Cornel West and Micheal Moore on Democracy Now! today discussing their activities and excitement about participating in the Occupy Wall-Street protests. They complain that the Democrats and Obama are attempting to co-opt the movement, and Amy points out "but you both supported him."
Cornel protests "critical support" based on their fear of the Republican alternatives, "but I think both of us knew that he tended to go too much to the center... The occupy movement has been able to show how both parties are tied to oligarchy."
As per my previous complaint: even the strongest voices of the left openly observe that they asked for that which they protest against. The Green party has been around for over a decade, essentially begging for the chance to represent based on the values that these people claim to support. They have remained a footnote in history because the OWS crowd and the voices of the left have spent the last ten years saying "we wish things were different, but we are too afraid of failure to stand for something else."
The leadership on the left naturally reflects this lack of courage and vision. It is foolish to criticize them for delivering the world that their supporters believed in. Again, it may not be what was wished, but this is what was requested.
I attended a Green Party meeting this evening. There were twelve people there. Aside from myself the youngest is over fifty years old. They are very excited about the OWS, and are trying to address the criticism that they should have more of a presence at the protests, despite the fact that almost all of them have participated.
Politics is not my preferred arena; I gained more from talking to the attendees about who they are and how they experience themselves after the meeting than I did from the agenda items. Additionally, my basic discovery that "I am responsible for my own experience" makes the entire premise behind our governmental system an uncomfortable fit, even if it makes it easy for me to love the DIY Hacktivist types. But all the noise has caught my attention, and struck a chord with the shift I've been making.
I'm working on asking smarter. I'd like the wisdom and courage to ask, and receive, according to my deepest wishes.
(love, joy, freedom, power)
So back around 1998 I was getting, and passing on, BBS delivered messages on feminist lists pointing out that the Taliban sucked and we should really push our government to stop supporting them. My journal entry from 2011/11/11 says I'm really sad about what's happened, but I'm also worried that the way our country reacts might cause more problems than it solves. In 2006 I started trying to convince my mother that she had too much debt to support her house / lifestyle and she ought to cut back and simplify. The bulk of my career so far has involved tech support for efforts to fix Native American and USA government relations, and then reshape how we deal with poverty, and there's the whole Free software and did activism in West Philly thing, blah... Blah. Blah.
You know something? It's nice that the protesters finally decided to get off their ass and take note of the fact that "it is up to us, the people, to decide our future." You know what else? You asked for this crap. Every time you skipped the PTA meetings, and treated your teachers like poorly behaved babysitters, and decided it was easier to watch another movie than volunteer for anything at all, to drive instead of biking, to buy the sweatshop sneakers, to work for that shitty boss instead of risking a pay cut to do something worthwhile, to vote for someone in the two party system, to live on credit cards, and to throw every dollar you ever made at people who were producing what they thought you wanted at (human) costs that you were only too happy to ignore, you said "please sir, can I have some more" to the stupidest vision of what our species can be.
Oh. So now that you can't actually afford an X-Box to piss your life away on, you want to do something that matters?
Fine. Good. But let's not stand here and pretend that it's Wall Street's fault. Whether you knew it or not, this is exactly what you've been asking for. When you're done with the pity party, please have enough sense to go home and create something better.
Yes, that was me having a pity party of my own. It's all very ironic. I was promised that the beatings would continue until morale improved, and that I could listen to Ani sing Recoil in between.
Pretty sure that relationship is dead. Stupid.
I/we forgot the first and most important rule. Love is a verb. My culture frequently obsesses over the worst question possible: "What do you want?"
Quick and obvious observation: Hunger is pretty clear form of want. Want an orange? Pull it off the tree, tear off the skin, eat it. Lucky it's an orange. You know what happens to a cow when I start getting really hungry?
I've had a few reminders recently about womens' experience, particularly as related to street harassment, rape, etc. My point: being wanted pretty much sucks. Especially if you are wanted by someone who has the power to actually do something about it.
We humans though, we need the love. We need to give it and receive it, and doing that well is just about the most useful and rewarding skill and experience a person can have.
Reminder to future-self. If you practice the whole love thing well, there is a pretty good chance that the whole "want" question will simply be replaced with joy and satisfaction. On the other hand, whether you lead or are led down the "what do you want?" path, chances are you will eat and eat until there is nothing left, and find yourself hungry at the end.
You spoke of wanting to be more of an activist; laudable, assuming that the experience of being an activist suits you.
In college we made a study of systems and injustice. Investigated capitalism and found that both wealth and poverty are an inevitable consequence. Saw that the history of racist policy in this country has not closed, and that even if it did the inequalities will affect our institutions for generations to come. We looked at the destruction of our environment as related to the industrial revolution, and the implications of our resource usage for undeveloped nations. We considered the problems we create when we assume that other cultures are supposed to want what we want.
It was all very complicated and interesting, and left me burning wish to go out and change the world.
Since then I have learned that behind all the complexity things remain simple. Everything I learned could be summarized: "Life is suffering. Trying to change that creates more suffering." Every system of suffering I have ever seen was born of someone's attempt to make the world a better place, if not for others then for themselves. We don't create our dreams: we create our dreaming.
There is a way out, of course, but I only know a part of it. Suffering is alleviated when we learn to accept and work with it. Here is where I am challenged:
Given that we are made for both joy and sorrow, hunger and satisfaction, love and loneliness, how do we live in the world in such a way that we can encompass all of these things? If misery is inevitable, can we use our lives and creativity such that we are not its allies? Is this wish a trap as well?
I am not the first to ask such questions. Maybe I should look it up on Google...
