#society

“Welcome To The Colonies”

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Yesterday was Independence Day in Trinidad and Tobago, complete with parades and traffic schedules that go along with it. There wasn’t the usual amount of national colors, but when I got my eyes tested near the parade route, there were plenty of young men dressed as trees with automatic weapons stationed on corners. I even saw a truck filled with them, as if the Ministry of Agriculture had some greenification project going on.

I don’t know that celebrating independence is anything but a polite lie in any nation. The world is made up of co-dependent nations. I don’t think any nation is truly independent in the strictest sense of the word. I’m not even sure that it would pass a lazy inspection.

Where I live, the service elevator is down causing people to run into each other more. This is generally a good thing. A middle-aged woman asked me why the elevator was down, and I explained about a nearby lightning strike that seemed to have overloaded the circuit board in charge of the frequency of electricity that drives the motor. It’s something most people wouldn’t even know about. It allows the motor to slow without jolting, and since most people have never even imagined that jolting, it’s an ‘invisible’ feature’. Like living in a colony.

The man accompanying her said something in what sounded like a British accent, something about it taking a while to fix, and I said that the provider doesn’t keep those parts on hand. There’s just not enough of a market to bear that expense. I ended with, “Welcome to the Colonies” and a smile.

Indeed. Welcome to the colonies.

Today, I felt like having a Peanut Buster Parfait, so I drove down to the nearest Dairy Queen. They of course did not have the chili hot dog I was also thinking of. A Canadian guy was there – no, I imagine you’re picturing a white Canadian, but it wasn’t. He was getting exasperated himself, complaining McDonalds didn’t have this or that, that Dairy Queen didn’t have this or that, and telling me he would be taking the kids to Pizza Hut later. I told him I wished him luck.

He didn’t drop it, so I simply said, “Welcome to the Colonies.”

He didn’t get it. This is the experience of colonies. Sure, Trinidad and Tobago gained independence from the British Empire in the last century, but it seems it was a part of a larger cost reduction strategy of the British Empire. It’s a small market, run for decades by governments by governments whose level of corruption is a constant topic of discussion. There’s been no diversification of the economy, there’s been no worthwhile attempts to create new revenue streams.

The present government seems to be balancing between Chinese soft power, finding ways to work with Venezuela without irritating the U.S. over the sanctions, and gaming numbers to keep forms of assistance coming in. It’s an election year coming too, so that will be more interesting.

I was mildly surprised that the Dairy Queen didn’t have a cover for the Peanut Buster Parfait. Welcome to the Colonies.

Independence, as anywhere else, is an illusion.

As with any colony, wherever you live, it’s not too hard to find the colonial masters.

Keep Your Secrets.

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Some people I trusted lied to me recently, knowing full well that I would find out within a matter of days. I, of course, found out earlier because of the relationships I have built over time, and so it came back to me almost immediately that I had been lied to.

Clearly, I’m not going to trust those two people as much again, but I suspected them not telling me the truth because of their behavior. The confirmation only proves what I suspected: They are poor liars.

It wasn’t about something important enough to make a difference, but two things bothered me about it: First, they knew I would end up finding out and were dishonest anyway, and second, that they would risk a relationship built over years to be dishonest to me.

There are reasons people lie even over inconsequential things, and research has shown the most common reasons people lie, but it’s easy to go into the weeds with that and lose one’s bearings. It’s best to stick to the simpler aspects until more complex aspects present themselves – Occam’s razor.

Clearly I had valued the relationship more than they did, which is often the issue when it comes to forms of betrayal. If you value a relationship highly and the other values the relationship less than you expect, ‘betrayal’ is often what we feel. This is an important thing to know since I may have positional authority over them soon, particularly since as I have come to understand that they may have been instructed to lie by someone who will be an equal in the near future, which also tells me that the equal doesn’t see themselves as equal. They see themselves as above, and that does not bode well for any sort of relationship. Or maybe it’s just insecurity.

I tend to live my life openly and transparently. I value authenticity of people and provide the same. If I can’t say something because it might betray a trust, I say that or avoid being put in a position where I would have to say that. The people I try to surround myself with respect those sorts of boundaries, because if I invoke it for someone else, I will invoke it for them. Because of this, I have a small circle of people I call friends where the level of trust is high, and this could be because of my own attachment disorder as well; I understand I have one and have pushed back against it for some time. It’s hard to tell where it begins or ends. How one feels about a person isn’t always about the person.

