Young ≠ Lazy, Selfish, and Stupid

If you haven't heard about the recent Occupy Wall Street movement in New York, I hope you look it up. Is it likely to fail? Sure, probably. But, just as a measure of people's spontaneous desire to try at things, its a wonderful, wonderful thing, all these young college students sitting on the sidewalks days after day, all these people finding ways to get space heaters and hot meals to them. (Note, by the way, I know there are people older than college age participating in this too - good on 'em. This isn't meant to marginalize what they're doing either).


Which made the reaction of New York Mayor Bloomberg particularly interesting to me:

We need the banks, if the banks don’t go out and make loans we will not come out of our economy problems, we will not have jobs. And so anything we can do to responsibly help the banks do that, encourage them to do that is waht we need. I think we spend much too much time worrying about how we got into problems as to how we go forward. [...] Also we always tend to blame the wrong people. We blame the banks. They were part of it, but so were Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae and Congress.

I see what Bloomberg is saying, I will not naively say that our entire current financial woes are the result of the Machiavellian schemings of a couple of rich men in pinstripes. The current economic crisis is a systemic problem.


What's more interesting to me was that he said there is one solution to our current problems: the banks need to make big profits, so that they're willing to go out and make loans, and that will make reinvestment and growth opportunities, and get people jobs. This is, I will not argue, one way out of our current crisis (I WOULD argue that it's not necessarily the most sustainable one - banks have been growing in profitability for the last 30 years in a  way that sure isn't directly making the average real wealth level of middle and lower class America any higher). What was interesting to me was the assumption inherent in his description, that these protesters were making a stupid, knee-jerk reaction, out of anger and ignorance: "Ah, if only you understood the banking sector as much as I do, kids, then you'd see that you're being childish."


Any time, I think, when you refute someone's opinion with the assumption that they're simply too stupid to know as much as you, there's a fair chance that you're either actively trying to marginalize them, or that you're passively assuming they are less competent than you in some ways.


I see this all the time with young people. I've recently become a manager at work, and have attended a few management training classes, a group in which I was on the lower half of the age spectrum in the group. Probably pretty close to the bottom. One of the points someone brought up in the class was that you just had to work harder to manage the current generation. To paraphrase what he said, kids today are so mollycoddled and spoiled, that they don't understand how to function in an eight hour job, aren't capable of stopping playing long enough to work, don't have the attention span to finish difficult tasks, and haven't been taught to take risks and try new things. Heads bobbed nearly universally. The MySpace generation (yes, their words, not mine) simply hasn't been taught how to be functioning members of society.


Today, Amanda and I went to a book festival, and besides being a wee bit overstimulated (thank you, notebook and a pen, how often you have saved me from loud, busy rooms), I was absolutely plucked in the heartstrings, seeing so many teenagers in one place, again. As you get older, the world repeatedly inundates you with the idea that teenagers are lazy, teenagers are brats, teenagers are selfish, teenagers are know-it-alls. A group of perhaps fifty 12-16 year olds came out at the beginning, in homemade costumes, strung through a crowd with no rehearsal in the hall they performed in, and did a remake of Michael Jackson's "Thriller", choreographed. The whole, painfully long song. I personally am not a Michael Jackson fan, but their choreography? Great, well-practiced, energetic and fun, and filled with sparkling, individual personality. This wasn't the dancing of a bunch of kids quietly obeying the instructions of a wise older teacher who shows them precisely how to move - it was kids who took a framework, and made it their own, every kid a little different, while all still keeping the synchronicity that makes choreography what it is. Lazy, imaginationless drones with no focus? Unwilling to take risks? How can people even say that?


I know, this is something every generation goes through, the process of deciding the next generation down is a lot of worthless heathens who will throw the world away, but dammit, this is my generation, and I don't want it badmouthing, say, my sister's generation, just because it can't quite put its finger on how it works. 


And that's what I don't get about Bloomberg. See, his whole thesis is basically this: "Look, kids, when there's a crisis, the banks take a while to get comfortable, and then start returning everything to the status quo, and that's how crises end." He forgets that what he's REALLY saying is 'That's how crises HAVE ended BEFORE.' That's a valid direction to look. Heck the young generation itself, these days, is harking back to the 'Keep Calm and Carry On' posters of World War II Britain. 


