Wednesday, September 29, 2010

The Smug Satisfaction Of The Self-Righteous



First a short, not too severe drought, and now unending rain for a week with floods galore. One thing is sure about the weather. Eventually it will change. As long as there are equinoxes and solstices it has no choice. Is the term "weather" a noun?

It really surprises me sometime that my personal conclusion that humans can only accuse other people of being what they think they would be like if they behaved like they interpret the other human to be acting. This woman on a discussion list I'm fixing to get kicked off of, who called her own self a "fat lady" (I have no idea if she sings), accused this guy of being "preachy" because he likes to explore at length as he writes. I kinda knew that it wouldn't be long before she started preaching to him and filling him up with unsolicited advice she herself never follows one day later.

I have an old friend who unmitigatedly advises people to follow the same diet that forces him to take purple pills to deal with the results of his own inflated opinion of the diet. Is he aware that he's doing this misdeed to the people he wants to respect his experience and wisdom. Not a bit of it. Nada. Zip shit. He just goes on advising people to act like he thinks he does, and attending funerals with the smug satisfaction of the self-righteous.

It's easy enough to make judgment of other people's opinions, and accuse them of being like I would be if I did that, but going through the motions of taking my own advice is hard work. The problem is that its difficult for me to monitor what I'm saying or writing while I'm "seeing" the content of what I say or write in the real time of when I'm composing it.

Ad libbing is a lot easier to do when I don't pay much attention to what I'm actually saying or writing. It's pretty well understood by me that I generally write to capture drifting thoughts with words for the specific purpose of being less clumsy in speech when I talk the talk. It's a hit or miss preoccupation. A crap shoot. Occasionally I'm right on when I utter my inane tossed word salad, and other times I'm not even in the ball park.

It was only when I figured out what the psychological concept of projection was that I was able to realize and predict other people's behavior by what they proclaimed about... anything. Any other person, animal of inanimate object will do for the purpose of accusing other humans of being like the accusers opine themselves to be like.

I don't know why that had to happen first. The process that determined that I would realize other people were betraying what they didn't know unconsciously about themselves by what they accused other people of being like. I do know it didn't take that much longer to figure out I was doing what I accused them of. Thereby betraying my own unconscious view of the sensory dimension.

To a large degree I've made myself aware that I'm just as vulnerable to other people's observations as they are to mine. It's not an easy thing to do. The hard part is realizing what I'm doing when I do it. If I can or do become aware I'm betraying myself with my judgments of the other, while I'm doing it or soon, real soon, after, then I can stop doing that, for a while, but soon enow I find myself doing it again. It can be very discouraging.

Recently I've become aware of a doctor with unusual ideas about what makes people sick, including rheumatoid arthritis, and he claims it's the excretions of bacteria in our gut lining that does it. A cure is effected by doing what it takes to kill the harmful ones and stimulate the growth of the good bacteria. He's a doctor, so the cure he recommends for RA people is a prescription drug. My doctors don't seem like they'd give me a prescription for a drug that might cure me. I'll ask anyway. Whatta they gonna do? Kill me faster than usual?

I was at the over-the-counter drugs shelves at the drug store and looking for a supplement of Acetyl L-Carnitine and Alpha lipoic acid mixed together because I am running out of what I have. I wasn't having any luck finding what I wanted among the numerous supplements the drug stores love to sell.

Maybe it was my taking so long that caused the big (I mean real big) middle-aged black man, sitting on the benches that the prescription fillers provide when their customers have to wait a while, good-naturedly asked me if I'd found what I was looking for. I just had found it, and showed it to him as a matter of friendliness and courtesy.

He asked me what I was taking this hard-to-pronounce supplement for? I told him it was for rheumatoid arthritis, and he sighed. "You don't need that", he said, "what you need is a teaspoon of wild honey and a tablespoon of apple cider vinegar, and that will take care of your arthritis."

I repeated what he said to make sure I got it right, but I just said "vinegar" and honey. He leaned forward to correct me, and said, "No, not just vinegar, it's gotta be apple vinegar!" I thanked him and left to pick up the ingredients. He reminded me of Esther, one of the black women who helped my mother with the cooking and cleaning house. Anybody who reminds me of her gets my instant trust.

The concoction doesn't taste bad at all. The honey keeps it from tasting too much like medicine. What I'm wondering since I read about the excrement from gut bacteria is whether apple cider vinegar kills those bacteria in my gut. I know they're in there. Why else would I have RA? Time will tell if my impulse is once again correct. '-)