This is pretty important to be able to work through. It seems like a life skill that we should pay more attention to, particularly in an age where people are having their text generated by algorithms trained on the output of what could be the most dishonest and delusional species on the planet.

In that regard and a few others, I am thankful for the dishonesty – it tells me who is not trustworthy over little things, and when they are not trustworthy over the little things, the big things are always suspect – for they are made of the little things.

How Democracy Died.

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Half watching the world’s rhetoric spinning against it’s axis, I ended up in a conversation with a supporter of the opposition in Trinidad and Tobago. We both agreed that the present leadership of the opposition party, the UNC, should step down, and the argument presented was that ‘we need to support her because…”

It’s a bad argument, albeit pragmatic. It’s like saying you’re going to have another drink when you’ve just dodged the barstools to get to the bar, weaving as if the entire bar were being tilted like the old pinball games. “One more drink…”

It’s a short term solution to a long term problem, and like such solutions, it generally comes with a hangover.

This same person – a friend, someone I respect – made the mistake that the U.S. Presidential debate hosted by CNN demonstrated why Biden should step down (I do not disagree) and why Trump should win. So the short term solution only applies to something he’s passionate about, but at a distance discussing another country, his argument changed. Why?

Passion disguised as pragmatism versus pragmatism.

There are so many problems with democracy that it makes young intelligent people look into other modes of government, from communism to socialism, and they’re equally screwed up at best because people are… people, regardless of what system you put them in. I’m half surprised sometimes that someone doesn’t suggest monarchies again, but then what is a dictatorship but a crownless monarchy, and what does democracy do when it wants to protect it’s interests? It embraces dictatorships with the belief that they can be controlled as much as voters think politicians can be controlled.

If you find yourself on a planet where they vote for politicians, leave. That’s my advice.

Politicians dress in whatever fabric of society is most popular, and like good marketers, sometimes they create the need to fulfill. Elected officials don’t do what we want them to do, they do what they want to do. We could simply remove them and vote on things rather elevate puppets we cannot control. You want to go to way? How much in taxes are you willing to put that way? Are you willing to go fight? To send your children to war? No? Well, you don’t really want a war.

You want to help here? Great, how much are you willing to pay in taxes to do so?

Of course, that dooms underprivileged communities, but they were doomed by the same systems that rule the world now, and no, no matter how much you protest, you’re still part of a system that allows and ignores protest. It’s not about voices, it’s about what’s trendy and popular because people don’t vote for rationality, they vote for comfort. When they get in that voting booth, all bets are off: It’s about how they feel.

And who are they most feeling about? Themselves and their circle, not some ideal that is lost when people outgrow Disney remakes of the classics. People aren’t as good at thinking as feeling.

That, you see, is how democracy died. The marketers became campaign managers, and the game is completely rigged.

Being ‘woke’ and being ‘enlightened’ are different, and are vectors, not scalars.

Of Spheres And Shapes

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There’s a lot to consider these days regarding intelligence and consciousness. I’ve developed my own thoughts over time, as we all have to some degree, but few of us it seems have the time or inclination to really sit and think about such things.

What separates us from other forms of life on the planet? Only we have excised ourselves from the rest of life on the planet as far as we know, and that’s fairly narcissistic of our species, a species where we accuse individuals of our species of narcissism – which must mean that they’re pretty bad if they merit a diagnosis rather than suffer armchair psychologists around the world.

When we boil down what reality is for us, it’s all derived from our senses. We look, we smell, we touch and we listen – these are our inputs, and from it we develop a model of the world within what we call our minds, which we blame our brains for. Yet there are other senses we have related to our own bodies and how we physically and emotionally feel at any given time, and influences how we perceive the world.

How that interacts with others is akin, if not the same thing, as a ‘sphere of influence’ – something my father often talked about, since he had heard about spheres of influence somewhere: I’d read all the same books he had, sometimes even before he got finished reading them. I don’t know where he was introduced to the concept, but the concept is worth fleshing out in an era where we’re all data streams to fund some billionaire’s stab at a version of success that seems disassociated with the rest of the planet.

