Psychological projection. Psychological projection is a defence mechanism in which the human ego defends itself against unconscious impulses or qualities (both positive and negative) by denying their existence in themselves while attributing them to others. Wikipedia

What the above quote from Wikipedia doesn’t say is that everything is a projection. We see the world through the vail of our own consciousness and we can only see what we first believe. A couple of days ago, I got in a spat with a friendly neighbor. Like me, he self identifies as part of what he called the nutty left, but, unlike me, he thinks Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is arrogant and a complete grandstander. He thinks that: this kind of shit is not good for us. I hold the polar opposite position. For a lot of reasons, I think that this kind of shit is good for us and we need more of it. In fact, the thing I most like about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is that she is asking, out loud, for laws and programs that Democrats say they want but have been afraid to ask for. All of a sudden Global Climate Change and raising taxes on the rich are being talked about again.

It bugs me when I talk to my fellow Liberals and they all say they want Single Payer or a decent wage for low paid workers but they have a litany of reasons why it isn’t practical to bring up right now. It bugs me because I know that if you want something, that is not enough, you rarely get it if you don’t ask for it. That you only get what you ask for is my good advice for the Democratic Party and it kind of shocked me when I realized that it was not the advice that I’ve been following recently (which is, I suspect, why it bugs me so much when I see the Democrats doing it).

I feel like my life has been contracting lately and, at 78, that is troubling. Last Friday night or, maybe, Saturday morning, it dawned on me that, like many of my Liberal friends, I was holding on tightly to a litany of reasons for why going out and expanding my world isn’t practical right now. Michele and I attended a retreat over Friday night and seeing how hard I was resisting change was both frightening and liberating. Frightening because I saw my projected self in the stuck-in-the-mudders I’m so critical of and liberating because I can change what I do see.