When I was a kid - a teenager, I had a radio-cassette player that I loved. It gave me music, which was terrific, and, on those nights when I couldn’t sleep, I had AM, FM, and two short wave radio bands, and, on those short wave bands I could listen to people from other places in the world that I couldn’t hear during daylight hours.
It was fascinating - even when they weren’t speaking in English and I had only tone of language to guess at what they were saying.
Just a few years later, when I was at Uni, I would occasionally head in from the suburb the Uni was in to the (small city) CBD, and do what I termed “people watching”: looking at complete strangers, and making up a different life story for each of them - and a rule I gave myself was that each story had to be different.
Those experiences were in the 1970s; in the 1980s I started working as a trance medium, and, as I’ve written elsewhere (e.g., here and here), that also gave me a fresh set of insights into the variety of human experience.
For a couple of decades from the mid-90s, I had a few international trips for work, and that led to a whole new set of experiences and what I started to recognise as connections and potential connections.
In Việt Nam the woman who cleaned my hotel room became a friend, and I was invited to her home for a meal (during which I entertained the neighbourhood’s kids by making paper planes), we corresponded for a while after I left ... and she had wanted me to take her daughter back to Australia for an education, which was an utter impossibility for many reasons - not least of which was her daughter’s desire to be with her parents.
In China, apart from staying in contact with another translator for a while (until she had go back to her home village to look after her father after a major medical procedure), I worked with people who liked to socialise over a game of cards and a few drinks - which didn’t appeal to me, but there were people I knew in Australia who would have got on well with them ... if they had not been racist - as I told those people, with some effect.
Mongolia had the Gobi desert, which is a different theme, but also continued the theme of humans being “normal” (exemplified by helping a mother with her pram down a set of stairs) but all uniquely varied ... and a theme I have not mentioned yet of suffering from deprivation and/or circumstance.
In Mongolia it was poverty (although not for everyone), including the struggle for those in gers on the outskirts of Ulaanbaatar to stay warm enough to live through winter leading to horrendous air pollution as a result of things like burning shredded tyres, spring floods, and the struggle to develop the economy enough to give the people of Mongolia better.
In China, it was unacknowledged class differences (a blindness shared by Australians), the quest for work for money to live (as we were being driven to the project site in the early morning, we would see dozens of small fires under trucks to heat the oil enough to be able to start the truck, and dozens of people on corners with signs ) in a nation largely without social security, and, in one city, providing a river water treatment plant to overcome the problems of a groundwater supply that had too much fluoride in it, causing bone and the other severe problems.
Việt Nam had poverty also, and, two decades after it had ended, the legacy of the Việt Nam War - including legless veterans begging on the streets for money to survive, damaged buildings that hadn’t been demolished because of unexploded bombs, but a proud legacy of resistance and cleverness, including the world’s first University, where graduates’ names were carved on to stone turtles (that claim about the world’s first Uni is disputed, but I will continue to be a polite guest, three decades later, and agree with my hosts) and active measures to improve their economy - which China and Mongolia also had underway. (The engineers in China had better laptops than us, an excellent grasp of theory, and only needed a little more practical experience - which was a key part of our role - to flourish as engineers ... so I have never been surprised by their technical accomplishments over the last three decades or so.)
My work trip to Thailand had less direct human connection with the Thai people, but that was largely as I had an enthusiastic ex-pat Australian who wanted to learn, and he wound up being unintentionally a barrier to direct contact - but I was struck by aspects such as discussions on the need for politeness in their newspapers, a view I know many Australians would agree with. (They also had a fantastic underground - and it should be noted that in many of these places I felt safer out on the streets at night than at home.)
None of this was without problems for me. I am neurodivergent, and at times I would get overwhelmed and retreat to my hotel room if I could, but the ADHD part of my AuDHD enjoyed the variety of experiences, and the autism had engaging work to focus on ... but I would wind up exhausted, partly from extreme workload, partly from the change of earth energies and climate, diet, etc. After my first trip, I accumulated around 15 hours sleep on the journeys back to Australia, and then went home and slept for another 15 hours.
The increasingly invasive air travel security measures also reached a point where they became traumatic, and I declined to travel (including within Australia).
But the aspect I want to focus on here is that all these individuals had, much as for the people I invented stories for while people watching near Uni in the 70s, unique life stories; their cultures all had differences - often fascinating, but significant differences all the same.
And yet all those people and cultures were recognisably human, and shared a recognisable humanness.
In some cases, I would consider the stereotypical eccentric uncle more “different” than what I observed.
A part of that humanness was the desire for a stable security (food, water, shelter, health care, education to give children a better future than parents, etc) as a foundation for life - something I often think about when I hear amathiacs grumble about the alleged cost of social security (have they forgotten, or did they never know, of the problem of people starving to death on the streets of our cities a mere century or so ago, and what that cost society - especially in terms of lost human potential?).
Another key part was the desire for human connection.
To some extent, in the pre-Internet age books could provide that (very effectively, for some of us - based on comparing my travel experiences with my reading experiences), but travel was also a commonly advocated means to broaden one’s mental horizons, albeit a means that, through human history, was often unaffordable for many, and thus uncommon ... until shared by means of books and other forms of telling stories.
For all its flaws (and there are many - which, in itself, is an indication of humanness, but in this case, one that should be overcome - much as done with the lack of adequate hygiene that developed after agriculture led to cities), social media has the potential to be this age’s books-and-travel-to-broaden-one’s-mind mechanism, as I have recently been reminded.
For the last decade and a bit of my working life, health problems and a nightmare working situation led me to be withdrawn (it should also be noted I am by nature not sociable, and never will be), but even in the midst of that, I enjoyed contact via the initial version of Twitter, and then Mastodon. In the last few years, for obvious and perhaps less obvious reasons, both of those became untenable (Discord provides some connection, but some experiences there drove me mostly off that platform - but left me with one excellent friendship) ... and recently I compromised my ethics enough to try a platform I won’t name, but they decided I was a bot after around a day and a half ... so last night I tried Bluesky ... And I am enjoying that, perhaps because of its similarity to the early version of Twitter, and the connections that have been made, including with one man in the USA who is a living, breathing, flesh-and-blood example of the harm being done there by that nation’s current regime, as well as an example of courage and resistance, and the humanness which we all share, and which is ultimately the reason why, as the song puts it, tyrants always fall.
Possible flaws
Where I can, I will try to highlight possible flaws / issues you should consider:
- there may be flawed logical arguments in the above: to find out more about such flaws and thinking generally, I recommend Brendan Myers’ free online course “Clear and Present Thinking”;
- I could be wrong - so keep your thinking caps on, and make up your own minds for yourself.
If you appreciated this post, please consider promoting it - there are some links below, and there’s also other options.
Note that I am cutting back on aspects of my posts - see here.
(Gnwmythr is pronounced new-MYTH-ear)
Remember: we generally need to be more human being rather than human doing, to mind our Mӕgan, and to acknowledge that all misgendering is an act of active transphobia/transmisia that puts trans+ lives at risk & accept that all insistence on the use of “trans” as a descriptor comes with commensurate use of “cis” as a descriptor to prevent “othering” (just as binary gendered [men’s and women’s] sporting teams are either both given the gender descriptor, or neither).#PsychicABetterWorld and may all that I do be of value and actively BPM used for and by the nonphysical BPM
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