Welcome to the rest of the world

In the midst of job hunting again, I came across a listing for an NGO in California that is nominally led by a good friend of mine. They're looking for someone to handle the financial end of their operation and, while finance and fundraising are not my most preferred activities, I'd certainly feel a lot better about doing so for an activist organization than for yet another property owner. So I pinged my friend and asked if they'd be OK with me doing the job remotely, as I'm not currently compelled to go back to Cali. He said: "It's no problem doing it remotely, but I have to tell you, the board is pretty set on hiring a person of color."

...

The first thought that comes to mind, since I'm kind of eager to be employed again, is that it's frustrating as hell to immediately be discounted simply because of who I am. They haven't looked at a resume or even seen my name and already I am persona non grata. The second thought that comes to mind is: Welcome to what many non-white people encounter every day! Irritating as it is, it's almost impossible to remain so because there are probably 10 other jobs for which I would be ushered right to the top of the list, while someone who didn't share my skin color or gender would not be.

(H/T jabarkas for reminding me of this.)

Now, one competing thought is that the progressive political world is one that needs more people, not less. One of the defining characteristics of that world, in general, is inclusiveness. Anyone that wants to assist in reforming society or pushing forward an agenda that helps everyone, not just the rich, is going to be welcome there, regardless of color, sex, creed, whathaveyou. And not just welcome, but NEEDED. Gotta keep up with the Tea Party somehow, right? (Ignorance is always easier than reason.) On the other hand, it's also that world that should be at the forefront of demonstrating that people who aren't white can also be at the helm. It's that world that should be actively promoting the idea that non-white people are just as capable of performing any task asked of them. How does one do so? By counter-balancing the inherent racial attitude of society by creating accelerated opportunity. In other words, intentionally choosing people of color (and/or women.)

There is, of course, room for argument that doing so is inherently a racist act. I would be justified in the eyes of some by claiming: "I was encouraged not to apply simply because I'm white!" And that's true. As I said, the board was already slanted against me without even having seen my name. But there's a rather poignant example from the book, Freakonomics, on just how much impact actually seeing my name would have had. Those with "black-sounding" names frequently get less, or less positive, attention than those with "white-sounding" names. (And you don't get much more white-sounding than my full name.) I've seen evidence of this, first-hand, as well.

I just left a job on the south side of Taylor, the population of which is predominantly black. The company I worked for is fairly ruthless about rent collection and I had to review my delinquency reports with another long-time manager in an adjoining property to ensure that I was toeing the company line. Now, this woman is white and had been working in Taylor for at least 20 years. Every single time we came across a "black-sounding" name, like "Tawnisha", she would pretend to struggle over its pronunciation and then shake her head and grumble at the idea that someone would actually have that name, as opposed to something like "Judy". I always followed her faux struggles with a quick enunciation of the name in question ("Taw-NEE-sha."), which she responded to with a roll of her eyes. Accompanying that mild cultural resistance was a rather pronounced difference in attitude when it came to interpreting just why the rent wasn't paid. White names had reasons. Black names had excuses or lies.

So, in my personal circumstances, I'm disappointed that I wouldn't be given the opportunity. I like the sound of the job. It fits my principles. It's something I am motivated to do. I want the job. But there are many more people who may be as capable of and are as motivated to do the job as I would be who haven't had opportunities before this one and I think that's probably the more positive result for society, overall. Frustrating, especially while unemployed, but understandable.

Finally, the deeper meaning

Significant spoilers below if you haven't seen the most recent episode of The Walking Dead.

I'm not a huge zombie fan. Most of the entertainment surrounding them is pretty one-note: dead people chase, live people flee and occasionally kill. None of the Living Dead films has ever been more complex than that and most have been relatively self-contained in scope, aside from occasional details about what might be happening elsewhere. The whole world is represented by one little town or even one shopping mall. The exceptions to that are the "28" films (Days and Weeks), which examined the initiation of the problem from a purely scientific perspective (a weaponized disease that escaped containment) and which instigated the utter collapse of the British nation, and World War Z, an excellent book presented as a series of first-hand accounts collected by a UN Commission ten years after the "zombie war".

