Live and Let Live

I will fully admit to getting bent out of shape about things over which I have little or no control. I do it all the time. It is, in my opinion, one of my major flaws, one of the main things that keeps me from being content in life, and it is one of my major focal points on the road of spiritual development. It is a hard habit to kick. For instance, I left my apartment today to go meet a professor at his office, and I immediately became nearly enraged by various impediments. For instance, the city does not monitor street parking very well, and there are various areas where cars are allowed to park all along both sides of relatively narrow streets. You can imagine how much this problem obscures visibility at crossroads not to mention causing near collisions daily with cars pulling in and out of parking spots and driveways as well as near collisions with pedestrians and cyclists. Impediment number one. Furthermore, Denton is full of hippie cyclists who think they own the road despite their unwillingness to cycle faster than 5 miles per hour in front of a line of vehicles in a 30 mph zone. Impediment number 2. Denton also seems to be full of pedestrian students who like to stand directly in parking spaces that vehicles are clearly attempting to back into. Impediment number 3. So on. So forth. I'd like to say that it is just the oblivion of youth, but frankly I've witnessed people living in such oblivion straight into their graves.

I am not proud of such frustrations. Not the impediments themselves. Those are not my problem (though I wish I were better at recognizing this fact in the moment). It is the getting frustrated of which I am not proud. However, generally the things that frustrate me despite my inability to control or change the circumstances, are things that directly affect me. This is why I call them "impediments." Many of them literally impede my movement - my ability to get where I'm going swiftly and efficiently. If they do not literally impede motion, they at least figuratively do so.

What I have a difficult time understanding is why people work themselves into piping, red pretzels over things that have absolutely no affect on them whatsoever. I am speaking mainly of the conservatives that have frustrated me (because they, for no clear reason, act as direct impediments by berating and intentionally making life more difficult for me or those I care about), but I'm sure liberals and everyone in between are guilty as well. For instance, I had a student submit a blog entry today essentially bitching at me because of the placement of my tattoos. He claimed that people with visible tattoos are "not smart" about such decisions and that they should not make such unwise decisions because it could ruin future job prospects. My question is, what on earth do my tattoos and my job prospects have to do with this kid? He doesn't know me. He doesn't care about me. His life has absolutely nothing to do with mine outside of the classroom. He's not concerned about my job prospects (his concerns didn't even apply to academia but to the business world where everyone wears dress shirts and suits anyway). His blog entry was a candy-coated way of saying that he doesn't like my tattoos and that he thinks they're inappropriate and that I shouldn't have them. Well, good for him. I still don't see what that has to do with me or what my body looks like has to do with him. That's like saying "I'm offended by the shape of your eyebrows and I don't think they should be shaped like that anymore." Okay. So stop looking at my eyebrows (tattoos) and mind your own business!

The same goes for the homophobe who thinks that an adult individual having sex with another adult individual in the privacy of their own bedroom on the other side of town (or state, or country, or world) has something directly to do with said homophobe. Homophobes have claimed that gay marriage defiles the "sanctity of marriage" in general. But what does one person's marriage have to do with a complete stranger's marriage? Each relationship, each marriage, is wholly unique and autonomous. Yes, there are certain conventions that many people follow, but just as no two individuals are alike, neither are relationships between individuals. The "institution" of marriage is a construct. What is fascinating is that in the recent Republican platform, Republicans actually had the nerve to rhetorically depict gay marriage and the acknowledgment of homosexuality as a valid lifestyle as an "assault" on heterosexuality and heterosexual marriage.

To such unfortunate, delusional souls, I will say this: Live and let live. The people and lifestyles you are ideologically (and sometimes legislatively) attacking HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH YOU. They are not impeding your lives in any way. They are not hurting you. They are not affecting you whatsoever. If you feel that you are being affected, that is your choice and that is your problem. Please stop making it everyone else's.