Forgive and Forget
Posted: Fri Jan 11, 2013 8:05 pm
At times I've been the worst person for holding grudges and I get offended as much as a regular person does too.
Last quarter in school, I was trying to develop a metaphor to teach my classmates about how we can cope with the violent, bigoted, and cruel events of the past we had been reading about in regards to the first 100 years of American History.
And I came up with this both listening to a history lecture from YouTube from some Ivy League type, some things I learned about post-modernist thought, and watching a very late night episode (one of the first) of "Community."
Simply, the essence is that our consciousness exists in various sorts of boxes.
The boxes all represent the boundaries we have created for ourselves in reference to the experiences we have had and the judgements we made in reaction or passivity to each experience.
Naturally each boxes boundaries is also created by the natural limitations of our own physical realities, like the expression of our genetics, some of which happens due to environmental influences in which genes naturally respond and react.
So here each of are, sitting in a great stack with all these other boxes, deciding what goes into ours and what does not come into ours. We are also rubbing up against OTHER boxes and sometimes those boxes really don't seem to go together.
Surrounding all these individual boxes is a great huge box that represents the collective consciousness. One could call it the community. One could call it the end result of a group of people all being exposed to generally the same sort of education, experiences, and resultant backwash from prior generations WHO all had common experiences.
The end result of this is that people come up with ideas that permeate and inspire, and transcend the self-made boundaries around each other.
What does this have to do with Alfa?
We are all here representing very different boxes and the unity of our collective consciousness and the creative commons is defined by one simple affinity, in this case Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. It is an idea and practice that transcends our own personal boxes, and it also encourages us to extend ourselves beyond our local collective boundaries that we accept to be uniform and true.
This puts many people in a quandary. A community is created around an affinity, but the issues of our personal boundary/boxes still exists. Everyone has a different level of boundaries and a different way of communicating.
I cited an example. This last fall, only one person used Alfa chat to make mention of Obama winning the election. And that person is a known troll and is most frequently banned from chat because of that. Plus no one really responded to him either. This is the type of restraint that needs to be accessed when using a chat room that is based around connecting people who want to play AD&D online. It is pretty much the normal amount of restraint everyone shows.
Why do we do it?
A community is unified in its ability to forgive and forget.
Any one who has been around in ANY community eventually butts heads with someone who does not share their views or desperately threatens the structural integrity of that box they use to define themselves in the collective.
Being able to forgive the wrongs of others, recognize that they are functioning under the boundaries they have accepted and the world has made evident to them, strengthens the community. It does not mean you need to trust them immediately afterwards, but it basically restarts that friendship/trust process at 0 level.
So in all cases each member (and myself) constantly needs to be asking themselves both in chat and in game:
1."Am I adding to the stability of the community, or are my comments subtracting from it?"
2."Will this statement help me get my needs met, or is a passive aggressive statement that confuses the issue?"
3."How will I help this person find forgiveness when their personal boundaries have been challenged or transgressed upon?"
4. "Am I using a public chat room about AD&D in an IRC system with 10,000 chat rooms for all sorts of issues/affinities/self-help groups, to try to get my personal needs met and my personal boundaries validated?"
5. "Are my comments going to help people have fun, or are they going to discourage them and ostracize them"
6."Should I be in chat or in game if I am drunk, on drugs, exhausted, emotionally drained, or in a very reactionary mood due to external events? Perhaps there is a better person or a place I can vent this incredible angst?"
And finally:
7. "Can I forgive and move on?"
Last quarter in school, I was trying to develop a metaphor to teach my classmates about how we can cope with the violent, bigoted, and cruel events of the past we had been reading about in regards to the first 100 years of American History.
And I came up with this both listening to a history lecture from YouTube from some Ivy League type, some things I learned about post-modernist thought, and watching a very late night episode (one of the first) of "Community."
Simply, the essence is that our consciousness exists in various sorts of boxes.
The boxes all represent the boundaries we have created for ourselves in reference to the experiences we have had and the judgements we made in reaction or passivity to each experience.
Naturally each boxes boundaries is also created by the natural limitations of our own physical realities, like the expression of our genetics, some of which happens due to environmental influences in which genes naturally respond and react.
So here each of are, sitting in a great stack with all these other boxes, deciding what goes into ours and what does not come into ours. We are also rubbing up against OTHER boxes and sometimes those boxes really don't seem to go together.
Surrounding all these individual boxes is a great huge box that represents the collective consciousness. One could call it the community. One could call it the end result of a group of people all being exposed to generally the same sort of education, experiences, and resultant backwash from prior generations WHO all had common experiences.
The end result of this is that people come up with ideas that permeate and inspire, and transcend the self-made boundaries around each other.
What does this have to do with Alfa?
We are all here representing very different boxes and the unity of our collective consciousness and the creative commons is defined by one simple affinity, in this case Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. It is an idea and practice that transcends our own personal boxes, and it also encourages us to extend ourselves beyond our local collective boundaries that we accept to be uniform and true.
This puts many people in a quandary. A community is created around an affinity, but the issues of our personal boundary/boxes still exists. Everyone has a different level of boundaries and a different way of communicating.
I cited an example. This last fall, only one person used Alfa chat to make mention of Obama winning the election. And that person is a known troll and is most frequently banned from chat because of that. Plus no one really responded to him either. This is the type of restraint that needs to be accessed when using a chat room that is based around connecting people who want to play AD&D online. It is pretty much the normal amount of restraint everyone shows.
Why do we do it?
A community is unified in its ability to forgive and forget.
Any one who has been around in ANY community eventually butts heads with someone who does not share their views or desperately threatens the structural integrity of that box they use to define themselves in the collective.
Being able to forgive the wrongs of others, recognize that they are functioning under the boundaries they have accepted and the world has made evident to them, strengthens the community. It does not mean you need to trust them immediately afterwards, but it basically restarts that friendship/trust process at 0 level.
So in all cases each member (and myself) constantly needs to be asking themselves both in chat and in game:
1."Am I adding to the stability of the community, or are my comments subtracting from it?"
2."Will this statement help me get my needs met, or is a passive aggressive statement that confuses the issue?"
3."How will I help this person find forgiveness when their personal boundaries have been challenged or transgressed upon?"
4. "Am I using a public chat room about AD&D in an IRC system with 10,000 chat rooms for all sorts of issues/affinities/self-help groups, to try to get my personal needs met and my personal boundaries validated?"
5. "Are my comments going to help people have fun, or are they going to discourage them and ostracize them"
6."Should I be in chat or in game if I am drunk, on drugs, exhausted, emotionally drained, or in a very reactionary mood due to external events? Perhaps there is a better person or a place I can vent this incredible angst?"
And finally:
7. "Can I forgive and move on?"
