Ignorance Is Unblissful

Ignorance Is Unblissful

by Alfred Lehmberg

Ignorance was, is, and will ever be... unblissful. Full stop.

Is ignorance ever bliss? No.

Sincerely, reject "blissful ignorance" because it does not work, it does
not respect you, and it seems to prove, invariably, that it's only a mechanism for the control of your energies and your efforts on projects or activities you're, by design, not well informed about, by someone apart and unconcerned with you: what they can only see as a mark. 

Seriously, to let an individual go blithely along in an ignorance that suits the manipulator and not the individual... is to communicate an ongoing lie and a trammeling of all ethics! You are being lied to if others know better, and don't tell you. That lie by omission. That's not informed consent. That is duplicity and obfuscation and I would be expected to be jailed or otherwise discredited if it was me engaged in that behavior...

Verily! Has it not ever been pompously intoned that "It is folly to be wise when ignorance is bliss"? ...But, you see, that old proverb makes an assumption that continued ignorance equals continued bliss, and this is just not the case. 

Ignorance, from my experience, can be bliss... but, only for the moment! In the real world there is always a premium paid for ignorance, and that bill must eventually come due. 

In the real world ignorance equals loss, injustice, sickness, and failure... abject failure... failure to grow, failure to achieve, and failure to make meaningful progress! Truly, the only life worth living is the examined one, and ignorant bliss is a tragic booby-trap where the individual concerned is not aware that his primrose path is a minefield!

It's never served THIS aging citizen. There has only ever been error and loss with its inclusion, even tragedy, reader, resulting from the "ignorances" tolerated that we'll shortly regard. Willful ignorance? Twice as bad. There's a lot of that about now... 

Anyway, no one was ever served by their ignorance, only betrayed and left out, short-changed and short-sheeted. ...Sure, not knowing the asteroid was going to hit until it did may seem fine on its face, but what was that, really, but a missed opportunity to set some things right, howsoever futilely, before you passed? 

It was time you could have had, denied... Time to do something "important"... something that you could have done. ...Hell, tell the wife you love her... or buy that pack of cigarettes you've been craving for a decade... how blissful would any of that be at our asteroidal passing?

To the chase, at last? Well, last century, I was at best ambivalent (...when I wasn't hostile!) to gays, on the whole, and the whole transgender-smear-of-one's-sexual-identity issue. It was poppycock, I'd viscerally (if baselessly) felt... completely ignorant on the issues. It was "choice," it was socially "proscribed," it was "threatening," it was "wrong." I was so sure... my respected Dad was havin' none of it, and Grandad, a high school principal (In 1950s Texas!), was of a mind and once observed to me that homosexuality had destroyed Rome (...nothing about the purposeful corruption of the middle class by the upper class in a series of psychotic barracks emperors...)!

Why, I even thought it might be a good idea to burn books defending homosexuality! That was actually the beginning of a turning point for me. I'd had some education on the history of book burning and book burners. Book burners have NEVER come out on the correct side of the issues in contention, in fact, they have ever held us back as a species, even, when Alexandria and some razed Moslem libraries are recalled...

I recall "thinking," buffered by erroneous societal convention (every "gay" guy in a film was a bad guy?)..." How can a real guy be attracted to another guy where women are available to them? I'd called that "reasoned." 

Oh, and by the way, it was ok with girls together... that was fine [wink-wink nudge-nudge]... highly desirable if on the sly... and still "wrong." That hypocrisy went wholly unrecognized.

...But still, I'd "wondered," how could a woman genuinely prefer another woman to a man?! It must be a pathology or an aberrational mental sickness... I'd rationalized all this, wholly unaware of any of the facts on the issue. One can be reminded of the toxic phrase "Your body, my choice," at this point... that's where all the aforementioned goes...

...Yeah, the gays would be cat-called and terrorized, beat up—killed even! That was terrible, but hey... they kinda brought it on themselves for making their "nastiness" public... right? ...And it "remained"... that it was kind of an affront to "decency," right? Consider, you don't want the kids to see it, right? They'd ask questions... right?!

...But I aspired to ongoing education, too, one real in the real world! I wanted to be able to provide sound citations for my bigotry, logical "justifications" for my prejudice... legitimate "reasons" for my chauvinism. ...I'd done the same for Jews... I really should have learned my lesson, then... that was an exposure to a cosmic truth! I wished I'd taken the lesson better. To wit?

"Always be prepared to have everything you "know" found to be entirely wrong, wrong-minded, and wrong-hearted! One must be prepared to have their "convictions" challenged, always. Be prepared, always, to change to that necessary course, one more sentient and constructive, but endeavor to adapt to and to overcome... always? Your ignorance? 

Cut to that chase aforementioned: biology, anthropology, psychology, history, and record of performance, cogent primary histories, personal associations, and science, anatomy and genetics... albeit!

Come to find? Well, the short version is that homosexuality (or alternative sexuality) is an organic hard wire psychologically damaging to change... arbitrarily... just like the downsides incurred as a result of criminalizing eye color or handedness... skin color? It's the way things are, that's what was revealed to me! 

Moreover? It is something not remotely countered by wholly unsupportable religious concerns, as uninformed as they are (and have been!) hypocritical, grinding superstitious axes as narrow-minded as they are unreasonable! Now?

Ignorance! Rejected out of hand as a counter to sense, sensibility, and a sensible society of efficaciousness, efficiency, and enlightened elevation, boy howdy! That's the read from an unbiased social science of many decades, cited and peer-reviewed, earnest professionals trying to get things RIGHT... ...'K? ...'K.

Gay is OK, was the Gestalt conclusion! Good persons swell their ranks even as good persons complement the ranks of others in the "Queer" category, who also have entirely natural orientations and preferences. Pedophilia? We don't fuck our kids because they are justifiably adjudged as being unable to give informed consent to sexual activity. We'll move on.

I opted for the rainbow-colored picture to show solidarity with a needed sea change, not be on a bandwagon. There is much to be singular and original about, showing solidarity with this cultural change from a sexually bigoted society to one unbigoted is for the good, is the feeling of this writer, and may he remain to be one with them, still.

Any other view on the biological smear of life's very fluid "sexuality expression" is as uninformed as it is deconstructive and as insultingly Pharisaic as it is vastly hypocritical. Dangerously... toxically uninformed. Needlessly divisive. So, evil, even.

Clearly... people are not perceiving the need to stay off one another's asses, more. Verily! We must reject the popular impetus to embrace our baseless divisivenesses and reject any uncalled-for demand that we BE unnecessarily divided! That seems good sense!

We are some 350 million souls living in one monstrously complex society! The administration of that society requires talent and expertise which the new fascist right has not paid off on, in the manner that they have promised, for decades! The only faction paying off for the people (in an economy that is the envy of the world!) is the left. 

What else is the left telling us? Well, topping the list? Authoritarian fascism must be as detested as it is resisted, and as resented as it is reviled. Second? Stay off your neighbor's ass for baseless bupkis!

...But what of the offense, the shock, and the shame discounting one's personal ignorance? In the first place? It's not always offense, shock, and shame. In the second, there is, more often than not, joy beyond the shame, satisfaction beyond the shock, and fellowship, good reader, beyond the offense. 

Whatever the outcome? Personal growth was had, and as we all know, when you stop growing you start dying. 

Closing, I'm sure glad I was able to clear up some of my own ignorant rubbish before that aforementioned asteroid hit... though, let's face it. We've all our own personal asteroids. Read on.

Remember!