But you can't just assume that revolution has nothing to tell you, just because it will make your life a bit easier and tidier if we just do things how they've always been done. The social cohesion, the energy, the heterogeny, the beauty and spirit, and inexperienced fervor that is youth, there's a reason that we have these things. They have a value that isn't one that needs to be condescended to, its one that, sometimes, has to condescend to us, just to get to our tired, stuck little brains, and say, "Wake up! The world can, if you let it, be something else!" In a time when our problems are paralyzing us with fear - terrorism, disasters, environmental decay, poverty and economic change, employment shifts, you name it - isn't that kind of courageous optimism at least more useful than a drudging terror of doing things differently than they've always been done?

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Luna, Manchester, and Why Political Correctness IS Important

(Warning: This review makes occasional use of 'the f-word'. I don't use it OFTEN in life, but once in a while it finds it's way in. Sorry if I offend :/)

I recently read Luna, a book about about a transsexual girl - originally I had intended to write a more extensive conversation about it, but I don't think I could do so while maintaining my composure entirely (it was that good). And nobody needs that. I will only say that it was a beautiful book - it has it's faults, but fuck that, because it was beautiful and made me feel more awake than many a far more 'perfect' book. I don't know if it will affect everyone the same, but it did for me.

That being said, and my little store of comabtiveness being worn out...

I've actually had a number of places lately where I've been in contact with liminal things - those things which are neither this nor that, one thing or the other in our mind, and it has made me thoughtful on the idea.

Let me start with something that isn't as emotionally charged for us now: Victorian Manchester.

Manchester

Having just started a history of Manchester (Manchester in the Victorian Age: The Half-Known City, by Gary S. Messinger), but having long been fascinated by the city, I found one of the early statements he makes very intriguing. Manchester (if you're not familiar with it's history) was the world's first truly industrial city, the first city that was built entirely around factories and industrial production (during the Industrial Revolution of early 19th century England). The city was a sort of shorthand for the horrors of modern living, as a result, for most of the Victorian period. And with good reason - people there lived in dire poverty, the rivers stank of chemicals and shone strange colors, the air was mired in endless smoke, the people were a mishmash of displaced immigrants, and the city government was forever trying to deal with problems it simply could not understand. This was early 19th century England - 'city' meant London, a mercantile city resting largely on the arms of merchants and tradesman, containing a (literally) medieval governmental structure. Manchester was something different, and it took a long time for people to find a paradigm to understand it:

Growth [in Industrial Manchester] posed fundamental problems of perception.... Educated Englishmen could have cited ancient Athens and Rome as more impressive than Manchester on all counts. Even easier were comparisons with the cities of the Low Countries... [or] London. Nevertheless contemporaries could find no complete precedent for Manchester.
To the present-day historian the reasons for this perplexity are clear. A modern observer can see that Manchester was the first predominantly industrial city in the history of the world... Contemporaries, of course, could not view matters in this perspective. But they did sense that Manchester's growth posed a challenge.

This challenge was, in many ways, a challenge of naming. People did not know what industry WAS, because they did not have the vocabulary we have now: simple words like 'blue collar workers' and 'urban growth'. Even words like 'industry', and 'wealth' had meanings that simply were not equipped to deal with these huge changes (consider that 'the spinning industry' pre-industrial revolution was something women did in the evenings in their homes, to earn extra money for their families, and a wooden spinning wheel was a complex, expensive piece of machinery).

The results of this phase shift are too complex to list hear, but they were deeply coloured by fear. Consider this is the period of the Luddites, who tried to destroy the machinery because it made it too easy to produce goods, reducing labor costs, for example. When the thing was an unnamed, belching smoke and displacing cultures, the thing was a monster, eating the green fields of England even as it bankrolled the empire. William Blake epitomized his horror in one of his poems, written as he calls for a struggle to return England to a state of New Jerusalem:

And was Jerusalem builded here,

Among these dark Satanic Mills?

