disconnect
if i were an element, i imagine i would be nitrogen, being as it is sulkily disinclined to react with anything else.
only a few people make sense to me. as in, i can understand the path they are on, and their thoughts and joys and sadness.
everyone else i can talk to and share with, but i cannot help but feel that we interpret things in fundamentally different ways. our frequencies are simply different. this can sometimes be a question of just needing more time and exposure. like with jake! i fairly detested him the first time i met him. but that was a greatly mistaken impression. maybe everyone just needs more or less time to synchronize and come to an understanding. but maybe not.
i was with some other volunteers a few days ago, and they were talking about one of their family relations, a man who evidently makes $10,000 a week playing online poker. everyone expressed great admiration for him, and i was left thinking that i simply could not understand their admiration. for the first part, i can not help but imagine that such an existance would be horribly empty. looking around your paid-off house and numerous possessions, how could you not be tortured by the question where did this all come from? what labor brought it to me?
then the second part, making money in such a form is not only zero-sum but in fact negatively productive! since you are consuming energy and someone else´s computer code just to redistribute a fixed pool of money.
but mostly, these are peace corps volunteers and college graduates. every one of them is at least academically aware of the massive problems facing our species and our role in the global ecosystem, as well as the need for decisive and conscious change. but even though they are here, working in nicaragua and trying to address these problems, i can´t help but feel that we think about these issues in different ways. change starts inside, you have to live in a way that reflects your beliefs. you cannot just shake things about and hope that the problems will compress and reduce. that attitude is what caused copenhagen to fail, and will cause such efforts to continue to fail unless a great change is undertaken. you cannot approach an international meeting table without bringing something to it. all of the negotiation in the world cannot supplant the need for deliberate action at home, be you an individual or an entire nation.
that sounds terribly judgmental!
sometimes i think i can be judgmental, and i hope to remove that tendency. but in this issue, i consider it so much more a matter of exposure and particular kinds of education. i think that if i experienced exactly the same type of upbringing as someone else, i would not turn out terribly different from he or she. i´ve been lucky enough to have very reflective parents, good teachers, and simply beautiful friends. when i think about their activism, dreams and goodness, it is the antidote to such pessimistic venom.
there are many solutions. one of the issues that strikes me particularly much, here, is the question of elders. we generally don´t have them, or listen to them. i adore the idea of one´s elders considering the impact of things on the next seven generations, and being present to resolve disputes and add wisdom to decisions. very generally in nicaragua, elders are treated with great respect, and deferred to, and their advice is sought for all sorts of things. in america (if you will permit some very generalized statements), i think that corporate culture has supplanted the roles of the elder, and the actual elders are herded away where someone else will care for them. our culture heavily emphasizes the opinions of the youngest generations (which is no sin or problem in itself!) but hands us the recipes for our own destruction! it is printed in TV guides and advertisements and beer bottles, so many forms of distraction and excess. ironically, i also think that our generation is the very first in history that has the capability of turning human history into something conscious, by virtue of our unparalleled education and the connective powers of the internet and other technologies. we could truly seize the reins and direct our course towards sustainability. but first we must dig ourselves out from under the mountain of distractions and apathy, and that is among the greatest challenges facing us.
dig out, opt out!
harvest and love