The book is used to examine any number of social issues that confront us today and which would be accentuated by the utter breakdown of society that takes place during the war, just as it does in the 28 films. That is what makes both book and films interesting, because the problems are far more complex than simply confronting walking corpses. The Walking Dead, originally as a comic and now as the TV series, is presented in a similar vein: the story isn't about running from and occasionally killing zombies. It's about what happens when society completely breaks down. Where does food come from? Where does electricity come from? Who enforces the laws? Who heeds them? Do you absorb others into your group, creating security but also creating more mouths to feed? Or do you reject all but a chosen few once you've learned to trust them?

The TV series has come under criticism from fans of the Romero movies who profess to simply want more scenes of hardcore corpse-killing action. That's a series that would last about two seasons and then get cancelled and the producers and the original writer of the story, Robert Kirkman, have often tried to explain that reality. There has to be something more to the story being presented or else it will quickly become trite. Tonight's episode highlighted that in almost every way possible and finally made the last two-and-a-half seasons well worth watching.

Lennie James returns as Morgan, who appeared in the first episode of the first season with his son, Duane (Adrian Turner), as they rescue Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) after his escape from the hospital. They're holed up in their house in Rick's home town and they explain how the world has changed before Rick sets off in search of his family, promising to try to keep in touch with them by radio. Tonight, we learned that Morgan has remained in town, but shifted locations to a more defensible area where he's amassed an arsenal and established an array of traps for the walkers while he continues to paint doomsday graffiti on every available surface. Duane has died and turned at the hands of his mother whom Morgan says he was too selfish and too weak to kill. Morgan has been driven at least mildly insane by this course of events and is now determined to embody the nihilistic approach toward the world that he thinks is the only reasonable course: everyone will turn and everyone will die, so there's no sense in associating with other other people or trying to rebuild society.

This is the crux of the story: Will society be rebuilt and, if so, by whom and how? The Governor of Woodbury has one approach that seems bent on authoritarian control and an intent that society will be what they want it to be, which is closer to the approach of most of the forces present in the 28 films. Rick's group, on the other hand, seems relatively deterministic: survival is the only real goal and the future will somehow take care of itself, once the problem of the zombies is resolved, which is closer to World War Z's depiction of the problem. The Walking Dead has managed to incorporate both approaches and this episode is what brings it into focus. Morgan had been a survivor, but now presents as an iconoclast. Nothing matters and it's his own weakness that has assured that situation (again, still somewhat deterministic, as his inaction seemingly assured his insanity and change in philosophy.) As he says: "I was too weak and it's people like me that have inherited the Earth."

Meanwhile, the former iconoclast of Rick's group, Michonne, discovers in the course of the same episode that perhaps it is better to be part of a group than a loner determined to distrust everyone. She does this by assisting Carl in the retrieval of the last picture of his mother that he knows to exist. His effort to reach this is motivated by personal feelings, but also by his desire to show his sister, Judith, what their mother looked like. In this way, he firmly positions himself in the camp of those trying to rebuild society, as he understands that the foundation of many human relations is the memory of what has gone before. If we don't possess knowledge of our forebears, we're cast adrift; essentially making it up as we go along, rather than confronting problems with a set of values rooted in the past and our knowledge of the people that lived then. As Orwell said: "Those who control the past, control the future. Those who control the present, control the past." That's a bit more heavy-handed than Carl's motivations, but the truth is essentially the same. Society will be based on a vision of what the controllers feel is essential to preserve, whether out of genuine altruism (Carl) or darker motivations (The Governor.)

I've been watching the series because I'm interested in most comic-oriented stories and Kirkman's is one that has been spoken of quite highly (I only read the first arc.) At times, it was difficult to continue because the story seemed to lack purpose. It was, in fact, just a bunch of people sitting around bemoaning their fate and occasionally entertaining us with new methods of killing walkers. But the third season has been a bit of a revelation in that it finally began to address the bigger picture and this episode brought it home, not because it delivered some poorly-executed expositional homily to the idea of recreating what was, but because it showed people confronting those problems and how it motivates and changes all of them. In that respect, I think I've become an actual fan.