That which is unknown and new is evil. The Faustian connection with science, progress and discovery is as old as the hills, and continues to hold resonance today (name me a movie about cloning that approaches the subject differently than a movie might approach a demon...). It was only, later, when we as a world had lived with the thing long enough to know it and to name it, and to learn what we meant with the name, that we could accept the new thing, and make it into something at least LESS disorderly. And in the end, industrialization has certainly had it's faults, but people live longer, more comfortably, and with a greater degree of equality than they did before the 'dark Satanic Mills' sprang up.

Before this could happen, though, people had to make a human, intuitive relationship with their new world. All the science, all the reason, all the evidence of the world couldn't win out UNTIL people had words and thoughts and history to understand themselves with.

Which is not to demean the science, reason and evidence - after all that's wher ethe words, thoughts and history CAME from. The industrialisation of England was accompanied by education - often feared and opposed by those in power, but in the end inevitable, and powerful. Common workers, put together in a small space, could take classes, discuss the world, come up with ideas, and make decisions about things larger than their own house. And for all that factory owners frequently feared that an educated populace was a cauldron of discontent, it was education that eventually saved the factories from public hatred. Education, after all, taught people to write and spell the names they had created, and taught them what the names meant.

Calpernia Addams

So, I know, that's oversimplifying a very complex issue, but turn now with to an (equally) complex issue that is more contemporary. In 1999, Barry Winchell, a PFC in the US Army stationed in Tennessee started dating a performer from Nashville. The two loved each other, they were happily dating, good sex life, the whole bit. The difference, the woman Winchell was dating, Calpernia Addams, happened to have a penis.

At this point, I find myself, paradoxically, in the same position that 19th century thinkers were in over Manchester: namely, what do I CALL Ms Addams? Is she a woman? Is she gay? Is she a she? I don't struggle with these names because I dislike transsexuals, but simply because there ARE no names that aren't terrifically loaded with meaning that I don't necessarily want to carry in what I'm saying. If I say gay, that implies something that doesn't exist in this case, for instance. Winchell was attracted to someone who he, and the other party, considered a woman. Winchell was asked, point blank, if he was gay, and responded 'no.' The same issue occured in Luna: the father asks if his son is Gay. Well, from the son's point of view? No, not at all. She's attracted to men, and in her mind, she's a woman.

With other words, there is just too much baggage. 'Transsexual' as a word, to me, feels either clinical (like a diagnosis) or derogatory (ie, the root of the word 'tranny'). Of course there are many transsexuals who don't feel this way, and in fact many words in a lot marginalized communities are derogatory terms that are being reclaimed as badges of pride (queer is a good example). But that's the thing: until the world has time to settle in, the world HAS baggage - negative or positive depending on the readers point of view, but baggage nonetheless.

This can make it uncomfortable, even dangerous to have the conversation. If I don't LIKE the word transsexual, then when you say it to me, the meaning of what you're saying changes, unavoidably. If the word Drag Queen has associations of ridiculousness to you, it's difficult to discuss someone who likes to wear women's clothing without marginalizing them, EVEN IF YOU DON'T WANT TO, simply because our vocaublary is designed to marginalize people.

And the marginalization is sadly very effective. After being harassed by some of his fellow soldiers for his relationship, one of the harassers pounded his skull in with a baseball bat as he slept.

The immediate reaction in this situation is, for me at least, horror, abject and terrible. Followed by a deep desire to believe the murderer is, simply, a monster. But the problem is, believing men to be monsters is what created the situation in the first place. This isn't to remove any personal responsibility from the situation. The murderer is, DEFINITELY a murderer, and the act he committed is horrific. But, to make actions like this stop, just like making Luddite riots stop, we have to be able to name things, we have to be able to give people a vocabulary, because without a vocabulary, there is no world of ideas and thought, there is no change. You cannot get rid of monsters by killing monsters, you can only get rid of monsters by teaching them to be human.

Creating Names

Names are very powerful things. Consider the history of the last 10 years of the United States without the word terrorist, or the history of the holocaust without the words holocaust and genocide. Words DO matter - that's why I love to read, after all. The problem is that, naturally, the past has an advantage in loaded words over the future. When homosexuality became more public, it was the old word, first, that people knew: sodomy.

