If you want fast & easy news: this post is about how slutty women will ultimately bring down the US.
Yesterday I was having a discussion with some loved ones. It went something like this:
“Oh I see you’re following the March Madness bracket. Is that your predicted bracket or the results bracket?”
“I’m just keeping track of the results.”
“And I’m sure you’re doing the same for the women’s bracket.”
Eye roll.
Silence.
You see, I was all fired up because I had recently seen some news on my carefully-curated-by-a-third-party-Facebook-feed about the discrepancy between the men’s & women’s NCAA.
And by news…
I mean headlines:
NCAA apologizes for disparities between women’s and men’s facilities
NCAA budget for men’s basketball tournament almost twice as much as women’s budget
Weight rooms, swag, and the ‘March Madness’ brand: How the NCAA is shortchanging women’s basketball
Well, that was all this budding feminist needed to form her very important & verified opinion truth! #unfakenews
And so, with those same loved ones, who might have read headlines or who might have their dissertations in the topic or who might have played in a MM tourney themselves-I mean who knows these days–I began (naturally) to have a well-informed (obvious) discussion about the patriarchy in sports.
Down with the patriarchy!
And I am sure, or am I, that this conversation is multiplied over a hundred countries, a thousand dinner tables, and a million moments.
It’s like Descartes’ cogito, ergo sum 2.0: I scrolled, therefore I know.
Tweet
Dave & I have this running joke about how “we read an article, well, actually [insert any amount that isn’t whole here] part of an article.” It comes from this Toyota commercial & pretty much is a staple in any of our conversations that incorporate an outside source.
But really, our household only mirrors society at large.
We are headline whores.
And then we take our newly established “truth” & head into war with the other side. We don’t talk to listen anymore. We talk to catch. We talk to prove. We talk, well, because, WE.
Talk has become war. But now, fortunately, unfortunately, oh what a tangled web we weave, we are armed with the world wide web.
And the problem with the world wide web is just that…it is world wide.
We have a world–who are we kidding: a. world. a. minute–of information at our fingertips, but really, all we do is search for justification of what we already think & arm ourselves with soundbite-swords & head into the battlefield of my right versus your/you’re wrong.
Tweet
There’s a fancy term for this: confirmation bias.
The unfancy term is the Divided States of America.
Broken families.
Capital attacks.
Sigh. Error 404.
I wish we could all just be scientific.
Experiment: a choice to explore a hypothesis.
I wish we could all just be religious.
Faith: a choice to believe in some sense of a mystery–
knowing it can’t be proven.
I wish we could all just be mindful.
Curious: observing what is without judgment.
Maybe we could move our conversation-compass away from the blood-simplicity of morality to the heartbeat-stratifications of complexity.
Maybe.
Just this week I as listening to Krista Tippett interview Arlie Hochschild.
Her concepts of “deep story” & that “we are all products of our own experience” & how important it is to find “common ground” resonated with me.
As did this:
“Consider the possibility that in their situation, you might end up closer to their perspective.”
Wow.
But to consider… deep breath here… takes consideration.
It takes listening.
It takes humanity.
Let’s all be human, k?
If you made it this far, you get cookies (please accept all) (see what I did there). Cheers to reading a whole post 😉
