Broken

266843669_10165786532015150_2257642047355982724_nDouglas Adams was on to something with The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy. If it were an option, I would have left the planet decades ago in the hope of finding something better, running away from the problems. I’m not proud. I’d love to be transported into a future where just changing the polarity of shields would solve a problem.

It just doesn’t work that way, nevermind the pet peeve I have with Roddenberry naming the USS Enterprise when it’s mission wasn’t to protect merchant shipping. ‘Discovery’ might have been better, really.

These past years have shown plenty of weaknesses in systems that we humans have depended on for sometimes centuries. Everyone’s talking about how much of a problem the pandemic is when it’s only been a problem because antiquated systems continue to fail, and we continue to shore them up. I’m not saying we should descend into anarchy by any stretch, but looking around it’s pretty clear the anarchy of our world is having a field day with our systems.

Trust the governmentIt’s sensible to distrust systems that pretty consistently fail, and almost always these systems has something to do with government. Nobody, regardless of their political lean, goes out and blames the trees for bad weather. Nobody shakes their fist at a hurricane and says, “I didn’t vote for this!”.

Well, not yet anyway.

The speed with which we see the problems, globally, is sped by our ability to communicate while the response of government has not kept pace. Bureaucracy, as Gleick pointed out in ‘Faster’, was designed to slow change – it keeps things from happening too fast. For centuries mankind has been frustrated by systems that are slow. When things are slow, as individuals, we tend to find ways around them because we don’t have time for dealing with them. We’re busy running around trying to get shiny things to trade for things we need within other systems that are not working for lots of people.

Is that a condemnation? No, it’s an observation. As individuals, we don’t have the time to figure out everything that affects us because of the sheer complexity of the system. Right now (February, 2022), the Inland Revenue Service (IRS) in the United States is overwhelmed in processing tax returns – people haven’t gotten returns from 2020 (this is 2022), and the tax system is so complicated that an entire industry has been built around taxes.

Let’s take stock. The system by which monies are given to the government has become so complicated that people are making money off of making it simple. The only reason that’s not considered corruption is that the laws permit it – if I told you I could speed up a government process if you paid me, under different circumstances I could be a criminal. I’m not saying that people and companies that help with the tax returns are criminals. What I am saying is that the system got complicated enough that it’s easier to pay someone else to deal with, and that means people are paying money to get diminishing returns. Who wouldn’t be upset about that? How far have we come from hiding livestock from the King’s tax collectors?

“We are so POOR, sir…”

1555562_10152473548405197_3394893658298250242_nHaving lived here and there, and having visited here and there outside of the tourist traps -they are, after all, traps – I can say that the problem is global, and if there is a human somewhere that doesn’t have issues with the system of taxation, they are a distinct minority. We double down here, because how that money is spent is decided by people who win popularity contests. Politicians.

What’s more, in the United States, with the case Citizens United vs FEC, corporate spending entered U.S. politics and with that, marketing which has been used effectively to sell people stuff that they didn’t want by creating a need, or selling products that are less than useful, like politicians. There are children who will say that they want to be President and yet I have never met one who aspired to be a politician. Maybe I hang out in the wrong circles, but if you do too, well, we have the beginnings of something more than anecdotal.

Meanwhile, it seems like every media outlet is echoing a sentiment of how much is spent on things that people believe are important, such as education. This is not a good metric. I can go buy a car that meets my needs for a few thousand dollars or a few million dollars. If you spend a few billion dollars on education and students aren’t learning more, what does that spending mean? Worse than nothing, it means that money is being wasted. Is it the government’s money? The government says so, but whose money is it? The money of those governed, with the exception of monarchies, authoritarian states and oligarchies where they don’t bother being dishonest about it.

Things are broken. We live in an age where we can communicate faster and somehow we manage to say less in unit time about things that are important. How do we change that?

First, we have to recognize that there is a problem. Sure, we recognize that there are problems, but in the acknowledgement of some problems it’s always about them. They caused this. They did something, or they did not do something. They. Them. The exception would be those that use they and them as pronouns, and while I don’t have an issue with people asking to be called by specific pronouns, it seems like an odd set up for self-persecution when we always seem to blame thems and theys. That seems inconvenient for them, but it is what it is and the flag has already flown.