The trick is the future must find a way to make a new word. Sometimes, this is done, again, by subverting the old words, taking them back to make new meanings like I mentioned earlier. Sometimes it isn't - perhaps the old word is unreclaimable, perhaps the people affected want a fresh start. One way or the other, new language is created: 'Negro' becomes 'African American', 'sodomite' becomes 'homosexual'.

Of course, this new-word attitude is easy to lampoon, and can be overdone. This is where a lot of the animosity towards political correctness begins. If *I* say Negro without bias, why shouldn't I say it? Frederick Douglass said Negro. WEB Dubois said Negro. MLK said Negro. Why make a new word? Why be upset when people don't use your new word? It's a tricky balance, of course, but you have to remember that while you can control how you say an old word, you CAN'T control how someone else HEARS it. And even if using an unloaded word, using careful language feels awkward now, and even if it changes noone's mind, it educates a new generation with a new, more compassionate vocabulary - just as the old Mancunians had to learn a new way to describe a city, a factory, a world.

One of the truly painful things in the story about Addams and Winchell to me was that the two men most implicated in it were not designed to be bigots. One of them had a transvestite fetish and may have been homosexual. The other had known homosexuals in high school and had no problem with them. The issue is that the words still carried the weight of bias, and the stiuation provided no vocabulary to talk the situation over like humans. The argument: "You're a faggot!" "No, I'm not!" is, if you tease it apart, an argument over labels, a war of definition. The argument never made it beyond definition into conversation - partly because there IS no general definition for the situation Addams and Winchell found themselves in. Would the murderers have magically been nice guys who could have overcome their fear if there was a way to define the situation? Perhaps not. Perhaps the conversation would have solved nothing, perhaps it would have revealed only an irreconcilable hatred. But I wish they could have had the conversation, that they could have tried. And I wish WE could have the conversation, as a society, without having to struggle to define what it is we're even talking about.

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Response to MomGrind's take on Photoshop

Women Who Say No To Photoshopping |

What these women did is important, because in a culture that puts a lot of pressure on women to be physically “perfect”, it’s important to see women who are BEAUTIFUL, strong and successful - in a real, non-airbrushed kind of way.

