On Politics and Having an Opinion

I recently had the interesting experience of watching someone's political awakening. Different people experience it at different parts of their lives, and some never experience it at all. It made me think about why I believe what I believe and the process that took me here. It also made me think about how I've grown from when I first started thinking about politics.

Our society, and politics in particular, is a great conversation. I think everyone should join this conversation. If we want our government to represent the people, then all of the people need to understand and contribute to it. I don't always agree with everyone in the conversation, but I value their voices. The voices of opposition make me reconsider my own views; they force me to justify my positions and sometimes to change my mind.

Often, it's better not to speak. It's better to listen and read and absorb. Stay out of the fray, and let it wash over you. Listen to the people you agree with, and decide whether that's really an argument you want to associate yourself with. Listen to the people you disagree with, and think about the issue from their perspective. Above all else, challenge yourself to remain objective until you know you understand the issue and can form a well-informed opinion on it. If you speak more than you listen, what do you learn?

When you do speak, not everyone is going to agree with you. Be prepared to back up your views with arguments based on facts. To do so properly requires time and preparation. Some people will listen to rational arguments; some people won't. The second group will only frustrate you, and you probably shouldn't engage them. I try not to enter a political debate unless I am very, very sure of my facts, and I try to stay as neutral as I reasonably can. Most things aren't worth going to war over. Once you get into a fight like that, it's easy to lose your perspective. Winning and defending yourself become more important than the issue itself.

The sad thing about our political conversation is that it easily becomes a cacophony of voices. Everyone is so intent on speaking their mind that they stop listening. Everyone is so convinced they are right that they don't consider the other sides of the issue. Our society today faces many challenges. Some of these challenges are economic, like healthcare, student loans, and the recession. Some of these challenges are moral and societal, like abortion law and gay marriage. Still more challenges concern our safety and security. These challenges are complicated. Some of them involve the careful manipulation of massive, partially-coupled systems that we can't fully model. Some of them involve reconciling the very real views of groups that oppose each others' way of life. These are complicated problems, and they have no simple solutions. I promise you that regardless of what your idea is, someone has had it before. There is probably a reason it hasn't been implemented. In some cases, the reason is inertia, fear, or lack of will. In more cases than not, the reason is because there is a fundamental flaw in the idea. Beware of simple solutions, because they rarely hold up to scrutiny. Of course, that doesn't mean you should throw up your hands. Keep looking for answers. If we give up, we consign ourselves to living as we do now forever, and not only is that unsustainable, it's a denial of our awesome potential as a civilization.

Here's the bottom line. I've been interested in politics since a relatively early age. I'm not politically active in the sense of canvassing for a candidate, but I've been aware of current events for as long as I can remember. I've had a lot of different political views over the years, and no, I don't blindly parrot my parents, although we agree on many things. When you first start looking at politics, it's easy to get distracted by shiny things. For eleven year-old me, it was democratic communism. For many college-aged political neophytes, it's Randian libertarianism. Ideas like that are appealing because of their simplicity, and it makes them look elegant. They are a trap for people looking for simple answers. Once you start thinking harder and listening more than you speak, you move past the political junk food. The scary thing is that the world isn't black and white. Nothing is simple. The answers to our problems are subtle and nuanced. Many of the solutions come at high costs, costs we might not want to pay. I've looked at enough issues from enough sides that I've got a decent idea of what I believe and a healthy knowledge that I don't know the answers. I'll keep looking at issues from different angles, and my beliefs will keep evolving. In the past, I've completely reversed my views on things. More often than not, I've withdrawn from issues entirely. There's no shame in changing your mind, no shame in admitting you're wrong, despite what the press would have us believe. That said, you can't take anything back. You own your words, and unless you've thought very carefully about your beliefs, maybe you should hold back a bit longer.

Breaking the Silence: Gay Marriage

I decided on Breaking the Silence for the title of this post for two reasons. The first is that I haven't posted here in months. There are a few reasons for that. The first reason is that I'm a busy guy, and I don't have time to write. "But wait!" you say. "You have time for robots and video games and taking showers! Sure you mean that you choose not to spend your time writing!" This brings me to my second reason. The thought of actually sitting down to write inspires in me a visceral horror that defies all logic. Every day or two, I have an idea in my head that I would like to write about in this blog. It might be an observation about life, or politics, or friendship. So for about thirty seconds, I think "Gee, I should write a blog post about that," and then the idea of actually expanding my one-sentence thought into a piece of prose is so unsettling that I give up on the idea. Sometimes I tweet the one-sentence thought, which makes me feel better.

