Democracy in America?

You know a culture has gone full circle when 100 square-foot houses become news simply because they’re small.

Imagine walking into a small town in a remote village in South America and trying to explain to the villagers the resurgence of tiny homes in the U.S. I’m sure you’d draw some hefty laughs and quite a bit of confused stares. As they invite you into their 50 square-foot shanty you tell them that their house design is in high demand in the liberalized cities of the northeast and western U.S. We’ve got billions of house designers in developing countries just waiting to be discovered. Pay attention Bravo network, this could be your next big deal!

The micro-home phenomenon is another instance of Americans doing what they are supposed to do and reveling in it. Sorry, but a vast majority of the world live in tiny homes and have been since the dawn of humanity. At one time, so did most Americans. Micro-homes are not news, they’re olds.

It’s wonderful that this happening, don’t get me wrong. But it’s not an invention. It’s a resurgence. Necessity was the mother of invention until the industrial revolution orphaned the notion and invention was adopted by laziness. Is there really, truly a need for a remote control for a car stereo? Or automatic windows on cars? Or the Segway? Let’s look at industry, do we really need barber shops and hair salons and spas and gyms? Can’t we cut our own hair, give each other massages and exercise on our own? Do we need fast food? Can’t we cook ourselves? Do we really need grocery stores that sell food from countries that are 10,000 miles away? Is cable television our only connection to the world and is the Internet our lifeline to social interaction? Do we really need cheese puffs and pork rinds and dippin dots? Why do we have napkins and paper towels, don't we need one or the other? Are all these inventions necessities?

Naturally, there are arguments to be made on behalf of all these things. Safety. Fear of being hurt. Convenience. Help people. Pleasure. These days, the number one argument for inventions is that people don’t have the time to do it themselves. And lack of time creates the "necessity." Ironically people don’t have the time because they’re spending most of their time doing things that feed the system. I can’t cook because I have to go to work, doing something that is a service. Eighty percent of the jobs in the United States are service-oriented, meaning that they provide a service for people who don’t have the time or ability or inclination to do it themselves.

For some odd reason, do-it-yourself is also some kind of newsworthy phenomenon. It’s as if we never could do anything ourselves and now that we can’t afford services anymore we have to figure out how to fix that leaky pipe on our own. People wonder why the economy is still shit but the stock market is bull-strong? I suggest two reasons. First, companies are exploiting volunteer labor and internships given the market is flooded with extremely valuable talent – and these people are willing to do anything to get their foot in the door. Second, people are saving more money, doing more things themselves and hurting the small businesses that provide most of these services. Walmart is doing wonderful, and why not? Where else can you buy items for odd-numbered prices like $2.41 or $1.27 that are designed to fuck with our minds?

That’s what happens to a foundation built of sand, eventually it falls into the sea. A consumption-based economy cannot and will never sustain itself.

So laziness and greed are now the adopted parents of invention. It’s amazing how we create a “need” for material things that are useless. iPhones. Don’t even get me started on the iPhones. Useful, absolutely, but so is a toilet. That doesn’t mean I want to carry a crapper with me everywhere I go. Or the iPad. The Kindle. The Nook. WTF? The only good thing is that it’s saving paper. That’s it. Other than that it is killing the essence of literary culture. In some extreme cases, I can see the need for it. But for everyone? I sure as hell hope not.

Sooner or later if we keep on the path we’re on, we’ll all find it necessary to have nuclear reactors in our homes. Why? Because the Joneses have one, of course! Plus Walmart is having this awesome sale, if you buy 100 pounds of enriched uranium they’ll throw in a 5-year-old Indonesian servant girl free of charge. You can’t lose! (My love for Walmart runs deep)

To paraphrase Chilean economist Manfred Max-Neef, we need to readjust our definition of growth and development. Growth is quantitative and has limits. Development is qualitative and has no limits. The U.S., as Max-Neef opines, is underdeveloping, meaning that the quality of life is diminishing as growth has surpassed the threshold of sustainability.

So much propaganda exists in the information ether, so much misinformation and disinformation it’s impossible to know what’s really going on. For some reason I cannot fathom, we still do not have universal health care in this country. It’s as if we don’t give a shit about the 20,000 people who die every year from lack of access to health care. Sure they can get treated, and live their life with a six-figure debt over their heads, maybe lose their house because they can’t pay their medical bills, but hey, it’s better to be alive and homeless than dead, right? What kind of choice is that to offer citizens of a “free nation?” Even under Obama-care, health care experts estimate that thousands will still die because of lack of access.

