ANST - awards & peasants & peers, oh my

Jax jax at onr.com
Wed Jun 17 15:28:12 PDT 1998


Laury Torrence said:

> As to stereotyping
>we're all guilty of it, including yourself in your first posting.  It's 
>natural for folks
>to try to quantify things so they can decide how to act/react to them.


Yea Verily, Brother! Amen! This is a very bad habit, and responsible for 
much of the misery in the world. I have personally come to call it the 
Salt Shaker Syndrome.

Consider. Most of us will walk into any home, or bar, or restaurant in 
the world, and if there is a little jar with holes in the lid,full of a 
white crystalline substance, it is automatically a 'salt shaker'. It 
could be full of sugar. It could be rat poison. It could be any damn 
thing, and yet we will scoop it up and sprinkle it all over a $50 steak 
without a moment's thought. Why? Because we are not interacting with the 
actual thing, itself; we are interacting with the *symbol*. With the idea 
we have of 'salt shaker'.

And the worst part is, that if it does turn out to be sugar, we don't say 
"Oh, it was a sugar shaker. My mistake." Instead, we say " What f**khead 
put sugar in this f**king salt shaker!?!?!". We feel positively 
*tricked*. We feel *betrayed*, because reality did not conform to our 
experience, our conceptual model, our idea of how things 'should' be. We 
not only create these little boobytraps for ourselves, we bloody *defend* 
them.

We do the same thing with people. Like black people. Or gay people. Or 
people in brass hats. Karl, you reminisce about a time when the SCA was 
shiny and new. You say you prefer to hang around w/ individuals, 
undefined by rank. But definitions, like all other ideas, are only found 
in one place, and that's your head, buddy! Maybe the SCA has changed, but 
as we get older, so do we... we tend to collect these salt shakers...

Fortunately, there is a simple, if not easy solution. Take a taste. To 
paraphrase the character Merlin in the movie "Excalibur", 'before you 
taste it, what do you really know? And then of course, it's too late.' 
You may have made a friend...

All Love to the List,
-Erik Wulfriksson-
Barony of Bryn Gwlad
whoisalittlepreachytonite
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