June 5, 2009

• What is offensive?

  For starters, “offensive” is the flip side of “defensive.”  I’ll try to remember to come back to that later.

  Definitions of offensive on the Web:

  • violating or tending to violate or offend against; “violative of the principles of liberty”; “considered such depravity offensive against all laws …
  • for the purpose of attack rather than defense; “offensive weapons”
  • causing anger or annoyance; “offensive remarks”
  • unsavory: morally offensive; “an unsavory reputation”; “an unsavory scandal”
  • unpleasant or disgusting especially to the senses; “offensive odors”
  • dysphemistic: substitute a harsher or distasteful term for a mild one ; “`nigger’ is a dysphemistic term for `African-American’”
  • offense: the action of attacking an enemy
  • nauseating: causing or able to cause nausea; “a nauseating smell”; “nauseous offal”; “a sickening stench”
    wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn

  Oooh, I like that word, “dysphemistic!”  I have been using “euphemistic” longer than I remember, but this word is going to be working itself into my working vocabulary now.  I endeavor to use terms that are neither eu- nor dysphemistic.  Some performers have based their schtick on dysphemism:  George Carlin, Don Rickles, Howard Stern.  The spiritual teacher Osho peppered his speech with dysphemisms to relieve them of their emotional impact through familiarity.  But that’s not precisely the sense of “offensive” that brings me to my present subject.

  What offends one depends on one’s background, training, and experience.  The U. S. Supreme Court acknowledged this in their, “community standards,” ruling on obscenity.  I know from experience that a smell that is pleasant one day can be nauseatingly offensive the next.  Eat enough of something to make yourself sick, or get a spoiled batch of some favorite food, and you’ll know what I mean.

  It’s the “anger and annoyance” and morally judgmental senses of offensiveness that I am here to examine now.  One of my spiritual teachers taught me that it is equally spiritually unevolved to take offense as purposely to give it.  One who innocently “offends” another bears no responsibility for the offense… and I have covered that aspect of this idea ad nauseam.

  One can choose not to be offended.  This is my point.  One can accept what is and decide not to let reality ruffle her feathers.  I perhaps had an inside track in coming to the decision to choose not to be offended, being an ultra-Virgo (Sun, Mercury, Jupiter, Chiron, Ceres and Vesta in Ninth House Virgo) attuned to any little flaw, omission, false note or anomaly in observable reality.  When one can’t ignore shit, it is in one’s interest to learn to accept it.

  My life is ever so much happier now that I’m not offended by all that stuff, but there is an awkward aspect to it.  The stuff is still there.  I still notice it, and I tend to talk and write about it.  It is interesting.  That’s something I discovered:  stuff that was once offensive is now interesting.  I might even want to do something about some of these things, and I’m more empowered to do so now that I’m not wasting energy on taking offense.

  Oh, but then there is the way others react to my commenting on our interesting shared reality.  Many are offended.  Imagine that!  Often, people interpret my dispassionate reporting on things that offend them as either an attempt to offend or an expression of being offended.  If I tell them they are mistaken about that, they might even find that offensive.  It’s an interesting aspect of social reality — something to think about.

  The YCYOR concept naturally comes to mind in this context:  you create your own reality.  All of us, thinking, dreaming, planning, plotting, fearing, desiring, working and playing, collectively create our shared external reality whether we like it or not, whether we’re willing to accept the responsibility or not.  Each of us individually has the power to create his or her OWN inner reality or to allow others the power to manipulate our thoughts and feelings.

  It seems reasonable to me that I am responsible for my own reality, since I have the power to create it.  From that, it follows that I am not responsible for anyone else’s reality.  It also seems reasonable and prudent to teach children at a very early age that they can choose happiness, self-respect, adequacy and personal power, or not, but whatever we or they choose, we’re responsible for our own creations.

  Defensiveness — the ubiquitous reliable marker for neurosis, guilt, shame and low self-esteem, might soon be extinct if everyone understood that nothing is necessarily intrinsically personally offensive.  Imagine a world where everyone knows and understands his or her own power.  Imagine.
  

  • 3:28 pm
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