> If you had written all this at the beginning, I would have had a completely > different undertstanding.
yes I made the mistake of assuming people had thought about it. > However, initially you said "We all live and we > all make choices and those choices are political. Choice in what we think, > what we buy, > what we eat, who we give to, even who we sleep with. It is all politcal." yes and I stand by that. > > When people use words like "choice," "personal" and "every action shows what > our political beliefs are" i didn't use that phrase. i did not speak of belief but of action. > and then go on to talk about how we buy food and > clothing processed or made by people under slavery, isn't is being implied > somewhere in there that we have "chosen" by our "personal actions" not being implied no, being pointed out. Whetehr we like it or not, our choices have ramifications. > > reflecting our "political beliefs" to support oppression and poverty? never said that. this is where people read into things that are not there and thus feel attacked or guilty which is unproductive. > If we > have personal choice in this, don't most assume that we then have personal > responsibility for the ramifications? Of course we have personal responsibilty for our choices. Even when we don't know what the choices are, our actions still ahev ramifications. Ignorance is not a defence against personal responsibilty. I may do something that has a bad outome. I may not have known about the bad outcome and acted in good faith. The fact I was wrong deos not absolve me from the personal responsibilty. The action was mine and therefore I am resposnible. PR and guilt are not the same thing at all. > But now you seem to be absolving most > from accountibility for the ramifications because there is not much we can > do about it. Not at all. that is not what I said. Just because we are ignorant of something doesn't mean we won't get the result. i.e a young child will get burned by sticking her/his hand in the fire, even tho they may not have known would happen. The law doesn't change because we are ignorant of it. We still have personal responsibilty and we still have choices to make. My point being that we cannot possibly cover every single point but that does not absolve us and mean we should just say 'to hell with it all'. we do the best we can do. Beating ourselves up over failures is waste of time. If you KNOW you are buyin something that is prodcued thru cruelty or slavery or whatever, then you are saying it is okay that the slavery/cruelty exists and thus supporting it. If you do NOT know, you cannot be said to be supporting in your belief but the act of buying it is supporting it. Again act and thought are different. A simple example: buying a foreign car instead of a home produced one. What happened here is their are no home prodcued cars anymore. All our car manufacturers are owned by foreign companies. Maybe our cars were crap, that doesn't mean that our buying foreign didn't have it's affect. it closed copmpanies down. Our buying foreign made a point-we didn't want crap, maybe, and we didn't care that our own companies would go bust. Buying a daily newspaper. we have one or two or more papers that push out racist/homophobic/ zenophoic filth. Some of the people that buy these papers say they don't agree with the politcs of the paper but buy it for other reasons. Yet they are still providing money to enable the said paper to continue to publish it's filth. For that they are responsible even if they don't think so or like it! We have the grreatest gift of all-the power of choice. The more we eductate ourselves, the more we understand what those choices are and the better able we are to make imnformed choices. However, we still need to be gentle with ourselves. we cannot always make the right choices and sometimes it is impossible to make the right choice. Personal responsibility is not about balme or shame or guilt, it is out being accepting responsibility. Just because an action or ours does not have the outcome we intended does not do away with PR. I might add that this PR does apply to out thoughts and beliefs. It is our thoughts and beliefs that create our individual world. Our thoughts and beliefs are the cause of much or our suffering. It is not always what is done to us or what happens to us that casues the suffering but what we believe and think about what was done or happened. One person may be seriously ill. Their thought about it is'oh shit, what bad luick' and they deal with it. Another person may react by thinking'why me? what have I done wrong?' and thus suffer more. There is always more than one interpretation of any given event. Someone hasn't returend your call: oh, they don't like me, what have I done wrong(centre of the universe syndrome!). OR Oh, maybe something has happened to them. OR Maybe they missed my call. How we habitually react to things is what makes us. Habits can be changed. If we continually think we are being attacked, or we feel guilty all the time, or feel less than all the time, then we need to change these habits. Change is always possible and this is where PR comes in. The way we think, believe and act all have ramifications. None of us is isolated, we each affect the other. What goes on in my mind not only has ramifications for me but for others too.
