Tom's Views

Low vision, faulty legs or arms, deafness, and the symptoms of simple aging can heap big challenges on people so affected, especially in dating. Further, not only is there the challenge of the disability itself to cope with, but also, the negative ways most non-disabled folks regard the disabled.  Many disabled people report that they’ve struggled over the years to date people they find attractive. The root of that struggle is this: When the non-disabled learn of the disability, they immediately bolt. They avoid dating a disabled person. This generally happens regardless of whether people tell them early on, or hesitate several weeks. No matter how well the non-disabled know the disabled, once they dub the disabled as such, natural selection seems to dictate that any romance that might have been, vanishes forever. Most healthy folks avoid the disabled men. So the disabled might as well become asexual.

Some disabilities hamper more disabled women in this way than disabled men, while for others more men are negatively impacted socially than women.  Just about any disability that impairs a man’s ability to provide well for a woman and family, discourages non-disabled women from dating him.  Likewise, any disability that impairs a woman’s ability to properly birth and raise children
discourages men from dating her.  The result is that most disabled people, regardless of sex, do not regularly date much less marry.  They are left alone and isolated.  While the healthy are lonely as they look for that “perfect mate,” so too are the disabled while they search for that rare person (disabled or not), who accepts them and who does not regard their disabilities as disabilities.

To be sure, the non-disabled (those in perfect health) will often be courteous, and perhaps even pity disabled persons, as they attempt to secure their places in Heaven with God, once their life here on Earth is done. But they’ll likely never seriously date a disabled person. They will rarely be in awe of him.  So, non-disabled women will never see disabled men as acceptable mates. He will never be the “perfect” man in their eyes due to his disability.  Nor will the disabled woman ever become the goddess in his eyes. Not even the holy enticement of the eternally good afterlife makes most of those in perfect health truly love disabled people, and view them as complete equals.

But this is so sad, because dating a disabled person can be one of the most rewarding experiences a mortal can enjoy. I’ve dated numerous disabled women and non-disabled alike in my time. I have found that helping a blind woman locate a coat that she’s misplaced, read a users’ guide for a new appliance, or describe what’s happening on TV screen to someone who cannot see it themselves makes me feel quite useful and needed.  It erases any guilt I might otherwise feel, for being too idle, and fills me with a greater sense of
meaningful purpose.  There is no more justifiable way to spend your hours, than in the service of others.  Indeed, I feel much less lonely while helping.  I sense that I’m truly making a positive difference in the life of a wheelchair-bound person for example, when I push them to lunch, or around the mall as we shop.

Helping others is perhaps the safest, yet most effective antidepressant.  It makes us feel good about ourselves, and the disabled represent a ready-supply of opportunities for helping.  Perhaps people at large would not be so depressed these days, if they’d only help others  little more. People are simply too focused on themselves and what they want for themselves.  This narcissism can leave us feeling quite sad, especially when we so often do not get what we want while believing strongly how much we deserve it.

But dating a disabled person definitely lifts spirits.  While helping them find greater happiness and joy in spite of their plights may not give you precisely what you think you want in life, helping nonetheless will attend well to your rightest needs.  True, you probably won’t make lots of money serving others day-in and day-out.  But you’ll experience increased health; both physical and mental.  You’ll truly get outside of yourself, and thus, observe a much longer-lasting sense of achievement than any job promotion, bigger house, or better car can ever provide.  Plus, you’ll lower your stress levels, as it’s much easier to please someone you’re helping than a cranky boss and his or her ever-increasing expectations of you.  So if you feel sad that you’re not making a bigger positive difference in this world, then by all means consider dating a disabled person.  I believe that the disabled were probably put here to not only test the brawn of compassion in the healthy, but also to help the healthy remain healthy by providing endless opportunities for meaningful service.  So help yourself and the disabled as well.  Date the disabled.  If you have any need whatsoever to give of yourself, you defiitely won’t be sorry.