When we weed through that mess and stop blaming people out of a matter of convenience, what we find is that there are people who simply believe differently about things. And why is that?

Education, largely, or lack thereof – and not training for jobs, but actual education, and ongoing education. Marketing of narratives for politicians and their parties. Biases in cultures we don’t understand, even in the same countries, much less what is known about other countries. And, largely the most important aspect: personal responsibility that gets lost in over complicated systems.

Citizenship vs. Global Citizen.

UntitledMy personal thoughts on citizenship seems to be an outlier. The idea that a person can belong to one country by accident of where they were pushed or dragged out of a uterus seems strange. It seems peculiar.

It seems wrong. I was born in one city in one country. I left there when I was three and have been in motion ever since. People ask me where I’m from – well, I got out of the uterus there, but that says nothing about me other than where my mother happened to be.

We get tagged with the hard part of the change, the painful part – the part mothers never really let their children forget. We don’t count where someone was conceived – the hopefully fun part – where two people mixed their zygotes to form a human.

That pain just keeps giving. Not born somewhere you want to go? Get a passport from the nation you were dropped off in, get a visa, wait for the TSA to look all that over as well as a lovely scan of your body. Don’t leave those shoes on. Granted, travel wasn’t always that hard if you could avoid it, with the exception of people who had to make those journeys in chains.

All of this got dredged up because of a lot of heated conversations I’ve had in the past day since the passing of Sir VS Naipaul, a man who was born in a colony of the British Empire, that later became Trinidad and Tobago after – well, let’s face it – the UK got bored with their colonies. A few nations became nations after overthrowing a foreign power, Trinidad and Tobago is not one of them.

This is not to say that Trinidad and Tobago doesn’t have it’s charms – I am here, after all – but to claim Naipaul seems, ultimately, petty. If he were not as successful, no one would be claiming him.

And I think – after having traveled, lived in some different countries and traveled to many more… I think after you hit a certain point in traveling, nationality becomes a thing you are tasked with. When I think of people, I tend to think of them globally. I don’t drag up where they were born, where they lived for so many years – that may be a part of their identity, but it’s certainly not their entire identity and it’s sort of insulting to think otherwise. That’s sort of like being prejudiced, isn’t it?

Of course it’s being prejudiced. The Greeks called anyone not from Greece a barbarian.

We live in a world now that, even if we pick up all the trash in a small part of the world – let’s say, the Caribbean – it doesn’t matter that much, there’s not that much of an impact unless the rest of the world is doing it. Ocean currents, winds, etc – these things don’t care about which country you’re in. Economies, too, are breaking through in this.

We are global citizens, whether we are consumed with nationalist pride or patriotism – a thin line between the two –  or not. At least while we’re on this planet, anyway.

On ‘Race’

TheTruthHasNoConscienceThe history of ‘race’ is one of illusion, based on tribalism and nationalism – both of which have had a sometimes useful purpose in mankind’s development. It boils down to someone being ‘one of us’ or ‘not one of us’.

The Greeks, those that gave us the concept of democracy, called everyone who wasn’t Greek a barbarian:

The term [barbarian] originates from the Greekβάρβαρος (barbaros pl. βάρβαροι barbaroi). In ancient times, the Greeks used it mostly for people of different cultures, but there are examples where one Greek city or state would use the word to attack another…
…The Greeks used the term barbarian for all non-Greek-speaking peoples, including the EgyptiansPersiansMedes and Phoenicians, emphasizing their otherness, because the language they spoke sounded to Greeks like gibberish represented by the sounds “bar bar bar;” this is how they came to the word βάρβαρος, which is an echomimetic or onomatopoeic word. However, in various occasions, the term was also used by Greeks, especially the Athenians, to deride other Greek tribes and states (such as Epirotes, Eleans, Macedonians, Boeotians and Aeolic-speakers) but also fellow Athenians, in a pejorative and politically motivated manner…

Sound familiar? We see it every day, really. What we do not understand we dismiss as alien, invasive and ultimately something that needs to be dealt with because of fear or resentment. It is not hard to imagine how this has served in repelling foreign invaders. It is also not hard to imagine how this has been used to dehumanize others as either a reason to conquer. “They’re only barbarians.” Modern media, which sells advertising to stay alive (except the BBC, I think – funded by the Queen), promotes things that people want to see. It’s a reflection of society. Nowadays, we get to pick our channels – which makes it more complex.

