10/31/16

Today’s Horoscope

Some signs:

The stars want to remind you that there are an awful lot of people out there that don’t get it.  They don’t really understand most of the positions they have or even the things that they say.  It may seem like a large swath of humanity is just too stupid to live, but there aren’t really a lot of truly stupid people out there.  There are just a lot of people that have had seriously messed up upbringings, or no one in their lives that gave a shit and in turn they don’t give a shit.  

Or maybe they never learned any comprehension skills, or developed any critical thinking.  Maybe they were raised in different circumstances than you, and now they are connected to a world that is alien to them.  Maybe they are anti-intellectual because they never had a chance to learn about the things you take for granted.

The world has changed so much in the last few decades.  People that lived their lives in a simple and detached existence where many things didn’t even occur to them now are forced to think about things that they have no foundation in.  They are new to politics or pop culture or science, really anything that previously fell into a category that they could ignore and still get by reasonably well in their world.

But now they are connected, through the internet and 24 hour cable news.  They don’t know what is real and what isn’t.  They don’t understand abstract concepts and how to interpret a lot of what they see and hear, so everything loud and emphatic gets their attention and riles them up.

Let’s not even mention the fact that many of them hold outdated and borderline(or not so borderline) racist and misogynistic views. They were never taught any better and they don’t even see it as a problem, and they resent it when you point it out.

It doesn’t mean that they are stupid, or even wrong from where they are sitting.

What can you do if you are exposed to people like this all the time?  Not much.  You can try to calmly explain your side of it, but people don’t take kindly to being told what they think is wrong.  You can decide you hate them, and unfriend them or ignore them or mute them, although I don’t think that helps anyone. You can accept them and hope that your influence makes a difference.  

You might be surprised to find that most people are not evil, or hate filled, or even morons, they just don’t know any different.  Once they are exposed to the people they think are bad, they find that maybe those people aren’t the faceless monsters they viewed them as.  They start to humanize the people that previously disgusted them because now they have a face, and feelings, and redeeming values.  They find that they might have common ground.  They come to see that you can’t just lump a bunch of people together into one big catch all group.  Then their opinions change and maybe they aren’t as blind to things or racist or hateful as they used to be, and they grow.

The stars want you to understand, that scenario works for you too.