intellectual properties

postmillennial hope

“I give thanks to America, a country insane enough to declare the pursuit of happiness to be an inalienable right.”

i’m reading Susan Sontag’s most excellent book In America: A Novel, about a group of well-to-do Polish people who give up everything - for some of them including fame and wealth - to become farmers/settlers in Southern California around 1876. why would these people, who had everything, give it all up to work as field hands? the book is amazing at expounding on the thoughts/ motivations of the such early immigrants - The Dream of America was *so big* that even those who had everything in their homelands were willing to give it all up for a shot at The Dream. how many of those dreams came true?

relatedly, yesterday i shared on gReader and facebook this piece from Adbusters written by Michael Larson, a philosophy teacher from Pittsburgh:

Postmillennial Tension: Can we be the ones we’ve been waiting for?

some excerpts:

That dominant ideal of modernity is tied to a notion of ever-expanding progress and limitless consumption. The oil crisis of 1973 signaled the onset of the postmodern malaise. “Our future was all of a sudden mortgaged,” writes Bourriaud in Altermodern. So while capital has continued expanding its reach in other areas, there has been a lingering denial – an inability to mourn the lost object and the dream’s impossibility. If this was the death of the dream, then our present reality of global warming, water and food shortages, market collapse and the continued proliferation of violent factionalism make it clear that we had better get on with mourning and confront the sorrow we have been trying to repress. Putting it off has only allowed the problems to grow.

We have had a century of continuity in which the basic operating assumptions of the economic system have been hegemonic. In fact this version of “modernity” was to have closed the book on history: We have reached the best of all possible worlds; there are no alternatives. Proclaiming the end of history intimates that our desires have been satiated and that there is nothing further to strive for.

i don’t read adbusters too much anymore because i think a lot of it IS too hopeless/ armageddonist/depressing, but i still subscribe to the online feed and what caught my eye about this one is that there has been something in my mind for a really long time now with respect to my particular demographic - educated middle class americans with plenty of food, clothing, shelter - that goes something like “WE HAVE EVERYTHING.  WHY AREN’T WE HAPPY?”, which seems simple, but it is all heavy with a million questions about both of the words “everything” and “happy”, and extends way beyond myself and my community to America as a whole, and our self-image of always “the best. america is the best. the best of everything is here. it is yours to take if you work hard enough”.

but it turns out that maybe, just maybe, that isn’t true, that the American Dream was a fallacy, or, even worse: what if the “everything” isn’t enough when you get it? what if, when you get to the top run of the ladder - the house, the yard, the boat, the kids, the degrees, the “everything” - what if then that isn’t enough? it must be really depressing to get to the top and realize it’s not far enough.

my speculation is that, like the early Europeans who came from perfectly good lives with solid communities to risk everything on the American frontier, there is a part of human nature that is utterly insatiable, no matter what you give it, and that the “everything” we want isn’t as physical as we’ve been lead to believe - via consumerism, marketing - the “everything” is something intangible, and possibly unattainable. it’s what drives us as humans to do what we do. if it were attainable, how would we evolve?

my generation (X), and the next (Y) seems to be the first in a few to really FEEL this. we were taught, growing up in the 80s especially, that once certain things were attained, peace and happiness would follow. but all after our parents and grandparents and great-grandparents hard work, building industries and fighting for civil rights and freedom, those of us in the educated middle-class who have access to all the things our forefathers dreamed about, here we are, standing on the top rung of the ladder, and we’re still not happy, and the world - and the rest of the world - it’s even more of a mess than before.

that is why the one sentence that hit me most in this piece was “Jean-Paul Sartre described anguish as the recognition of responsibility and the ensuing need to act without guarantee, without hope.“  as Americans, we have a lot of responsibility in this world, as we consume most of the resources and control a lot of the politics. but what hope can we feel now about it all, when it seems we inherited a wealth of square pegs but none of them fit in what turned out to be round holes?

so then finally, the author asks:

So we find ourselves in this moment of rupture, precariously exposed to risk and perhaps devoid of hope. Can we think of these facts as possibilities? Can we confront our situation and imagine what things might be like otherwise, even without guarantees? The end of history has reached its end. Can we be the ones we have been waiting for?

i also felt a lot of this, but wasn’t able to express it, during Obama’s HOPE campaign, like all of Democratic and minority America felt like everything had been done - all the groundwork was laid out, and now everyone was pinning their future on one man/one moment that was going to seal the deal. HOPE is what Obama tried to sell us, and for the election season, we bought it. but here we are 1+ years later, and people are getting depressed because the whole world didn’t change when Obama took office.

so what about now? we have to stop waiting for the thing that is going to save us. we have to stop standing on the top rung of the ladder, thinking there is no where else to go. we have the tools to build a new future. we are what we have been waiting for.