It is always fashionable to point out others live in bubbles, and saying that billionaires live in bubbles doesn’t let us off the hook. Some people admire the bubbles and want to get into a bubble – a sphere with that much influence.

I’ve been listening to Lex Fridman podcasts on YouTube in the background off and on over the past month, and I forget in which of them he mentioned that he wanted to use his influence for good in an election year, or in some other thing, and I admired his honesty in that and worried that his own sphere wasn’t broad enough to truly have an effect I would desire. Often he seems a supportive role in whomsoever he talks to. I forced myself to listen to his episode with Elon Musk – at least one of them, they seem to talk offline a lot – and in that podcast there seemed a lot of soft pitches to Musk, and much of it was nothing more than what I call an advertorial.

To his credit, the casual listener may not have picked up on that with Musk, and those who want to be like Musk (in whatever way) wouldn’t want to notice it, but as someone who is not impressed with Musk, I forced myself to listen to the interview and be as objective as possible. Musk, like everyone else, wants to make the world a better place, but the way that he sees the world is often incompatible with reality in my mind. That being said, I listened and found myself mildly impressed with how human he came across. Yet when I thought through everything, it was a mildly entertaining soft pitch for Grok throughout, while not actually challenging Musk.

The comments on the video were quite supportive of Musk. It’s a hit. Lex Fridman, then, would see how many views the episode had, read the comments, and think it was all wonderful – but having listened to many of these sessions, and watching the body language in the videos, some of those interviewed (and I include Musk) weren’t really challenged and where criticism of them was either ignored or simply peacefully bridged, as if the opinions didn’t matter.

And yet, there were gems, like this one with Sara Walker. It’s long, it’s worth it, and while she does seem to have what I call a ‘Valley Girl vocal tic’ which I generally don’t find endearing and often have trouble taking seriously. ‘Fer shure!’ and stuff like that have been grossly overdone with shallow movies, and isn’t something I hear often outside of that context – but she is amazingly well thought, and like me, she likes playing with words (and also like me, apparently, doesn’t think in words).

It was a soft pitch for her upcoming book, too, but in this context – and I’ll give Musk credit for saying this, paraphrased – advertising that is contextual to what a person wants or needs at a time is content. Well, maybe, it depends on how the want or need was created. It happens that she was talking about things that I was thinking about and she randomly popped up in YouTube. If you’re interested in that sort of thing, watch the video. She’s quite well thought on all of this. She’s someone I wouldn’t mind having coffee with, if she could put up with my speaking style – I imagine it works both ways. Regardless of how Sara Walker says it, she says a lot worth listening to1.

When ideas collide in the ether between we humans, it’s because of language communicating a common concept between people. It can be between two people, and that develops a common language. It can happen within a group of people who work or play with the same things, which gives us lingos. On rare occasions, these lingos – words or acronyms – can go mainstream, as the meme about memes did by Richard Dawkins. And even then they can be curtailed by languages2, and when it transcends language, it hits very mainstream.

This all fits really well with the concepts that Pierre Levy has communicate in his own way over the decades brilliantly. Being more steeped in being multilingual than I, reading his works was at first challenging.

One of the beautiful things that Levy writes on is IEML, a semantic language he created that has challenged me more than I have had the capacity to challenge it. I have yet to see someone come up with an equivalency, which may exist. I have also yet to see anyone approach a lot of knowledge management in the same regard, particularly in an age where Large Language Models are also ‘Literal Language Models’.

These spheres of influence are telling. Pierre Levy resides mainly in academia, and AI resides in the mouths of people marketing stuff that while initially impressive has demonstrated more and more that it can regurgitate the opinions of others based on what it has read. This marketers have celebrated as a success, and this I have seen as a limitation that more data is not going to solve.

‘Spheres of Influence’ also… aren’t spheres. They are shaped by what we are exposed to, and when people focus on one aspect I describe it as wobbling, because these ‘spheres’ spin, and it’s convenient to talk about spheres since they are so perfect – but we are not perfect, we have our biases, some of us delve deeply into subjects and change our centers drastically. People who are more open minded would be more fluid, like water, and those who are closed minded can be like concrete.

