Tragedy

Lonely worlds sometimes get lonelier.

Throughout my writings, I have occasionally mentioned someone named Jeff. I have described him as a fellow who lives with my parents and who has battled with addiction problems (saying that he’s bounced from addiction to addiction like a ping-pong ball in a dryer wouldn’t be too far off the mark).

Well, recently he’d been doing better. He’d been clean of his alcohol addiction for almost two years, and had only occasional times (only one or two in the past year) where he’d taken too much of his prescription medication. We hadn’t become friends, but we’d certainly become more cordial to each other. Heck, I even invited him over to my home one evening when the power had gone out at my parents' house.

Today, my parents found Jeff dead in his bed. He likely died sometime early this morning.
We aren’t sure yet what carried him off into the night, but this is a difficult time for my father and mother especially.

He had plans for his Christmas and was looking into getting a job that he could do to accommodate his disabilities.

Things rarely ever go as planned.

Adults also say "I'm sorry" when they are wrong...

I have thought quite a bit recently about the differences between being children and being adults.

I don’t think that any of us truly ever becomes fully ‘grown-up,’ and everyone retains some elements of childishness throughout their entire lives. That said, being an adult means taking on adult relationships, modes of thought, and attitudes towards others. Becoming an adult means leaving one’s childishness behind and aspiring toward something better than we once were.

Part of being an adult is recognizing that other people are rarely (if ever) ‘good’ or ‘bad.’ Even people who do things we would call evil did them for reasons that they believed were truly righteous. Even Hitler believed he was bringing about a better world.

As adults, when we feel that someone else is wrong, it is easy to fall into the childish trap of demonizing the other person and thinking that they are somehow evil or malignant. The hard path is the path of being an adult, and that path requires that we confront the other individual, tell them politely and calmly what it was that they did that you found wrong, and let them explain their side of the story.

More and more, I am concerned at the future of a society that is so quick to judgment that it refuses to even listen to the other side of the story and judge that version of events on the merits of the version.

A good example of this is our national epistemological crisis. The prevalence of claims for which no rational explanation is offered would be laughable except for the fact that so many people believe them. Finding the truth of a situation requires that people acknowledge that evidence and explanation are required to make something true. I find it inconceivable that people planning on entering a career in our national truth-finding enterprise for interpersonal conflicts (the legal system) sometimes find themselves making exceptions to the norms and premises which underlie the very system they plan on working for. And yet, I am confronted with people who believe in things like leprechauns, demons, magic crystals, and aura-cleansing.

When people jump to a conclusion without weighing the evidence, there is little to restrain them to a set of conclusions even remotely close to the actual one. Offhand observations about emotional states somehow are transformed into personal attacks. Discussions about the wrongness of governmental policies become grounds for accusations of anti-Semitism.

When will people learn that evidence must be the basis for conclusions about reality? It isn’t just a coincidence that non-evidence based conclusions held sway over humanity for all of recorded history until the Enlightenment when a few rationalists got the idea that reaching conclusions without evidentiary warrant hadn’t progressed humankind very far. In the past 300 years, evidence-based thought has progressed humankind at a rate far exceeding all of human history prior to the Enlightenment.

Even I have been guilty of reverting to my childishness and holding on to reactionary perceptions. Sometimes it may be difficult to avoid demonizing people for their perceived faults, but as adults it falls upon us to talk to the person and see whether our perceptions of them have been flawed. However, as adults, it is incumbent upon us to put aside the trivialities of childhood and treat other people as adults.