You may be familiar with the frog metaphor. If you put a frog in a pot of boiling water, it will jump out of it. If you put this same frog in a pot of cold water and applied heat to it, the frog will remain in the pot, get boiled and die. The point here is – people hardly notice little change, then it’s too late.
A little detour from the subject matter of this article would help explain the meshwork that holds the topic together with this metaphor. I have never given any serious thoughts to white privilege for two reasons. One, I really don’t care. Secondly, the few things I’m interested in that involves most races in the world have no such thing as white privilege. These few things are sports and rap music. As far as I know, rap has always been a black thing and the GRAMMY Best Rap Album of the Year award seemed like a category to celebrate black excellence in the world scene. Hence, when Macklemoore and Eminem won this award in a back-to-back fashion in 2014 and 2015, it seemed like blacks were slowly losing their heritage in music, and if not checked early enough, it could be the end of black dominance or supremacy in rap music. Some months back, Macklemoore released an album titles “This Unruly Mess I’ve Made” and well, I don’t personally think white privilege will be a problem rap fans will protest against any time soon. But I hope you get my point.
A very recent experience of mine has left me well-acquainted with the complex relationships of paranoia and nonchalance. Worry too much, you blow nonissues out of proportion, then your dreams blow up in front of you. At the other end, when you have absolutely no worries without any sort of plan in place, your dreams don’t even see the light of day. A simple solution emerges in the form of a fine balance between the two ends; but that’s too much middling, and gives you boredom – an odd by-product of the supposed gold standard. Hence you have a lot of people living mostly in this balance, yet shift positions from time to time to avoid boredom. These oscillations are so far-reaching that most people are in a period of transition for most of their lives; making most described philosophies of life – including those four temperaments that attempts to describe why reactions are premeditated – not just of a spurious nature, but also quite dead on arrival. This has been my life for a very long while. A story that has been a hitherto unruly mess with very limited clarity as to its origin or extent. A trainwreck in the form of a con artist, who has a lot of expectations from those who believe they know him, without any true skills or any clear directions as to what he wants to do next – forever replaying different scenarios in his head and picking that with the highest trade value as the major plot in the next episode in his life series. Maybe today is the day it all changes – after all, the purported first step in solving a problem is identifying the problem. Or maybe this is just another chronicle in the life of a very confused person. Ciao.
Heavy: Lift with Caution 