The Problems With Being Nice

I got to how I don't like the word "nice." In the past few years I've really, really started to hate that word. I hate the connotations for it, how it's lumped in with the politically correct crowd. I'm told to be "nice," to act "nice." "Nice" is supposed to personify me, wholly take me over. But what really is nice? Looking up the definition gives you this:

1. pleasing; agreeable; delightful
2. amiably pleasant; kind
3. characterized by, showing, or requiring great accuracy, precision, skill, tact, care, or delicacy: nice workmanship; a nice shot; a nice handling of a crisis.
4. showing or indicating very small differences; minutely accurate, as instruments: a job that requires nice measurements.
5. minute, fine, or subtle: a nice distinction.

Not good enough. Words are constantly redefined, changed. Decades ago fag used to mean rotting wood. Now it's used as a derogatory term for homosexuals. So, off to do some etymology -- that is, the history of words and their meanings. Turns out being nice doesn't mean what people think it originally means, and is a whole lot worse than that.

late 13c., "foolish, stupid, senseless," from O.Fr. nice (12c.) "careless, clumsy; weak; poor, needy; simple, stupid, silly, foolish," from L. nescius "ignorant, unaware," lit. "not-knowing," from ne- "not" (see un-) + stem of scire "to know" (see science). "The sense development has been extraordinary, even for an adj." [Weekley] -- from "timid" (pre-1300); to "fussy, fastidious" (late 14c.); to "dainty, delicate" (c.1400); to "precise, careful" (1500s, preserved in such terms as a nice distinction and nice and early); to "agreeable, delightful" (1769); to "kind, thoughtful" (1830).

So, to be nice is to be foolish, stupid, senseless or agreeable. Sounds appropriate. Instead, perhaps we should substitute niceness for the more appropriate kindness, although in the latter sometimes being kind means doing what a person needs done, not necessarily what they want done. Although the synonyms for "nice" include such things as "kind," in reality, the word is also used for "ingratiating" or "conciliatory." In both these cases you can see the "politically correct" ideal portrayed in the word itself.

So, being nice is to suck up to the ego of someone else, not to ruffle feathers. This is not being kind. It is ego-stroking, brazenly so.

You Can't Win

Liberal, Conservative, Communist, Nazi. See what I did there? It's the standard dichotomy between the two political sides. One side calls the other stupid and the other side mirrors it, both not seeing their own stupidity or how they're being manipulated by the media in the echo chamber (rights for rights and lefts for lefts). How is it that I'm no longer allowed a voice, and am told that I should go die, because my views differ from the other side? And it doesn't matter which side you're on, either. It's heated, almost a warzone (to which I'm surprised it hasn't devolved into one). If you're pro-choice, you're a murderer. If you're against abortion, you're a backwards thinking neanderthal who is against woman's rights to choose. Dissension to a party line even if you don't fully support it is tantamount to putting yourself up on a cross and waiting for the people around you to throw stones. There's talk about free speech on both sides of the line, but differing points of view are wrong and need to be stamped out before they create another communist or fascist regime.

How did we even get this far, anyway? It's like the parties themselves happily cause these shifts in the population. It's like they want class warfare and racism and the problems brought about by such in order for government to step in to solve it all. Because that's what big daddy government and big mommy government do, they solve problems for the children instead of us figuring things out on the lowest level and keeping them out of our lives and out of our businesses. Government doesn't believe we're intelligent people -- they view us for the stupid quivering masses that we are. Easily manipulated by the media systems that have no integrity that report for their side. Giant propaganda machines. We are living in Orwells world, it just isn't quite how Orwell thought it would be.

A people divided from within. A nation divided from within. And we are ripe for our destruction and reintroduction into the new machine that's waiting

Ramblings

It is an odd quality. Faith in any amount moves a person or a mountain, and when it lacks, it does nothing more than eat away at the conscious. The decision is to of course have it, an active choice, required daily. Like prayer. Faith is in all things, from the man of faith (the misnomer descriptor for anyone believing in a higher power, because all persons are people of faith, even when they deny it) to the agnostic to the atheist--although in the later his isn't as outwardly pronounced, nor would he ever admit to having any.

There are moments of fleeting, just-grasped pursuits of faithfulness. Fullness of faith. Or just as the original word implies, of being faithful, devoted and otherwise there. But how there is it? Does it matter to have or be without? Sharing faith is callousness. Sharing callousness is benign. Being benign is called being an asshole. Being kind is being a jerk, and being nice is being depraved enough to know that you're inwardly inflicting harm upon others, but not being man enough to admit it.

To be kind is to do what's right, including what would be right even if it outwardly might appear mean (although not wrong). Being nice is satiating the ego, in more ways than one. He's nice and she's nice, but never kind. And he's nice but not faithful and she's nice but not faithful. And in both cases they're faithless. But in their nice but faithless havens, lacking in heaven (but pursuing it), they speak of the appropriateness of their actions, how nice is good, but kind is wrong, kinda wrong, and goodly niceness. It leads back to faith, altruism, and the pathologies that crusade their daily shenanigans. But never with thought. That requires questioning, even in faith.