Mind Your Own Business & Four More Principles to Live By

Here's the core of my politics and what informs what I write...

At the beginning of each grade school year, my teacher – regardless of who they were - would line the class up from tallest to shortest. I was always the second or third shortest kid in the line-up, something that the taller kids, especially the bullies, would get loud about. As a small-fry, I was a target of bullying, though not for long: My folks taught me that I needed to fight back. Winning, they said, wasn’t as important as standing up for myself. Refuse to be pushed around and the bullies will leave you alone, they said. My parents were right.

Another thing I learned in school, specifically in kindergarten, was the value of sharing. More than anything else, the first year of my formal education was dedicated to socialization, which meant sharing, cooperation, teamwork, politeness, and manners. The guiding principle behind all this was Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

The combination of standing up to bullies and Do unto others…, along with my dad’s egalitarian approach to coaching Little League baseball, gave me a deep appreciation for fairness, true fairness. The Trump-style whining of “It’s not fair” every time something didn’t go my way was not tolerated in my family. “Life’s not fair,” my dad would say, as my mom nodded in agreement, a statement that was way more matter-of-fact than cynical, as the follow up was “You have to create fairness.”

The last value I picked up in my grade school years was Mind your own business. I’m not sure where that came from, probably my dad, who was private to the point of closed-off and remote. Even when I was a pre-teen, my parents didn’t meddle. They left me alone to discover myself and figure things out, without, yet, embracing neglect.

Stand up to bullies, share, Do unto others, create fairness, Mind your own business – those are the five pillars of my politics. The pillars are not ideals, but guiding principles. They are also very practical.

You must stand up to bullies if you are to experience freedom and live a full life. You share because, when there is enough, hording is a greedy asshole move. When there isn’t enough, refusing to share is downright cruelty. That and sharing makes things easier for everyone.

The reasoning behind Do unto others is right there in the second half of the clause: …as you would have them do unto you – though I would add, People will treat you as you treat them. Because individual behavior is impossible to predict, that “rule” is not a lock, but its as good of a way to ensure an outcome as I can think of.

Creating fairness (or the foundation for fairness) is a sound strategy for anyone who deals with society’s inequality and the physical world’s terrible sense of humor. I’m short, so there’s plenty of times I need a step stool or ladder to reach something. Making sure a ladder is at hand makes things fairer not only for me, but for other short people. Handing someone something from the top shelf when I am atop the ladder is just what you do to make life a little more pleasant for everyone. And, yeah, if you don’t have a ladder on hand, borrow mine. That is not only me creating fairness but I’m doing for you what I’d like to have done for me, and I am helping to create solidarity among short people so that we can fight back against bullies.

Finally, minding one’s own business is where everything starts. It is the baseline that we build from. Rather than react to every bit of stimulation, take a step back and survey things. The first question we must ask ourselves is “Does this involve me?” If the answer is “Yes,” the follow up is “How much?” The answer to those two questions is all one needs to figure out how to respond to stimuli or provocation.

But, for Mind your own business to be more than an excuse to withdraw into selfishness it must be aligned with the four other principles. Get into life’s details and this stuff can get sticky. That is why I start from the abstract and reshuffle as I get closer to the real world.

Being able to live a decent life is one of the most important things in life. To live a decent life, one needs food, shelter, opportunity, freedom, and safety. To guarantee that I have a decent life, I must look “down,” not “up,” make sure others have their basic needs met for – systemically – so that if I “fall through the cracks” I don’t wind up on the street. By working to make things fairer, I help establish an atmosphere of cooperation and kindness. In this way, I am minding my own business, my business being the holistic world we live in.

Looking “down” is pure common sense. Those at the top, generally, they aren’t interested in changing the system so it’s fairer for everyone. At best they engage in charity or top-down fantasy like trickle-down economics. Others believe that their success provides an example of what “hard work” can accomplish and they limit their “participation” to being “role models.” And a lot of people at the top default to “I got mine, you get yours.” That doesn’t work for me. And centuries of top-down ideology is proof it doesn’t work for society.

To be clear, there is a big difference between making basic decency the floor and telling people what to do willy-nilly, i.e. getting into other people’s business. When Craig Usher and I started doing illegal punk shows at the Loft in Sacramento, we had a firm set of rules: No racism, no sexism, no homophobia. Those three rules were painted on Loft’s entrance and they were our playpen’s only written rules.

The reasoning behind the three rules was very simple: We wanted to create a space where people had the maximum amount of freedom to be themselves, to party in a place where they don’t feel threatened because they are “The Other,” and for that to happen, people had to be free from bullying or any kind. We weren’t telling White, straight men – or anyone else – how to live their lives or what to think. The rules weren’t about them. The rules were about us. They were about minding our own business by respecting others. Don’t shit where we all sleep. That’s it.

Everything that you read me write about politics is rooted in the above and everything above is pretty damn practical and even conservative (in a non-political way). All that stuff also is the basis of what I call punk rock politics, a political outlook that is neither left, right or center, urban or rural, identifiable by race, gender, sexuality or anything else.

Punk rock politics explains why so many Gen Xers are excited about Tim Walz and his combo of compassion and “Mind your own damn business.” Know that Walz is a huge fan of the punk bands Hüsker Dü and the Replacements and that combo makes a hell of a lot of sense. Know that Walz’s core principles and his musical fandom makes sense.

Stand up to bullies. Share. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Create fairness. Mind your own business.