Low Tax Policy and National Debt

When reading headlines about Greece and Ireland in debt crises, we see photographs of the leaders of the world bamboozled.  These disturbing pictures of educated men crumbling under the weight of unadulterated lies told to them by other supposed educated men who study such things should trouble us.  When a man such as Alan Greenspan, the celebrated hero of the Neocon deregulation and “low-tax” revolution engages the “liberal” press out of retirement, and states his philosophy of deregulating debt was wrong, that he caused a destruction of wealth the likes of which the world has never seen, how are we to proceed?  How are we to proceed with any advice from a man that has been horribly wrong, yet claims to be incredibly enlightened?  As the leader of a business, would you take the advice of a man who had made a mistake that had nearly bankrupted you, but had claimed that he had learned from the experience?

Like any other business, our government maintains a balance sheet of outstanding debt and incoming revenue; however, many continue to discount the reality of the numbers on this sheet, or their relevance to us.  The reasons for this vary widely.  Previous generations cited our military might and strategic positioning in the world as reasons that the faith and credit of our nation was one of the strongest in the world.  And many of the same economists that believed the market had a steady hold on the credit default swaps and the mortgage bubble still believe that the market has a steady hold on our debt, which is “marketed” to foreign countries and investors in the form of Treasury Bills.

The truth is neither of these insurance policies are good ones.  Economists can no more predict the outcome of particular financial instruments than they can the results of a Poker game.  As evidence, I cite that there are as many bankrupt traders as there are rich ones.  However, the wiser ones are typically the poorer ones.

As far as our military might is concerned, the number of nuclear powers in the world is increasing, despite our attempts to control it, and a nuclear threat from another nation is an inevitability.  As far as our tactical infantry and fighter planes are concerned, I will allow others to gauge their success in recent history, particularly in Afghanistan, where we continue a war for a decade against the likes of everyday mad men with machine guns.

The truth is, the days of coercing others to invest in our economy, and/or proving that others will always invest in our economy through the use of sophisticated mathematical formulas are clearly numbered.  The world today is smarter than that, and the playing field is much more level.  The lesson of history is that every great empire eventually falls.  The difference between America today, and the Historical America that many today seem to dream about and long to see restored, is that Historical America seemed much more aware of the possibility of its failure. While I don’t want to be particularly morbid about our eventual failure, I do want to confront the American psyche: we cannot always be the only game in town, militarily speaking or economically, and the idea that we are is toxic.  It is this attitude of self-sufficiency, invincibility, and even entitlement that lead to the current crisis that we are all facing, and it has lead us down horrible roads in our history as well, from the peculiar institution to the genocide of this continent’s indigenous people; it will only prove to annihilate us the tighter we grasp to the idea.

There has been much talk about tax policy, and not surprisingly many are clinging to the idea that we can continue to have other countries that are working much harder than us pay for our way of life.  This too is one of the greatest lies that has ever been told.

Historically and during one of the most industrious and prosperous times in our nation’s history, the most profitable members of our society bore the burden of our government’s bills through higher taxation.  This much is entirely clear from observing tax rates from the past century.  In 1917, due to debts incurred from WWI, the top tax bracket of those making over $2,000,000/yr (approximately $34,000,000 dollars in today’s money) was 67%.  Post WWII, that top bracket tax rate surged to 94% for those making $200,000 (or $2,000,000 per year in today’s money).  The top tax bracket stayed above 70% until 1980, when the Reagan administration dropped the tax rate in the top bracket to 28% over the course of its tenure.  It’s not surprising these drastic changes to our tax law have increased the debt burden on our government tremendously.

One might think that this type of policy might have increased personal savings rates because people had excess money on hand, but peculiarly, those also decreased in the same time frame (until recent months, when we entered the Great Recession.)

To be clear, personal savings rates can also mean that people are paying down debt, it is simply money that is not being spent on goods in the economy.  When the savings rate went lower, that may have meant that all the excess money people were given was being spent, but it may also have meant that people were getting poorer by eradicating existing savings and/or borrowing to buy more goods.