Tom Hesley

Related Posts

• Darwinism: Bad News For Blind Lovers
• There Is A Place For Pity Love

Is it wrong to seek different things from lovers than what you can provide to them yourself?  Often, people accuse each other of hypocrisy when the accused harbor dating double standards.  Men, they say, want women of greater attractiveness than they themselves offer (average men want stunning women, heavy men want thin women, thin men want curvy women, dumb men want smart women, and so on).  Women likewise, want more attractive men (poor women want rich men, good girls want bad boys, the wheelchair-bound want those who can walk, et al). Double standards in relationships abound when one partner wants something from the other that he himself does not (cannot) offer in return. 

Since  no   two people offer   exactly the same   sets of desires and gifts in love, we’ll never completely get rid of dating double standards.  In fact, the whole desire / gratification mechanism upon which love affairs flourish, depends on the presence of dating double standards.  So it makes little sense to object to double standards in dating relationships, since they’re so ubiquitous and so   necessary.  While it’s fair to strive to avoid them when making public policy (as in dolling out medical care and other pursuits that serve the common good), eliminating dating double standards would destroy the very foundations upon which successful relationships rest.  Healthy romances rely on healthy amounts of double standards in relationships.Thus, holding a double standard in love is no character flaw because double standards in relationships cannot be avoided.

Also consider that people want what they want, regardless of what they offer in exchange.  You don’t just stop wanting the things you do just because the crowd thinks you should.  In fact, who among that crowd can rightly say whether a person actually deserves to get what they desire, except for the people from whom they’re seeking it? Ideally in a truly free society, people spend little or no time changing what they want, and all of their time working on getting it because, that’s human nature and it’s what makes the worlds of love and economics go around. 

Fishermen like steak but have only fish to trade for it.  So, should they renounce their desires for steak because they have no steak to give?  No. They ought instead, to find someone who’s willing to give them steak for their fish, rather than doing without steak altogether.  

Only if it turns out that absolutely no one who has steak wants to trade it for fish, would it make sense for the fishermen to give up their hopes of ever enjoying steak.  Here, the double standard of fishermen looking for someone with steak when they themselves cannot return it in kind is only “bad” when no trader can accommodate it.  It matters in no other respect than this, what the crowd thinks.  Likewise, if an average-looking guy desires dating top-notch women, he ought to be able to do so without crowd ridicule for holding a double standard.  It’s between him and the women he likes.  If a beautiful lady likes him back, then the crowd should support them and not act to sabotage them.  

Indeed by definition of the word   want,   we humans want what we have not.  The fact that we do not have it (deprivation) is one big reason why we want it in the first place.  If we had it already, then we would not want it.  So we cannot really stop desiring a person or thing unless we actually get it.  Repressing our desire for certain classes of lovers just to appease the double standard accusers   does not   eliminate the desire nor does it really eliminate the double standard in relationships.  Repression may in fact, intensify it (in that we sometimes desire more, the most forbidden people).  So it’s best to avoid purging a dating double standard by renouncing the needs that make it up. 

Further, we cannot easily change what we want.  While we can decide not to act to gratify a particular desire, again, the desire remains unchanged usually.  So it’s ironic that people offended at dating double standards would get so riled up at them, since the people they accuse of holding them cannot usually alter the particular desires that serve as premises for said double standards.

Finally, since desires cannot in any largely practical ways be altered, a person’s best bet at fulfillment is to actually   gratify   his love desires; not renounce or repress them.  He should seek to delight his desires as long as he has them and as long as doing so hurts no one.  Why?  Because if people don’t get what they want in love, then they’re unfulfilled and will probably remain so for as long as the desires persist.  Lacking individual fulfillment imposes costs to society as well. 

So, seeking someone who compliments us (offers things we do not (cannot) offer in return) may make us hypocrites.  But so what?  It’s better to be dubbed a hypocrite and accused of maintaining a dating double standard in a relationship, than to live a forever-longing life. Thus, dating double standards are okay.  Without double standards in relationships, there would be far less reason to have a relationship in the first place.

Tom Hesley

Related Posts

• Definition: Offensive Dating Double Standard

A doctor said once that the most meaningful formula for determining a person’s   ideal body weight   for women is not necessarily the healthful range of the body mass indes (BMI) calculation or what the scale or weight charts say.  But rather,  finding ideal body weight   is best done by noting how you feel.  If you seem bloated and sluggish frequently, then you may want to try   losing weight and see if those sensations disappear.  If you’re tired or weak, then gaining a few pounds may be in order. 

