On January 11th, 2016, I started a daily practice of writing a joke meditation of the day called Cracked Pot Meditations. I was still recovering from the treatment of cancer, and I was having very challenging cognitive issues, so I chose just to put something simple and easy to write every day. Posting it to the blog allowed me to have some accountability. Some of those meditations were poorly written and unedited. I have gone back and begun editing these and adding an illustration, starting with the April 27th meditation. I hope you enjoy.
Meditation for August 15th
Being Offended Versus Being Scared For You Life
Here at the news bureau for the Center for Learning Arts and Journalistic Integrity at the University of Cracked Pot Meditations, we take offending people very seriously. We love to offend people. We want you squirming in your seat. Please consider other people’s perspectives and understand where they’re coming from. We don’t want you to drown in safe, comfortable ignorance.
Nothing bad will happen to you when you get offended.
Not offending you is worse for modern society than offending you. Freedom of speech and freedom of expression are fundamental rights in a genuine democracy. That means people with different points of view also have the right to express themselves.
We have a Facebook platform that allows people to express themselves and their ideas to the world. Facebook has people who are active participants scrolling through ideas after ideas, opinions after opinions, but the problem now is that when someone sees something that offends them, they unfriend, unfollow, and completely quit Facebook forever (one and a half days in real time).
The University of Chicago is now issuing a warning that it will not provide trigger warnings or protect students from potentially offensive content, which has offended some individuals.
Being offended means you disagree with someone’s point of view. Hell, that point of view might be completely from ignorance and lack of research, but that person has come to a conclusion and is sticking to it.
In fact, I believe that one or two people might have read up to this point and are getting heated about my opinion on this. There are probably a few people who didn’t even read this blog because they were scared of being offended. They have no idea what my ideas are. The people who have read this far and are turning red in the face have no idea where this blog is going, but they are already mad.
This is a great blow to American education. It’s not just the politically correct liberals who are pushing for a safe place, but religious people are trying to get their places more comfortable for them. Even the anti-politically correct crowd wants a safe place to be as offensive as possible so they can troll emotionally charged people and giggle into their Reddits.
We learn and grow by being uncomfortable.
“Problems are the cutting edge that distinguishes between success and failure. Problems call forth our courage and our wisdom; indeed, they create our courage and our wisdom. It is only because of problems that we grow mentally and spiritually. When we desire to encourage the growth of the human spirit, we challenge and encourage the human capacity to solve problems, just as in school we deliberately set problems for our children to solve. It is though the pain of confronting and resolving problems that we learn.” – M. Scott Peck
Nothing causes views to grow and learn better than being hurt. We become better people when we suffer loss, climb up from the bottom, and when we feel isolated and alone. Comfortable people sit in their towers knowing nothing – until their comfort is threatened.
So be offended—that’s considerable. People are going to hurt your feelings. Some of them won’t even know they are doing it, while others are just complete assholes. You will be a stronger person because of it.
Find out from people who don’t share your opinions why they don’t share your opinions. Have a dialogue. Share ideas. Let’s get active rather than offended.
If you’re one of the people who think the world is getting too soft and easily offended, this next section is for you:
There’s being offended and then there is being scared for your life. There is a huge difference between the two. The second reason is that your precious hate is being tolerated by fear anymore.
Women have had to endure men literally trying to rape them on a daily, YES I SAID DAILY, basis. Religion and traditional values point out that women are only meant for two reasons: babies and pleasing the husband (which sometimes one makes the other). THERE ARE PEOPLE WHO FUCKING RUN THIS COUNTRY THAT STILL THINK THIS IS TRUE BASED ON MYTHOLOGY BEING TREATED AS FACT!
Men get angry at women for not sleeping with them, then get self-righteous when the same women sleep with someone else. Men have shot up malls because they couldn’t get laid. Men have murdered women because the women wouldn’t sleep with them.
Men follow women down dark streets, saying disgusting things about body parts in a threatening manner.
Women are bitchsay tocunts, sluts, whores, hoes, tricks…
A book (many books) could be written on how men treat women daily. A FUCKING DAILY BASIS!
Rape is real. Women get raped. Yes, men get raped too, but more often than not, a woman is being raped. There is no spectrum when it comes to rape – date rape to murder rape – rape is rape, and it is happening all the time. Rape isn’t funny. You’d have to be a comedic genius to come up with a funny rape joke…
…yeah, that is a guy telling a rape joke and it is mostly men laughing, try and tell a rape joke where a rape survivor laughs…
Rape jokes are not offensive; they remind someone that they could be raped any day now. Rape jokes make rape seem a little less dramatic and take the power out of it. Does rape need the power taken out of it?
I would rather be murdered than raped, and I have been raped before.
