Volumes and Reams

I had listened to many proposals to resolve the stalemate.  Some of them included references to recent pop culture - movies like "The Net," "Hackers," "Antitrust," and "Live Free or Die Hard."

So I dug deeper.

I pulled out scrolls given to me by an old couple down the street, both who meditated on the enormity of every task at hand, telling me that this moment in which we live is it, so treat it with grace, honour, dignity, seriousness, humour and patience.

I consulted with wise sages by reading their texts in dogeared books.

I smelled the wind.

I picked up fallen leaves and compared them to the naked, twisted sculptures standing tall above me.

I listened to those who had no solutions to offer.

Here, in this moment, is what I found.  The seriousness of this moment is a laughing matter.  We need not raise angry voices to sway lost leaders.  So, I call on those of you physically able to do so to give thanks for all we have.  Let us proclaim this "Hunger Strike Week" and demonstrate our solidarity in wanting to creatively get us out of the way of fatcats and others who desire to enrich themselves by taking all our money.

In this part of the world, it is Black History Month, which is a way of celebrating the diversity within our general culture.

Diverse ways of thinking.  Martin Luther King, Jr.  Gandhi.  Benjamin Franklin.  Sacagawea.

I live only in this moment.  In this moment, I choose to drink water.  Let this moment live for a while until I see that leaders put us first.  If they, active or retired, show they are using their re-election funds for personal use, then I will continue to find similarly quiet, dietary ways to encourage them to think otherwise.  I will not act rashly.

Style Points

In a dream last night...

Last night, a dream, in...

A last night, dreamin'...

I spin the tiny rock in my hands and remember the theme park song about the size of this planet. Rubicon. Rubik's cube. Pros and cons. Political debate. The click and tock of phonemes.

The first grunts. The expanding vocabularies of sights and sounds. Who gets to name the object in front of us? Whose vocal utterings are the official mental lists? Why do we keep breaking down the image in front of us into smaller chunks?

We aim to please, our precision and accuracy like archery class. The more we seek unity, the more we find disparity.

The rock has no boundaries, just a continuous spherical surface, smoother than a billiard ball. But no one cares about those comparisons.

We want more descriptive details. We want delineation. We want categories.

Big government rolls down a hill, gathering no moss and crushing tiny stones, smoothing all in its path. Plurality has a single personality.

The issue at hand, what to do with artificial boundaries, issues proclamations to protect the right of sovereignty to govern others.

We watched tribes grow to the size of municipalities and feudal lords into kings and queens. We watched monarchy give way to democracy and communism. We'll watch the ecumenopolis turn democracy and communism into...?

I had a dream last night. Dreams are what they are, my brain with little external stimuli to play with. In my dream, I walked around a theme park with a former classmate of mine. We met other former classmates and eventually lost track of our current families, just the two of us walking through the park, looking for a way to get to the other side, finding a tram to take us up and over. I had other dreams, too. I value my dreams for their insight into my personality and the changes I seek to make my days more eventful and fulfilling. But my dreams are not secret visions or gifts from the other side. They are the result of my earlier interaction with the environment and lack thereof in the moment.

I am one person watching all of you, interacting with many nearby. Like the kids who walked into my yard to find a lost cat. Or the woman who wants my wife and me to attend local weekly religious services.

Local, regional, global. I have opinions and dreams about what to do with perceived conflict between the regional factions in Afghanistan. But I don't have a clear picture. Do we declare groups in the area VNSAs (violent non-state actors) or belligerent forces? Do encounters with FARC, the Red Brigades, the IRA and other fighting forces teach us valuable lessons to apply in the Afghan hills and Indus valley? What is the definition of a benevolent government and is there such a thing in existence? Does unity or disparity make better diplomatic policy in situations like this?

In Britain, a separatist got major airtime to talk about insular views. Is there a place for British separatists and Afghan separatists? Should there be? If the planet knows no bounds, should we recognize others' desires for homelands? If separation is granted, should international support be taken away?

In becoming an ecumenopolis, we face the question of who we are. Are we one species and two genders? Are we one species with multiple cultures but not necessarily multicultural, or a little of both? I don't have the right answers. I have opinions and dreams. I depend on my fellow members of our species to come up with a variety of answers, situational and timely, to solve problems iteratively because we're perpetually changing.

Change is constant. Change is pain and joy. Thus, we face constant pain and joy. Easy? Never. Eventful? A most resounding "YES!" We can see square pegs and round holes. We can pound a screw with a hammer. The choices are many. The solutions are few.

You can choose where you want to live. Your life is now subject to international scrutiny. Can you live a separatist life that is acceptable in an ecumenopolis? Absolutely. The right of a member of our species to perpetuate a subculture is guaranteed at birth. How hard you're willing to fight to protect your subculture against those who want to be where you live is up to you, not me. Cooperation and coordination 'midst competition - that's where I'll meet you and see if your subculture is worth promoting on the international stage. As always, we don't have to like each other, just agree that we're one species. The rest of our lives are opinions and dreams to do with as we see fit.