This is not to say that  BMI  and weight measures are irrelevant.  These can indeed show us how far from ideal body weight and fat composition we are.  But, ideal body weight is not determined so much by   the numbers   as it is by our overall health. If we feel good and our blood values indicate normal cholesterol and triglycerides readings, and our joints do not hurt, then our weight is fairly close to ideal.

Studies show that when choosing between being 10 pounds overweight or 10 pounds underweight, the healthier alternative is to choose underweight.  Underweight rats and mice live almost a third longer than their overweight colleagues.  Plus, they’re healthier throughout their longer lives.  This appears to also hold true for humans.

Bone size is a small factor in determining your ideal body weight.  Measure the circumference of your wrists with a tape ruler.  If it reads less than 6 inches, then you have a small frame.  If it reads 6.5’’, then you’re a medium frame.  Readings above 6.5’’ suggest a large frame.  But keep in mind that a large frame only raises ideal body weight by perhaps ten to twenty pounds.  To paraphrase Whoopi Goldberg: It’s not about the bone, baby.  It’s not about the bone. 

If a lady really wants to catch the guys’ eyes, she might consider getting her weight down to 105 – 110 pounds if that’s constitutes ideal body weight for her.  If she loses weight the correct way (and the correct way   is not   to starve), I can just about guarantee that she’d feel much better than when she’s twenty or thirty pounds overweight, and she’ll look much sexier besides.  Often, people with allergies, who then lose significant weight, lose these allergies too. 

If you want to eliminate parallax error when reading your scale, get one of those digital ones.  With them, you get the same reading no matter what angle you view them from.

It’s true that being underweight does not mean that one is healthy necessarily.  However, if proper nutrition is maintained at this lower weight, it usually  creates improved health.  Thinness has a bad reputation these days because people confuse it with anorexia, which is simply a lack of appetite.  Though thinness is indeed a symptom of anorexia, it does not mean that all thin people are anorexics.  Nor does this mean that all anorexics are thin.  Nor does it imply that in order to get thin one must become anorexic. 

The media pummels us these days with images of thin people whose health is failing, and it attributes their frailty their thinness.  But this is not usually the case however.  Thinness, in and of itself,   does not   cause poor health unless we’re talking extremely thin (like a 5’6’’ woman who weighs 70 pounds – that’s   too thin indeed).  The poor health in thin people comes more from malnutrition than just the fact that they’re thin.  Show me a thin woman who is not malnourished, and I’d say that she is a paragon of good health.

Also, eating too many refined carbs (flour, added sugars, concentrated foods, food parts (as opposed to whole foods) Etc.) can cause irritability and depression as well as excess weight.  Bad food makes us feel bad.  It heaps on the pounds and turns merely annoying issues into overwhelming crises.  It complicates controlling one’s temper by promoting a fighting spirit.  Added sugar is an enemy of benevolence in my experience, just like caffeine.  Good whole foods however, make us feel good.  When properly nourished, it’s easier to take life’s curves in stride and thus, to maintain a positive outlook.  Proper nutrition helps us to greet the problems of each new day with zeal, resolve, and level-headedness.  Plus, whole foods promote healthhier, more attractive looks too.

Tom Hesley

Related Posts

• Am I A Bigot For Wanting A Tall Thin Woman?
• Fasting Alone
• Prettiest Women Have BMIs Of 15 To 20
• Suing McDonnalds For Obesity
• Thoughts on “The Fat Ideal” 

References

• Anorexia   definition on Wikipedia
• Body Mass Index (BMI)   definition on Wikipedia
• Ideal Body Weight   definition

I do not get many headaches these days but did experience lots more of them per month some thirty years ago.  Since then, I’ve identified numerous headache causes   in me, and with some success, have eliminated them from my life; thus my near-zero headache experiences nowadays.  Below, I list the tried-and-true headache causes for me and advice for avoiding them: 

