What will change?

This is for encouragement, ideas, and support for people going through a faith transition no matter where you hope to end up. This is also the place to laugh, cry, and love together.
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Thoughtful
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What will change?

Post by Thoughtful » Sat May 30, 2020 8:03 pm

Between COVID, riots, executive orders, upcoming election...I feel like the world may look very, very different for us all in a year, 2 years. What do you think will emerge?

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alas
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Re: What will change?

Post by alas » Sat May 30, 2020 9:09 pm

This reminds me of an old song, that doesn’t get played much. It was written when the WWII generation thought the boomers were ruining the world and of course blaming the younger generation for all the messes they had actually started. It was called “we didn’t start the fire”. It mentions a lot of disasters that most people, even the ones who lived through them don’t remember. Another idea I am thinking is the expression that the more things change, the more they stay the same. So, basically saying, not much will really change. We might get another president who caters to the very rich, Or keep the one we got who really caters to the rich, and the world will pay lip service to climate change and keep on burning fossil fuels, and the rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer.

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Give It Time
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Re: What will change?

Post by Give It Time » Sat May 30, 2020 9:28 pm

One change I would really love to see and I think is very possible is improving assistive technology for the hard of hearing and deaf. I am hard of hearing and have recently embraced what the Deaf community does to better navigate life in a world full of hearing privilege. I jokingly say "I'm in it for the tech". I wasn't looking forward to masks and not being able to read lips. However, a lot of people with standard hearing are facing hearing and comprehension challenges that the hard of hearing and deaf face. So, assistive technology and progress in that area is no longer a niche offering, but will have mass market appeal. I would love to see improvement in that area.

As for overall society, I don't know what will change, but I know what I will change.

When I saw the clear waters in the canals, I started looking at this pandemic very differently.

I'm going to be eating less meat and trying to exploit animals less. I figure this pandemic started because of human exploitation of animals. I'm not going to go 100% vegan and I will still wear leather shoes, because a vegan diet isn't satiating and leather is the only thing the doesn't blister my feet, but I will be more aware of what I choose to put in and on my body.

I will be more aware of my carbon footprint. I don't plan to become a full environmentalist, but I can definitely do better than I've been doing.

I have two brothers in Asia and they believe this is not our last pandemic and the next one is likely to be worse. The brother that has lived in Asia for a quarter of a century puts the next one out at about a decade. I think he may be right. Going forward, I will have a three months supply of most goods. I will also pay down my debt and think long and hard before going into debt in the future.

I think there are people who are going to look around at their lives and world and make individual changes, like the woman at my work who is going to be washing her hands more. I think there are people who believe we had all these things before and we will have them again, so why change what we do and how we live?
At 70 years-old, my older self would tell my younger self to use the words, "f*ck off" much more frequently. --Helen Mirren

Thoughtful
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Re: What will change?

Post by Thoughtful » Sun May 31, 2020 9:46 am

alas wrote:
Sat May 30, 2020 9:09 pm
This reminds me of an old song, that doesn’t get played much. It was written when the WWII generation thought the boomers were ruining the world and of course blaming the younger generation for all the messes they had actually started. It was called “we didn’t start the fire”. It mentions a lot of disasters that most people, even the ones who lived through them don’t remember. Another idea I am thinking is the expression that the more things change, the more they stay the same. So, basically saying, not much will really change. We might get another president who caters to the very rich, Or keep the one we got who really caters to the rich, and the world will pay lip service to climate change and keep on burning fossil fuels, and the rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer.
If you mean Billy Joel, its not that old, is it? I'm a xennial....know this song well, as do my gen Z kids. My son posted about it yesterday.

Thoughtful
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Re: What will change?

Post by Thoughtful » Sun May 31, 2020 9:47 am

Give It Time wrote:
Sat May 30, 2020 9:28 pm
One change I would really love to see and I think is very possible is improving assistive technology for the hard of hearing and deaf. I am hard of hearing and have recently embraced what the Deaf community does to better navigate life in a world full of hearing privilege. I jokingly say "I'm in it for the tech". I wasn't looking forward to masks and not being able to read lips. However, a lot of people with standard hearing are facing hearing and comprehension challenges that the hard of hearing and deaf face. So, assistive technology and progress in that area is no longer a niche offering, but will have mass market appeal. I would love to see improvement in that area.