MLK and the dream

today, remembering that only 50 years ago, white people in this country thought it was just fine to separate people by color, to deny them freedoms and rights and treat them like animals.  may it be so that in 50 years from now, the people who are still fighting for equality in America today (gays, immigrants, among others) will look back at now as a time in history when people fought for change and won.

a few choice quotes from MLK, Jr:

“I refuse to accept the cynical notion that nation after nation must spiral down a militaristic stairway into the hell of thermonuclear destruction. I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right temporarily defeated is stronger than evil triumphant. I believe that even amid today’s mortar bursts and whining bullets, there is still hope for a brighter tomorrow. I believe that wounded justice, lying prostrate on the blood-flowing streets of our nations, can be lifted from this dust of shame to reign supreme among the children of men. I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality and freedom for their spirits. I believe that what self-centered men have torn down men other-centered can build up. I still believe that one day mankind will bow before the altars of God and be crowned triumphant over war and bloodshed, and nonviolent redemptive good will proclaim the rule of the land.” - 1964 Nobel peace prize acceptance speech

“Modern psychology has a word that is probably used more than any other word. It is the word “maladjusted.” Now we all should seek to live a well—adjusted life in order to avoid neurotic and schizophrenic personalities. But there are some things within our social order to which I am proud to be maladjusted and to which I call upon you to be maladjusted. I never intend to adjust myself to segregation and discrimination. I never intend to adjust myself to mob rule. I never intend to adjust myself to the tragic effects of the methods of physical violence and to tragic militarism. I call upon you to be maladjusted to such things.”

“…it is no longer the choice between violence and non-violence. it is the choice between non-violence and non-existence.”

Realize the Dream

good reads

the november 30th issue of the new yorker is the best one i’ve read in a while, with several articles i read all the way through. for anyone who wants some good reading, here’s 3:

1. Either/Or, by Ariel Levy, is a long but engaging article about Caster Semenya, the African track star who was recently in the news because people were questioning whether she was a woman.  the article is great because it neatly braids several things: 1. the history of sex/gender testing in sports, and relative to testing for other things (drugs, hormones, etc) 2. sex/gender issues in both Western culture and in her native culture 3. basic civil rights regarding what is private information and what is public regarding such issues 4. how much international sports have changed Africa (Mandela credits sports for breaking the racial barriers of apartheid), and 5. what does it actually mean to be a man or a woman? is it hormones? chromosomes? genitalia? some people are born with confusions of all 3.

2. The Politics of Death by Jill Lepore uses the case of Karen Ann Quinlan, who went into a coma in 1975 and her parents had to sue the hospital for rights to “pull the plug”, to discuss the idea that “The more successfully medicine has staved off death, the less well anyone has accepted dying“.  It goes into the history of the case, the complexities of what it means to be alive or not biologically, and, as the title states, the politics around dying.  the whole thing is interesting, but the most interesting point to me was that basically, before the 1950s, there wasn’t really such a thing as “life support”, and when you got really sick, you died.  usually at home.  and no one fought too much about it. but as soon a there became “life support”, people were no longer allowed to just die natural deaths, and in fact, any family asking that their child/mother/father be allowed to do so has been villainized, and now today we even have people talking about “death panels”, as if believing in natural death is somehow now akin to believing genocide is ok.

3.  A beautiful short fiction piece by Don DeLillo entitled “Midnight in Dostoevsky“.  The writing is superb. Maybe i was partial to this because i also like to talk long meandering walks, talk subjectively a lot about nothing, speculate about other people’s lives, and had a philosophy professor who only talked with his eyes closed.

i’m on the SFgate homepage….

if you scroll about halfway down, there’s a pic on the left of me with a link to photos from dia de los muertos in SF.  here’s the full link.

dia de los muertos/day of the dead is a latin american holiday celebrating those you have loved and lost, and participants dress as skeletons in honor of the dead, light candles, create altars and sing and dance. it’s beautiful.