Every Day Is Special

I dedicate this day to a coworker and friend of mine, Jay Hereford, who taught me many moons ago that the color of your skin is irrelevant to what you can or cannot accomplish. Jay, I still remember sitting at home after calling in "sick" and watching the Million Man March, listening to the convoluted speech by Louis Farrakhan and feeling glad that I live in a country that has made so much progress in allowing free speech by people of all colors on the national stage. Along with Joyce Battle and Jackie Crutcher, you let me be me so that we could enjoy a work environment without undertones of racial bias so prevalent in certain workplaces of the South.

I wish you never had to call in sick to celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr, Day. May tomorrow and the rest of the term of U.S. President served by Barack Hussein Obama be a blessing to you.

Summer Storm

Thickening clouds. Darkening skies. Ominous foreboding.

This isn’t Hollywood. Instead, the atmospheric disturbance we call a thunderstorm passed over my domicile earlier today as I finished up, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being.” Oomph of compressed air hitting the house. R-r-r-rattle of the window frames in ode to Newton’s Third Law of Motion, “Lex III: Actioni contrariam semper et æqualem esse reactionem: sive corporum duorum actiones in se mutuo semper esse æquales et in partes contrarias dirigi. All forces occur in pairs, and these two forces are equal in magnitude and opposite in direction.”

Tears flowing down my face at the reading of a fictional dying dog, named Karenin after a character in “Anna Karenina,” when I haven’t had a dog in my life since 1980. Seeing paragraphs that reminded me of “Atlas Shrugged” and the leaders of a capitalist society going on strike to take the jobs of day laborers:

After the three of them had had a good laugh, the editor told the story of how his paper had been banned, what the artist who designed the poster was doing, and what had become of other Czech painters, philosophers, and writers. After the [1968] Russian invasion they had been relieved of their positions and become window washers, parking attendants, night watchmen, boilermen in public buildings, or at best – and usually with pull – taxi drivers.

What drives people to such extremes, banishing intellectuals to work with their hands instead of their minds when some of the intellectuals would gladly trade their intricately complex minds running thoughts like the turbulent water over Victoria Falls for the enjoyment of a laborer’s life, with a job so automatic one could think with the lazy, cool waters of a spring-fed creek again? Why coerce when you can coax?

Why do we – why do I – create blogs like this one to expose our – my – minds? Do we wish to stir the hot and cold zones of others’ thought processes to create a tempest, a sudden summer storm? Do we seek to quench our vanity's searching thirst, instead? Or are we covertly coaxed into revealing our minds in ways no external form of punishment would reveal? Are we closer to the idea of the character Tereza?:

Gazing at the remains of Old Town Hall, Tereza was suddenly reminded of her mother: that perverse need one has to expose one’s ruins, one’s ugliness, to parade one’s misery, to uncover the stump of one’s amputated arm and force the whole world to look at it. Everything had begun reminding her of her mother lately. Her mother’s world, which she had fled ten years before, seemed to be coming back to her, surrounding her on all sides. That was why she told Tomas that morning about how her mother had read her secret diary at the dinner table to an accompaniment of guffaws. When a private talk over a bottle of wine is broadcast on the radio, what can it mean but that the world is turning into a concentration camp?

Almost from childhood, Tereza had used the term to express how she felt about life with her family. A concentration camp is a world in which people live crammed together constantly, night and day. Brutality and violence are merely secondary (and not in the least indispensable) characteristics. A concentration camp is the complete obliteration of privacy. Prochazka, who was not allowed to chat with a friend over a bottle of wine in the shelter of privacy, lived (unknown to him – a fatal error on his part!) in a concentration camp. Tereza lived in the concentration camp when she lived with her mother. Almost from childhood, she knew that a concentration camp was nothing exceptional or startling but something very basic, a given into which we are born and from which we can escape only with the greatest of efforts.

And so it is we find ourselves accompanied in our lives by pervasive, intrusive, invasive, persuasive forms of media. Gentling coaxing us forward to the light, promising us much and delivering little. The light at the end of the tunnel turning into the barrel of a camera pointed back at us and recording all of our movements. Oh sure, you just want to post some private pictures on a social networking site for your friends and then don’t get a job because what your friends thought was acceptable is not considered acceptable by a prospective employer. Or, someone just wants to quietly share his thoughts “off camera” about a Presidential candidate, using words he had told others not to use in public (but anything goes in private, right?) only to find he’s been nailed to a tree like some crazy fool trying to skip over the River Styx on a monorail tour of Hades, described in the tourism office as a “fun and exciting trip through the layers of Dante’s Inferno.” Did he forget to read the fine print: “fees and tips not included”?

