Snakes and RAMs

1. Love Yourself
2. Love One Other Person
3. Understand history without guilt, blame, or shame
4. Avoid Snakes. Nurture your tribe
5. Win with Integrity.

Those are my rules for Social Justice Warriors. And I woke up today with a notion of another way to apply it, based on some resent and progressively more un-useful discussions.

Here goes.

I had a thought this morning concerning that progression from Sleepers (the unaware) to Snakes (liars without the courage to act directly) to Monsters (snakes with enough power to shed their skins). It occurs to me that the illogic and confusion snakes (trolls are a variety of snake) utilize is indistinguishable from another sort of person…someone who is simply, honestly looking at reality from another perspective. Who knows…they might even be more accurate than yo!. But speaking to them produces much the same effect as talking to snakes. And to the degree that it is often a waste of time to have certain discussions with them, the remedies are similar. The difference is that these people who, for the sake of simplicity I’ll call RAMs (Reading Another Map), deserve no insult, and can be genuinely interesting and educational to observe.

At a distance (on the internet, for instance), without body language, facial expressions, vocal tonalities and observation of the degree to which behavior aligns with speech, I cannot tell the difference between people who GENUINELY see the world…