It’s tough, being new to the Right. I have a lot of Left habits that need to go. I was in the process of getting rid of many of them anyhow, because they no longer served me, but it’s becoming important.
The Left fights everything with emotion. Don’t agree with a legal standing? Cry at it. Have a problem with a cop or a sheriff? Scream and flail your arms. Care to protest oil drilling, farming methods you disagree with, or a politician’s third wife? Lay on the road and have a tantrum. They revel in their emotions, and I struggle with it. A lot of why I moved “right of left” was because of this behavior.
The Right tends to make claims that they’re entirely fact driven. It’s not true. A good portion of the Right seems to want to base their facts on a book written by human beings (however inspired) over a thousand years, translated (badly) many times in the interim, and tend to cherry pick the parts they want to use. While I consider the Bible to be an inspirational writing, likely inspired by the Divine, I have enough theological training to know that it wasn’t written by God (or Goddess, or whatever). It’s a great book to use as a moral compass. It has a great outline of moral and ethical laws that apply to a person individually, and specifically to the Jewish (and later the Christian) people. But it isn’t fact. It *contains* facts in some places, but it is not, itself, fact.
That said, the Right does a much better job of putting together coherent factual arguments. They are much less likely to let emotions interfere with their stance. I don’t expect to see someone on the Right break down in cringe-worthy tears because they’re being questioned about something.
I struggle with emotions. I am an emotional person. I grew up in a household where I was forced to sublimate any emotions I had. As a child who was being verbally and emotionally abused, I quickly learned to stifle any emotional response. When I left the house of horrors I grew up in, I decided I would never squelch my emotions again, and so I set myself up to emotionally vomit on everyone around me. While it was important that I learn to emote in a healthy fashion, that was NOT the right way to go about it.
So when I’m talking with someone on the Right about things, and I know that I have a good argument, I sometimes lose track of the words I need. The emotions I feel are overwhelming, and I react rather than act. I have the ability to create logical arguments, but if I care about the outcome, my emotions tend to get in the way. This is an ongoing personal issue that I’ve been working on for years.
One of the problems I run into when attempting to engage people on the Left is that my emotions actually hamper conversation. Either they think I’m on the Left as well (which turns into a shit show when they figure out I’m not “on their side”), or they simply don’t understand what I’m saying. I can use the same argument techniques on Leftists that they use on the Right, and they have no idea what to do with it.
There’s an ongoing conversation right now among my Left friends that has to do with RFK and some of the statements made about medications being investigated. Of course they believe that refusing hormones and surgery to minors is “denying medical care,” but I don’t want to get into that. When it comes to anti-depressants, anti-anxiety meds, pain meds, and so on, they just want to keep on the way we’re currently going. They’re horrified that RFK is going to have studies done on various medications and food additives.
They have already decided that RFK is going to ban things, so if it turns out something is horribly bad for us and RFK bans it, they see it as a dire consequence of the Fascist Right. They cannot conceive of a possibility that there are medications out there being over-prescribed, wrongly prescribed, or abused. To them, it’s obvious if anyone is accused of misusing medications, “they” (the mysterious group of deep state operatives, I guess?) are going to take those medications away from everyone. I don’t follow the logic.
As a part of the conversation I mention above, I explained my experience with albuterol. When I was in my late teens, I was diagnosed as having asthma. I was given a script for an inhaler, and sent on my merry way. I used that inhaler several times a week for about 20 years. Fast forward to a few years ago, I ran out of refills on my script. I couldn’t get in to see the doc, and I had to go without. I panicked. I went into absolute meltdown. That was the emotional addiction response.
The physical response was awful. I had about 72 hours of fever and chills, shakes, dizziness, shortness of breath (that was unrelated to being able to breath), and a number of other symptoms of detoxification. I now know that I was addicted to albuterol. Yet if you talk to a doctor, they’ll tell you flat out, it’s not addictive, and you can’t get dependent upon it. I know that’s not true. You don’t get shakes and fevers and chills from a psychological addiction that has no physical component.
If someone had checked on me in the intervening years, I could have avoided becoming addicted to albuterol, and I could have avoided having to detox myself. If proper studies were done on albuterol, there might have been a warning that it had a possibility of becoming an addiction. Not only was there nothing written about it, they denied it entirely. They still do. In 20+ years, no one had questioned that I had asthma, despite never having a dip in my blood ox, and outside of the times I had pneumonia or flu, never having problems with my actual breathing.
Do you know what I actually had? Panic attacks. The physical symptoms experienced during an anxiety attack are very similar to the sensations you experience during an asthma episode. The difference is, when you’re having a panic attack, your breathing doesn’t actually change. You can breathe just fine. It just doesn’t feel like you can. Once my anxiety was brought under control, my need for albuterol was gone.