I don’t have to live in constant fear of being raped. While I have spent my entire life recovering from being raped, I don’t worry that it’s going to happen again. Even though it had happened once in my life, I don’t have to constantly look over my shoulder and wonder if this or that person is going to rape me. Women have to fear that EVERY DAY!
These are our mothers, daughters, sisters, nieces, friends, and even our significant others. They may never get raped, and I hope they don’t, but they have to live in constant fear of it.
You don’t intend to rape someone? It’s just a joke? “Stop policing what I say, you Gestapo liberal!”
There is a huge difference between being a republican and pissing off democrats with your aversion to taxes and being someone who tells rape jokes. One is possibly offensive, and the other is making someone fear for their life.
Gays and trans people are BEING KILLED EVERY DAY JUST FOR BEING WHO THEY ARE! You might love the word faggot or calling someone a cocksucker, but that just states that what some people are is less than others.
There is a mythological system that states very clearly that gays are an abomination and should be put to death. They won’t go to heaven. SOME OF THESE PEOPLE ARE RUNNING OUR COUNTRY! They believe that it is not to be enacted to discriminate against specific individuals in the name of “protecting our values. ” Referring to those who are voted to run our country, they are fighting to keep certain people as second-class citizens, while other people get to hold on to their beliefs that they are targets for violence.
Telling jokes about how feminine being gay is doesn’t do anyone justice. Gays for not being like “normal” men, women for being less than men, so therefore these gays are just like them, and men for creating a standard that all men must adhere to in order to not be called names just because we cry at Disney films or love show tunes.
Making reference that someone who is straight likes to have gay sex is not offensive; it is a reminder that a massive person knowing that someone is gay could mean violence or death.
Being all confused about it is no reason to hate. A person who is stating that they don’t fall under the human-constructed gender narrative is being brave and putting themselves in danger. Our society already has a gender fetish where two genders must fit into certain stereotype boxes. People are killed for looking one way and dressing another way. PEOPLE ARE GETTING KILLED RIGHT NOW IN THIS HERE FREE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA!
The point is that there is a huge difference between being an offensive jerk and being an arbiter of hate and fear. You are actually being as scared and offended by gays, women, and trans folks as the politically correct folks you think are trying to take your “precious” little words away. You are keeping the hate and therefore the murder and violence towards certain folks that live at our societal fringes as outcasts because of TV and the Bible.
Does “All Black Lives Matter” offend you? Good. It looks like your treasured free country, where you get to act however you want and you won’t get any consequences, while a black guy can’t even act like Carlton Banks without risking a fatal shot by police.
“All Lives Matter” is just saying that you feel like all people are born equal – and I mean socially and economically, and not ‘legally’ – and that police just like to shoot everyone the same. No, the unfortunate news is that your white ass, even if born poor as fuck, still has more opportunities than a black person in this country.
“Police shoot more white people than blacks.” That is a shocking sentence if it weren’t for the fact that math is in favor of that. There are 211 million white ass honkeys living in these here United States, while only 35 million blacks live here. There are 6.2 white people for every black person. That is math that more white people are shot by cops than blacks, but when you do the math on the possibility of being shot as a black man, it is 2.5 times more likely than if you are white.
“What about black on black crime?” Well, if blacks are killing each other, then it’s fine to let the system stay the same, right? No. The system in place is a slow process of progression, being slowed to a minimum by religious, rich, and scared white people to keep blacks at a certain level of privilege. People are still mad that slavery is illegal. People are using “science” to prove that black people are less than. We let white people off for rape because it might bum them out to do time, and keep blacks in prisons for years for marijuana.
Racism isn’t cute, nor did Dave Chappelle make it okay to start making racist jokes again. This isn’t being offensive; it is purely based on fear of blacks.
A lot of people that are happy about the University of Chicago’s choice to ignore trigger warnings and creating a safe academic place for people to learn must be sick and tired of college campuses across our nation not allowing certain people to speak because of students possibly being offended must know that sometimes there are legitimate reasons that someone shouldn’t say.
At the University of Virginia, a man named Charles Murray was going to speak, but the students got together and advocated that he not speak. Is Charles Murray offensive? Yes, but he also uses pseudoscience to prove that some races are, in fact, inferior to others. The activists were appalled that a University would have a man using no real science to back his claim that whites are better than blacks to “educate” anyone.
If you want to know what is offensive and what is worse, think, is this just dumb and won’t really hurt anyone, or is this going to strengthen centuries-long ideas and practices that kill people for being themselves?
If you’re a bigot piece of shit white guy, then that question will be so hard to answer. I hope calling you a bigot piece of shit white guy offends you, and you write me an angry email or comment.
I won’t ok the comments because I don’t want anyone to be offended.