It’s something to consider when we assess intelligence, consciousness, or our own lives – and what we’re being sold, or what we’re being told should be important to us.

This kind of stuff is part of the basis of the novel I’ve been working on. Would love to hear more from others, though my own sphere of influence on the internet is not that large. Comment below.

  1. Her book comes out in August 2024, and I’ll get a copy because of how she expressed what she did: “Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life’s Emergence”. I didn’t agree with everything she said, and that’s exactly why she’s worth reading for me. I may not know enough. 🙂 ↩︎
  2. I prefer the Spanish word idioma for language – it seems much more sensible to me as it encapsulates dialects as well. ↩︎

Absorbing Silence.

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I had some dalliances with the outside world, some with interesting people, but mostly not. The community I live in is remarkably ignorant and petty. Someone dropped an egg on the stairs and the janitors had not gotten to it, so that was a point of discussion. A security guard had laid on a couch was another, which became a matter of pettiness as well – the guard was unwell, it ended up. The ‘rain flies’ of Trinidad became a topic or so I thought – it ended up that the recent deluge of rain flies (termites) was accompanied by actual flying ants – alates – that befuddled the denizens of this strange community.

Recently, in a group chat, someone posted a video of an extraction fan in a bathroom and said they thought they had animals in their ceiling. Upon listening, it was clear that there birds involved, and being a curious person I had long found that the extraction fans connected to open air rooms where the split AC units vented their heat to the world. Like most chats, I was late to it and a day’s worth of speculation had already gone into it with only one person out of maybe 10 involved actually getting it right: birds. I don’t know how people couldn’t identify it, and the original poster retorted to me that she didn’t have time to watch the discovery channel.

I live on a planet where being able to identify the sound of birds was being shamed. Discovery Channel? Most of this can be found by simply walking outside and observing. Listening. Watching. Noticing. Finding the right questions, and thanks to the advent of a communications network filled with information, finding the right answers to questions. It used to be much more laborious with encyclopedias and the Dewey Decimal System alone. How can you not know the sounds of a bird in Trinidad and Tobago? What sort of life has one lead for not knowing the sound of birds to be defensible?

I sat drinking beer with a friend a few evenings ago, and said as much. He, too, has a curious mind, and like me, his advice is often ignored by people not as far away from brandishing pitchforks and torches over small and petty things while larger issues loom. We commiserated, laughed, and went about our lives after a few beers, but it bothers us both not that people don’t know as much as people don’t seem to want to know. What if I told you the person with animals in the ceiling was a musician? How does a musician not know the sound of birds?

Are we so removed from our world, staring at the flat screens in our caves that we shout complaints at these same screens about things we should know? How is not knowing the sounds of birds defensible? What sort of life does one have where one doesn’t hear the birds around on a daily basis? What sort of silence is in that cave?

Is it a cave, or a tomb with wifi?

Is it that the red dots of life have replaced the sounds of the outside world?

Like every morning, I sat with my first cup of coffee listening to the birds – the orange winged parrots and their revelry of cacophony, while every now and then the sounds of various tanagers and the croaking of the orependola rings through. The ever present Great Kiskedee chimes in now and then to a natural symphony of sunrise every morning. Not all would know the different instruments involved or name them, but certainly we should be able to hear them and know that they are birds. Rodents are not known for their voices. Birds are. One doesn’t need to be a naturalist to appreciate the songs of the morning.

It seems we absorb more and more silence around these flat screens that we expect that as nature when it is not, but I know it is not silence. I hear the fans of my computers, the whine of electrical devices all too well, and in time I tune it out but it also takes a toll on me where I need to hear the other lack of silence. That there are people who are different does not surprise me, and still I wonder after over half a century why people don’t know more about their world when the information is so readily available.

My knowledge of birds came from observation and answering questions that came to mind. My knowledge of insects was the same way, with trying to understand which insects were beneficial or not to households and plants pushed me on minor quests to get more knowledge, and I do not claim great knowledge of these things, yet the ignorance of others about these things has become as palpable as the shroud of silence they seemingly snuggle in. What sort of life is there without curiosity and only complaint?

We are the noisy ones on the planet, mostly, and we are deaf to our own noise. We are deaf to the sounds around us, it seems, and we are blind to the world around us as well if it is something inconvenient.