• Caffeine. Caffeine has been the most frequent of all the   causes of headaches   for me.  So, Know your caffeine limits.  Many people underestimate how debilitating a caffeine-withdraw headache can be.  I myself can only drink roughly six to eight cups of decaffeinated coffee per week before developing chronic headaches; less if it’s regular coffee.  So be sure to limit caffeine consumption.
• Too little sleep.  So, get enough sleep.  Make sure you’re regularly getting a good night’s sleep.  Sleep deprivation can also cause headaches, and there are no vitamin supplements I know that will lessen them.  No vitamin in the world, and no amount of caffeine  is a good substitute for a full eight to nine hours of shuteye.  When I was younger, I believed I could get by on six hours of sleep.  Of course this required mass consumption of caffeine to temporarily combat; though I still fell asleep in class with a coffee in my hand. Insufficient sleep always got the best of me; no matter how much caffeine I consumed.
• Too Little Good Food.  So, by all means make sure you’re eating enough.  Some diets I tried in the eighties left me feeling very hungry and made my head ache a lot.  Then, in the late 1990s, I tried a few three-day fasts; where I ate no food or calories whatsoever.  Headaches often came during the second and into the third day, although I’m not sure if this was due to actual food deprivation, or if the food I had been eating contained chemicals that, during the fast, I began withdrawing from.  But after talking with a few doctors about fasting, I’m quite sure that this is a risky thing to do for most people.  But the absence of food seems to be the common element in these sorts of headaches.  Eat well, and you’ll eliminate this cause of headaches. 
• Dark Chocolate.  So, minimize dark chocolate consumption.  Consume only small amounts of dark chocolate (say an ounce or two per day), green tea (one cup per day maximum), and in general, any food or drink that contains caffeine.  Dark chocolate contains more caffeine than milk chocolate.  Indeed, dark chocolate is a highly concentrated form of chocolate that really revvs up my metabolism, and a couple days later, leaves me with crushing headaches.  Cffeine has been a root cause of most of my headaches, because it appears in so many of the foods I enjoyed as a college student. 
• Stress.  So, Reduce stress.  Either learn to cope in relaxed ways with the people and situations that cause you stress, or where possible, avoid these situations altogether.  Any stimulus that raises blood pressure can create stress on the body, and cause headaches of the nastiest variety besides.  So if you find that you’re always fighting with a particular someone, then get that someone out of your life if possible.
• Alcohol.  So, reduce, or better yet eliminate alcohol.  Once I stopped drinking some eight years ago, the number of headaches per year I got fell by at least half.  Anyone who’s consumed alcoholic beverages such as beer, schnapps, vodka, rum, gin, et al, knows that it takes only several ounces of them to produce hangovers.  Hangover symptoms include the headaches, spins, stomach churns, weakness, and other symptoms of dehydration and alcohol withdraw.  Three or four vodka martinis would leave me with hangovers that took several days to completely clear up.  So if you think you’re getting too many headaches, please consider giving up drinking. 
• Pain Relievers.  So, take pain relievers if you must. However, avoiding headaches in the first place is the best approach for maintaining a low rate of headache incidents.  But I admit that it’s probably impossible to completely avoid all headaches.  So on those occasions that you do get a headache, a couple aspirin, ibuprofen, or acetaminophen tablets can work wonders.  But keep in mind that many drugs in the pain reliever class especially, typically have side effects, and can stop working if you over-use them.  So for this reason, I view taking drugs to cure a headache a last resort, commando sort of action.  Sometimes, you can actually get headaches from the headache pills themselves; particularly if they contain caffeine, as some do. 
• Excess Anything.  I’ve gotten headaches from any number of foods if I consumed too much.  Diet pop, sugar, salt, preservatives, meat, et al, all can cause headaches if consumed in large quantities.  So a life of moderation can help control headaches greatly. 

But alas, if headaches persist and do not respond to the above techniques to reduce them, then see your doctor immediately.  Do not put it off, because an ongoing severe headache can signal a serious medical problem; one that could be fatal.  So, never ignore your headaches, as they’re a signal to you that your body either does not like what you’re putting into it, how you are caring for it, or that there’s some potentially dangerous ailment in progress.  Listen to it, because there’s no such thing as a normal headache.  Headaches should never become routine. 

Tom Hesley

Related Posts

• Tom’s Diary –> Abstaining from Caffeine
• Tom’s Diary –> Caffeine Headaches
• Tom’s Diary –> Chocolate Forbidden
• Tom’s Diary –> Excess Refined Sugar When…

Some of life entails defying the odds, that’s true. However, in the healthy person, another big part of it involves determining and then  accepting limitations.