As for overall society, I don't know what will change, but I know what I will change.

When I saw the clear waters in the canals, I started looking at this pandemic very differently.

I'm going to be eating less meat and trying to exploit animals less. I figure this pandemic started because of human exploitation of animals. I'm not going to go 100% vegan and I will still wear leather shoes, because a vegan diet isn't satiating and leather is the only thing the doesn't blister my feet, but I will be more aware of what I choose to put in and on my body.

I will be more aware of my carbon footprint. I don't plan to become a full environmentalist, but I can definitely do better than I've been doing.

I have two brothers in Asia and they believe this is not our last pandemic and the next one is likely to be worse. The brother that has lived in Asia for a quarter of a century puts the next one out at about a decade. I think he may be right. Going forward, I will have a three months supply of most goods. I will also pay down my debt and think long and hard before going into debt in the future.

I think there are people who are going to look around at their lives and world and make individual changes, like the woman at my work who is going to be washing her hands more. I think there are people who believe we had all these things before and we will have them again, so why change what we do and how we live?
I love this. I hope for flexible work hours, work from home optopm, better sick policies, better health care.

I fear we will get things like police state, (more) genocide, more slavery to oligarchy...

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Corsair
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Re: What will change?

Post by Corsair » Sun May 31, 2020 11:01 am

There is a paradox in all of this. Most of the time, things don't change very much. But then something big happens and nobody saw it coming. But after it has occurred, the signs were there all along. This is the problem with revolutions and big changes, because signs for change may exist all around, but the big change still ends up as a surprise.

For example, the fall of the Soviet Union did not get foreseen by anyone. But long after he resigned from Soviet leadership, Mikhail Gobachev stated that the explosion at the Chernobyl reactor unintentionally led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The catastrophic explosion of reactor 4 served to publicly show all of the cracks in the Soviet system. The reactor had a design flaw that was not well understood until long after the post-mortem investigation as to the cause of the explosion in 1986. The Soviet empire had numerous social and economic flaws that were finally triggered by reactor control rods tipped with too much graphite.

We simply don't know what will be the catalyst that changes things. It's not unlike how it takes some combination of emotional events and logical issues to initiate a faith transition. Everyone on this board had something that led them here. Was there ever a case where a participant made plans to end up here? Not at all. We all eventually showed up when events aligned and an emotional break from the LDS church allowed us to look at the logical breaks in the LDS church.

Having only an emotional issue like a bad bishop often leaves people relying on the best aspects of LDS doctrine to remain active. "People are flawed, but the church is true." Finding out about doctrinal issues usually causes people to double down on how the church makes them "feel" good. It takes multiple converging challenges to initiate that revolution and change in religious thinking. We don't know what will truly cause the change.

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Red Ryder
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Re: What will change?

Post by Red Ryder » Sun May 31, 2020 11:13 am

Russians in Afghanistan.
JFK blown away
What else do we have to say
We didn’t start the fire
It was always burning
As the worlds turning...

Thanks alas..... The song ear worm has crawled inside my head!
“It always devolves to Pantaloons. Always.” ~ Fluffy

“I switched baristas” ~ Lady Gaga

“Those who do not move do not notice their chains.” ~Rosa Luxemburg

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alas
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Re: What will change?

Post by alas » Sun May 31, 2020 11:58 am

Give it time, I love your thoughts. There are things that I would love to see change, but I think sometimes I have lived too long to believe that other things will ever really change. I too have gone pretty close to vegan and I am watching the carbon footprint. We are looking into solar panels but with two houses and limited income, it is hard. But one solar panel guy told us, “frankly, with the tiny amount of electricity you guys use, it isn’t worth it as it will take 20 years to recoup the cost.” I wanted to tell him, “well frankly, we are not doing it for economic reasons, but so that the earth is still inhabitable when you are my age.“ but I stayed polite.

