One nonrhetoric that
we behold is home. This construct is a key position in time-space
that we handle to represent who we are and who we are not. Seemingly, every
place in which we dwell is home. Inversely, every place
in which we do not dwell is elsewhere. This well-used path to
self-identity can be accessed when we abide by the margins imposed upon us by
our locations and by the mortals who occupy them. We integrate these
prescriptions and accept the environments that they devise.
Sometimes, our
homes are tangible. Other times, they are transcendental. Either
way, grasping the qualities of our homes requires intentionality. Said
differently, the stances that we maintain regarding the strength and vitality
of our earthly homes are often taken for granted. Furthermore, our
fervent convictions about our homes in the World to Come include
opinions that aver that our supernal homes will perform as more than
terminuses. When we manipulate language to put together our highly specialized,
narrowly focused, messages about our homes, likewise, implicitly
and simultaneously, we are apprising ourselves of the nature of
homelessness; no one among us wants to be without their ultimate
loci.
During the pandemic,
e.g., our shared outlooks shifted. Importance was no longer
assigned to glittery objects, but to flesh and blood. Esteemed
ceased to be relegated to citizens with the most toys and became
neighbors who were commited to preserving life. Worth no longer
took its denotation from communal superiority but from harmonious relations.
Overall, we became exceedingly conscious that our older strands of social
connection [had been] abraded - even destroyed - by technological and
economical social change (Putnam 382) and that we would be abetted when
we re-evaluated those codes. To wit, we multitudes recognized the degree to
which we had been distinguishing ourselves visa via artificial topoi instead of
by organic starting points.
Another of our most
dynamic concepts is self. Whereas home informs
self, self does not necessarily define
home. More exactly, on occasion, we glance beyond our domiciles for
our identities. We might count on scripts that weve prepared, regard our
dreams, hang onto our calculated visualizations, or reach toward our
aspirations. In addition to our homes, these founts can notify us who we are
and who we can be.
Alternatively, when
we insist on having faith in liaised doctrines, we increasingly comprehend
ourselves as impotent, as slaved to media minders. This emphasis of ours on
outward appraisals leaves us skunked, explicitly, leaves us searching for
disparities among ourselves causes us to categorize each other. Our
subsequent stratification, in turn, evokes anxiety, which, itself, fuels
consumerism/false bases for self-respect. Under such conditions, we remain
confused about who ought to establish the heuristics for our moral
agendas, [and] we mistake the essence of public moral agendas for the essence
of private moral agendas (and vice versa) (Greenberg 2005, 5).
Sadly, in our
marketplace (of ideas), vendors axiomatic tosh has become widespread,
even popular, fare. Its of little wonder, therefore, that the immensity
of home and self in our lives has been reduced such
that they have become mere cognitive Band Aids. When we reflect on the
unconscious, unspoken stimuli that guide our attitudes, we find ourselves
pondering a composite scarcely made up of tradition, constituted by
unremittingly negotiated existent roles, and comprised of questionable future
prognoses. Nowadays, were more likely to espouse the advantages inherent
in conserving the status quo than any derived from challenging it.
No matter the type
of framing that we rely upon to delineate home and
self, we stay limited by the moral deliberations promoted by our
bounds. One impact of our contemporary languor is that too often we are more
concerned with competition than compassion. Answerability for civic
insensitivity, as noted by decentralized, organized efforts to protest
incidents of viciousness and other (demographically driven) aggressions,
teeters given our fragmentation.
Our filtered
explanations of merits make our collective principles oscillate and make our
mutual sense of indispensable discernments range from pitiful to reprehensible.
Among the most shameful deeds that stem from our morass of apportioned scruples
are the degree to which we vacillate in treating the homeless and
neurologically divergent souls. Inasmuch as we keep on being ethically lost, we
sidestep empathy, consequently, allowing our brothers and sisters to get
rehomed in temporary settlements. Self-reassurance that we want to improve
their plight is rubbish as long as we fail to utilize inclusive meanings for
home and for self.
Humankinds
ideal endures as removed from its experience. Whether its the
aforementioned, hit and run accidents, deceiving insurance adjusters, taunting
the elderly and the infirmed, or engaging in other tolerated conjoint past
times, our conduct has become akin to that of schoolyard bullies; our
unwillingness to take responsibility for our chief tenets has resulted in our
sacrificing being a functional public. Were not at all helped by limiting
egg-throwers liberties, but not restricting the circulation of anti-hate
discourse.
