(6)
A county inspector walked lazily onto the production floor of a citrus packer. He had done it dozens of times before, but this time seemed oddly different. It was quiet, for one. All the machinery stopped and no one around. Only a few employees leaving out of some doors on the far side of the massive area made any noise.
He shrugged and continued on toward the packing lines. He glanced down at some boxes as he passed, just making a quick check that they were within regulations. They had never been in violation and it was unlikely that some bizarre printing error had occurred that would make these any different than the other hundreds of thousands. What was foremost on his mind was the ringing.
“Huh,” he thought, “I didn't know they had a phone on the floor out here. I sure wish someone would answer it, though.”
Time passed and still the phone kept wringing in it's peculiar half-klaxon that kept repeating. It was horribly annoying and the inspector had half a mind to tell someone that. Luckily, a frantic little Hispanic woman was running toward him, arms waving.
“I have a question!” she screamed as she got close, still waving her arms frantically.
“Uh... OK. Go for it,” the inspector replied, a bit confused.
“I have a question! I have a question!!!” the lady repeated.
“Well, I probably have answers,” the inspector replied.
The lady pointed at an exit excitedly and screamed, “I HAVE A QUESTION!!!”
The inspector paused, wondering why they had promoted this undocumented worker to supervisor when there were so many competent and non-loopy ones around. He stared at her with a look of hoping to understand what she was babbling about.
“EYE VAH KWAY SHUN!!!” The small, barely-English-speaking woman screamed.
“Hmm...” thought the inspector. It suddenly occurred to him that it might not be a phone ringing. It also occurred to him that “eye vah kway shun” could mean “I have a question” as he previously thought or it might mean “evacuation”. Seeing as everything was shut down, everyone was running out of the building, and this little lady seemed a bit panicked; he decided that the latter interpretation made a lot more sense.
“Ah,” he said to the lady, shoved his hands in his pockets, executed his best right-face motion and walked out of the building.
Sometimes the events of my day are stranger than fiction.
I'm glad nothing was seriously wrong there because, had it been, both the small “English as a fifth or sixth language” supervisor and myself would have been dead. She in frantic death throws wondering what the stupid gringo in front of here wasn't running for... and me trying to piece together if this woman's cheese had done slid off her cracker.
Oh well, in any case my weeks of abject boredom (and quite a bit of reading) are coming to an end. My supervisor informed me that next week I was going to be placed on RIFA (red imported fire ant) duty. This will be fun in that the primary cause of a RIFA outbreak would be on incoming honey bee hives. Oh, the chances to be viciously stung a multitude of times should make the upcoming weeks rather interesting.
They will give me a little beekeeper suit, though. So I got that going for me. “All you really need is gloves and the hood,” my supervisor told me. He doesn't yet realize how much God hates me. He will come to learn, though. So, next week will involve a lot of stingy-type-insects and me. Sounds like a party.
But we're not here to talk about the minutiae of our job. We're here to talk about choice.
It occurred to me, both after the posting of my last rant and my failed attempts to explain sex-linked recessive genes at the New Year's Eve party, that a lot of judgmental attitudes are born of the problem of choice.
I also occurred to me that X-Men 2 (the movie) completely butchered a scientific principle to deliver a line. In it the mother of the ice-mutant-kid is asking him has he tried “not being a mutant” and thinking “it was all her fault”. To this, flame-mutant-kid responds, “Actually, we found that the mutant gene is passed on by the father... so it's all his fault”. He then points smugly at the dad.
OK... time fucking out! There is exactly ONE gene that can be traced to come only from the father. That would be the Y chromosome. So, if they want to say it is passed on by the father then it would have to be on that chromosome. The problem is... there are female mutants. This, by any objective metric, is impossible if the gene is on the Y chromosome. I know it's an odd thing to get all worked up over, but it's just as easy to get these things right as it is to get them wrong.
Focus. Choice.
Right. OK. I'd like to start this off with a bit of wisdom:
Judge not, that ye be not judged.
-Matthew 7:1 (KJV)
Good advice. Even though this is my least favorite of the synoptic gospels, it is backed up in Luke. But it's not only good advice because we, as humans, are such hypocritical creatures... but also because judging implies that a choice was made. It's easy to judge those who seem to make decisions which lead to ruin. After all, they had the choice. It's harder to judge someone for something we see as beyond their control.
No one judges someone with muscular dystrophy as a sinner who CHOSE to be that way. No, it wouldn't make any damn sense.
But – back in the day – it was common to judge those who had some deformity or illness as having run afoul of God and thus their condition was justified. Today someone who takes that view is held as a fucking moron. Well... let's not be so quick to judge.
I do not believe there is such a thing as choice. Only the illusion of it. Perhaps it's such a bad idea to judge because judging someone implies they had choice. Choice implies free will. Free will... well, I'm not sold on it.
My view that we are bound to execute our programs in a very specific way is well known. The fact that it is so complex that we can't understand it is not my concern. I will admit that my continued learning may throw all of this into flux, though. You see, I still say there is no such thing “random”. If there were then there could be no cause and effect, no action and reaction, in short there would be no universe. It is built upon the absence of randomness... but also probability.
Those of you who aren't trapped in this skull might want to look away now.
If you can wrap your head around the concepts of quantum physics then you're already familiar with the mechanic that most of what we perceive as action/reaction is only that way because we perceive it as such. In reality, if we weren't looking at it, the universe would pop along its merry little non-distinct probability-wave way. But... we ARE looking at it. And thus, we are forcing it to bend into what we think it should be doing.
In effect, when I was doing “research” with a perception-altering substance and observed that the concrete below me was really just a few dozen layers of paisley-etched glass... well, in that moment the chances that it WAS, in fact, paisley-etched glass became slightly more probable than it had been. So, in effect, if I concentrated hard enough and got enough people to perceive something the same way I did then that thing would bend to become how we perceived it.
But that just brings me back to my initial point of non-randomness. We, as observers, would have to be influenced in some way to change our perception. We wouldn't have a choice of the perception... even if we had initiated it ourselves with, say, a dosage of D-lysergic acid. It's all an infinite regression and I've spewed forth on that subject before.
What's important to understand for this argument is that whether someone is gay or has muscular dystrophy or a kleptomaniac or a small Hispanic woman that cannot clearly articulate “evacuation” in English really has nothing to do with choice. Therefore, how can I judge any of them in any sense of right or wrong, good or bad, sinner or saint?
Simple, because you have no choice.
Damn you! You're right though. I don't. But I do have something that (apparently) most of America, and the world, does not. I have been given the clarity of vision to know that I have no choice and thus it has given me the ability to more clearly see the actions I do take.
So please, don't judge others because of actions or conditions that you disagree with because they made the decision to do them. They no more chose to be gay or have muscular dystrophy or compulsively steal or shout “eye vah kway shun” frantically than the Sun has a choice in rising from the east or JB has a choice in being half-Jap or I had a choice in being named Caleb.
You could always change your name.
Eh... I kinda dig it now.
You fucking would!
...
...
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Anyway, I would leave you by imploring you to consider that even though you do not understand why you have taken an action... it doesn't mean you could have taken any other action at the time.
Judge not... lest you yourself be judged.
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