Wired Magazine explained recently that the "online" world of the web is fading in importance as apps that just work and machine to machine conversations take over the Internet. A major driving force behind this phenomenon is that those of us who grew up with the World Wide Web are reaching the point where we have a few bucks to spend, and would rather pay for a service then spend our time fiddling with computers in order to get access to the ideas, music, news, people, etc. that we love. They take a look at the history of industrial development and the like as a model to understanding the further implications of this phenomenon, and point out that regulated oligopolies appear to be the natural end point for capitalism.
There are some broad implications that occur to me, which I'd like to think through.
My first thoughts are for those of us who are convinced of the principles behind Free Software, and who would see that those principles guide the future. It's been stated repeatedly that our interest is not that people are prevented from making a profit, only that we want to ensure that said profits do not come at the cost of people's liberties. To win the pragmatic side of the debate is likely more important that to win the ideological debate. I suspect that in this case it is actually good news that most people don't care how things are done "behind the scenes" so long as everything basically works. Why? Because machine to machine communication is simplest with open, standardized protocols (I'm thinking TCP/IP and the like). The trick is not, as was thought, to take over the desktop and win the hearts of computer users. The trick is to make sure that the open platforms are the best way to handle the back-bone first.
Okay - Stop writing this for a certain audience. This is a think through..
Damnit. I got to the end without any of the steps. So what is the end? The end is that we use REST to deliver real life services.
Thats the trick. Okay - so what does that mean? That means that your "pizza" application is both a free app and an open api. Nobody fucking cares about the advertisements, coupons, etc. They want to push a button and trade their money for Pizza. Or, more importantly for a guy like me, photos, or what the fuck ever.
Like rats in a cage - push the button, get a food. Button -> food, button -> food, and pretty soon you've got a rat that wouldn't leave his fucking cage if you paid him.
And thus was conquered a world.
Son of a bitch!
Writing an e-mail was inordinately difficult because my brain is trying to comprehend that the Internet + non-dualism + the development of multicellular life implies that the Borg are a probable future; but when we arrive as such it may be a form of enlightenment. If current individuals were particularly intelligent in the next couple of years, they could probably existing technologies to establish themselves as effective precursors. Conclusion: Facebook + wireless sunglasses could turn "friends" into multi-organism beings. But the sci-fi writers knew that no later than 1989, so why does this feel like news to me?
Queries:
Does your brain do this kind of thing? Does everyone's? How much of conversation is spent simply attempting to establish a premise from which you can actually say something useful? How often do you find it hard to tell someone what your schedule is this weekend because you are preoccupied by the idea that sending someone an e-mail in order to make plans is functionally similar to one neuron passing on a message to another, only less efficient?
I've mentioned a wish for effective dense communication in the past. So are we all walking around, intensely frustrated by an inability to communicate the bigger picture of our circumstances to each other, or is all this crap in my head a uniquely problematic: akin to schizophrenia or ADD?
As children, my siblings and I were given a rule for conversation: anything we wished to tell our mother had to be finished within four sentences. If we went over the limit she would make us stop, think it through, and then get to the point. It taught us to consider the meaning of our words, separate important ideas from the useless ones.
So after a decade of trying, failing, reading, learning, adjusting, asking, answering, thinking, exploring, playing, wishing, wondering, re-evaluating, contemplating and so forth, I think I've come up with a motto that encompasses everything I need to know moving forward.
"Kiss the dragon on the nose."
Sounds kind of silly, but it covers love, power, freedom, creativity, adventure, and playfulness. It does so in a way that those words can be remixed into other forms - compassion, courage, humor, joy, etc depending on circumstance. Easy to remember, requires a lot of internal fortitude but also a particularly intense sense of humor and imagination. Plus I stole the core idea from someone who inspires me.
I like it, it's mine. Now I'll have to see how well it applies.
I've been thinking about principles again. I once mentioned that having some solid principles to rely on makes for a useful fall-back when things get rough. One can address certain problems by asking, for example, "what is the most powerful thing I could do here? The simplest? The most adventurous?" I find that far more useful than the typical, emotionally reactive things I've seen.
I've been bored a lot lately. Too much cognitive surplus, and video games don't cut it.
It occurs to me that one might not simply fall back on principle when dealing with problems. What's the most powerful thing a human being can do at all, regardless of circumstance? What's the most adventurous thing I'm actually capable of? The simplest?
Some of these ideas are already reflected in my habits, but at a relatively low level of understanding. I make sure I'm doing some kind of exercise regularly, which is a minor exploration of power. Treat family and friends with the intent of loving them. Stick to Free software to the extent that work allows. I have a pretty simple life punctuated with minor adventures, when the mood strikes. It would be interesting to see how far these can be taken though, get past maintenance and into.. I don't know, world domination or something. It bears a bit of investigation and then experiments and application.
One thing that occasionally blows my mind is a fairly simple train of what I hope is logical thinking. It goes like this:
I am a small piece of the Universe.
I am aware of myself, and aware of the Universe.
Therefore, the Universe is aware of me, and of its self.
I don't expect to get back on the Christianity train any time soon, but the experience of having this epiphany "feels" more like it should be worded:
"I think, therefore ... (God!?)"
There are other odd tracks that tend to flow. Such as whether the oceans or Earth should be counted as "alive" even though the rocks and salt don't reproduce themselves. If you take a fish out of the ocean, it tends to die. So is the fish not a part of the ocean? What about the fact that if you took a given scoop of ocean water up and looked at in under a microscope, it would probably have a ton of single celled organisms in it?
Oh right... they call that an "ecosystem."
The whole thing is a mental parlor trick. I can't do anything with these thoughts.
"Ooh, it's amazing! But wait ... so what?"