“Don’t just cry mournfully over the individuals, dreams and influences that have helped make you what you are. Dance for them; sing for them; honor them; leap into the air and kiss the sky for them.”

i uploaded the few photos i took here.

you know what’s REALLY weird is i saw that coming, as so many people took photos of me last night, and when this nice photog asked for name and where i was from i neglected to ask her who she was shooting for, but then i told jay last night “i think i’m going to end up on the front page of the Chronicle tomorrow.” spooky.

add to the list of things that can blow your mind: sesame street

last night on PBS there was a special about Sesame Street and their global productions.

i had no idea they produced localized versions all around the world, especially in war-torn and developing countries, places where poverty and racism and disease run rampant. and when i say localized, i don’t mean that Big Bird gets dubbed over and everything looks the same.  i mean that they send in teams to develop and film on-site, using local children, local music, local language, different puppets that reflect their surroundings, and, in addition to the Alphabet and 1-2-3’s, focus the content on what’s most important to teach the children where they are: the puppets on Sesame Street in Bangladesh discuss unexploded ordnance, in Kosovo the Serbian and Albanian puppets broach topics of racism, nationalism and genocide, and one of the puppets on the South African version had HIV and talked about her mother dying of AIDS, which caused a national controversy here in the U.S.

watching how hard the producers worked to develop these localized versions for these children who in many cases have no other means of education, sometimes putting themselves in very uncomfortable positions (getting the Serbs and the Albanians to be in one room together proved to be monumental) and even in the middle of conflicts and wars, all to try to get positive, educational television to children  was really perspective-shifting. i never really even thought about how Sesame Street in the U.S. was revolutionary in the early 1970s, having a completely integrated cast and discussion topics like racism and sexism (in 2-4 year old terms), but UXO? AIDS? genocide? wow. kudos to PBS for funding these kinds of efforts and for realizing that, in some places, the children really are the only future some communities have, and reaching them, teaching them, is honestly of global importance.

There are several things that we hope that people take from the film. Number one is reflected in a quote that Anu Gupta of Sesame Workshop said: “Children are not born haters, they are taught to hate.” We were so surprised to find three- and four-year-old Serbians and Albanians in Kosovo talking about each other with distrust and hatred.

If only I’d thought of the right words

related to the quarterlife crisis post, here’s one on love in mid-life:

NYT > Modern Love >Those Aren’t Fighting Words, Dear

amazing. so amazing. I SO NEEDED TO READ THAT RIGHT NOW. and maybe you do too.

i think this captures something that has been lost about how we see love (and ourselves in love) in this modern age - how love has become disposable like so many other things we used to fix, mend, and keep around. when it seems like it’s broken, we just throw it away and look for a new one. modern love has been fictionalized to the point of impracticality. the vision of how young newlyweds think their love is going to go is fairytaled and full of unreasonable expectations, possibly the most dangerous of which is that the two people will always want and need each other, always, everywhere, for everything, and that any sign of that not being true is a sign of infidelity, or loss of love.

sometimes, in love (and in work, and in friendships), people need room to center themselves and find their own balance without anyone holding them up, especially if it’s been a while since they’ve been without the guy wires. they need to not be co-dependent. they need to know that they are who they are, on their own, without the other. this idea that “i am nothing without you” is one that sounds romantic at first, but after a long while, is oppressive. deflating to the human spirit.

i think a good number of relationships/marriages might be saved if they realize that both lovers still need to be individuals, and stand on their own, and that sometimes, when your partner says they need space, it really isn’t personal, and you should give it to them. how many marriages have ended at this point, where one feels stifled, because their partner refused to give them room? how many partners scream and cry and fight instead of opening up the space? sure, in some cases, you give someone room and they take advantage of it and you might end up with an “open relationship” when you didn’t want one, but if the relationship is at this point then that’s a chance you have to take. in that case, it’s you who walks away.

in my line of work of trying to resolve environmental conflicts, there is a mantra:  “separate the people from the problem“.  don’t let personal or emotional issues interfere with the solving the problem. get people to talk about the issue, not how they feel about it, and then move on to what steps they are willing to take to resolve it. it’s hard enough to do in your professional life, and even harder when it comes to personal matters. it might sound overly pragmatic to apply such a dry philosophy to something as emotionally complex as love, but being able to discuss issues, not emotions, and to not take it personally when your partner has their own problem to resolve without you (and being clear-headed enough to be able to discern when this is the situation)  is key to avoiding implosion.

and just so i have it forever i’m reposting the whole thing below, because i know there will come a day when i will want and need to read it again. especially the paragraph about ending your own personal suffering. that is a gem of advice that should be applied to everything.