It seems despite my best efforts, I am surrounded by the deaf and blind, who lash out at the smallest inconveniences, and who will complain as if it’s their problem while acting as if it isn’t.

We do not live in silence. We live increasingly in ignorance, it seems. The troubles half a world away, where people die because other people choose to kill them, are likely filled with people who appreciate the songs of birds as a welcome interruption to the sounds of the weapons of their enemies.

What luxury we live in to not know the sound of birds. What depravity.

AI should replace some of these people, for that is all they have become – large language models with no questions and hallucinated answers.

A Day In The Life.

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I read the news today, oh boy

“A Day In The Life”, The Beatles (John Lennon/Paul McCartney), 1967

Oh, the news.

There was a time when I thought mankind as a species had lost it’s way, but longer observation has allowed me to realize that we never had a clear way from the start.

We go in circles, in cycles.

That’s how we infested this planet. We don’t like each other and we go our separate ways.

We hate being alone and love those like us, hiding behind the groups that give us anonymity as individuals, maybe because alone we feel dehumanized, maybe because in groups we feel the need to dehumanize others.

Like an amoebic pseudo-pod, we oozed across the planet and lived where we could find purchase, until now, there is no further place to find purchase.

Wars are fought. Sides are picked like the noses of children who do so out of reflex, rolling their hard earned prizes between thumb and forefinger before being chewed on. We admonish children not to pick their noses, but we pick the world they live in with as much thought it that they put behind it, it seems.

This is where some might say if we just all sat around a campfire naked and sang songs that the world would be a better place, or if we got rid of all the corporations, or if we took money out of politics, or if… if we just did that one thing… the world would somehow magically be better and wouldn’t make people consider lawsuits against Disney1 for false advertising about the realities of the world.

I have bad news. It ain’t that easy.

Change is hard. Change starts with the self, and changing the self means leaving groups because groups hate independent thinking unless it’s to their own end. It means ignoring the red dots of life and being human by one’s self. It means finding value in one’s self, not finding value in what others want you to value.

It means identifying one’s own biases and pulling out a bright light and rubber hose to interrogate them mercilessly, even if you feel you’re a victim, particularly if you do feel the victim. No, I didn’t say it would be easy, but when you dig down deep into why you do as you do, why you think as you do, you become aware of things at a different level. Don’t worry, the world won’t make more sense – it will, in fact, make less sense, and the trick then is to make it make sense for you.

Too often we fear calling bullshit on things, or too often we feel we have the right to call bullshit on things without that interior interrogation, that introspection, and maybe that’s because we feel we do not have enough time in a world that keeps promising to make more time for us to do the very same thing but has demonstrably done the inverse.

Until we as individuals embark on that change, I don’t see things getting better.

  1. Disney built it’s business on the public domain, where they copyrighted their renditions of stories that already existed (check Gutenberg.org for originals), but in doing so have made their popular versions there epitome of the values that they themselves are not so good at practicing. ↩︎

Killing Off the Geese that Lay Golden Eggs

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We all know the story of the goose that laid the golden eggs, and the idiot who killed the golden goose got no more golden eggs. It’s been considered good practice not to kill something that is producing important things for you1.

This is what some companies are doing, though, when it comes to AI. I pointed out here that companies have been doing it before AI, too, though in the example of HuffPost the volunteers who once contributed to it’s success simply got left out in the cold.

It is a cold world we live in, and colder each day. Yet more people are being impacted by generative AI companies, from writing to voice acting to deepfakes of mentionable people doing unmentionable things.

Who would contribute content willingly to any endeavor when it could simply be used to replace them? OK, aside from idiots, who else?

I did hear a good example, though. Someone who is doing research and is getting paid to do it has no issue with his work being used to train an AI, and I understood his position immediately: He’s making enough, and the point of doing research is to have it used. But, as I pointed out, he gets paid, and while I don’t expect he’s got billions in the bank, I’d say that once he’s still getting paid to do research, all will be well for him.

Yet not all of us are. Everyone seems intent on the golden eggs except the geese that can lay them. If you can lay golden eggs, you don’t need to go kill geese looking for them… and dead geese…. because it seems that tech bros need reminding… dead geese do not lay eggs.

