score 1 for Mother Nature

Wanna bet no one is going to be buying a car this President's Day anywhere on the east coast? Yay for blizzards!

happy "Stop King George from making his B movie into a reality" Day

The problem with protests is that there's a lot of effort put into them, but often there's no real progress. Standing around with a bunch of other people who agree with you is nice, but doesn't really accomplish that much. Imagine if all those people who are presently decending upon NYC (and 500 other cities around the world...) spent just a few hours actively advocating for peaceful solutions to world problems. What if, instead of standing around in the cold, these people met with their local legislators, mayors, news reporters, neighbors, school committees, etc. and simply talked about solutions more productive than violence? Better yet, what if these people mustered the courage to run for office on a platform of civility, with rational appoaches to politics and and a serious aim to put people before profits? Or how about if these folks quit working in corporate habitrails, broke their addiction to personal automobiles, vowed not to contribute to overpolulation, and spent their lives working to enrich society. Take that gut feeling of wanting the world to be a beautiful, happy, safe place and use it to effect change as a teacher, a holistic doctor, a writer, an artist, a political leader, a police officer, a lawyer, a city planner, a craftsperson, a baker, or a farmer. Think of the thousands of people who you could share your idea with in one of these jobs!

I used to think that I was accomplishing something by being an outspoken person in the corporate world. But, for all the good I was doing, I was also comtributing to business as usual. In my desire to have a comfortable job, I lost sight of the fact that the point in life is not to be comfortable, but to be alive. Sitting at a computer day after day working on making a product that no one needed is not what I want to do with my time here on the Earth.

Manufactured Joy

We hear more and more these days that depression, road rage, stress, and fear are becoming the norm, rather than an aberation. Some may claim that it's a result of the gaping rift between the rich and the poor, while others may blame terrorists or the media. And all of these problems are definitely causing society to feel pretty damn crappy. But I think that a cause even closer to the root is the fact that we humans have become so seperated from our human-ness that we feel completely unwhole. Everything from our friends and our enemies, to our joys and our sorrows, even to our genetically modified food and our excercise machines, is manufactured and approved and then served to us on a shiny platter by the people we've chosen (or had chosen for us) to be our leaders. We've become so addicted to the easy high of a far off war fought by someone else, or a mindless romantic comedy at the local megaplex, that we don't even want to want to know what is really going on in the world or even in our own communities. Sure, escapism is a necessary part of the human healing process, but we've become a nation stuck in the fantasy world that we work so hard to pay for. We sit in our hermetically sealed cars for two, three, or four hours a day, placated by "music" created by profit-enhancing algorithms, while the rest of the world is relegated to obstacles that threaten our very purpose in life (working and consuming). And when we finally manage to extract ourselves from protective bubble of the personal vehicle, we immediately scramble to return to the environmentally and emotionally controlled environments that are the buildings we work, shop, and live in.

But this isn't living. This is a coma. (Or perhaps an ill placed comma?) Deep down we all know that this is all fake (and may be why so many "normal" people enjoyed the movie the Matrix), but we're incapable of giving up the falsities that the Bush administration, the "news" media, and Hollywood in general are feeding to us (on pewter spoons that will eventually kill us). Why should we give up the manufactured joy of a successful killing spree on a video game for the unknown reality that might hurt us for real? Well, because this manufactured life is making us ill on a human level. It's destroying our hearts and our minds and even our bodies (US citizens are the unhealthiest on the planet, despite our vast medical resources). Plus, this fantasyland is just no comparison to the real joys of life. You can choose to be alive and human, and to be in charge of creating your own joys and sorrows, or you can choose to be plugged into the feeding tube of the masses.

Technology, fantasy, even drugs are rarely bad in and of themselves, as they are merely tools. The danger lies in the user. Even duct tape can be used to kill.