Accepting limitations, a healthy supply of resignation regarding things we can’t easily change, is essential for sustained happiness. Today we spend too much time teaching people how to push excessively hard against their natures, and not enough time on how to be happy with what they have. As a result, society is chalk full of stressed-out, depressed, unhappy, and therefore, unhealthy people because they’ve not learned sufficiently well how to accept their   personal limitations.

Since we can’t objectively measure yet what a person’s real limits are, people tend with dogmatic fervor, to believe that such personal limitations do not exist or are way less formidable than they actually are. Many assume that what they don’t see   cannot exist.  We know well the Pollyanna-style rhetoric: You can do and be anything you want. To them, accepting limitations seems weak, lazy, whiny, and a sure sign of lacking personal responsibility and success potential. 

But like the blind person who wants to be an airplane pilot, history abounds with similarly fruitless pursuits.  When we fail at accepting our   personal limitations, we fail ourselves.  Would it be wise to conclude of the blind man, that he lacks enough of the value of   personal responsibility,   and that this is why he cannot fly an airplane?  I think not.   

We cannot realize much potential where there is little potential to start with. Failing to fully accept limitations can lead to chronic disappointment and senses of inadequacy.  Yet therapists get rich because patients enlist their aid to avoid even acknowledging their personal limitations. Therapists help them milk dry cows and to lessen the effects of the natural frustrations when the utter remains dry. In short: They pay therapists to help them avoid accepting their peronal limitations rather than simply owning up to them. 

Now it’s true that people would seem to be able to accomplish   more   with a therapist encouraging them, as evidenced by therapy’s growing popularity and increased success that’s attributed to it. But that’s so unnatural, and creates an unnecessary and costly dependence on the therapist. Indeed, I might have continued working [in the corporate world] if I’d wanted to keep seeing a therapist and refused to embrace my own personal limitations. But I wished not to remain tethered and reliant on therapy just to get me through the next week.

More people than ever before utilize the employee assistance programs these days, because society forces us to overly repress and cope via therapy with our personal limitations. But at some point, as happened with me, one must wonder how much of his success is due to his will and natural abilities, and how much comes via his therapist. Is he really succeeding if his therapist is always close by to pick him back up after a bruising confrontation with his personal limitations?  Yes, it appears that people are more successful these days. But this may be hollow success – a product of therapeutic propping as well as excessive collectivism and unhealthy conformance.

Currently, we can’t objectively measure how much each of nature, nurture, and choice contributes to personal success. No, our genes do not exclusively determine our behavior, but they do strongly influence it, and as time passes, we’re finding that they guide it more than previously thought. Even more so does the   combination   of genes and environment, particularly in the childhood years.  Personal limitatios do not derive exclusively from lackng willpower to overcome.  Some limits simply cannot be overcome, no matter how willfully we try. 

Again, I’m not saying that it’s impossible to do something different than what is born and nurtured into us. However, too drastically going against one’s grain, particularly in directions of lacking aptitude, can lead to a lifetime of alienation, disappointment, dependence on therapy, and unrealized potential in the areas in which one is   actually   suited to succeed.  We need to in some significant degree, embrace our natural abilities as well as accept our personal limitations as a  simple attribute of humanity

Now understand that I believe society should leave the individual to his dream quests. Despite the perceived long odds of a dream ever coming true, never should the desires of the individual be overpowered by   “the people”   so long as his pursuits aren’t harming anyone. But again, an enlightened society must also recognize that people that it deems unsuccessful are not always just lazy and dumb and avoiding accountability.  So they should not bear full personal responsibility for their failures. Perhaps they’re just fighting the forces of destiny; a fight that could be lessened by a healthy dose of acceptance of our limitations; both in ourselves and in others.  Society needs to better accept limitations of its members, just as members should accept limitations happily within themselves.  Maximal personal responsibility does not eliminate all personal limitations. 