Thing Number One

On to the topic at hand, last week two things happened with regard to gay marriage in this country. I'll start with the thing that happened last Tuesday. North Carolina, a state best known for being part of the South, but still putting North in their name, had a plebiscite to determine whether or not to amend their constitution to specifically ban gay marriage. It's worth noting that gay marriage was already statutorily illegal in North Carolina. The amendment is just to make sure. To make a long story short, the amendment passed by a 61% to 39% margin.

The world is changing. Ten years ago, gay marriage was a fringe issue. now, it's it a Big Deal (TM). This is something that a lot of people feel strongly about, on both sides of the ideological fence.

There are of course the people who are affected immediately by legalization of gay marriage. Gay, lesbian, and bisexual Americans can currently marry same-sex partners in six states, and those marriages are only recognized in nine states. If you don't live in one of those states and you love someone with the same bits as you, you can't get married. If you oppose same-sex marriage, stop and think for a moment about what that means. From a purely pragmatic standpoint, that means you are deprived of the tax and employment benefits that come with marriage. Sure, you could enter a sham marriage with someone of the opposite sex, but if you value the sanctity of marriage at all, you wouldn't do that. From an emotional perspective, the consequences are heart-wrenching. Marriage is more than a piece of paper. Marriage is an affirmation of love and commitment. Marriage is a public statement and a legal promise to care for someone and be cared for in return. Marriage gives you the right to push past the red tape to a sick loved one in the hospital; it gives you the security of someone to look after your affairs if you're sick or dying. Right now, there is a whole class of people in this country who want nothing more than to legitimize and formalize their commitment to each other by getting married, and they can't.

There are also a lot of people who support same-sex marriage even though they have no stake in it. I consider myself one of them. For some, this is a crusade. For reasons personal or ideological, the fight for marriage equality is something they take personally. For others, gay marriage is just logical. Why restrict someone else's rights if it doesn't hurt you? What will gay marriage harm? If two people love each other, why stop them from getting married? I haven't heard satisfactory answers to those questions. I think that to oppose gay marriage is, ultimately, to deny the legitimacy of homosexuality. Gay people are a reality, and they're not just going to go away. They're part of our society, and they deserve the right to marry.

The fact remains that gay marriage is scary or wrong to a large part of the population, and that's why this happened. One reason is religion, but I think that might be overstated. I think blaming religion oversimplifies the issue. Most people don't decide things are right or wrong just because The Bible says so. The Bible says a lot of things; people in modern America pick and choose which ones they can and should apply to their modern lives and modern society. So why do people oppose gay marriage? How can otherwise kind people be so bigoted and narrow-minded? I believe that by and large, most people are fundamentally good. They try to do right by their own worldview. If someone espouses or does something that I disagree with, it's not because they're a bad person, it's because either they see things differently or haven't given the issue a lot of conscious thought. It's easy to condemn people as evil or stupid or wrong, but you'll never win an argument that way. If you want to convince someone that you're right, you can't dismiss them. You have to get inside their head, and see what makes them believe what they believe.

Why People Oppose Gay Marriage: Some Theories

I mentioned above that same-sex marriage as a political and legal issue is relatively young. A lot of people haven't had a lot of time to digest it. When you begin with a closed mind, and most people do, it takes a long time to appreciate an issue and come up with a proper response. Everyone begins with a knee-jerk response that is a function of their principles, their environment, and their experience. A lot of people in this country don't personally know any gay people, or the ones they do are so closeted that they have no idea. For the majority of the history of marriage, it has been defined as the union of a man and a woman, primarily for procreative and economic purposes. In that context, the knee-jerk reaction to same-sex marriage is dismissal. Why would two men want to get married? A lot of people don't move past that knee-jerk. They aren't being hateful or bigoted, at least not intentionally. Many people who oppose same-sex marriage bear no particular ill-will toward same-sex couples, they just don't see how it's possible for two people of the same sex to marry. It doesn't fit into their worldview.

Of course, religion does compound the issue*. The knee-jerk reaction doesn't hold sway forever without something to affirm it. The dangerous part is that people like to be proven right. It's so much easier to stick to your guns, and it's even easier when an authority figure tells you that you were right all along. So when someone from your church or your community says that homosexuality is unnatural and unsightly in the eyes of God, it affirms your knee-jerk reaction that gay marriage is wrong. I think for most people, this is the role that religion and The Church plays in this debate. Contrary to what some atheists seem to think, religious people aren't sheep. All human beings are rational, intelligent creatures capable of making their own choices. What they choose to believe about the world, morality, and the supernatural comes from analyzing their experiences and consulting people they trust. Our different conclusions about these things are a result of having different influences and different temperaments. My point is that religious people haven't been brainwashed. They just see things differently, and that leads them to reach different conclusions about what's normal, what's right, and what's wrong. Their worldview may be unfortunate and backwards, and it may be incompatible with how some of us want the world to be, but that doesn't make it any less real.