In “Democracy on Trial,” Jean Bethke Elshtain points out a similar issue:

The Czech novelist Milan Kundera tells a chilling tale. In a 1984 interview with Philip Roth, Kundera notes a “magic border” between “intimate life and public life…that can’t be crossed with impunity.” For any “man who was the same in both public and intimate life would be a monster. He would be without spontaneity in his private life and without responsibility in his public life. For example, privately to you I can say of a friend who’d done something stupid, that he’s an idiot, that his ears ought to be cut off, that he should be hung upside down and a mouse stuffed in his mouth. But if the same statement were broadcast over the radio spoken in a serious tone – and we all prefer to make such jokes in a serious tone – it would be indefensible.”

Can a man, who claims his public legacy by association with a great civil rights leader who himself claimed a legacy through his belief in the principle of civil disobedience laid down by the likes of Gandhi, survive a gaff spoken privately in a public place like some bad stage play about a person overheard in public when a PA microphone was not turned off during a burst of offensive ranting offstage? Not when that man’s legacy includes too much baggage stuffed with dirty laundry that others want to see, feel and talk about. Not when attention on him deflects attention from what a normal, sane, rational person would see as important political issues. Not when inimical sharks have been circling around him for years ready to rip into his carcass.

I hold no claim on reality or normality. I wake up each day and feel the aches and pains of a poor night’s sleep, not expecting anyone to have recorded my dreams, not expecting anyone to know my early morning wishes and would be watching and waiting to see which wishes of mine remained unfulfilled at day’s end. I can separate my reality and fantasy any way I wish because I am a relatively obscure writer. I have no duty to write a certain way for a paying public. I can spend days without writing a word, never worrying once about the lack of words to put food in my mouth. In other words, I value freedom. I value who I am, not who I am to others. I do not seek fame because I’ve seen the price one pays for having a public face.

Some want to be the fierce storm passing through people’s lives, drawing attention to the strength of wind, rain and lightning that one can throw down like Zeus. Some want to be the protectors, providing shelter during the storm. Some want to be the ones who go on missions to help restore the lives of others after the devastating storm has passed. I want to continue to live out my childhood dream of a mountain hermit, digging ditches for a living, asking nothing of others but a few goods and services I can’t produce in my cabin in the woods. I’ll leave you with my last hoorah for Rand’s opus, “Atlas Shrugged,” some of the twelve passages I’ve marked for future re-reading:

“So you think that money is the root of evil?...Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can’t exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?

“When you accept money in payment for your effort, you do so only on the conviction that you will exchange it for the product of the effort of others. It is not the moochers or the looters who give value to money. Not an ocean of tears nor all the guns in the world can transform those pieces of paper in your wallet into the bread you will need to survive tomorrow. Those pieces of paper, which should have been gold, are a token of honor – your claim upon the energy of the men who produce. Your wallet is your statement of hope that somewhere in the world around you there are men who will not default on that moral principle which is the root of money. Is this what you consider evil?”

“Did you want to see [your work] used by whining rotters who never rouse themselves in any effort, who do not possess the ability of a filing clerk, but demand the income of a company president, who drift from failure to failure and expect you to pay the bills, who hold their wishing as an equivalent of your work and their need as a higher claim to reward than your effort, who demand that you serve them, who demand that it be the aim of your life to serve them, who demand that your strength be the voiceless, rightless, unpaid, unrewarded slave of their impotence, who proclaim that you are born to serfdom by reason of your genius, while they are born to rule by the grace of incompetence, that yours is only to give, but theirs only to take, that yours is to produce, but theirs to consume, that you are not to be paid, neither in manner nor in spirit, neither by wealth nor by recognition nor by respect nor by gratitude – so that they would ride on your rail and sneer at you and curse you, since they owe you nothing, not even the effort of taking off their hats which you paid for? Would this be what you wanted? Would you feel proud of it?”

“Who is the public? What does it hold as its good? There was a time when men believed that ‘the good’ was a concept to be defined by a code of moral values and that no man had the right to seek his good through the violation of the rights of another. If it is now believed that my fellow men may sacrifice me in any manner they please for the sake of whatever they deem to be their own good, if they believe that they may seize my property simply because they need it – well, so does any burglar. There is only one difference: the burglar does not ask me to sanction his act.”

“Market? I now work for use, not for profit – my use, not the looters’ profit. Only those who add to my life, not those who devour it, are my market. Only those who produce, not those who consume, can ever be anybody’s market. I deal with life-givers, not with the cannibals. … Here, we trade achievements, not failures – values, not needs. We’re free of one another, yet we all grow together. … What greater wealth is there than to own your life and to spend it on growing? Every living thing must grow. It can’t stand still. It must grow or perish.”