I’m just frustrated with our culture, or lack of culture. I see so much ignorance around me, and it’s the people who consider themselves knowledgeable who are the scariest and most in the dark. I admit, I don’t know a damn thing. All I know is that what we got ain’t working, and it’s a shame our president did not take the fire from his campaign and use it to create real change. He tried to appease the right, he tried to pander to them, to find a middle ground, and admirably so. But in the end he just made himself look incompetent. The right will block him to their graves, as that is “good politics.”

Our country needs a drastic and deep upheaval. This two-party democratic republic is a farce. It’s not a democracy, it is a oligarchy dressed up in blue collar clothes. We are a nation of hypocrites. Homosexuals can die for their country as long as nobody knows they’re gay. We want our military might but we don’t want to pay for it. We want a strong economy but we’re not willing to eradicate the disease. We want our neighbors to have access to health care but we’re not willing to help them get it. We want immigrants to leave but we don’t want to wash dishes or cut grass or hang drywall for cheap. We want China to slow down but we can’t stop buying shit from Walmart. We want our children to get a good education but we’re not willing to understand what a good education is. We want our own cars, our own houses, our own pets, our own hobbies, our own lives but we don’t want to deal with our own share of the problems. We want the world to listen but we don’t know what to say. We want our independence and our freedom but we also long for connections and security.

In his book Democracy in America, Alexis de Toequeville states this dualistic phenomenon most succinctly: “Man alone, of all created beings, displays a natural contempt for existence, and yet a boundless desire to exist, he scorns life, but he dreads annihilation.”

Do you ever get the feeling that our leaders are making it up as they go along? I saw a Craigslist post for a government writing position, and it was the longest, most asinine and convoluted post I’d ever seen. After taking 15 minutes of my life and losing five of my 10 brain cells I finished reading the post. I had to pause and gather myself. There were so many unnecessary words in the ad I couldn’t begin to imagine what the hell they were actually looking for. I decided to risk a second read. After recharging my eyes with several doses of hand rubbing I reengaged the advertisement. After reading two sentences my brain registered something. As if my subconscious figured it out while my conscious mind scrambled in vain to determine the meaning. I realized something, and it blew my mind. It was one of those eureka moments that I will always remember, and it perfectly summarizes my feelings regarding American culture.

The federal government agency was looking for someone to write roughly 15 reports to tell them what the hell was going on in the agency. They had no idea what they were doing, and they needed someone to come in, observe what they were doing, and then write a report telling them what they were doing. Operational procedures I think it was called.

All they wanted to know was what the heck was going on. It was truly amazing. I swear to you, I can’t make this up. And I know why they had to make the ad so convoluted, they had to appear somewhat professional and word the ad in a way that would entice academics and make them feel less incompetent. It’s like writing a 1,000-page treatise on the physiology of the back left leg of a carpenter bee.

So I applied for the job. They asked me if I had any experience with operational procedures and I told them I had no idea what that was. Needless to say they hired me on the spot. I wrote them one sentence in my report. “I don’t have a fucking clue what the fuck is going on. Ask Sarah Palin.” (Okay, I guess it was two sentences)

I was immediately promoted to senior executive account assistant managing editor. Gotta love fed gigs.

What's right is right, right?

Doing what’s right is good, right? As opposed to doing something morally questionable, like stealing. But what about the person who steals but is honest about his theft, does he get any kudos for honesty? He doesn’t lie to himself and pretend that he’s a modern day Robin Hood. He knows he’s scum, he knows he’s low. He doesn’t bullshit. Is that respectable?

And what about the person who does what’s right? It’s easy to admire a person who, on the outside, seems righteous. Let’s say there’s a woman who runs a nonprofit that feeds homeless people. That’s definitely a good thing, right? (If you don’t think so, my entire essay might not work for you) She’s respected in the community, everybody knows her as a “good” person. But let’s say she lies to herself about what she’s doing. What if she holds herself above other people, like lets say, the aforementioned thief. Or even better, let’s say that she considers all bank executives to be below her, morally speaking. She lifts herself up in her good deeds, and lowers others whom she considers are parasites in society. Is she lying to herself about how great she is? Is it better to do good and inflate your self-importance through telling yourself lies, or to do bad and at least be honest about it?