I shared this story with the person talking about how medications shouldn’t be investigated because the people taking them just need them. I was told that it was a shame I’d experienced what I did, but that the opposite was endemic (people not getting meds, being denied meds, or having meds stopped when they were needed), while my case was a one-off. I expected push back, but I didn’t expect the belittling tone and statements. It was… frustrating.
Anyhow, this is a bit rambling today, and I apologize. Time to get back to sewing. I have a lot of work to do before I go to the Venetian Masquerade Ball at Hammond Castle on March 1st!
Comments
6 responses to “Learning to Lean Right”
welcome to “our” world luv. it can be frustrating. most who consider themselves to be on out side will listen. me, when who ever starts with the emotional response and closed mind I simply walk away. I don’t have to deal with them in the course of my life.
my problem with “modern” medicine is it doesn’t cure the problem, just suppress the problem while causing many other problems.
anxiety like any medical issue effects everyone different. my wife and my mom deal with it. glad you got it under control.
There are plenty of modern medical things that cure the problem. But yes, we do have a tendency to mask problems. Some of it is the unwillingness of doctors to admit there IS a problem.
I’m overweight. I know I need to lose weight. I struggle to do so. It is what it is. I know that my weight affects things like blood pressure, blood sugar, heart and liver function, etc. But being overweight doesn’t have anything to do with many of the issues I have. I still get told that my weight is the first thing I have to address, even if I’m in for tooth pain or a broken leg.
Conversely, quite a lot of the time the answer to “how do I fix this problem I’m having?” is to lose weight, eat better, exercise, and drink more water. Any doctor who suggests that tends to get ignored. There are lots of times when simply eating whole foods would answer a problem, and the patient isn’t willing to do that one simple thing.
As for my anxiety, yeah… I take meds for it. Before meds, I would go into an almost week long panic (ie racing thoughts, racing heart beat, hyperventilating, stomach and bowel issues, jitters, etc) before each and every event I attended. It was *bad*. Now, I get flutters a day or two in advance, but it doesn’t really bother me. When bigger anxiety hits me, I have the mental space needed to deal with it in a reasonable fashion. I’m not going off my anxiety med unless RFK discovers a magic pill that kills chronic anxiety. On the other hand, I just started weaning off my anti-depressant yesterday. The world is good. 🙂
What you describe with your “asthma” and albuterol mirrors my experience with sleep apnea and snoring.
Short version: I used to snore really badly and it was affecting my quality of sleep. I visited a sleep specialist, they did the overnight monitoring, and prescribed a CPAP machine. I won’t deny it helped and my sleep got better. But I despised the machine and my growing dependence on it.
In the back of my mind, I always had this feeling like, I have this thing because my body isn’t working right, and with it there’s no incentive for it to go back to working right. People are prescribed CPAPs because something in their body is malfunctioning. But the CPAP doesn’t fix the malfunction, it just masks (heh!) the symptoms, and moreover, since the symptoms are masked, it removes the stimulus that would normally trigger the body to recover and fix the actual malfunction. The true root cause gets worse but you don’t notice, and over time you become dependent on the artificial fix.
I found that with or without the machine, I slept better on my side; I only snored while sleeping on my back. And I started to wonder: I’ve gained a fair amount of weight around my mid-section over the years, could that extra weight be affecting the ability of my diaphragm to fill my lungs while lying on my back? And if so, wouldn’t the machine that lets my diaphragm not work, weaken it and make the problem worse over time?
So I became diligent about losing some of that extra weight and strengthening my diaphragm. I dieted and hit the gym, training both strength and cardio. I lost 15 pounds.
And my snoring went away. I no longer require the CPAP machine to get good sleep. It seems the extra weight was the root cause and losing it was the remedy, and that option did not come from the doctors or sleep specialists. They weighed me at the clinic, so they probably knew, but they never mentioned it.
My firm belief is that for some reason — laziness, pharmaceutical payoffs, insurance incentives, or some combination of all of them — doctors are no longer seeking out root causes. They just prescribe something that masks the symptoms. That’s how we have elderly people who are on 30 different medications that constantly have to be monitored and adjusted, when a change in diet or lifestyle would probably remove the need for most-if-not-all of them.
Society’s expectation and desire for a pill to fix whatever ails them certainly doesn’t help, either. And so nothing is being fixed at the root cause, and despite our advances in medicine we aren’t any healthier than we were 50 years ago, and decidedly less so in many ways.