  1. I’ve often wondered if this didn’t start Hindus not eating beef, as Indian cuisine relies heavily on the products of the cow – so a poor family killing a cow for meat would not make sense. Maybe not, but it’s plausible. ↩︎

Wanted: Another Renaissance.

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It’s hard not to feel at least a little dismayed every day these days. It seems that the news is full of headlines that twist knives of fear in our fragile human hearts. We’re largely kept pretty busy simply maintaining our own lives.

Food and shelter are as needed now as they were needed when our ancestors first slithered from the primordial ooze. Our bodies did not evolve to stand our environment, instead we wore the skins of those that had. We did not evolve to consume abundant vegetation, so we ate those that do, yet our bodies did not evolve to become predators.

In fact, compared to most animals on the planet, our bodies aren’t that evolved to suit the planet at all – we’ve been ‘cheating’ with technology, appropriating as much as we can from others on our planet. Our technology has evolved faster than we have, our impact on the planet has evolved more than we have, and our technology is not really being used to reduce that impact.

We communicated, we coordinated, and we took on greater tasks. Oral cultures formed and passed down information from generation to generation, but there were flaws with this sometimes as we played the telephone game (or Chinese Whispers) across time. Contexts changed. We figured out how to write things down – to literally set things in stone. From there we found more and more portable ways to write.

Imagine the announcements of tech companies back then: “New stone allows more words on it for the weight and the size! Less oxen needed to pull! They will pay for themselves!” and later, “Use Papyrus! Have a stone-free library!”

So at first only those who were literate were allowed to participate in writing, but more and more people became literate despite those who once controlled written language. In a few thousand years, we managed to spread literacy pretty well across humanity, and the cacophony of it began to build on the Internet.

And yet we ourselves still haven’t really evolved that much. We’re basically still living in caves, though our cave technology has increased to a level where we have portable caves and caves we stack on top of each other to great heights.

We’re still basically pretty much the same with more of us, and our technology almost provides enough for everyone, maybe, but our great civilization on the planet is hardly homogeneous in that regard. Most people can point to a place where people have less or more than themselves, and the theory of hard work allowing people to progress seems flawed.

Now that so many people can write, they get on social media and jibber-jabber about the things that they like, most of it just being sending packets of information around through links – some not reading what they pass along because it has a catchy headline that meets their confirmation bias. Others have learned how to keep people talking about things, or to start people talking about things, and despite having the capacity to think for themselves, they only talk about what they’re manipulated into talking about.

Our feeds fill with things that we fear. Election years have become increasingly about fear rather than hope – any hope is based on fear, and people just twist in place, paralyzed by a lack of options. The idea that we could, for example, have women control their bodies and not fund a foreign government’s version of Manifest Destiny. We could have a better economy and better healthcare that isn’t wrapped in a sinkhole of people making bets on our health and forcing us to do the same – insurance companies. We could do a lot of things, if people simply trod their own minds more thoughtfully.

We’re insanely busy getting the latest technology because… well, technology is what we have to evolve since we haven’t. Tech companies are the new politicians, making campaign promises with each new release. It can’t be ‘new and improved‘ – pick one; you can only improve on the old.

They promise us more productivity, implying that we’ll have more time to ourselves in our caves drawing on the walls when we spend more and more time being productive for someone else. We’re told this is good, and some of us believe it, and some of us tire of the bullshit we believed for so long.

We could use another renaissance, if only so that people begin thinking for themselves in a time when AI promises to do their writing – and their thinking.

A Battle of Perspectives.

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I had just returned to Florida from a 30 day ‘vacation’ in Trinidad and Tobago, and I was invited to have dinner with some friends who both worked where I had in different departments. It was before the turn of the millennium, my friend was in the midst of domestication, and I had some pepper sauce I had made while down there from bird peppers picked in the yard.

As usual, it was a good dinner, and as I recall I had also brought some rum from Trinidad – I never really enjoyed rum, but it was something to bring from my recent trip and there were no two better people to have it at the time. After dinner, we sat at the pool overlooking the pond, and somehow the whole Middle East came up. Everyone liked talking to me about the Middle East for some reason; I had no roots there, I only had access to the information everyone else had access to. Maybe it was because I was a veteran. Maybe it was because of a project I had completed for Israel when I worked where they did. Maybe it was because I was brown. Maybe it was because I grew up partly outside of the United States.