Social media creates echo chambers for the same reason, where everyone you know agrees with you either by algorithm or active choice. Some talk about ‘Fake News’. Fake news wouldn’t be around if it wasn’t what people wanted – it fits their viewpoint. Contrary to what people believe, we’re all subject to that – no matter how hard we try.

We invent our own bogeymen because we refuse to see them as the same as us. Now, people will quickly draw a parallel with however they see the world.

A person who appears Middle Eastern will think immediately of how they are seen as Muslim or terrorists, a hispanic will immediately think of the hispanic perspective. Being brown in the developed nations of the West comes at a cost with little or no redeeming value.

Being of African descent, identifying as black, is pretty much the same in this regard because of slavery. When slavery was abolished, the poor European descendants (white) and the former slaves were pretty much on equal footing, just as the Indentured Laborers from India were in parts of the Caribbean and South America with the former slaves. I imagine that there are other examples, but these are the ones I know.

This was a problem for the people in charge, so they stoked the flames. How do you do that? Make them fight among themselves; reinforce the natural tribalism and the tendency to treat people unlike as outsiders who are not to be trusted. Pakistan may be an example of this when you look at the Colonial period, since it was created as a two state solution for violence in India under British rule.

Some people might have been a bit uncomfortable with slavery, so those that were in power went to scientists or had scientists come to them to create pseudoscience which demonstrated ‘others’ were less than themselves. Intentionality? Most certainly. Whose? Well, it’s hard to say, but it would likely have to be both the scientists and those in power. Get the right people behind it, and suddenly, anyone who is not like ‘us’ is less than ‘us’ because ‘science’ says so.

People who know this have a tendency to attribute intentionality to all of this. It most certainly has happened. There is no denying that. The way it is portrayed by some leans on either the Left, where the history is portrayed as one of intentionality, or one from the Right, where those ruled were problematic in creating the troubles. The problem with this is that they are likely both right.

Some of this could be as simple as an uncomfortably sweaty Governor hearing about the troubles and seeing how the troubles would help rather than hinder those they represented. “Well then”, he might say, “It is not in our interests to intervene.”  That’s not intentionality, that’s allowing society to take it’s course. Argue if you must (and some of you must), but that stands. If you look closely, you’ll see it every day around you when people see things and do not intervene. We could delve into the psychology of it, but then we’d be stuck arguing at a different level. What we can say, whether we like it or not, is that it’s demonstrably human nature. Sometimes.

Some of this that we see, after seeing how well not intervening worked, might be a sweaty Governor hearing about troubles and saying, “Let’s help push this along, shall we? It’s not going fast enough”. There we have intentionality. There is no question there, there is a simple use of making the situation worse to make the problem work toward someone else’s interests.

A combination of both ignoring situations as well as intentionality is likely the truth of it all.

All the while, those enforcing control over these factions retained power because no one had the time, energy or will to even question those in control except a select few. The successful of these few we know about – Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, etc.  We can be certain that the numbers of the unsuccessful dwarf them; we can study each leader and come to some conclusions, but in the end it’s a matter of serendipity and ability. The right people, the right time. These people only seem to succeed when society is willing to let them, and when society is only willing to let them when there is a common problem that society recognizes and wishes to solve.

Otherwise, it’s business as usual.

protect delusionThe truth of it all is that there are no races. Bureaucracies still count people based on this archaic illusion and perpetuate the illusion. I have mentioned that when I purchased a weapon in Wisconsin, I noted that on the form I was asked about race – as if someone in the U.S. Government wanted to have the number of armed Samoans at their fingertips.

Policies that are based on race – this illusion, this bad parody of science – also perpetuate the illusion.

Stop the illusion.

Or, by all means continue it and wonder why progress doesn’t happen.

If you are colored by the past – pun intended – how can you not be colored by it in the future? The future is what we take with us.