hope

The Storms of Life.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 1 Comment
A photograph I did of a storm over New Smyrna Beach, Florida.

Things sort of pile up, sometimes because we let them, sometimes because in the grand scheme of things we’re little socks hanging in the wind on a line attached only by weathered clothespins.

The trouble with problems is that they are never static. Problems are dynamic, they can ebb and flow, and when problems find ways to be synergistic through the faux guidance of Murphy, things can get out of hand quickly. They become storms.

We feel sometimes like Rob McKenna.

“…And as he drove on, the rainclouds dragged down the sky after him, for, though he did not know it, Rob McKenna was a Rain God. All he knew was that his working days were miserable and he had a succession of lousy holidays. All the clouds knew was that they loved him and wanted to be near him, to cherish him, and to water him…”

Douglas Adams, So Long And Thanks For All the Fish.

I’m not going to say that’s the wrong way to feel. There are a litany of reasons all those warm fuzzy feel good ‘be positive’ folk don’t talk about what being positive all the time sets you up for. It sells books, though – largely gifts that sit on shelves because people are too depressed to read them, and if they’re not, they don’t need them anyway. It’s a good market because nobody wants to admit that the world is not for or against us. Largely, it doesn’t give a microdose of fecal matter about the individual.1

It’s not that positive thinking is bad. It’s just that this cult of “Don’t be so negative” often dismisses real problems that form storms that send livestock hurtling at people’s heads. Oddly, almost never their own, which has evolved a bunch of pseudo-positive people effectively hurtling livestock at the rest of us.

Duck.

Growth is not something that happens when you’re constantly upbeat about being upbeat. We generally call that drugs or some sort of psychiatric disorder. We’re supposed to feel crappy sometimes. Problems can be solved, avoided, or will maim or kill you.

With that in mind, the key is to avoid them maiming or killing you, or if they are going to maim or kill you somehow, try to make it an interesting story. If you find yourself in the midst of a battle of pirates and ninjas armed only with a roll of aluminum foil, know that however it ends it will be a good story.

No matter how we end, we should try to at least be a good story for the people to talk about around the water cooler while they’re microdosing fecal matter2 and throwing positive thinking at each other and livestock at everyone else.

“…And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about…”

Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore.

The self-help book industry will probably be killed by a self-help generative AI model soon that just says cheerful stuff all the time. The trouble with that, and all it’s precursors, is that it discounts people in storms. It robs them of their reality by trying to force them to imagine things are better.

If they are successful in the imagining, they’ll be ignoring the reality of their problems and may well succumb to them. It’s like selling dehydrated water in a desert.3 They tell you that you need it, they tell you have it, and, ‘for you, my friend, special bargain!‘.

The reality is that only you can plot your course, and you have to have a realistic understanding of the storm and where you want to end up – or, at least, where you don’t want to end up.

The key is to survive, but in surviving it is also possible to thrive. Sometimes you need people to support your efforts, but they have to want to support your efforts – even if they don’t need to.

What you need to know is that you alone determine how you make it through the storm. You can be influenced, particularly when you see no other ways, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t look for the opportunities instead of blindly following cliche advice someone else hands you.

Now, you can go back to those other folks trying to sell you dehydrated water. Try selling them sand.

  1. Please do not microdose fecal matter, for those of you who need to be told. For the rest, I hope you enjoyed the footnote. ↩︎
  2. Again, please do not microdose fecal matter, and also, please do not cause livestock to hurtle around if only for the sake of the livestock. ↩︎
  3. “Just add water!” ↩︎

When Hope Fades.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 1 Comment

Sitting and writing the first chapter of the project was pretty fast and fun. Of course, there was a symphony of distractions, but when that happens you just find the right rhythm to go with them.

Having gotten the first chapter done, I started thinking about how to get to the 2nd chapter, did some research and decided that the 2nd chapter will be different. Tomorrow, I rewrite the first chapter after I sleep on it and get to the 2nd chapter.