I would love to see better training for police, and I am saying this as someone who has lost a family member to an officer shot in the line of duty. But, I would love certain tactics made illegal, like knees on necks and choke holds. And I would love to see the police trained less to shoot first and ask questions later. Too often they go in with guns blazing and umm... find out they are in the wrong house, or find out it was a cell phone he had in his pocket, or find out he was 11 with a toy gun. None of the shoot first kind of stuff would have saved most officers killed in the line of duty. My own family member was killed when he pulled over two drunks, so a driving while intoxicated charge. But there is just too much police brutality. This most recent case, the cop had 18 brutality charges against him. He should have been fired long ago.

I would like to see denial made illegal. That would at least enable us to solve the problems instead of pretending they don’t exist. Kidding....not kidding. If we could just punish denial with capital punishment, it would move us forward real fast solving several of earth’s problems.

And Thoughtful, you are correct, the date on that Song is 1989, but that was when WWIIers were blaming boomers for wrecking the world. The date doesn’t matter though, because the point is this crap has been going on “since the world was turning”. A lot of what happened that the song mentions was when I was a kid, so during the reign of “the greatest generation to ever name themselves greatest.” We have had pandemics every 10 or 20 years, H1N1, Ebola, SARS. Most have not hit the US very hard, but then we never had a president write a disease off as a hoax and conspiracy before either, so I blame some of how bad this has been squarely on tRump. Race riots have actually improved since the 60s and so have lynchings/police killings of blacks, but that is still around. Fights over abortion, heavens people are still fighting over a woman’s right to birth control.

And red, JFK blown away. There was talk then about how that would change the world. I was a kid and our school principle led a ceremony to lower the school flag to half mast and part of his talk was the world needs to learn from this, but months later MLK blown away.

There is talk now about how corona virus will change the children, well JFK and MLK changed the boomers.

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Give It Time
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Re: What will change?

Post by Give It Time » Sun May 31, 2020 5:06 pm

alas wrote:
Sun May 31, 2020 11:58 am
...There are things that I would love to see change, but I think sometimes I have lived too long to believe that other things will ever really change...
I understand, very well. I agree about the solar panels. There is more than one way to measure what is worth doing.
At 70 years-old, my older self would tell my younger self to use the words, "f*ck off" much more frequently. --Helen Mirren

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MoPag
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Re: What will change?

Post by MoPag » Mon Jun 01, 2020 7:22 pm

alas wrote:
Sun May 31, 2020 11:58 am
There is talk now about how corona virus will change the children, well JFK and MLK changed the boomers.
Coronials.png
Coronials.png (177.51 KiB) Viewed 5312 times
...walked eye-deep in hell
believing in old men’s lies...--Ezra Pound

Thoughtful
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Re: What will change?

Post by Thoughtful » Tue Jun 02, 2020 7:51 am

MoPag wrote:
Mon Jun 01, 2020 7:22 pm
alas wrote:
Sun May 31, 2020 11:58 am
There is talk now about how corona virus will change the children, well JFK and MLK changed the boomers.
Coronials.png
Ha!

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Not Buying It
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Re: What will change?

Post by Not Buying It » Tue Jun 02, 2020 9:47 am

What will change? Who knows? Back to the Future 2 told me I would have a hoverboard by now.

Change hardly ever comes the way we expect it will. After the election of our first black president did I expect to see an increase in the rhetoric of white supremacy, did I expect to see white power push back so hard, did I expect to see the racism that had gone underground stick its ugly head up in the light of day? No, I didn't expect that, but looking back I should have, because hate always pushes back. We forget that, we think that the warm fuzzies we send out to the world will conquer everything, and everyone will want to live in peace and harmony if we can just get the message out - but hate always pushes back.

One thing is for sure. The next five months will be ugly in the U.S. What happens in America after that? There are many reasons to be hopeful - and many, many reasons to be very afraid.
"The truth is elegantly simple. The lie needs complex apologia. 4 simple words: Joe made it up. It answers everything with the perfect simplicity of Occam's Razor. Every convoluted excuse withers." - Some guy on Reddit called disposazelph

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