Obviously both paths are incorrect. That’s where the third way comes in. But for me, I struggle every day with humility. I struggle with it bad. Throughout my life, I have continuously experienced events that knock me down, cut me to a stump, position me in a place that seems lower than I was years earlier. Humbling events are difficult to accept. You feel weak, insecure. You feel worthless, like all your talent is wasting, like nobody appreciates you. You feel lost in a bubble of inward affectations, disillusioned by pain and confronted with the reality that the world is a cruel and bitter place. And in a dog-eat-dog society such as ours, we will not last.

I remember getting fired from a job, then going back to another job I had also been fired from and begging for work. I was hired on, but not in the same capacity as before. Before I had been the equivalent of a sous chef at an upscale restaurant. But now I was a dishwasher. The lowest rung on the food and beverage totem, the place where only immigrants find pride because to them, work is work, money is money.

But for me, work has never been work. For some reason, after World War II, the understanding of work changed dramatically. For eons, work was what you did to support the people you loved, your family and close friends. You didn’t work a job you were passionate about, you worked a job that paid the bills, that enabled you to send your children to college, that provided for your retirement. Now it seems we are all scrambling to find our voice, our calling, our niche in the ever globalizing dynamism of the marketplace. It is now more important to do something important than it is to just do something. Say that ten times fast.

Of course we can say that the blood and sweat of our forefathers has enabled us to pursue more meaningful careers. We could also say that people were angrier back then because they did not derive a sense of personal satisfaction from their vocation, and that we’re better off having the freedom to choose rather than the obligation to just work.

But we could also say that something was lost in the process. During the lightning evolution of labor, the definition of responsibility has changed dramatically. It used to mean that we were responsible for more than just ourselves, that we have a family to look after, elderly parents to care for, brothers and sisters and neighbors in need of a helping hand. But now we consider responsibility limited to ourselves and our household. If my bills don’t affect you, we have nothing to do with each other.

We’re not all like that, but I would argue that this is the general sentiment of our society, and that it will only get worse as the introversion of our social interactions exacerbates through the expansion of technological relationships, or technoships. But I digress.

I remember returning from Ethiopia and going back to work for my stepfather doing construction. I had helped to create an NGO in Ethiopia, I traveled to Italy with my future wife for an international photography exhibition that included my poetry. I had dined with ambassadors and presidents of countries and multi-millionaires, the elite of the elite. I had found my voice. But now I was living in Goochland, Virginia with my parents, working at a job that I never felt comfortable doing.

But of course I had to. I was getting married and I needed to give something to my future wife and family. We needed a foundation, and although I had the time of my life in Ethiopia, it was not an environment conducive to starting a family–traveling here and there, living on couches and barely scraping by. Even with the blessings of the upper class I was still a mere pet to them. A western boy with bright eyes and big dreams, a bit naive and 100 percent lost. Focused, yes. Passionate? Absolutely. But so caught up in how awesome I was I forgot who I really was.

Why do bad things happen to good people? Because people are so caught up in how good they are they forget that they are just like everyone else. Even the nicest most generous people in the world are subject to being proud of their kindness. Like the story of the monks who argued over who was the most humble. Talk about an oxymoron.

But my time, our time in Goochland dragged. It really strained my new marriage, especially when I had no work for a month, no car, no means to even drive to the city for a job interview. Stuck in rural Virginia, waiting to be saved by something, waiting in vain. Eventually I got a job at a restaurant. Here I was, 29 years old, a life of adventure behind me, and I was back working in the food and beverage industry, making less money per hour than I did when I was 21 and in college. My college degree sat collecting dust in the closet–a $27,000 piece of paper in a cheep Walmart frame. I think that was the last time I ever stepped foot in a Walmart.

Eventually I was hired as a stringer for a newspaper, writing little tidbits of mundane community minutia. The people I wrote about certainly were not mundane, but what I wrote certainly was. Finally I was hired on as a full-time staff writer. Even then I thought is was below where I was in Ethiopia. After eight months I learned that I had won two writing awards, but in the same breath I was laid-off. It was surreal.