Return of the messiah

So, today the president of the United States put his foot down, saying that he supports the idea of gay marriage. This is, of course, music to the ears of the half dozen NGOs that have emailed me today and a good chunk of the electorate still desperate to revel in some kind of delusion. For some commentators, this was the moment that Obama chose to "energize the base."

Which, of course, only goes to reinforce the fact that the American electorate is as dumb as a bag of hammers. This is the political equivalent of watching these guys try to organize a three car parade while the populace stands on the side of the road, waving their little flags and waiting for something to happen.

"Abortions for some. Miniature American flags for others!"

So, the Romney campaign, being all things Romney, hung their foreign policy guy out to dry because he was gay and the enthusiastic wing of the GOP was foaming at the mouth at the concept. Not that he was gay and had gotten married in Massachusetts; just that he was gay. They're the "values" party, y'see? As long as those values are circa 1950s, at best. But, as with most Romney moments concerning social or cultural issues, this instantly became an opening for the Democrats. The Obama campaign and DCCC started dropping buzzwords about gay rights, human rights and, of course, gay marriage. The media, by and large, ignored the whole issue and Fox News remained quiescent because they know that most intelligent people consider gay marriage to be a fait accompli. In other words, it's stupid to argue against it in the nation that prides itself on being the "leader of the free world" (and, in the case of Fox, also when the longtime host of your highly rated show, Fox Report, happens to be... shhh... gay.) So, first test passed.


The next step is to float the idea with everyone's favorite verbal live grenade, veep Joe Biden. The veep says he's "comfortable" with the idea. The media, once again, basically moves on to other pressing issues (Secret Service agents being poor tippers or some other moral crisis.) That's perfect for Obama, because if the press had recoiled in outrage, they could always laugh it off. "That's just Joe! When does he get through 30 days without saying something outrageous?!" That's basically what he's there for. He's about one step up the political evolutionary ladder from Dan Quayle. As long as he's telling some guy in a wheelchair to stand up and be recognized, he's diverting attention from anything constructive or destructive and basically being a bullet shield for the president. This is where the concept of going back to the veep being the runner-up in the presidential race becomes enormously appealing. As much as I appreciate the mouth that is Joe Biden for all the times that he unintentionally speaks the truth (much to the owning class' dismay), can you imagine the fun that could have been had with President Obama and Vice-President McCain?

Fast forward to today and Obama makes the daring move to say that he "supports the idea". You know, in principle. A hypothetical, as it were. If asked at gunpoint, he might nod his head. Because, after all, he only supports it now because he "assumed that civil unions would be sufficient."

It's still water, amirite?

This guy is as timid on social issues as an Amish woman climbing out of her wedding gown. Why? Because, of course, he doesn't give a shit about things like that. That stuff is for the poors, or at least the non-rich, to worry about. Anyone moving in his social circles doesn't worry about tax benefits or insurance coverage or hospital visitation rights. They get what they want because money buys what they want. And what Obama really wants is more money, preferably in separate checks from different people at the same corporation (the process is known as "bundling".)

And, yet, because he kinda, sorta, wobbles in the direction of an issue near and dear to the deluded masses that still think he cares about them and their lowborn concerns, "the base" is "energized". Keep in mind, of course, that he has not a shred of power to actually effect a change toward gay marriage anywhere in the nation, since the laws concerning such a thing are the purview of the states; 3/4 of which have explicitly banned the practice, sometimes by constitutional amendment, because the majority of state legislatures are packed to the gills with rednecks frightened of the gays, like we have here in Michigan from Jackson to Houghton.

It would be funny if it weren't such a goddamn tragedy.