Link through to this article, let me preface - this was an excellent, well written piece (not sure how much my taste matters, but I liked it - oh, and just a warning, yes, there is a breastfeeding picture, if that bothers you). That being said, I don't completely agree. Now, don't get me wrong, at some level, I agree. I agree with the value of images of women (or men, mind you, who don't actually look much like, say, Brad Pitt as a general rule) as a check on the bloated reality of the modern world. I think that there are many siutations, in fact, where you should NEVER have an airbrushed photo. Journalism for example. In a situation where one is showing factual truth, one shouldn't be altering a photo, as a general rule. However, that being said, I'd just like to point out a few subtleties to the argument. Now, of course, there is a place for Photoshop, so let me be clear what I'm talking about. When I worked for a newspaper, not to break anyone's heart, but every single picture that appeared in the paper was 'Photoshopped' - they ran it through filters to make the picture's colors appear brighter, more striking, they would sharpen fuzzy images, etc, etc, etc. There's nothing wrong with this. What I'm talking about is alterations of the basic facts of someone's face - clearing away scars or wrinkles, or a rough complexion, shrinking a nose, accentuating a hip, etc, etc, etc. The first case for when, perhaps, Photoshopping is appropriate is referred to in the blog MomGrind links to at the bottom. This is the area of personal choice. If you're posting an image of yourself on your blog, or if you are sending a picture of your family out on a Christmas card - to some extent even if you're, say, sending your picture to someone you met and are thinking of dating, or something - I see this kind of like makeup. It's your choice. There are those who are completely comfortable with having their face be just what it is. And then there are those who are not. If you have a disfigurement, or something that pains you about your looks, then, I don't presume to judge your choices. This is one of the beautiful things about technology, after all, that we can live fantasies in a limited sphere. Whether it's healthy or not, that's an argument I'm not going to even embark on, but let it be what it is. It's not my place to intrude. I would argue, however, that if you think of photography as an art, even, sometimes, the airbrushing of a model might be appropriate. I know, that's an uncomfortable thing to have said to you. It's uncomfortable to say, as well. But, for a moment, step outside of the immediacies of the situation. Imagine, for instance, Michelangelo, sculpting David. He had a young man, standing in his studio, naked, on a pedestal, and he was looking at him, to sculpt David. David was, for all intents and purposes, a reproduction of this young man's form. But, Michelangelo was not just making a carbon copy of an individual, he was using the frame of this, probably beautiful, boy to extrapolate something different, an ideal - an inhuman one. One that, if I'm supposed to hold myself up to it's standard of beauty, well... let's just say I'm one ugly man, in comparison. But that's what art IS, sometimes, the hyperbolization of life. Now, is the cover of Maxim art? As a general rule, let's go with no. But, unfortunately, if you're goign to foster art, you have to allow garbage. I firmly believe that. And in 50 years, luckily, people won't remember the garbage (or at least, they won't worship it as art. I hope.), but they will (hopefully) remember the art. The real issue, I think, gets missed with all this talk of airbrushing. The real issue is, when a graphic designer touches up a girl to appeal to me, the male consumer, why is it that my market sector demands someone who looks like they would snap if the wind blew too hard? OR someone who looks like they traded in their brain to purchase a larger libido? Why is it that America wants women who define beauty as sickliness? IS it because we see all these images of beautifully airbrushed sickly women? In part, yes, and I would like that to change. But, it changs when we show healthy women, not when we censor unhealthy ones. A parable. There was a time in our history when we realized that alchohol, as a general rule, is unhealthy, for individuals and society. Women, particularly, were victimized by it. IT was the root of a lot of poverty, a lot of abuse, and a lot of the patriarchal society that ruled America at the time (and still, I suppose, in many ways). So, we banned it. Yeah, that didn't work out so well. People did not stop drinking, because illegalizing a market does not destroy a market. What destroys a market is marketing. It's education. We learned this, to an extent, many years later, when we FINALLY got around to deciding that smoking was unhealthy. Did we illegalize smoking? No. We demanded labelling on cigarettes. We taxed cigarettes. We educated children and adults, we shocked people into realizing what a lie they'd been pulled into for so long. And, slowly, smoking is being reduced across the country. And, perhaps, eventually it will dissapear, more or less. But, it will never dissappear through prohibition, it will disappear because you assume that the public is smart enough to not want what's bad for them, and you search for a solution from there. So, why do we want Barbie-women as our role models? Why can't we see how beautiful a Ruben painting is, or an old woman, or a woman with a scar, or with short hair, or with freckles, or whatever? Until we understand the answer to that, Photoshopping will remain a way to deceive, instead of a way to create.

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The largest table in the world

An interesting post from Bilgrimage, yesterday. The line that most struck me was this:

"Because race has always mattered and always will matter—as long as we choose to let it matter—Mary McLeod Bethune envisioned the school she founded as a place of reconciliation between the races (and the genders). A place in which everyone could gather around a table large enough to include all whose voices needed a hearing, all shoved from the table of participatory democracy in the culture at large."

The table, she talks about has some very dangerous implications. This is not to say anything against Ms Bethune (or Mr. Lindsey, the author of the post linked to), who I am led to understand was a saint. But, we as the inheritors of this legacy of activism, sometimes I think we misunderstand this legacy, or take 'the easy way out'.

After all, the statement that Mr Lindsey makes equates "all whose voices needed a hearing" with "all shoved from the table of participatory democracy." This, however, makes a dangerous assumption - the assumption that those who do not fit in this group do not need their voices heard. It assumes, or implies to some degree, that there is a party that ought to have the power - the currently dispossessed - and another party that does not need the power anymore - the non-dispossessed. This sets up, subtly, a dangerous dichotomy, a dichotomy of the suffering, and the wicked who cause the suffering.

In real life, of course, it isn't that simple. Those who are dispossessed are not always right - dispossession breeds crisis, and crisis makes us reactionary. This isn't to say that the 'oppressor class' is right either (they certainly aren't), but it is to say that the answer lies in conversation - not just conversation between all the people who are suffering, but conversation with those who, sometimes ignorantly, cause it. Without that dialogue, you have the blind oppression of the weak (a good example is found, for instance, in the majority of Americans who might buy goods that exploit labor in ways they would find unacceptable if they really understood), or the blind supplanting of the strong with a new oppressor group (the Russian Revolution, sadly, became a good example of this).

