brother.md 12 KB
what should be done in this situation should I be compelled to spend the time with family members, even if I am not convinced that there is even any specific reason for us to be hanging out, other than habitaul ones habitual ones the habit of us always expecting to see family at family events that somehow the event is made more important and meaningful by attendance alone we are expected to be present, and therefore that canbe taken for granted and these minute little inflections of indulgeance become more readily presented I've long suspected that the interactions between myself and my brother, and especially between myself and his wife, do not bear the dignity and respect that should be expected of a healthy relationship worth pursuing and engaging that is, it leaves a lot to be desired, and even if there were some assurance that doing work on the relationship can result in improved communication and a more meaningful experience for all parties involved, I am not really sure what would result from the interactions such that I would feel the effort is worthy of being pursued what is it that I'm looking for in a relationship with my brother's wife? Am I hoping to learn from one another, or at least to have a better understanding of one another? Do I put up a roadblock to understanding her? what is my duty in that regard? am I to ensure that the exchange is authentic and meaningful? am I to ask very specific questions at specifc times to lead the conversation in a direction which is something more than her repeating whatever happens to be on her mind, with absolutely no interest in the other party or any exchange of ideas? i'm not even sure if we've had a conversation of any sort other than "how are you" or "how's working going?" and even when asked those questions, I can manage to not even respond to her without her noticing, because it's only but half a moment after she has finished speaking that she stops really paying attetion there is no listening from her end, it's just a brief moment where she pauses her speech, as though it's the expected custom, and if something else happens to be present for her to divert her attention, it will easily be directed to it and I am free to disengage from a contrived, fake conversation without having to spend more time, and without her noticing so how is that something worth salvaging? Should I be spending my time playing into that scenario over and over? If i had only 5 minutes to live, but she happened to be present, shoudl I be spending those 5 minutes pretending to have a conversation with someone who is completely disinterested in anything I mgiht have to say? I know what it's liek to have a meaningful conversation with people who listen and exchange ideas, because I've had them before and when you find yourself in one, you both learn and benefit from the experience there is nothing of the sort with my brother's wife, and I have lost all expectation that this will be the case as time goes on, the same has become true of my interactions with my Brother perhaps this began to happen more or less a few years ago but there were issues withour communication throughout our history earlier on, it was because of hte great divide in our ages and experience it would be difficult to engage someone who is that much younger, without also having to remove a great deal of your expression but it also taught me to interact with people of an older age, which was a great experience for me we grew apart, fo course, just by sheer distance and period of time between in-person interactions but then things became very political at a certain point, it would seem that he was forced to support ideologies or political organizations which were informed by such ideologies, because they were in lithey were in line with the type of work that he does as time goes on, he became increasingly invested in that way ofthinking, as he also began to study these subjects in university for example, when the Syrian issues began, he was fully on board with the uprising in the country as well as any uprising in any middle eastern country it is, perhaps, symbolic of the modest, meagre power of an individual against a giant tyrant the individual vs the state and this is a powerful image we are, of course, forced to presume that that is actually what is at play in this scenario it is, of course, deeper, and there is more than one way to approach the story in fact, there are various false dichotomies, approaching from divisions of opinion within a particular domain, and each of these domains approach the subjectge (or even just one, but truly it shoudl be considered as a range) of abstracted interpretations of the issue at hand in this case, we could say that one is supporting intervention vs not another is supporting western ideas vs eastern ones another is supporting one interventionalist government vs another interventionalist government in most cases, however, the stories surrounding the events of Syria are romanticized, and paint that need for diverting resources towards initiatives which promote a greater amount of change requiring more political power to propose, develop and support those initiatives and that is very empowering to people who are already engaged in similar initiatives here, which describes my brother, at least to some extent I don't believe that such a characterization is necessarily in bad faith, or unaccurate but perhaps it might not be the most nuanced nevertheless, the state of affairs is that we have a different divide over the issue mine has always been out of a need to uphold people's liberty - I don't like the idea of being a slave and I think that the best way to mitigate the threat of being a slave, especially in any sort of legal capacity, is it ensure that the rights and freedoms of every individual is maintained and upheld the problem with the language of supporting freedoms nad individuals is when it comes to expression because, whereas