Were poorly
epitomized by constraints that curb unsympathetic actors at the cost of
concomitantly decreasing benevolent folks freedoms. Bring to mind that
the opposite of suppression, historically and incorrectly, has
often been expression. However, censorships
actual counterpart is emancipation, viz., is the presence of
self-determination, the practice of critical/creative thinking that enables
groups to fabricate their own gist of home and of
self
Moreover, our
possession of and access to pooled scruples is rare for the reason that we have
lost reliable community, religious, and professional organizations. Over and
above, fluctuations in our cultural symbols, in our rules for behavior, and in
our officialdoms have become complicated because of our dearth of
interconnectedness. When we insist upon assuaging talking heads, we leave our
own heads emptied and detached.
Another problem with
our present-day semantic referents is that they are often grimly ineffable. Our
words create barriers. Lexicons with normative measures of
assessment tend to mandate that we fashion obstacles, fuel ideological
incommensurabilities, reinforce unbalanced strata, and bolster the separating
of us from them. According to those parameters,
home becomes not a place of the heart, but one devoid of acquirable
attributes. In parallel, those strictures establish self as
whomever we perceive ourselves to be in the context of remediable flaws.
Weigh depictions of
home in movies like Martin Rosens Isle of Plague Dogs
and Marjane Satrapis Persepolis. Think about depictions of
self in recent reports of governments pulling apart families at
national boarders and in fresh narratives of workplace harassment. Suddenly,
hominess, especially the comfort of home, is as suspect
as independence, the autonomy of self.
Since our websites
and our other instances of convergent communication impart our custodians
philosophies through the electronic dissemination of their accepted wisdoms,
currently, home has become more than a structure where we spend
vast amounts of time. This understanding has mutated into the places
where we take comfort/feel safe. Similarly, self has
transmuted from a persons requisite being to our
concern for others regard of ourselves. Just as
home has metamorphosed to indicate more than the singularity of any
spot, self has transformed to stipulate more than the
distinctiveness of any denizen. Truth, as it is screened through arbitrated
thoughts, words, and actions bears upon us and shifts our organization of our
rudimentary perceptions to the extent that most of us conceptualize
home and self contrarily to our ancestors. This
tweaking is worrisome.
Fortunately, a
minority of us disavow the layering of our identities upon peripheral cruxes of
validation. Its desirable for us, if we want our compulsary paradigms to
be credible, to do something about hurtful events, to reject archetypes
advocated by particular documents, and to question certain statutes.
We need to renounce
influencers and of kindred parties who sponsor not only brands of living room
furniture and imported face masks but also dictates for home and
self. We have a duty to refute fourth estate attempts, regardless
of how altruistically they are branded, to push us toward
portraying our abodes and our individuality as contingent on economic
incentives or other taints.
Still others of us
arrive at our senses of home and of self by
synchronously leaning on both internal and external instruments. In spite of
everything, linguistic ploys craft and sustain hierarchies. It follows that the
ways in which we interpret lifes nuts and bolts can originate in
assembled elucidations. Imaginably, morphology, syntax, phonetics, and
semantics are best employed interdependent with common sense proofs about
languages usage. Namely, we can authentically accept, at the
highest levels of abstraction, the possibility of the existence of our
[experiential] diversity (Greenberg 2003, 24). That is, our
generalizations must be sufficiently flexible to span our array of
perspectives. Attendant incongruences among us should be able to find at least
partial acceptability.
When we trust
outlying agents to prescribe our ethics, we have trouble addressing our core
obligations as those go-betweens render home and self
as exclusive entities. They perpetuate double-bind filled messages and muddy
cultural epistemology. If, as a replacement for that conduct, we embrace
private methods for developing arguments or topoi taken from a combination of
personal and public referents, we create parsimonious exchanges about the
makeup of home and to self, and lend clarity to our
civilizations theory of knowledge. In the latter case, as was the
veracity of our forbearers, home and self are
heartening notions.
Credits:
Greenberg, KJ
Hannah. The Social Status of Pregnancy Loss Rhetoric: Little Truth; Lots
of Falsehoods, Secrets, and Fantasies. Eastern Sociological Society
Convention. Washington, DC. Mar. 2005.
Malek, Amy.
Memoir as Iranian Exile Cultural Production: A Case Study of Marjane Satrapi's
Persepolis Series. Iranian Studies. Sept. 2006.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233658090_Memoir_as_Iranian_exile_cultural_production_A_case_study_of_Marjane_Satrapi%27s_Persepolis_series.
Retrieved Jan. 11, 2019.
Putnam, Robert D.
Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. Simon
& Schuster, 2000.
Vasquez, Zack.
Isle of Plague Dogs: The Animated Works of Wes Anderson and Martin
Rosen. Crooked Marquee. Mar. 21, 2018.
https://crookedmarquee.com/isle-of-plague-dogs-the-animated-works-of-wes-anderson-and-martin-rosen/.
Retrieved Jan. 11, 2019.