Moving Forward

If we want to win these people over, we have to do it from within their own worldview. We have to frame the issue in terms they understand and convince them without condemning them. It's easy to write these people off, but there are a lot of them, and we live in a democracy. The reality of a democracy is that everyone gets a say. In North Carolina, the majority of voters oppose same-sex marriage. According to our principles of governance, that means that same-sex marriage should be illegal in North Carolina. That's the price we pay for representative government--it saves us from dictatorship and monarchy, but leaves us at the mercy of the majority. That means that if we want to get something, we need to convince people that it's right. This is hard, and it requires we carefully examine whether our own beliefs are even fundamentally correct. If we can come up with reasons for our arguments that aren't predicated on our own worldview, then we're more likely to convince people who don't share that worldview.

However, we have a voice. We can stand together and we can vote. We can choose to elect candidates who support gay marriage. We can go to the polls and vote in the plebiscites. We can deny our patronage to companies that have made opposition to gay marriage part of their corporate philosophy (after all, boycott is the most capitalist form of protest). If nothing else, we can have the courage to stand up and say that this is what we believe. We believe that marriage is a civil institution, regardless of its status as a religious institution. We believe that as a civil institution, marriage is the right of any couple in a committed relationship. We believe that gay people and gay couples are just as legitimate as straight couples. We believe they can and should be married. We believe we're right, and we believe that history will remember us as progressive.

The tide is starting to turn. The President finally came out in support of gay marriage. It's an empty gesture, and it looks like they had to drag it out of him, but at least he did it. I don't know how much this will change things (if at all), but at least he's on the record. After all of the waffling and political expediency I've come to expect from the White House, that's kind of refreshing.

I originally wrote this post on May 13, 2012. It was a rush job and was even more of a mess than it is now. At the time, I decided to post it without editing or even proofreading. On July 28, 2012, with gay marriage and gay rights back in the news, I decided to edit this post. I don't retract any of the things I originally said, but many things were edited for clarity or typos. I also added some things. To be clear, I'm still not particularly happy with this post, but I think it's a bit more lucid now.

* I should point out that not all religions or religious people oppose same-sex marriage.

A Nifty Little Script

Here's a nifty little script I wrote for a specific application, but you may find it useful as well.

We use Git for version control. If you're a programmer and you're not familiar with Git, you should check it out. Pro Git is a good resource. Our setup is what I would call a hybrid between centralized (SVN-style) and decentralized version control. Every developer has their own repository on their user account, but we all push and pull to a central repository. It's very similar to the GitHub model of using Git for collaboration. Every developer has their own live version of the site, which makes it a lot easier for everyone to develop and test their own code. There's also a test version of the site, which needs to be updated with the current code. I could do that with git hooks, but I've been using this script running in a daily cron job. It's sort of our equivalent of a nightly build. The script fetches the changes from the central (origin) repository, merges them into the test site, and emails me the list of commit messages, which I then use to inform our data entry/test personnel what the changes were.

#!/bin/sh
cd /home/alpha/www
git fetch origin
if [ -n "$(git log HEAD..origin)" ]
then
 git log HEAD..origin | mail -s "Git Merge to Alpha on $(date)" ME@EMAIL.COM
fi
git merge origin
exit

I should note that

git fetch origin
git merge origin

is exactly equivalent to git pull origin. A pull is just a fetch followed by a merge. I split the two so I could read the log and email it to myself. Some people prefer to split the two so they can check what's being fetched before they merge it.

In Which I Return

Greetings Internets!

You may recall that I used to blog here. I managed to not write anything for the entirety of last semester, and continued that winning streak through winter break. Alas, winter break is now over, and I thought it was about time I wrote something here.

Of course, in order to write something here, I'd have to have something to talk about. I'm not going to do another politics entry, because I think the last three were. Instead, I'm going to write a boring entry about my boring life. Maybe if I stick to such mundane topics as what I ate for lunch I'll be able to update this more than biannually.

Since my last entry back in August, I've managed to build a desktop computer, take several classes, and (finally) get a project for my masters. My masters thesis is going to be in the field of robotics, exploring uses for mobile industrial arms. I will be mounting an ABB IRB-120 industrial robotic arm to an electric wheelchair drivetrain, then working to create a hardware and software framework for that robot. I haven't yet defined the scope of my work on the project, but eventually someone (probably not me, but a successor) will use it to experiment with recognizing and retrieving boxes in a warehouse or inventory setting. I'm just excited that I get to play with a giant FIRST robot.

Speaking of FIRST, yet another season has started -- I started feeling old when I realized that this is my eighth. This year's challenge is essentially a modified version of basketball. Rather than try to explain it, I'll just direct you to go watch this:

I'm already tired of writing, so I'm going to wrap this up.