I dreaded these conversations because I grew up around Muslims in Trinidad and Tobago, and I had grown up around Jews in Ohio. In neither place did either group speak ill of the other at the time. They were busy being who they were, living their lives.

She brings up Israel, and I had only recently found out she was Jewish. She talked about how terrible it was that her people were being attacked all the time in Israel, and I agreed – civilians being attacked is never a good thing, and at the time random rockets had been tossed at Israel from some group or the other that were Palestinian, and she went on about how terrible these Palestinians were. My knowledge of the area being less than it is now, I did know that the Palestinians she was talking about were living in occupied territories, not unlike the ‘Reservations’ in the United States for Native Americans.

Being me – I have an unfortunate tendency to be me – I mentioned that it was terrible, that it wasn’t good of them to be launching rockets at civilian targets. It was a problem, there was no doubt about it, but then I asked, “Well, what do they want?”

She looked at me, having been caught mid-rant, as if I had grown another head. I expanded. “Well, if they’re attacking people, they want something. People don’t go around just launching missiles without a reason”. She stared at me a moment, and she said they wanted to kill Jews. That was pretty obvious, so I asked, “Well, why do they want to kill Jews?” and suddenly I was painfully lectured through World War II history, and the Holocaust – which did happen, by the way, and it’s shameful that I have to write that.

After she wound down, having heard her out, I said, “It seems weird that people who have so much in common would be so violent with each other.” She asked what I meant, and I said, “Well, kosher and halal are pretty much the same idea, the same concept, as an example.” She told me they were not the same thing, but a rabbi1 and I had eaten in a Middle Eastern place in New York City years before, and he simply asked if the meat was halal and was fine with that.

She had become very upset. She’d brought it up, I honestly didn’t want to talk about it anyway, so I tried to change the topic but she wouldn’t let it go. They hated her people. It was deeply personal for her, and I felt bad because she was a friend and I didn’t want her to be upset. The whole time, her husband, my other friend was quiet, but that was his way.

These people, she told me, were animals.

I’ve never liked when people do that, so I said that they weren’t animals, and that there had to be some reasoning – however flawed it might be – that had them upset enough to launch missiles randomly into a human populace.

She told me that I didn’t know what I was talking about, that I didn’t know the history, and got up to go inside – but before she did, I said, “You’re right. I don’t know what I’m talking about. I don’t know the history of Israel.” In a moment, she was smiling again.

She was absolutely correct. I had no idea of the history. So she sat down and told me the history, late into the night, and I listened and asked questions carefully.

I got a big hug before I left and all was well.

The More Palestinian Perspective.

Over the years since then, I’ve encountered more Muslims than Jews that talked about this issue, and they gave me their perspectives, which were sympathetic to the plight of Palestinians. So I head that side as well, though I never heard them refer to Jews as animals2. Of course, none of them were Palestinians, and the only anchoring point they had with the Palestinians was a common religion.

Yet no one really helped the Palestinians in meaningful ways. The surrounding dictatorships only seem to use it to political ends, not to end the politics of it.

What I Learned.

The tensions have been built up over the decades – 7 of them – and nothing has been sorted out. An occupied people would of course have some extremists that want to fight back. Until recently, Palestinians weren’t really given voice in the public forum. How could that happen? Everything that came out of the area, everything that went into the area, passed through Israel’s hands. Yet not all Palestinians have resorted to violence. Hamas came into power, but it’s not really a democracy in the occupied territories, and how could there be a democracy there within what is cast as the Middle East’s only democracy?

And when you live in Israel, you don’t want exploding things hitting civilians either. So you get angry Israelis when that happens.

So there’s a lot of angry people doing angry things, but some angry people are better armed, and have mandatory military service that seems mainly to be about keeping the Palestinians in the occupied territories while settlers move in.

The situation is out of control, clearly. The Balfour declaration was born of war, quickly following the declaration of war by the British Empire on the Ottoman Empire, garnering support of Jewish people for the war against the Ottoman Empire. The whole existence of Israel seems to have been built on war, and it battles for existence are extraordinary.

