January 29, 2024
After waking up at 4:30 AM, I took care of the morning chores, making coffee, feeding and taking the dogs outside, putting some clothes to wash, and cleaning the kitchen. After, I did a workout and then sat down to write. Before I knew it, it was time to jump in the shower and get ready for the day.
During lunch, I drove into Nash County to the Piggly Wiggly to pick up food for lunch and dinner. The store was busier than usual and I was happy to get out and head back home.
After finishing work, I took a long walk into the woods, snapping a few photographs along the way. I visited a fallen tree I recently discovered on the west side of the woodland and found a crow feather resting underneath it. The feather was so black that it gave off a blue hue. Seeing the feather reminded me of an article I read last week about how crows recognize human faces. If they find someone they don’t like, they somehow communicate the person’s features to crows in other locations. Remarkably, those crows can recognize a person they have never seen, and harassed them because the original crow must have passed on some awful rumor.
I continued on to my favorite sitting place, which we have unofficially named Beaver Teeth Rock. The large boulder earned this name after we discovered beaver teeth pooped out of a coyote or bobcat. Of course, we found lots of teeth and bones, including deer teeth and a cat’s claw. We’ll see if the name sticks.
I sat on the rock for about an hour with my small pocket journal, making notes about whatever came to mind. My thoughts drifted to an article I read in the local paper, The Wilson Times. Someone submitted an article, political commentary if you could call it that, that outlined some pretty outrageous claims, presenting them as commonsense. It returned me to an old question I have been trying to answer for several decades now: How do you open a willfully closed mind?
Specifically, how can you educate someone who doesn’t want to be educated? While the simple answer is that you cannot, it’s my opinion that this topic is so critical to human progress that we have to look harder for solutions. Certainly, specific experiences change people and help them realize the shortcomings of emotional decision making and general closed-mindedness. But it’s a tragedy that we have information that can make the world a better place, but, sometimes, the very people who would benefit from it have blocked its transmission. While that seems like a harmless personal choice, this type of self or group management will inevitably cross paths with the protected rights of others. And once the rights of one group violate the rights of another, then the first group’s rights are no longer protected. That’s a hard concept for many to swallow until someone tries doing the same thing to them.
The two paths I have found in my contemplations are to break society up into groups of children and adults. Most adults believe in improvement and want better circumstances. However, the population is divided into two different philosophies centered on attitudes toward change. While the first group accepts change, there are always those who resist it, because they like things just the way they are. Unsurprisingly, this is commonly the attitudes of those unaffected by injustice and inequality. This is the approach that, “if it ain’t broke, then don’t fix it”. Unfortunately, humans often show indifference when things are broken for others. We seem to have a hard time understanding that what harms my neighbor harms me.
There are those who accept change and those who want things to remain the same. The fallacy here is that, by definition and the natural laws of the universe, improvement requires change. If we want something to be better than it is now, then is has to differ from the way it is now. And if we want to move from how it is now to something different, well, that is called change. To desire improvement and fight against change is another way of expressing the idea of repeating the same behavior and expecting a different result, the layperson’s definition of insanity.
The second path towards addressing this issue in society is a grander scheme of the way nature operates, improvement through attrition. We should accept that many adults are incapable of, or choose not to, changing their views. Here, improving society would involve teaching children how to think properly and make rational decisions based on universal moral principles like justice and equality. This is how nature creates change, in with the new and out with the old. Let ignorance wither and die. I think both fronts are worthy pursuits, to educate our young and offer adults the opportunity to learn the complexities of human observation, analysis, decision-making, and behavioral changes. When some people have the tools to see more, then they often choose a better way. But of course, there are those that will always choose to stand their ground, defending their ignorance until you pry it from their cold dead hands.
I closed my journal and made my way back to the house. In the pine grove, I noticed the deer had made dozens of swirls in the thick bed of dead pine needles that covered the grove’s floor. They searched out stray morsels of corn, using their noses to pinpoint single kernels of the tasty snack. When I arrived back at my SUV, I grabbed a bag of deer corn and carried it off to the forest, where I poured several piles until the bag was empty.
Nightfall came quickly as I fed the dogs and barbecued small beef ribs on the grill. I cooked the ribs with a thick barbecue sauce and ate them with a side of Japanese short grain rice scooped from the rice cooker. Before I knew it, it was time for bed.