Having done that, I picked up a new book from my reading stack and delved in to forget about the project for a bit. I came across this:

When hope fades, anger flourishes.

Lawrence Lessig, “They Don’t Represent Us” (2021)

That to me is poetry. It fits times I felt anger in some way or the other, being cornered or when the hope that others will behave better or do better is lost. What he’s writing about is ripe with that issue, and his book hopes to provide hope, I suppose. It’s been interesting so far, I recommend it particularly if you’re American.

In a world where instant gratification is sold as a tangible item maybe hope lasts only 47 seconds anyway. The world is coming at people faster these days and there’s more of it.

There are days I reminisce about waiting a month for a printed magazine, checking the bookstore to see if it got there earlier, so that I could have some insight into technology, the world, and maybe find out what the humans around the world were up to. Time magazine, National Geographic, Byte Magazine… portals into other parts of the world opened once every 30 days and then back to life for another 30 days.

Now we’re being bombarded with shit that’s spun not through a fan, but some specialized shit shredder that lets you build your own shit stories in your head from the temporally disparate scraps, based partly on landmines of truth someone accidentally left in, like corn. No wonder there’s a general lack of hope turning to anger. Nobody knows what’s going on, nobody’s trusted to tell the truth, and when they do there’s a distrust in it because it doesn’t smell like the rest of the stuff we’ve been covered in.

You have some corn on your nose. There. Got it.

I have some bad news, though. We’re producing what we’re wearing. No, not you as an individual, that would be something you would have to see a doctor about – well, we all would, I suppose. No, I’m writing figuratively about society.

If people would just take a deep breath and stop watching, listening to and reading all the crap out there and demand a substrate of truth that is regularly watered, I imagine we would have more hope. There was a time when for fiction, I went to the comics and horoscopes in newspapers, but now I just look at the cover page. I’m sure some of it is real, but it’s so distant and unable to be changed that it may as well be fiction.

If Jean Luc Picard jumped out when I was scanning the headlines and said, “Quick, come with us, we need your help to save the universe”, I’d likely arch an eyebrow and say, “Fascinating.” Clearly he came through a rip in the space-time continuum, and whatever’s happening there would seem a lot better than what’s happening here.

But hope is not lost, and so anger shouldn’t flourish.

We just have to take control of what depends on us and go from there.

Ukraine: A Light, A Hope.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ Leave a comment

Ukrainian FlagOne of the things I have been very involved with over the past months is Ukraine, particularly on Twitter but also in other ways. Yesterday, in a Twitter space hosted by Sparkles, the question went around asking what we were doing to support Ukraine, and even why. There was, of course, commonality because social media drives like minds to come together, and for unlike minds to be ignored.

For me, though, it’s complicated. When in 2014 the annexation of Crimea happened, I expected the world to do something. The world did do something, but clearly not enough as 8 years later, a brutal invasion with siege tactics began on February 24th, 2022, and the world decided to do something. A lot of the world, anyway, as far as sending weapons over. At the onset, looking at Ukraine as I had, I saw something that the world has not seen in anything other than history books: A young democracy defending it’s sovereignty, it’s way of life… where former colonies became independent one way or the other around 75 years ago, Ukraine is 31 years old. It’s young.

I’m older than Ukraine as it stands now by 19 years, but the culture of Ukraine is much, much older. That part of the world is something I had only passing knowledge of, in my lifetime colored by the Cold War. Knowledge I lacked, and still lack in some ways, was because of this implicit part of life where ‘Soviet Union Bad’ was sufficient to cover everything that the Soviet Union did. Insight into that part of the world did not seem necessary, and it ends up that it was being colored by all the major news outlets still having their offices in Moscow. Whatever news I got was likely written in Moscow and influenced by Moscow. I had no knowledge of Russia’s imperial past.