Yet what we’re seeing today is not a part of history, it’s a culmination of history, and while history was being studied, the world has changed. We’re connected now to see things we could not see before, we’re more aware of human rights, and empires are waning. We should not be killing civilians anymore, unlike what Putin’s Russia has been doing in Ukraine. We say we hold ourselves to a higher standard.

It’s time for the situation of Palestinians and Israelis to be resolved, once and for all, not as a final solution, but as a lasting solution.

But it’s not being resolved as the world watches the same mistakes being made again. I cringe at what Israel has been doing, just as I cringed at the actions of Hamas on October 7th, but disproportionately.

I hope in 10 years this is all a bad bit of history, but from what I’m seeing, it could either be remembered as a terrible part of this century or just more of the same. The world wants it to end.

  1. I’d fixed his laptop that he was returning to a store while he was in line ahead of me, and only later found out he was a rabbi. We became friends, though I lost track of him in his travels and mine. I hope he’s well. ↩︎
  2. I had an Uncle who was Hindu that called the Palestinians animals, and was a big Netanyahu supporter in the 90s. ↩︎

A Moment Between Worlds.

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

I have been living in two very different worlds lately.

The world I share with you has been full of violence, protest, nonsensical conflations and corporations taking advantage of individuals. It’s dystopian, and the only real commodity worth trading in a species that likes trading everything else is hope. Yet hope is often weaponized as a way to get the mob to do as others wish. I’ve lived long enough to see the fruition of false promises, and I’ve lived short enough to still be seduced by hope sometimes.

The world that I will share with you when I get done with it views our humble little blue dot from a distance, through many different lenses. It’s been hard to get there over the past week, but when I get there I stay longer. Everything is better there, because everything is different there. In writing this fiction, this world that I enjoy creating and manipulating, maybe it will allow the readers respite from the world we share. It’s certainly big enough for everyone, I made sure of that.

Our universe is really, really big and we forget that too often, that we actually do have larger issues to contend with as a species than who called who what name, what boundaries dead people set on flat maps of a round world, and why someone farting in court should be newsworthy. From that other world, we’re all raving lunatics, watching people who get dressed up to go to events escaping reality in their own way and then imposing it upon them and then complaining that they did go and didn’t say things we agree with.

I simply don’t understand why people gave them the platform in the first place, but I expect it’s about the same escapism, living vicariously through people we put on pedestals. Fortunately, just about all the people I have on pedestals are dead and every year the pedestals have gotten shorter. Manipulating them to do what we want seems more democratic than the insults to democracy that we call democracy in all these countries. By all means, take your attention away from them – but don’t blame them for the attention you gave them in the first place. Maybe you grew a little and their pedestals have simply become shorter. That’s not their fault. You’ve simply outgrown them – maybe – because if the intent is to hurt them, you still have them on your mind.

From a distance, we all seem silly. Even me.

Between A Rock…

Yesterday I found a nice rock. I’m not kidding. I liked the rock. In front of people who respect me, I picked up the rock because I had plans for the rock. A rock. It’s silly. I saw some potential in it, the handful of quartz with sedimentary sandstone in parts of it.

I soaked it in water overnight after teasing some of the sediment out with a bit of wire. People are generating crappy content all this time with generative AIs, and here I was working on a rock. I went to the hardware store and bought small diamond files and tools for scraping out the sandstone from the rock, giving me holes that I will someday run roots from a bonsai through. I saw that in the rock yesterday before I picked it up, and this morning I banged that rock against another rock to break it along the sandstone fault lines, so that the rock will fit in one of the bonsai pots.

It certainly beat looking at the news. The news is definitely a hard place right now, and there’s not much I can do where I can see a tangible difference. Thus, it seems, I went back to humanity’s roots and was banging rocks together.

That’s a little insane. I do hope the nebari of the tree I pick will work with this stone. It will be the hard place from which the tree seems to grow. Like me. Like you. Like everything else on this wonderful blue dot I enjoy more and more from a distance than I do through the windows of technology.

We Need To…

the world around us, even when it’s painful, even when we have an escape, because to grok the world around us is to grok the need for escape – and what better than escape than to make the world into a place we want to escape to? Why can’t we do that instead?

I wish I knew the answer, though it seems so many don’t understand that there is a question in the first place.