Revolution in the streets

I've never been much of a TV watcher. Outside of a couple regular programs (Game of Thrones, obviously, and Mad Men), I tend to only turn it on when I'm eating, provided that I'm not already reading something. In doing so yesterday, I came across a documentary on VH1 called Uprising: Hip Hop and the LA Riots. It's a decent effort for a piece that runs all of 65 minutes and attempts to cover a very broad social topic and juxtapose it with the relevant music of the period. While I remember the events like they were yesterday (I was living in a house on North State Street in Ann Arbor and was transfixed in front of the images of the riots on the oak cabinet TV that my housemate, Wendy, had inherited from her grandmother), I hadn't thought about them in years and failed to remember how chilling and infuriating some of the depictions of the violence to both Rodney King and various bystanders in the subsequent riots really are:

As the documentary attempts to explain how the beating and the riots were direct inspirations for things like Dr. Dre's The Chronic, especially the track, "The Day the Niggaz Took Over":

which actually includes soundbites from an amateur cameraman's depiction of the outrage of the crowd following the verdict; and Ice Cube's The Predator, especially the track "We Had to Tear This Motherfucker Up":

which contains soundbites from the news coverage of the ridiculous verdict and the riots; and, of course, Ice-T's "Cop Killer":

which Ice-T has repeatedly stated was directly inspired by the beating of King.

The fascinating thing for me was, while watching it, I felt some pangs of memory from events that had occurred 20 years ago (and the associated "I wonder what happened to..." or "I remember that!" moments) but I had an even stronger reaction to the music being played with the depiction of events. That era of hip hop has always been my favorite and I've found very little since then to be as good (exceptions being Mos Def, The Fugees, Nappy Roots, and all subsequent releases by Public Enemy.) Certainly the textural appeal of much of it being about resistance to the hegemonic system is part of it. No one who knows me could be surprised at my finding public revolt to be an enthralling topic. But, of course, much of NWA's output was in that same vein and I found both Dre and Cube to be far better on their own, both having found their rhythm, literally and figuratively, when they were out from under Eazy-E's thumb. Certainly, accumulated wisdom and experience has something to do with it, but so does their turn toward the archly political and the broader social contexts of that experience, rather than the often more narrow-minded themes of NWA.

Those feelings aren't limited to just thematic subtext. It's really about the music, man! There's a general approach to the sounds and rhythms of that era of hip hop that are really appealing on a visceral level. Looking at my list of exceptions above: Public Enemy was clearly a part of it. Mos Def, while fascinating on a more introspective and often musical level, is much more layered than the basic beats of the time. The Fugees' limited output was also more developed on much of the groundwork that Dre had laid. And Nappy Roots is a whole different social level. The following video, one of the first that I remember replaying repeatedly on Youtube, is a perfect example of that:

(For some reason, the idea of three guys, completely stoned, being totally distracted by the Atlanta Hawk on a scooter while listening to Nappy Roots' "Aw Naw" is endlessly entertaining...) So, while the concepts behind the songs of that time from Dre and Cube and PE are necessarily complex, the music that drives them often isn't. Mos Def can get me to think along those same lines

but I spend more time thinking about the texture of his musical approach than what he's saying, whereas with Ice Cube's Predator, his lyrics are what are foremost in my mind while the music is a primeval undercurrent; a gut feeling, as it were.

So, what is inspirational about all of this? Should one normally be inspired by what was a catastrophe for much of the community (as Jello Biafra used to say: "Tomorrow you're homeless! Tonight it's a blast!")? The underlying problems that built much of the anger that was ignited that day have not been resolved. Ice-T's "economic prison" still exists in the form of unemployment and the often extreme disadvantages in the area for anyone who doesn't happen to be white. In short, the riots lived up to the age-old adage: violence solves nothing (other than providing a short-term wake-up call for the rest of the nation.) But the music continues to move, propel, and inspire. The pragmatist would suggest that redirecting said violence toward the proper targets would produce better results. Given the still-simmering anger evident in the documentary, all it will take is another spark. Will I have the same gut feeling when it begins again?

A job worth having

I stopped into a drugstore today and the clerk behind the counter ran me through his whole spiel on their discount card in a very enthusiastic manner. He struck me as a person who was very happy simply to have a job. Given the overall unemployment figures and especially those in Michigan, it's not unusual for that to be the case among any number of people.

The thought occurred to me to think to myself: "I've been there." I've been unemployed for fairly lengthy stretches at times, struggling to pay the rent on time and putting 1 or 2 dollars into the gas tank; just enough to keep the car moving from one interview to another. But it's not true. I've never been happy simply to have a job. Any job that I've had that has directly contributed to keeping a roof over my head has always been one that I despised. Its sole function was to pay for the necessities of survival and nothing else. Well, that's also not true. The other purpose it served was to make me hate the majority of my existence while I was doing it.