It seems most of the world suffered the same. We tend to forget that aspect of colonialism, where the narrative is still that of the Empire, present or former, as nations begin to get their legs under them. We tend to use broad labels on things we don’t understand – Season 2 of The Wire, as an example, had a Ukrainian named Serhei constantly having to correct people that he wasn’t Russian, that he was Ukrainian, and that his name was not Boris. Granted, he did not play a good guy in The Wire, but back when the show first came out, had I been paying attention, I might have paid more to that issue that seemed like nuance then.

The world got smaller over the last decades, but my mental shorthand did not permit me to expand on nuances like that. There was the career, which was mainly either looking for the next job or doing a job with the work ethic of my father who was a workaholic. Thus time to explore the world was limited to what was right in front of me but for the last few decades, where I started truly exploring things beyond the scope of work and my work in the last decades also forced me to explore things. Software Engineering was good like that in some ways, in other ways it would have you so focused on the minutiae that the forest was invisible.

The world was busy, I was busy, and if we’re all honest it doesn’t seem like we got much done.

And so what happened in Ukraine, and is still happening, hit me with a visceral need to get involved. The wars of the world in the last decades have been, at best, unclear and uncertain. The ‘War on Terrorism’ made no sense to me because terrorism isn’t about direct conflict, it’s about creating terror. Afghanistan, Syria, and yes, Palestine and Israel, all largely created by conflicts of other powers who just seem to have had this curious need to use what we once called the cradle of humanity as their testing ground of weapons. Meanwhile, in the United States, I would frequently hear about how evil Islam was, where extremist Islam almost seems to have grown extremist Christianity again.

Or was it the other way around? I’m not sure. I don’t even think it matters anymore. In a world of globalization, extremism somehow became trendy.

But this invasion of Ukraine by Russia was clear cut. A sovereign democracy, young and getting it’s legs, attacked by a neighbor who is a nuclear power. There was a clear right and wrong because the world has rules, and these rules were being broken. As time progressed, I became educated on just how wrong it is.

I grew up on a steady diet of ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’. When I became involved with Free Software and Open Source software, ‘freedom’ took on new meaning: freedom means nothing when it stands alone, a lonely word. Freedom from what? From oppression? Yes. Freedom from other people negatively interfering in your affairs, as long as you don’t negatively interfere in the affairs of others? Yes. Freedom from not having a say? Yes. We Americans talk about freedom a lot, but as the last few decades have shown, especially recently, we don’t really know what freedom is anymore. And in the Caribbean, Latin America, ‘freedom’ varies.

Democracy? Ask 100 people what democracy is and create a definition from those 100 people, you have a definition of democracy that the majority agree upon – which is the implicit flaw in democracy. This is not to say that pure socialism, communism or anarchy are better – we have established that they’re not fairly well across the world – but we’re also seeing that the instantiations of the idea of democracy are also flawed.

Today, Boris Johnson resigned as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and I read things about the Westminster system [of democracy] being broken. Today, in the United States, people are wondering what the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) will overturn that will impact democracy. Today, in Trinidad and Tobago, people are still talking about the Prime Minister and the Attorney General. Democracy itself has not failed, mind you – but the stabs at it that have been implemented are not doing so well.

But in Ukraine, democracy is in full swing, and as imperfect as democracy may be implemented anywhere, nothing unites people like genocide, war crimes and an attempted erasure of culture and history as Russia is attempting to do. Elder democracies are sending weapons even as domestic issues around the world related to economies and by extension flawed socioeconomic striations, and even the very idea that there should be equitable opportunity. Women’s rights issues, which in my lifetime were pushing forward well beyond voting, have become degraded recently… there is much wrong with our implementations of democracy, but the problem is not democracy itself.

So when I look at Ukraine, a young democracy that has so much potential to learn from the mistakes of other implementations since it’s still only decades old… I see promise. Hope. And in contrast, a Russian state, a de facto authoritarian state, violently trying to erase it and the promise it holds in both freedom and democracy, I see the potential for the rest of the world to learn from this, and to learn from Ukraine what has been forgotten.

Hope. The world could most certainly use hope right now.