re: sigh

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Comments are closed on that post...the author wasn't "looking for a discussion".

However, disregarding the futility of this post, I wanted to point out one thing in the aforementioned post. She states:

Because we are your parents, who labored for you in ways you can never begin to understand.

[...]

Above all, let's find ways to help the current generation of adopted children, so they don't waste so much time in the emotional limbo of wanting something they cannot have.

I presume the author thinks "they" know what is best for adoptees, yet adoptees cannot, allegedly, "begin to understand" the plight of adoptive parents. Whadda they call that?...a double standard? And from a mother too...

***

On the other hand, I had been learning more about all the trouble my a-parents went through, stuff I have absolutely no memory of; how much of a pain it was to find a daycare, negotiating hours and pay at work, maternity leave, etc. But wouldn't any empathetic individual eventually think of those kinds of things?

Most of the time, I see little point in demonizing the individual when it's a larger structural problem. I also thought that was common wisdom in the community from what I've read.

re: Down with Metaphors!

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Well this becomes considerably more confusing the more you delve into it.

Metaphors can be damaging if they get out of hand. If a certain language usurps the prevailing discourse of an issue, that language will define the issue. This language, however, is external to its issue and is observable for everyone (already with complicated phenomenology...). Thus if a whole bunch of dumb metaphors start to dominate the discourse on adoption, there is a probability that the general public will be saturated with these metaphors, and the concept which the metaphor seeks to describe will basically become those metaphors. Lakoff and others get into this, what the metonymy and everything. I think this is the main problem with metaphors, to which I should be more careful to heed.

Here was another part of my comment on that post:

Do I know what it is for you? No. Adoption is a process, a condition, a mentality, not just some political and economic function external to individuals. So you can’t really reduce it to a one liner and say “what it is”. That’s speaking for everyone. I don’t think about my biological family. It wasn’t really a family anyway. Just a mother. Or will you say you know what my definition of a family is too? It’s all too complicated to grasp with one line.

At first you'd think I was instantly contradicting myself, saying that adoption is different for everyone, then saying that "adoption is". But there is a key epistemological difference. We can say what adoption is when it is a process external to the individual. You might say it's "objective" that way. But when we're speaking of the internal, psychological process and condition of adoption, you can never really say what it "is", because it will always differ between individuals. We are able to say what adoption is only as a social, political and economic function because these criteria are what bind us together in the category "adoptee", a category that is external to the individual. To say otherwise would be a horrid essentialist argument. However, when we arrive at the psychological realm, I think there will always be different experiences.

Before, I had said that this blog had an unfortunate academic flavor. I maintain that opinion. People usually scoff at things overly-academic. It's kind of a shame on both sides of the table, but I think this is important enough to discuss, hopefully without getting to rallied up as to cloud our visions.

\a box of cookies if you can detect all thirty-six instances of hypocrisy in this post

re: Are we all connected?

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Well, humans are connected genetically. Isn't all life genetically related, going back to a common ancestor? Not like I know when the first eukaryote evolved out of a prokaryote though.

But the notion that all humans are connected by a real bond - biology - just serves to indicate how disconnected humans are, how barriers are constructed, and the material of these barriers isn't anything real, nothing concrete. That's what race is, as one of my professors put it: it's everything, and it's nothing.

But of course race is more complicated than that. It can't easily be reduced to a single aphorism. What does it mean to be "white"? "Asian"? Merely the color of your skin? Is it what's on the outside? The inside? Race is as much external as it is internal. Why else would memes like "oreo" or "coconut" exist?

Race also exists as a function of class. btstormb2006 writes:

I am white because my aparents are white and my afather makes more money than your father, so that makes me white. It’s about the color of my aparent’s skin and amount of money my afather makes, but nothing to do with me.

Why is it that being rich can, to an extent, count as being white, regardless of ethnicity and heritage? I've seen this growing up too.

Eventually...idealism can be nice, but it's just a means to an end. \end marxism