I recently read Aurora Leigh (review here. Beware the poor iambs...), and the metaphorical struggle there between the Poet and the Philanthropist sheds some light on this. To someone who has never been taught to read, someone whose daily survival consumes their entire energies, someone who has been driven into squalor so long that society has unmanned them, a poem is completely worthless, only the philanthropist has meaning - he might, at least, give you dinner. When you are treated like an animal, you often start to think like one. The starving animal wants to live, and they want the power to control their surroundings. And there is nothing wrong with that.

On the other hand, if you are wealthy, if you have no real reason to need to work, no need to struggle, the work of the philanthropist has no particular, immediate value for you. The work of the poet, on the other hand, has a great value, because it awakens your humanity. You do not care for material things if you've never had to care for them. The lack of struggle atrophies the spiritual in us, it deadens the passion in us. The starving human soul wants beauty, passion, life. And there is nothing wrong with that.

The problem is that one of these, without the other, creates only half of a man. A man in poverty must struggle to be alive in one way, a man in squalid wealth must struggle to be alive in another, and neither one can truly understand the struggle of the other. To the man who does not understand material want, someone who will not pull themselves up by their bootstraps and make their own way seems lazy and selfish. To the man who does not understand spiritual starvation, someone who is miserable in the midst of plenty seems effete and selfish. In neither case is selfishness really the cause (or so my naive belief in humanity's underlying goodness tells me), it's simply blindness.

To broaden the scope a bit, then, I would submit that earth is a planet of suffering - every human being here suffers. Each and every one. Perhaps some suffer more than others, and we could argue all day long about who causes the suffering. And sometimes, perhaps, people are not willing to acknowledge the suffering of others, and sometimes people twist themselves so hard that they are no longer capable of understanding the ssuffering of others. But, at some, basic level, if we are to have a table where everyone who could gather whose 'voices needed a hearing', that table would have 5 billion some-odd seats, one for each human being (and I just don't know if the dolphins and chimpanzees and such need seats, that's someone else's crusade to fight).

Now, understandably, in some sense this is impossible. I accept that. In some sense, though, the wonder of the present is that this table is more and more beginning to exist. One hundred years ago, it would be difficult, even if one wanted to, to understand someone from another culture. We mock this now, we think how stupid our forefathers were, we're filled with righteous indignation at blind acts - how could the British Empire have believed that tripe about the White Man's Burden? How could the Conquistadors have just wantonly slaughtered entire nations that they barely understood to exist? But, turn upon thyself, oh questioner, and ask - why am I different? Are we all just better people today? Of course not. There are better, there are worse, but overall, I think most of humanity really does mean well. The problem is that, to a British reader in 1890, India, for example, was a vague idea, it was something you heard about from other White people who might have been there in the military, visiting a country of brown people while surrounded by and making your daily company with other white people, also visiting. How could you possibly understand what it meant to be Indian? And how judgemental would we be to look at such a person and say - they are bad? Some were, to be sure, but some always are. The reason you know better is, largely, one of education, exposure, and technology (and to be honest, we're still not that great).

To return to the present then, whenever I see a group of people that holds an opinion that horrifies me - sure, I allow myself to be horrified. We SHOULD be horrified. The fact that we don't feel like it's okay for someone with more melanin in their skin to be president is absurd, and in one hundred years, it will look as foolish as some of the examples I mentioned. But, be horrified at the sentiment, and then realize the people holding it are human. How can they feel that way? What is it that prevents them from being as wise as they could be? And, most challenging of all, ask yourself this: what blindness do I have, that they don't have? What is it that they can teach me? Remember : unless you're Jesus, you'll never be able to teach someone unless you open expect to be taught in return. Teaching the world something they're too stupid to understand makes for long diatribes that get screeching assent from those who already agreed with, and alienated distaste from those who don't. You know. Like Sarah Palin
(shoutout to my alienated, distasted wife!).

After all, that's been the genius and wisdom of Barack Obama, so far, I believe - he can be black, without telling you that's why you have to vote for him.

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