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quarterlife crisis aka the last 7 years of my life

http://www.eyeweekly.com/print/article/55882

He bikes to work at an advertising agency, where he uses his master’s in English to proofread ad copy, and spends several hours reading music blogs and watching movie trailers, periodically Twittering updates about his workday to his 74 followers. He doesn’t really hate his job, but feels as if his skin is crawling with vermin most of the time that he’s there, so he has a plan to move to Thailand, or to maybe write a book. Or go to law school.

At her government job, she instant messages her friends and mostly ignores the report she’s drafting because she’s planning on quitting anyway — and has been planning to quit for about a year now. She spends her lunch hour buying boots that cost slightly more than her rent, then immediately regrets it.

He listlessly works through lunch, then goes to the bar after work to meet up with some university friends, where they talk about their jobs and make ironic jokes about other people. Back at home, he wonders why he feels so gross and empty after spending time with them, but it’s mostly better than being alone.

She walks to the house that she shares with three friends and spends a few more hours on celebrity gossip websites, then clicking through the Facebook photos of girls she knew in high school posing with their husbands and babies, simultaneously judging them and feeling a deep pit of jealousy, and a strange kind of loss. “When did this happen for them?” she wonders.

They both eventually fall asleep, late and alone, each of them wondering what it is that’s wrong with them that they can’t quite seem to understand.

This phenomenon, known as the “Quarterlife Crisis,” is as ubiquitous as it is intangible. Unrelenting indecision, isolation, confusion and anxiety about working, relationships and direction is reported by people in their mid-twenties to early thirties who are usually urban, middle class and well-educated; those who should be able to capitalize on their youth, unparalleled freedom and free-for-all individuation. They can’t make any decisions, because they don’t know what they want, and they don’t know what they want because they don’t know who they are, and they don’t know who they are because they’re allowed to be anyone they want.

When a contemporary 25-year-old’s parents were 25, they weren’t concerned with keeping their options open: they were purposefully buying houses, making babies and making partner. Now, who we are and what we do is up to us, unbound to existing communities, families and class structures that offer leisure and self-determination to just a few. Boomer and post-boom parents with more money and autonomy than their predecessors has resulted in benignly self-indulgent children who were sold on their own uniqueness, place in the world and right to fulfillment in a way no previous generation has felt entitled to, and an increasingly entrepreneurial, self-driven creation myth based on personal branding, social networking and untethered lifestyle spending is now responsible for our identities.

file under: 1st world problem #1. and i’ve been suffering from it for years.

the article goes on, and it’s interesting.

who am i? what am i doing? WHY?

why so bored, jaded, listless when the world is in the palm of your hand?

the article suggests a number of things but none of them seem particularly relevant to me. i’m not in debt. i have plenty of friends. i don’t have a drug or alcohol problem. i am not looking for a career. being grateful is the only thing that relieves, but it feels like a meditative medicine i have to remember take every day to fight a persistent disease. what is my cure?

this weekend, i’m going camping.  that always seems to help.  maybe it’s urbanity that’s the problem?

To go walking down a country road at sunset
And see colors I could almost touch right over head
To hear the gentle breeze a blowing at the treetops
No out in the country there is no talk that God is dead

orwellian or huxlian?

related to the recent xkcd on sheeple: “Amusing Ourselves To Death” - a short graphic novel on Orwell vs. Huxley in 2009. you really should click that link.

are we in a military state where violence is used to control the masses and media, or one where everyone is so distracted by their wealth, their abundance, that the criminals operate without resistance? (social control through indulgence - give them everything, get them hooked on what they have, and they’ll let you do whatever so they can keep it….) i think it depends on what country you live in. Iran? Orwellian. the US? Huxlian. the result: fear and violence vs apathy and disintegration. for the future of the human race: both are bad news.

+ a whole lot of well presented points on this here.

h.t. to ill gates for this link.

“Liberties are not given, they are taken.”- Aldous Huxley

all the lonely sheeple

the most shared/linked/emailed xkcd i’ve seen in quite some time, which makes it EVEN FUNNIER.

oh, us. we think we’re so smart.

p.s. can i get a shirt with this on it?

my story with stuff

a friend just sent this SFGate article about a small urban farmer in oakland, which is interesting if you’re into this little subculture movement. how is it different than being a small rural farmer? not much, it turns out.

but the one sentence that really caught my eye was this:

I never learned how to take care of things because I’m used to them disappearing. The material world escapes me.

i’m going to ramble here for a minute.

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