I’m not worried about RFKJr’s stint as Secretary of HHS. He’s not talking about banning anything as far as I’ve heard; only doing the studies on various substances that should have been done decades ago. If the studies come back showing things are harmless, then nothing happens. However, if the studies show they are harmful, then maybe we should stop using them. But how are we to know, without taking a good hard objective look at the effects?
Face it, European nations ban a lot of the dyes and colorings we still use in our processed foods; why would they do that, if they hadn’t done the studies we refuse to do and found them harmful? I see RFKJr not as a threat, but as a voice for reason and sanity, not beholden to the investors or “Big Ag” or “Big Pharma”, and willing to dig for root causes instead of taking the payoff to just mask symptoms. I don’t see how that’s a bad thing.
There’s a known factor with weight and sleep apnea. Too many doctors are unwilling to say that, though. I wish we could give out prescriptions for personal trainers for six months, or exercise classes. That might make it affordable, as well as make people more willing to attend.
And yes, studies need to be done. As we often say, there’s no such thing as settled science. As our understanding of the human being grows, our ways of dealing with illness will change. I suspect we still need to be giving kids the MMR vaccine (looking at some of the places in the South that are having surges of preventable diseases in low-vaccinated areas), but maybe there’s a better way of doing it. Or maybe we need to separate the shots out, instead of combining them, because one isn’t needed. Or maybe there’s a better way to boost immunity that we haven’t thought of, because we’re just blindly giving kids shots.
We should be doing regular, ongoing studies of all medications, imo. Might be some of these ones we’ve been using forever have side effects that can’t be seen until we hit the 40 year mark. Or maybe something new has come along, making them unnecessary, or better, or whatever.
I’m all for RFK. I have a *concern* about his stance on vaccines, but I am not afraid he’ll ban them all. He said he would not, and I believe him. If he does, we can address it.
Main point first:
The main difference between the left and the right on a lot of what Trump has been doing, and his appointees is the right applies a test of reasonableness before they build their argument. The left tends to assume the worst, and make it their reality.
I had a cow-orker say he was going to every vaccine he was able to before Jan 20 because RFK is going to ban all vaccines. Is that a reasonable expectation of the new Administration? How exactly will that happen? Can a Presidential appointee/Cabinet member simply wave a wand and make all vaccines illegal?
Anyone that takes a few seconds to think about it before reacting emotionally will realize there may be cause for concern, but no reason to panic. And, there is one of the biggest differences between how the left and right are acting over the last month.
Now, on to a semi-related item:
“While I consider the Bible to be an inspirational writing, likely inspired by the Divine, I have enough theological training to know that it wasn’t written by God”
If I remember correctly, Dennis Prager had a good metaphor? Allegory? for that.
If you have ever watched a bunch of kids start playing together, somehow, they all know the rules. And, I am NOT talking about baseball or some other structured sport. Just a bunch of kids playing around. Could be a ball, could just be some form of tag, whatever… Somehow, without anyone actually defining the rules, they all somehow know the “rules.” This happens often enough that examples abound.
What the Bible did was man writing down God’s rules. The 10 Commandments were likely carved by Moses, but it was enshrining God’s rules in stone. And, as a moral compass, it fits. The rules exist, whether written or not. Do not murder, do not steal, respect your elders, do not covet they neighbors ass. (Even if it is especially alluring…)
And, you are correct. The folks on the right use that as their fundamental basis of what is right and wrong. The folks on the left tend to use their feelz as their moral compass. One leads to tantrums, the other to backing up their arguments with facts, or at the minimum established written word.
Finally, when the left bans something they claim it is for the greater good. Ban incandescent bulbs, gas stoves, fossil fuels, fun, whatever…and they are OK with it. When the right bans something, like a drug that has harmed millions, it is fascism. (Back to that discussion on reasonableness.)
On the Bible and translations, many of them bad: indeed. The well known English rendering of one of the Commandments as “thou shalt not kill” is a perfect example. The right translation is “thou shalt not commit murder” which is an entirely different mandate.
I spent some time on original-language bits of the New Testament while helping an SF writer friend with plot elements (Rolf Nelson, for his fascinating novel “Heretics of St. Possenti” — recommended!). For that we spent a while digging into the bits that anti-gun people like to quote as biblical support for disarmament. One example is “live by the sword, die by the sword”. More accurately, I would translate it “the swordsman will die by the sword”. In other words, having a weapon for self defense is not a problem. Being the guy who reaches for a weapon first, immediately, always — that is a problem. In the original Greek there are grammatical distinctions that distinguish the two; not so much in Latin or English.
I wish I had taken the Hebrew elective that was offered in my high school… but at least I got some Latin and Greek, not enough to read either well but enough that I can pick up from where I left off with the relevant textbooks at hand.