I took it in stride, saw it as an opportunity to work on other stuff, get refocused on my own ambitions. So here I am, seven months after being laid-off and still nothing. The humbling experience gets increasingly more painful and longer in duration the older I get. Only now I have a wife, giving the sword another edge and another stabbing point.

I even lost my faith for a while. Athiets and agnostics might find statements like that pitiful, or laughable, or justifiable even. I find it sad. I wish I had the lassaiz-faire spiritual mentality of an agnostic or atheist. I wish I could imagine a chaotic world that ends when it ends, a world in which the Golden Rule were the only thing to worry about, a world in which humanism was the epitome of my moral code. I truly do. But shit in one hand and wish in the other, as they say, and no doubt the dookie will win that battle.

But sometimes we have to lose our faith in order to find it. Sometimes we have to set the bird free and hope that it returns. Older? Naturally. Wiser? Maybe. I guess the key is to never lose faith in yourself, even if you lose faith in the divine. Because God is always calling to us, no matter how much we deny God’s existence or how much we ignore the voice of Mother Nature, God is always singing in our ears. But we are not always singing in our own ears. We are our own worst enemy, each of us is our worst critic. If we forget God, God doesn’t forget us. But if we forget ourselves, we are truly forgotten.

So as I sit, feeling sorry for myself, searching for job after job, writing countless cover letters that inflate my persona, trying desperately to attract the attention of a stranger who in all likelihood I will never meet, as I bounce around ideas for making money in my head, people I can go to for help, places I can go for networking, places I can go to just get the fuck away from everyone, as my brain takes it all in and focuses all its energy on doing something, anything that utilizes my passion and my strengths as a human being, I forget what it means to be humbled. As soon as I grab a job, humility is out the door. I am thrust into the world of Darwinist capitalism, and if I don’t swim, I will sink to the bottom and be forgotten to the sea. If I don’t exude professional confidence and surety I will not last. And if I allow my personal ego to supersede my faith, my soul will not last. So where does that leave me?

I have no idea. I want to give, I want to teach and learn, I want to write, I want to play music and travel, I want to help people. If these are selfish ambitions, so be it. As long as I’m honest with myself, as long as I truly stay humble and reverent and thankful, I have nothing to worry about. If I can be at peace in my heart, if I can know that everything I build with my hands and everything I create can be taken away or destroyed in the blink of an eye, if I know that the only true peace is dedication to a life of humble servitude, if I can truly love and cherish my wife and pray for my enemies and help people when it’s inconvenient to me and be kind with no acknowledgment, I will find my way.

I only hope and pray that the bird will stay happy in its cage. Not pacified, not incarcerated, but locked into the Way, chained in pure freedom.

Swimming in Babylon

We all know what happened nine years ago around this time. We all remember where we were. There’s no need to reiterate the pain of an atrocity as a cheep means to invoke sentimentality.

But where are we nine years later? It would seem that we are even further away from compassion and understanding. Dangerously so. Although we do tend to get wrapped up in the glass being half-empty, don’t we? We forget about the stuff in the glass that gives us strength because we’re inundated with propaganda from across the political spectrum. Not everybody is an ignorant, Koran-burning xenophobe with a penchant for media manipulation and cheep publicity tricks. Not every American hates the idea of a “Ground Zero Mosque,” as if reaching out to the Muslim world in a gesture of solidarity would spit in the face of those who died in the World Trade Center attacks. I thought Jesus said, turn the other cheek, and love your enemy and pray for those who persecute you. I guess we’re only Christians when it’s convenient.

How many churches were built in Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the U.S. detonated atomic weapons in the cities, murdering and maiming hundreds of thousands of innocent people? Is that okay, or is it an atrocity? How quickly we forget and how fast we point our fingers.

As I grow older, I experience an increasing cynicism that seems to wrap itself around me in a gradually thickening cloud of misanthropy. When I was in college, I knew that people were good. All people were good. And I still feel that way. But as the despondency of realism claws at my spirit like an undead zombie seeking to turn me into one of its own, I feel more and more inclined to just say fuck it. It is what it is. People are good in their core, but being good is not a priority. Being feared is what many people aspire to, as if Machiavelli’s question was rhetorical.