Tom Hesley

Related Posts

• Against NFB’s Self Sufficiency Philosophy
• Free Will, Yes, But Determinism Too!
• Money Not Only Measure of Success
• More Than Effort To Outperform Our Parents
• On Our Parents Defining Our Destiny
• Succeeding While Knowing Limits

I’d point out that though more people would achieve higher levels of success if they pushed very hard against the sense that they’d fail (whether that impression is rational or otherwise), we should nonetheless, not ignore the negative impacts of blindly forging ahead without considering one’s built-in limitations.  Pushing yourself too far in defiance of your true desires and talents often results in the following effects:

• Increased incidents of mental illness, physical problems, and stress. Indeed, we’re seeing drastic upsurges in health issues and early deaths due to stress. Heck, people can’t even sleep the whole night through anymore without taking a pill. They can’t eat meals anymore without taking an antacid.
• Lowering of prevailing moral standards, which I suggest is due in large degree to decreased compassion for one’s neighbor. If we believe that people deserve what they reap because they reap what they sew, and that they reap what they sew because they have complete control of what they sew, then we’re less willing to empathize with another’s difficulties. Disregarding the complicatedness that they faced while sewing fosters a highly critical and judgmental attitude in how we regard our friends, family, coworkers, and lovers. It supplies us more reasons to suspect another of laziness, and then when we find anything that resembles laziness, we’re less likely to look beneath the surface to figure out whether that laziness actually results from willful and thus culpable belief patterns, or something less voluntary. When we hold people _too_ accountable for their choices without considering the involuntary nature of their motivations, we’re more likely to fight and argue with them, to form cliques, to wrongfully exclude, to bully, and generally become more difficult to interact positively with. Society as a result becomes less desirable to live in.
• More Conflict. Imagine yourself working on an auto assembly line. The boss wants you to record the colors of each passing car, because everyone else is too busy. Now wouldn’t it be ridiculous for him to ridicule you because you can’t tell colors apart if you were color blind? Such misplaced blame would tend to make you a little upset, particularly when that job shelters, clothes, and feeds you. We know that when the boss wrongly refuses to accept a person’s limitations as being beyond their control, the victims get angry, and sometimes violent. Not only on the individual level, but as a nation, we do this to our neighbors as well. I’ve heard people from abroad say repeatedly that America treats their own citizenry well, but regards the rest of the world as second-class people. America looks down its collective nose at foreigners and says, “Hmmmm, you really should believe and do things differently than you do, because we have no use for you if you don’t. Or we’ll kill you if we disagree strongly enough. It should be as easy for you to succeed as it is for us. And if it isn’t? Well then, that’s too bad. Your failures are your own fault.” This attitude certainly doesn’t make for peaceful coexistence, does it.
• Heightened sense of inadequacy.  When we’re not doing what we really wish we were, and when we’re attempting to do well what we wish we weren’t, we injure our self confidence.  If we choose a career because we think we’ll get rich, but lack the patience and tenacity to fully master its numerous mundane details, we still may perform satisfactorily at it; indeed, well enough to actually become rich.  But we would not find complete fulfillment in the pursuit, because we’d know deep inside that we’re not as qualified as we would be if we actually loved what we were doing, and felt at ease doing it.  It’s indeed easier to exude genuine self confidence while one utilizes his talents and desires rather than dismisses them due to the motive of money. 
• Dissatisfaction with work.

While it may be desirable for society to advance individually as well as collectively, we should not dismiss the pitfalls of such ill-gotten advances.   People attempting to compensate for lacking desire or talent in their career with sheer willpower to succeed at it is bad. Perhaps this [obsessive drive to achieve high degrees of success] at the cost of our deepest dreams and truest potential going unrealized, is hurting humanity.  Indeed, it’s not as noteworthy a force once we consider its downsides. 

Tom Hesley

Related Posts

• Free Will, Yes, But Determinism Too!
• Limits of Success
• Rising Above One’s Raising
• Succeeding While Knowing Limits

So why do I use the phrases “total acceptance” and “total equality” interchangeably? 

Total acceptance and total equality are, in detailed semantic ways, distinct concepts.  But I often use them interchangeably in this blog, because they are so similar.  They’re so dependent on one another that you typically can’t have one without the other.  That is: We can’t treat the gays equally with the “more esteemed” heterosexual folks, unless we accept their life styles as equally valid and respectable. If we view their orientation as “less,” then we’ve lost the power to completely accept them, and along with that goes our ability to treat them with genuine equality. 

