While many of us like the idea of unfiltered truth, in this life, that doesn’t exist. In the first place, we don’t experience the world directly as individuals—we interpret sensory information provided to the brain. The quality of that sensory information, quantity, and interpretation quality all create variances in perception from reality. We also cannot separate ourselves from our past, which leads us to add color to our evaluation of the past of other people, places, and times.
Our responsibility is to make the best use of the information available to come up with an understanding that works for us. To assist readers in that as it pertains to this blog, I’ll give you a little bit of my background.
First, it’s hard to be Whiter than I am. I can’t even imagine anyone Whiter than I am. With one know exception and only a few possible unknown exceptions, all of my ancestors were in the land now belonging to the United States before the Revolutionary War. And all of them were, at the time of their immigration, in social positions allowing for advancement—though a few started as indentured servants.
Second, I’m male. In the sense of cultural privilege for heterosexual males in the United States, I fit pretty squarely in the most privileged set. Though now middle-aged, overweight, and bald, I had good hair, blue eyes, broad shoulders, and I stand six-feet tall. I also did the “male” things of tradition—sports, military, etc. With some deviations that didn’t seem to hurt anything as far as privilege goes (I collected Smurfs in my teens and twenties—great story for another time), and I had the privilege of being a varsity cheerleader on a competitive team.
Bottom line from the first two points is I very clearly have benefitted from White, male privilege and still do.
Also, there is associated with that a degree of racism and sexism. The more I learn, experience, and age, the less I feel I understand about my racism and sexism so you’ll just have to decide for yourself how much that influences my writing.
A couple of other factors in my biography are critical to evaluating what I share.
The most important of those is I am a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon), and I value the faith taught by that Church. I would not categorize myself as more than fair—at best—at living up to the standards I believe in. However, those beliefs color everything in how I see life and evaluate knowledge. Faith is an important way of knowing for me. Not blind faith in the words of others, but personal faith based on answers I feel I receive to my personal prayers. I own my actions—though I’d love it if someday Jesus forgave me a bunch of stuff because of circumstances. I can’t count on that, so I own my actions whether the situation I’m in is fair or not.
That being said, that sort of strict personal accountability is, in my mind, personal. I expect others to hold themselves to a personal accountability, but it is not my job to hold them accountable. Each person must follow the dictates of their conscience. However, I am not an individualist—not even close to the standard that seems to be the norm in U.S. and Western society today. I strongly believe in social standards including creating favorable conditions to those standards through even legal action and enforcement where appropriate. Much of what I write will probably cover that in more detail because the balance between the individual and society is crucial to the social concerns I intend to address.
The next critical piece to understand is I am both ex-military and ex-law enforcement. I am proud of both of those sets of experiences, and they deeply influence my thinking. That does not mean I always choose the route you might expect from someone with that kind of experience, but it certainly plays a factor to be an insider. In some ways, I think it allows me to be more critical, or, at least, cautious, when people clamor for strong law enforcement or military action. I am a combat veteran.
That’s probably enough to get started with. I hope this bit of background info on me will let you better evaluate what I write. I hope what I write will assist you in understanding issues deeper than what typical social media—or even mainstream media—encourages. I also want to be clear it is not my goal to convince people of one way or another. Often, my own position on an issue will be clear, but I am not trying to convert people. I am presenting an issue the way I see it, hopefully with some valid evidence and connecting arguments, and inviting you to add my discussion to your other research as you ponder your own answers.
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