I have had jobs that didn't pay the rent. Those were the ones that I loved and would have gladly continued doing even as financial failures. I did them while I was also working for a paycheck and didn't consider them "work" in the dolorous sense. Of course, they were work and lots of it. They often required more energy and effort, physical and mental, than anything I expended on the tasks that people were paying me for. But I was driven to do them because I loved what I was doing. The people that enjoy those tasks they do for a living are often termed "people that love their jobs". They're defined as a jovial anomaly; someone that, essentially, got away with something in the game of life because they found a way to put food on the table and still be happy while doing it. "Pursuing one's passion" they call it and it often involves a serious expenditure of money on one's own part to get to the point where you can chase those dreams.

Except that it's not such a great idea to make the attempt any longer, as a number of recent reports suggest that unpaid student debt now exceeds $1 trillion (ever notice how no one uses the phrase "that's billion with a 'b'" anymore, because the numbers we talk about in ominous tones now routinely exceed trivial billions?) The sad thing about that is not only that a large share of said student debt is based on people making attempts into the fields that they were encouraged to pursue because they were seen as "sure things" (read: economically viable) but that those things are nowhere near as sure as they used to be.

Time was, you could spend your 4 years in college and come out with an anthropology degree and find a career in research or curating or education or even cultural relations for the nearest oil company wanting to lay waste to Borneo. That's all gone now (except for the oil devastation.) I met a really interesting woman a while back who has just such a degree and further education besides. She's fully trained to maintain and enhance the nearest museum exhibits on what has gone before. But those exhibits might as well be telling the story of the American education system that used to be a byword for opportunity but is now reduced to this simple message:

(When I was 5 or 6, I remember thinking that my dad was going to get in trouble for driving past one of these signs...)

Do not attempt to be an art historian. Do not attempt to be a historian. Do not attempt to be a marine biologist (Ghostcrawler promised me a pony!) or a journalist or a practitioner of any number of cultural or geographic arts. And don't even bother to get medieval on anyone's ass. No one else cares. It doesn't serve the drive of the modern society. It's not productive. You can go into business, technology, the law, or medicine. Make your choice.

Except that... well... you can't really go into any of those, either. The vast majority of the aforementioned debt is the (ahem) product of people venturing into those fields in the past decade or so. Those are, after all, the fields that society has deemed truly beneficial. After all, they get paid the most and the most assuredly, right?

A friend of mine started a blog recently, entitled "Inside the Law School Scam", which details the apparent effort by major law schools to recruit students not for the purpose of teaching them to become lawyers, but simply to make money... for the law schools. It is becoming a supposition among lawyers that law school doesn't really teach you about practicing law. You learn that in the real world, when you're making money. After all, that's the point of being "productive", right? To make money? Except that making money often involves being unhappy; something done for the sake of "getting by".

What kind of successful society perpetuates unhappiness for the sake of popular concepts of efficiency? What kind of society deems any activity that does not make an immediate or enormous profit one that is, essentially, a burden to that society? Produce or die. And yet, most of the major works of art and literature that form the foundation of our modern society were the product of patronage or starvation. The very culture that is lionized and revered by the ownership class was created by the kind of people that that class reviles. Most of those people did so because they were driven by passion and, occasionally, assisted by those who had means.

Our means, at the moment, is often directed toward creating more means as an end unto itself. I remember thinking about going back to school a couple years after I had graduated from Michigan. I had thought about getting a master's in education and going into teaching. My father attempted to talk me out of it because "there's no money in it." True enough. Unless you're a big-time law or business or medical professor, I suppose.

What kind of society perpetuates these conditions? Presumably, the one that doesn't care about them and those left to endure them. That, in itself, is an argument for burning said society to the ground and starting over. "There always seems to be money for war but not for education..." Or happiness.

"What we've got here is failure to communicate."

