shocking as you try to internalize it, but i think that if you could escape having that experience, and you want to, you would avoid it. So you wouldn't really internalize, say the experience of life in a poor neighborhood by just passing through.
But then there are certain freedoms we have to pursue our own habits of choice.
I bring all of this up, i guess, to say that I have been sucking on the teet of the 911 truth movement for some time now; and it has affected change in my life. Coming to terms with how these 'fringe' social beliefs are related to the rest of the world is nearly impossible. From the outside looking in, a strange society of mastabatuers, of kooks and paranoia.
I cannot gain the strength to argue my convictions on this matter. Even when I am around others who share my belief that we do not know what happened on that sad september day, I feel uneasy. What if's always pop into my mind. Even when I know the truth through review of all the arguments, evidence, and balanced judgements that I have made to get there; even after years of solid conviction that i am right about this, or that my instincts are right, I doubt myself.
And this is my nature, I want to give the opposite view a chance, at all times. I am happy in ambiguity, in not being sure. Doubting the 911 official story and trying to tell other people about this, as you feel you must by civic duty, leads me to a place where i am in a black versus white world. I am immediately put into contrast with the whole world, as a 'kook'. I have sometimes said that it makes me feel like an evangelical.
So this gap between me and my fellow citizens, which creates a 'right' and 'wrong' to things, is just so alien. I'd rather have a discussion to all hours of the night about these things, and many others, that was not painted as paranoiac, was not meant to define a debate, that was not meant to be accusatory. Can we just have a space where we can agree is unclear.
Bush is the ultimate divisive character, in these regards.
Anyway, it rains here, in Richmond. Life is dreary today. the cat is cold, but the walnut burgers I made are good.