No, neither complete acceptance or complete equality imply “the same  outcome,” but refer to the same   chance   to make similar results happen.   Some folks are better suited to perform certain jobs than others.  I make a better writer for example than a firefighter.  Now total acceptance   does not   mean that if I go to the fire station and request to work for them, that I should be hired.  I can’t conclude that I’ve not been accepted just because I did not get the job.  Indeed, a person’s skill level and aptitude in a discipline, matter here.  That is, my being turned down because I lack the necessary skills and aptitude to perform the position well does not necessarily violate the equality precept.  However, if I do have the required know-how, then I should be considered   equally   along with others who also possess similar skills in similar degree.  Even if I happen to be gay, this should hold.  Bt it canot hold unless in the eyes of the law, and on a deeper moral level, I am completely accepted by potential employers, or at least accepted enough that prejudices do not exert an undue influence over the decision to hire me or not.  The laws can force employers to accept me, at least enough to hire me. But   no law   however, can make some accept me if they wish not to, and this makes enforcing equal rights difficult. 

In fact, I’venot established complete acceptance in the eyes of the employer, just because the law protects my right to equal treatment.  For complete equality, we must look beyond the laws, to the realms of moral acceptance; which rest deep in the internal psycological makeup of each of us.  Totalacceptance I suspect, would occur when we can view someone who has been heretofore objectionable and thus rejected in some way, and say to ourselves truthfully that we do not, in any way or degree, object to them any longer.  For the homosexual, this means that people would see him or her without the so-often-accompanying knee-jerk reaction of revulsion, and welcome him into their midst for his person-hood and the skills he brings to the table. 

But of course, the level of acceptance cannot be legislated.  While we might force employers to treat people somewhat equally with laws (and this is a step in the right direction), we can’t make them accept the person on these deeper levels, and as long as we’ve not attained this level of complete acceptance, the laws that help ensure equal treatment will always be challenged and require periodic extension.  But if complete acceptance wasto ever really happen, then the laws geared to encourage equality would no longer be challenged; at least not on grounds of sexual orientation or the dimensions laid out in the Civil Rights Act, such as race, sex, religion, creed, et al.  From this, I infer that   without complete acceptance, you can’t have genuinely complete equality.  Complete equality is an external manifestation of complete acceptance just as thunder and lightning are external manifestations of a thunderstorm, and unless you’re close to a volcano, you can’t have lightning without a storm to host it.  In fact, increased acceptance can inspire increased equality and reduced acceptance curtails the genuineness of equality.  In this regard, the existence of equality derives from the existence of acceptance. 

But also, complete acceptance would seem to require complete equality, or equality in some measure, to encourage people to more fully accept each other.  Since we don’t legislate acceptance, but only equality, we often create rules that foster equaltreatment of people with the hope that this will teach current and future generations how to accept each other.  If an employer is compelled by law to treat people equally for example, then holding on to oppressive attitudes becomes more difficult for many reasons.  For one, laws of equality (the Civil Rights Act et al) say that employers are not allowed to discriminate on the basis of various personal attributes.  Over generations, the laws encourage a more open exchange of cultures and ideas among people of differing backgrounds, and from those exchanges over time, grows a fuller appreciation of the person.  Different people work more together, and those who initially hold prejudiced and bigoted ideas, often learn that they were wrong once they work side-by-side with those they once shunned. In this way, enforced equality often brings about acceptance; though this process can take many years to complete. 

So, equality and acceptance, though distinct concepts as noted, are in fact highly and symbiotically linked.  You can’t really have one in full without the other.  So when we’re discussing one of these, we’re implicitly discussing the other one too.  Thus, I have used the phrases “complete equality” and “complete acceptance” synonymously for these reasons; though I do get that they’re different concepts. 

Tom Hesley

We in the chat group argued over whether to eat, drink, and be merry today, for we know not what will come tomorrow.  All of them seemed more reckless with their lives than I was.  Indeed, I advocated a   careful-living   approach as follows: 

We all die eventually, whether we live healthy lives, or lives or reckless abandon. However, our quality of life while we’re here is markedly better if we take care of ourselves. I’d opt for this higher life quality myself.

Tom Hesley