I'm not a real fan of 60s-era films. Cool Hand Luke is one of the few exceptions (the title quote is verbatim, incidentally.) I was once very fond of a character I created for a comic series for our studio that I named Cool Hand Luke. I always wondered if we would have been sued for copyright infringement or if I could have skirted the edge of fair use on that one, since he wouldn't have been the title character of the book.

But I'm not really talking about films or comics today. I'd rather talk about guns ("Lots of guns."), particularly the ease of access to guns like the Glock that one Jared Lee Loughner used this morning in an attempt to assassinate Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. A cursory view of Loughner's Youtube channel reveals someone obsessed with currency, the monolithic power behind it, and his belief that the vast majority of Americans lacked grammar skills in some way. He's correct about the latter, but not exactly in the fashion over which he seems so obsessed. And, yet, someone this unstable had easy access to a powerful handgun with a 30-shot clip; the use of which enabled him to kill 6 people and wound 12 others in seconds.

Am I a believer in the right to own firearms? That's a very difficult question for me. When I was with the Greens, I believed in what they state are their Four Pillars: ecological wisdom, grassroots democracy, social justice, and non-violence. Those four ideals are supposed to be the underpinning of everything that the Green Party puts forth as policy. The US Green Party, being Americans, expanded those 4 into a superfluous 10 so that they could be sure that the public would be more confused come election time while feeling self-satisfied about their own philosophical acumen. But the original four are still the bedrock for Greens around the world and, indeed, American Greens, as well. Everyone had their little shades of gray (chartreuse?) for each of them and everyone had different personal emphases. The majority of the American political audience views the Greens as "tree-huggers"; environmentalists, by and large. But there were many of us who focused more often on the "social justice" pillar. We were among those that were occasionally termed "Watermelon Greens" inside the party, because we were supposedly green on the outside but red (aka Marxist) on the inside. And then there was an even smaller segment who occasionally struggled, at least internally, with the whole "non-violence" thing.

None of us were foolish enough to believe in the idea of beginning an armed insurrection against the government (at least, not yet...) While Jim Morrison famously said: "They got the guns, but we got the numbers.", modern American society is too tightly controlled to make that a viable option, even with the best of intentions. This fact goes all the way back to Shays' Rebellion (look it up.) But is it wise to have the option at least present, however difficult, in this malfunctioning charade that we accuse of being democracy? When we look back at history, there are very few instances where violence was not necessary for significant social change. However, we see the downside of having said option left open every day: easy access to extremely powerful weapons by people who should be nowhere near such things.

People are stupid. People are also violent. Giving people an easy way to express that baser nature in the name of a 200-year-old screed referring to organized militias is an expression of philosophical stupidity that has few parallels in human history. Loughner's video screeds show someone outraged over the inability of the general public to communicate in what he considers an acceptable form. As someone who shares that belief in a less homicidal manner, it's funny (not funny like a clown) to see someone else so concerned about failure of communication in modern society. While I tend to think that it leaves people largely passive, confused, and distracted as only those who own this nation would like to see, there are times when it becomes less passive and a lot more destructive. And these are the people who have access to an arsenal that puts the armed forces of many other nations in the world to shame.

There was a great moment in a series of 1980s-90s science fiction collections known as the Man-Kzin Wars. The series itself was about man's encounter with an alien species of cat-people (the Kzinti) even more violent than himself. Dean Ing wrote a couple stories for the first two collections called "Cathouse". It was about a man who had been captured by the Kzinti and dropped onto a kind of laboratory world that contained prehistoric Kzinti and prehistoric humans; both Neanderthals and early Homo Sapiens. There's never been a clear understanding as to why the branch known as Neanderthal disappeared and the branch that eventually evolved into current humans survived. Ing's conjecture was that Neanderthals were telepathic. They could read the thoughts and emotions of those around them, which made them extremely empathetic and, consequently, passive (also, very interested in free love; a kind of early Flower Children, as it were.) Early Man lacked these abilities and, thus, denied instinctive communication, responded to situations of confusion and change with the still-current instinctive response: fear and violence. Thus, early Man exterminated the Neanderthals because the latter kept trying to understand the former, who knew only to kill what it refused to understand.

