An overdue apology

[x_cannonball]

I wanted to give a week for everything to settle down and so I could collect my thoughts. I'm currently suspended from teaching and the team due to hurting quite a few people and I'd like to take responsibility for that right now. I shouldn't have projected my anger onto the employees of Snow Valley and I certainly should have been cautious enough and in enough control to not hurt Kyle. I am very sincerely sorry for all of those events. I know better and there's nothing excusing me from those decisions.

I owe several of you quite a bit and Kyle the most. I have no right to expect forgiveness but I'd like to do what I can to try to earn it. I try to look at the positive side of most things and I think this has helped me to understand some things I hope I can pass on to others when the time is right. I've made the decision that I'll gladly explain everything to anybody who wants to ask me about what happened so they can learn from my mistakes.

My favorite author, Robert A. Heinlein, wrote in "Starship Troopers" that "Violence is the ultimate authority from which all other authority is derived." I always believed that was wrong and that the ultimate authority was freedom. The same book also says that violence "has settled more issues in history than has any other factor." I had always believed that hope and mercy held that honor. Now I know that I was right. I hope that I can use my experience to help others and my new knowledge to make up for my mistakes.

Comments

[x-cannonball.livejournal.com]

If Ethics are a human creation then there's necessity for them to be one way over another. You could justify anything like that and I think what I learned through all this is that I'm not alright with that. I prefer to think we discover what's right, not create it.

[x-dominion.livejournal.com]

It's a helpful lie, but it's not really practical. It assumes that there simply is only one true way, and anyone who feels differently is wrong, regardless of cultural, nature or environment. Mind you, I struggle with black and white. Is it right not to kill? Is it right not to kill even if doing so would save ten thousand lives? One hundred lives? A life? The life of someone you care about?

I seriously doubt these things have a single answer. Mind you, I got one of my degrees in psychology, not philosophy, so I tend to take everything as being largely a human creation.

[x-cannonball.livejournal.com]

I don't think any one of us have what it is to be good right. I don't think that means there's no such thing, though. I don't see how I could do the things I do if I thought it was just... preference.

[x-dominion.livejournal.com]

I never said it was a matter of preference. I said it was a matter of evolution. As we've, well, civilized ourselves, so to speak, our ethical scope has changed along with it. So either we're slowly revealing an ultimate truth, or with each generation, we change and refine what is morally and ethically acceptable and what is not. And different parts of the city, much less the world, have different ethical standards.

So, in the midst of a liberal arts college in Vermont, it would be considered henious and wrong to shoot someone who broke into your house and tried to make off with your television. In a farming town in the midst of Florida, your neighbours would firnly endorse your actions. Are the people in Vermont right and the ones in Florida wrong? Or vice versa? If there is a central truth to discover, one or the other has to be the case. I personally feel it has to be more complex than that.

[x-cannonball.livejournal.com]

Complex, sure. But I still think there's an answer somewhere and it's independent of just our knowledge of it. I mean, if we're refining an idea, we're getting closer to the truth of it, right?

[x-dominion.livejournal.com]

No, it means it changes with us. And if it does, it means it is linked to our changes. We're not linked to some kind of ultimate truth, or at least, that's what I believe. We make our own truths, and as we do, we find the consensus that works for us at the time.

An answer somewhere, for me, is an article of faith. My faith is mostly with people.

I admit, I do plan for some kind of conversation as a very old man to the ones that give me the garden full of nubile virgins or the mead hall of eternal drunkness, but I blame that solely on poor rolemodels.