Published for the Lolz: Or, Why it was OK that the Age of Rationalism Ended

Well, as of today my life’s work has hit a plateau that it may never revisit again. This pinnacle of my effort and dedication is immortalized in the public conscience. That is to say, a meme I made up with a stock photo and lettering in Impact was seen and chuckled at by several thousand of the kind of dorks who laugh at science memes:

It got even more gratifying to my easily-gratified little ego when I found it had been reposted by a facebook page with a not-so-savory word in its title that nevertheless expressed a rather, um, vehement love for science. A friend of mine spotted both posts simultaneously on her newsfeed:

Entitlement

These are the continuations of thoughts that I began to explain in my previous post on balancing our political and religious beliefs.

I live in a tiny apartment in the middle of a large city in China. My husband and I are here for a year, living off of a government scholarship and while we’re amply provided for, money sure does have to stretch and since our visas don’t permit us to hold jobs while we’re here, we’re very quickly learning the ins and outs of a shoestring budget.

“I don’t know how any X could believe Y … “

I’m not interested in making political enemies. This makes it pretty tricky to talk about issues that I believe in these days or to share articles I enjoy because particularly during election season everything in our discourse is charged. If I were to share an article that implied sympathy towards a cause that one party supports, those who identify with the opposite party would perceive it as an attack. It doesn’t help that our human-contact-free method of relaying information online is totally void of the interpersonal cues that would normally tell us the tone in which something is intended. We’ve gotten used to snide, barbed polemics and so now the things that we read are necessarily weighted as part of that kind of discourse.

So I hope to be taken seriously when I say I am not interested in making political enemies. I had originally intended to limit this blog to environment-related issues, colored from a Latter-day Saint perspective. There are other things I’ve been longing to talk about, to explain from my point of view, but I’ve hesitated because I don’t want to be perceived as a partisan pugilist who spends all my time congratulating those I already agree with and making snide jokes about those I don’t. So after a bit of an explanatory introduction, I’d like to be able to share some thoughts I’ve had lately on very personal reactions to things going on in the American cultural and political scene.