the original idea about expression was simply being able to speak to have opinions, and to be able to proclaim them in public this is an expression, and the simple manner of preserving that expression is to not allow the government to restrict speech the next step that process would be to use the government to increase safety from violence that the government is willing to apprehend and punish those who commit acts of violence but we have changed our ideas about what it means to enjoy freedom of expression rather than simply being able to say and do things (non-violent), it is not the expression of being that is, that you are able to embody a particular identity, and that there could be threats to your ability to do that there could be an imposition in the form of verbal criticism and what constitutes that criticism, being difficult to ascertain already, will need to be proven on the basis of the opinion of whomsoever believes themselves to be criticized we can see how this goes into a whole other conversation really fast, but keeping the overarching idea going forward, this leads to many new initiatives which require legislation, activism, new funding, new industries, and so forth and that these issues are closely connected with those which already supported the funding of interventionalist or developmental activities in foreign countries, means that there is a bias to accepting and adopting them readily in the case of my brother, this has lead him to participating in LGBT ideology, as well as BLM so these were already ideas that lead to us having a difference of opinion, and perhaps leading to conversations which can't really be had in hte presence of his children so, for the most part, since the act of responding to his opinion, especially as a refutation, is also the act of questioning his authority in front of his children, it becomes complicated to have a mature conversation about these subjects furthermore, it has been seen that having conversations about these subjects makes him angry and leads to his wife protesting, who is also present in all these instances because of this, it has become commonplace that he utters short representations of his ideas, without expecting any sort of retort, and we remain silent and just imagine that he is oblivious to whether or not we have any sort of opinion on the matter but this, of course, forces us to assume he is ignorant, or intolerant or that, he is wishing to be disrespectful by proclaiming something as a moral good which we do not believe in, which implies that we are not moral people, or that we are the ones who are ignorant of something this becomes increasingly complex as time goes on, and I no longer even feel the need to go through the effort of engaging in a conversation which will be necessarily shallow, doomed to fail, and likely to become a conversation with multiple people, when it really should be a one-to-one affair when actually engaging with my brother under 1-to-1 pretenses, the conversations have been cordia cordial but, mostly, it consists of my brother complaining about his job, or something similar and asking very little about what I do if I speak about myself, it's because I offer him information, and then try to gauge whether or not he's interested enough for me to actually put effort into elaborating on the subject I've often found that I am only bringing up something about myself so that I might participate in conversing with my brother through means which are not simply me asking him a succession of questions but, then, it also seems like I'm just trying to talk about myself and, since I already resent him for only wanting to talk about himself, I don't really feel the need to do the same so that makes the conversations even less fulfilling and more contrived or superficial though never as superficial or contrived as those with my brother's wife have been those conversations with his wife don't really exist it's mostly a procedure of making certain statements which, if taken at face value, would be for very specific purposes but the purposes they are utilized for are nothing of the sort they are mostly just a show of civility and a customary routine of demonstrating some degree of ethical community behaviour this, over time, is something I resent because I feel as though, throughout the yeras, I have tried to have a real conversation with her but I've never found that she actually pays any attention or even addresses me with respect as time has gone on, she has began to address, at least in person, with more respect, but the degree to which she is attentive or even interested in anything I have to say, has lessened or perhaps has remained nil, which it most certainly was at any time except perhaps the earliest years when she was a new person in my brother's life I've even found that being around people who speak constantly about themselves, fills my mind with their thoughts and words, which arem ostly a form of them thinking out loud for things to say, but often not about anything of any interest to anything but themselves and, whenever there is an opportunity to try and engage them in a conversation, anything that is said is instantly transformed into a search for them to find an opportunity to share a storyof their own there's never any interest in developing an idea, or in understanding something about the other person they are speaking with over time, this has become satirical in that I can even completely avoid communicating with them, and they don't seem to notice and when I do that, almost as an experiment, and find that I can predict the results, I lose my respect for them because I have to wonder, why they would want to allocate their own time to be spent with people whom they dont' have any interest in interacting with if they're just looking for an audience for themselves, then what can they possibly be learning in this world? what can they possibly be doing to mitigate the tragedy of life? exit