Chris Herrington decided years ago that his reality was much more fun…
and he’s ready to tell you why.
Sit back and relax.
It’s going to be a bumpy ride.
History and Word Choice
We know that there are different ways to communicate what has happened, depending on what outcome the different historians want to frame or support as the one that best communicates their interpretation of the facts that are known. Different people tell what they saw or experienced from their own point of view, and we need to understand why they might think as they do if we want to understand for ourselves. Learning their way of putting things and why they think that way allows us to understand the facts in context. We need to understand from others in order to think for ourselves. Their word choice reveals their point of view, and this is how history is painted or created. We might think that there is only one way to interpret the facts, but we will understand a lot more when we know how everyone feels and thinks about it all. Let’s look at examples of history and word choice in the country of Tibet, our lives, society, and in an area of interest.
Tibet is at “the top of the world,” they say, with an average elevation of 16,000 feet, well out of the way of anyone who might think of them as an enemy, and yet they have a reputation of having such a non-violent attitude about life that they have become infamous for being fiercely courageous in the jaws of their enemies. “They call their country Pöd yul and themselves Pöd pas.” There seem to have been no wars in Tibetan history since the Non-violent revolution begun early last Century; the Dalai Lama’s have brought a peaceful face to the top of the world. This is not to say that the Tibetans have stood by idly as they were attacked by the Chinese or that they have unilaterally staved off the subtleties of propaganda, through the British or the Americans; certainly they have been the brunt of several attacks, including the demolition by the Chinese in 1951 -1959, a destruction that brought the end of nearly 30,000 holy shrines and temples, and the creation of the world’s largest internment camp. The Dalai Lama, sometimes sited as a despot by the Chinese leadership, received the Noble Peace Prize, and has been around the world working on international peace. The world appeal for peace and reconciliation as proposed by the Tibetan community in exile is a tall order given that it is a country without its traditional leadership; its lands were taken by force, and its cities are over-run with foreigners, the Chinese numbering an additional 8 million people among them, and still the Tibetans yearn for world peace. 1991 was the International Year of Tibet, and worldwide people tended to their needs and history; this year I will be 57, and I am still, even just now, learning about myself.
I see myself as wearing several different hats in life, and I have to communicate differently when I change hats. School is a place where I can both be myself, and call for the risk-taking of self-disclosure from my fellow students; I exclaim their courage and uphold the testimony of their strength. My home is a testament to my having a single purpose in a space; my wife and I live in a barn-like structure that resembles a church, has the patio of a barn, and allows us to rest as ourselves together as best friends. Blogging is an activity that I really like, but it is often confusing because some people use the same words to describe different things, for example universalism, as in this question I gave on Amazon, “runningturtle87 says: Coleman, the word “universalism” is a sticky wicket since it means many things to many people. Please clarify what you mean by this term.” Racquetball has been a very important sport in my life since I have never been too successful at team sports; I view racquetball as one person playing against all comers, and so it has brought out the gladiator in me. My own way of engaging the world requires me to think, talk, and act in my own way in terms of the iconology I use to interface with others, but the way they communicate back is often surreal and encoded to me and gives me a sense of my being foreign if not alien in their eyes, and likewise.
People in society also wear many hats and talk about these roles in contradiction. Age is a hat that is not going to go away; to my older friends I am a kid; to my younger friends I am an old goat, to my peers in age I am intense; they all see me as odd, unless they need me to help them through a crisis, then I’m just plain Chris. Teachers are odd sorts of people in our society today, and, even though at one time they received much more prestige than they do now, they presently are often seen as tools of the system and used by the administration to function in certain capacities in order to complete its given missions. Religion/spirituality is often a confusing word that many people assume means one thing to all people but can have various meanings even in the same conversation between two people; for myself, I tend to think of religion as what man does to find God, and I think of spirituality as what God has done to help man know Him; I’m not so keen on the former, and I am a big believer in the latter. “Education” is definitely abused by many people as far as I am concerned; many people think of an education as what we get from teachers, but as a teacher I tend to think of an education as what I get from my students: Education… “to bring out that which is within.” Alternatively, within the field of sociology, the study of human interaction has drilled down on racism in all of its various forms and found a wealth of vocabulary to talk about a dearth of understanding.
In specific, one area where people tend to have a strong point of view is in the area of Race. A limited vocabulary hampers people from their being able to discuss the truth, and, above all, being less than truthful, they cannot be honest, even with themselves. Bias is a limited perception and underscores the lack of fully honest minds which might blame others for their own lack of perception; thus is the biased mind lacking in seeing its own limits. Segregation, the concept that independence is to be applied above interdependence, is a dance of society that both weakens its resolve to act interdependently, and strengthens the thought that separation is somehow a better choice, breaking with unity. Inter-marriage conceptually begins with separation and ends with interdependence, strengthened genes, and wider social bonds if people do not subscribe to bias and segregation. We can see that social blindness, in fact any kind of blindness, really gets down to how we perceive our circumstances, but there are none so blind as those who want others to see what they themselves cannot see.
Whatever must we think whenever someone asks us a question and we have to think about if he wants us to answer with what we know or with what we think we know? The reality is that we only “refer” to everything, and yet we talk about things as if we absolutely know anything at all! History is the story of how one person’s perceptions of what happened eventually became dominate over all the other versions, really. And the vocabulary that he chose to use to dominate the scene was in fact a concocted list of words that were used to manufacture a line of thinking that even the speaker may not have fully understood or believed. How can we even begin to discuss these things? Eventually, the master of all things, time itself, will tell us if our ideas were sound or if we have merely gotten lost in the narrative we became addicted to in our story of how we came to know it all.
runningturtle87
Having completed 32 years of public school service, Chris Herrington lives, with his wife, in Appleby, Texas, and his writing consists of blogging and essay writing concerning an array of topics including education, mediation, self-development, and human interests. He teaches at the Martin School of Choice, plays racquetball, and enjoys his job.
Chris Herrington can be reached at herrington@everythingnac.com