One could argue that fear trumps love because love has been thrown into the fire of illusion stoked by the imagination of Hollywood and its media contemporaries. Perhaps love began to die when Aristotle wrote his Poetics, an academic attempt to understand the inimitable qualities that make great art great. Perhaps when we started to try and understand love and all its intricate complexities was when we started to actually fear love. Because we can’t understand love, we fear it, so fear comes before love and is therefore more important.

There’s an interesting quote from Proverbs that always threw me for a loop. It says, “The fear of God is the beginning of knowledge.” I always took that to mean that we can’t have knowledge until we fear God. But fear is such a loaded word, isn’t it? Especially when talking about a Creator. Like George Carlin observed, I don’t want to worship a God who wants us to fear It. God should be an element of love and kindness and compassion.

But the English language–in all its bastardized glory–doesn’t due justice to the Hebrew word for fear. Like the online new age guru Richard Shelquist illustrates on his Web site:

“The word most often translated in the Old Testament as fear is the Hebrew word... yirah which can possibly mean fear, but also means awe, reverence, respect and devotion. A closely related Hebrew word is... yare which can mean fearful, but also means to stand in awe, reverence or honor.”

But I didn’t really understand the depth of the “fear of God” saying until I read a little bit of Van Til’s Apologetic. Van Til–in all his obtuse and esoteric glory–notes that the quote, like passages in all great works of literature, has several meanings and the meanings are constantly evolving. Til writes that reverence and respect towards our Creator is essential as all knowledge comes to us through our Creator. Specifically, when we learn something, we must not wallow in the pride of our indomitable intelligence, but rather, accept that the knowledge was actually a gift, a gift that can be taken away if not understood or appreciated.

Maybe we should look at love under the same light. Maybe we should hold love in reverence and respect, as a gift that we should appreciate, lest it be taken from our hearts and replaced with calloused cynicism.

As human beings have evolved, both physically and mentally, we have yet to make a dent emotionally or spiritually. We are still moved by sophomoric yet emotive techniques that should have been thrown in the trash with our baby teeth. We are so immature in our spiritual understanding it makes me queasy. Of course there are millions and perhaps billions of people worldwide who lack physical and mental sophistication but exude a spiritual and emotional maturity that allows them a peace of mind that others can’t even imagine. Not even Hollywood.

Perhaps this problem exists strictly in western countries, or maybe just in the U.S. I don’t know. I do know that when we create things to fix the problems created by other created things, we just create more problems (that’s a lot of creation). At one time in history, our worries were limited to food and survival. Now our worries and psychological problems are enough to warrant an entire industry to fight the negative side effects of our own inventions. It’s truly an amazing spectacle of hubris and fear.

This is no call to turn Luddite, blow up your TV, throw away your paper and move the country, as John Prine suggests. It’s more of a call to ask ourselves a simple question. Have Americans learned anything positive from the Sept. 11 attacks, or do we only care about defeating Islamic extremists? Perhaps what we need is a peaceful wing of Al-Qaida, a Christian Taliban. Maybe we need some people who want the same things but use peaceful means to achieve it. I’m not advocating intolerance against women and Sharia law, but I am asking us to join a fight against imperialism, against one-size-fits-all international policies, against ignorance and corruption and greed which are all symptoms of fear. A fight against the fear of "the other" that has plagued humanity since the tower of Babel fell and our pride thrust our tongues to choose a voice and we were forever separated from our brothers and sisters through language.

Rodney King, the simple-minded Los Angeles victim of the 1992 L.A. riots, was deeply observant when we mused, half-crying and with his head bowed, “Can’t we all just get along?” King echoed the very sentiment that has stirred the minds of every idealist since the tower of Babel crashed. Why can’t we get along? Why is fear so motivating?

If we listen to FDR and understand that fear itself is the only thing to fear, maybe we’ll get somewhere. If we respect fear only because of the power that it has to motivate our actions, maybe then we can stop using fear to achieve power or control. If fear exists only as something that stands in front of us, only an obstacle that must be overcome to achieve understanding, maybe we stand a chance. But we have a long way to go.

Only those who aren’t afraid to get their feet wet can really enjoy the ocean. If you can’t swim, maybe it’s time to throw yourself into the water and see what you’re made of. As long as you have a friend there who understands what you’re doing, you should have no fear, and neither should your friend. Only respect for the power of the ocean, and love for the gift of water.

Let’s all go swimming!