Thus, we come to Loughner. Was it because the surrounding public wasn't empathetic enough to his concerns that he responded with a shooting spree? Or was it simply because he was so off-kilter in the first place and no one would have been able to understand him, telepath or no? Regardless, is it sensible of modern society (oxymoron warning...) to allow a situation that enables apparent psychopaths to mow down people at random (and, apparently, specific in Giffords' case) before anyone can even think of stopping them? By the same token, assuming that there does come a day when the bloody revolution is needed to effect change that both Jefferson and Trotsky spoke of in different ways, do we close off the only avenue that may enable said revolution to at least get started, if not necessarily succeed? Obviously, once the violence begins, communication is over. Thus, I'm aware of the hypocrisy of complaining about the lack of effective communication and then suggesting that, at some point, that massive civilian arsenal may actually be necessary. In that way, I sound like Loughner. What separates me from him is the lack of desire to actually mow people down in the streets and my further lack of interest in listening to insipid ex-governors of Alaska.

In the end, I suppose I come down on the side of needing to get the weapons off of the streets. Tragedies like today are simply too frequent and people are, as always, too stupid to be allowed to handle weapons that are that powerful (what does that say about our armed forces? Yeah. I'll get there.) But there's that niggling little sensation at the back of my mind that says: There will come a day... I'm certainly not looking forward to it.

Deus vult and Deo vindice!

The madness that involves violating one's own supposed precepts in order to violate another's existence.

The madness that drives otherwise intelligent people to the depths of ignorance and ignorant people to the heights of destruction; their own and others'.

The madness that perpetuates war and disease and famine and death at the beckoning of writings from millennia past and drives communities apart from within and without.

One cannot have proper communication in the face of faith. The latter will eventually drown out any attempt to properly understand one another as the belief that the ultimate destination of those who do not believe will be doom of some kind that may or may not infect the minds of the children whom that faith proclaims to protect and 'save'. Cue Helen Lovejoy... One questions why people will simply not stop and think.

The ideas that have driven people to the limits of outrage; of achievement; of beauty; of earnest desire and contemptible desire are those that are in and of themselves earnest and contemptible. Faith has been used to create codes and to shatter them; to insist upon guidance and to set people free from it; to create unshakable laws and to empower people past any law written by a human hand. All of this has been done with the idea of some goal that can neither be defined or experienced because the ultimate experience will supposedly be at the end of any that can be related to one another. Thus, communication denied.

Is action taken by the will of a person or by divine fiat? The laws say thou may not and the laws say thou may. Are all of those laws prescribed somewhere before they are even written or has the will of the average human being been proscribed before he or she has even learned how to pick up a pen and use it to communicate what is in their mind? Are we a nation of men or a nation of laws?

Unfortunately, we're currently a nation burdened by the conviction of some that the principles upon which it was founded were both universally applicable and unchangeable; this in the face of the facts that the writers of said principles were objecting against the idea that divine, unknowable will elevated the status of any one person above any other. God/Yahweh/Allah/Brahman/Buddha were to have no part in the common designs of the American man and yet we are stuck arguing over how big their role should be in a time period where we are supposedly more educated and more knowledgeable about the world and our role in it than those hallowed people. Would that it were actually so...

I knew a man, once. I had the audacity to tell him that I had no use for philosophy or poetry. I was a pragmatic individual and I knew where of and what I was and where I was going and I had no time to stop and consider deeper thoughts. I was all of 15 years old and a senior in high school. That man taught me how to better use the words that I was so proud of and encouraged me to reconsider philosophy and poetry, telling me that I would learn to love them.

That man was a Catholic priest. I have little use for the beliefs that he held so dearly, but I wish that he was here right now so that I could tell him that he was right. My appreciation for words extended to poetry and philosophy became one of the driving forces of my existence. That man's religion had driven him to teach, in the same way that the driving force of Islam led Arabic peoples to develop scientific principles that we still use today (as we grit our teeth in chagrin over the way Islam is used as a tool of ignorance in Afghanistan.) Is there an upside? Of course there is. I miss you, Father Ziemba. I can't ever repay how you convinced me to stop and think. I only wish so many other people would do the same without the constraints of some presumed morality handed down from an otherworldly being that no one has seen nor ever will.