This is why I do not consider government spending as a percent of GDP a valid utility in assessing government spending, although I have seen this statistic published numerous times since the recession took hold as justification for our current tax rates and current level of spending.  One of the main components of GDP is private consumption.  To increase the size of GDP, you simply get people to consume more goods (and borrow more money).  Clearly, just because private citizens are spending more money, does not mean the government should also spend more.  We can see this by the accumulation of public and private debt in the past 30 years.

Popular statistics to trend wealth track household income year over year; these show a modest positive gain in wealth during the 1980′s.  However, this might be misleading.  Why is this?  During the 80′s there was a vast reordering of the number of people in the workforce per household, especially as more women were entering the workplace.  Divorce and a move away from the typical family model is also cited many places, which could have decreased the number of persons per household.  This all could have added up to a wash, but I’m not sure we’ll ever know.  (Because of this breakdown of the family, the other common statistic –per capita income– would also be misleading, as people were having fewer children.)

I hear your question.  Could people have actually been getting monetarily poorer, despite an overall break in taxes for everyone?  Is this possible?  I will leave it for you the informed reader to make that determination.  However, I’m not sure that it really matters, as it is clear that lower taxes for the top tax bracket did not make any other tax bracket in terms of percentage increase in income as wealthy as the top one.  According to Wikipedia, for the period of 1967-2003, “the income of the 95^th percentile [in the US] grew 15.2% faster than that of the 80^th, 146.8% faster than that of the median and 159.9% faster than that of the 20^th percentile.”  The top 1% experienced the greatest gains of anyone, and the share of income held by the top 1% was as large in 2005 as it was in 1928.  Strangely, in 1928, the highest tax rate for the wealthy was similar to what it is today, and even a little lower at 25%.  After the stock market crash in 1929, it took three years for the tax rate for the wealthy to correct back to 63% in 1932.

Presently, both Ireland and Greece today tax their highest tax bracket at 41% and 40% respectively, a rate that we have not used since 1985.  These countries also carry a VAT which is similar to our state/local sales tax.  It’s interesting that the Greece austerity measures include items like freezing Greek pensions for 3 years, and increasing the retirement age for working mothers, while they are only willing to increase income tax on the highest tax bracket by 1%.  In Ireland austerity measures propose tax rates for the highest earners remain below 52%.  Meanwhile similar cuts for working class people in terms of pension reductions, and an increase in the VAT (which effects lower income earners more) have been implemented.  In the mean time, Ireland’s economy has tanked.

My conclusion from this data is that history is clear in these matters, either the richest among us must bear the burdens of society –the one which they leverage progressively more as they earn more money from it– or we must learn to live with a lot less as a society.  When our wealth is poured in huge black pools of private investment, where it is not spent, or worse yet, used to pump up the consumerist economy for its own financial gain, we do nothing more than lose our savings, and our children’s savings.  I’m sure others may draw other conclusions, but I’m interested to hear counter arguments.

Expensive Food and Expensive Health Care

For those of you who don’t know, as recently as two years ago I was taking prescription drugs for Acid Reflux twice a day, and had horrible abdominal pains, which prompted me to have an ultra sound of my abdomen.  The hospital that conducted the test misdiagnosed me as having tiny gallstones, ultimately leading to the needless removal of my gallbladder.  It was at this point that I decided to question the logic of the Corporate Hospital system which has endless patience for “tests” and trying different drugs –including those which alter the mind– but conducts little to no research on any of the simpler alternatives –e.g., lifestyle and diet changes.  No doctor told me that certain types of exercise would improve my condition, and in fact I had some tell me that I was doomed to be on medication for life.  Two years into swimming five days a week, with much trial and error with regard to my diet, I have no need for any drugs, nor do I suffer from the same abdominal pains.

Many are suffering from a higher incidence of obesity, diabetes, IBS, acid reflux, gout, cancer, and so on.  When you plot statistics related to our physical activity over the past fifty years, there is a clear inverse relationship between our move into major metropolitan areas (or our increase in automobile ownership and move to auto-centric communities), and the amount of exercise we’re getting.  The less and less exercise we’re getting, the unhealthier we become.  We give our bodies the ultimate insult by sitting at desks all day, not using them.  Wendell Berry puts it this way:

Perhaps the fundamental damage of the specialist system –the damage from which all other damages issue– has been the isolation of the body.  At some point we began to assume that the life of the body would be the business of grocers and medical doctors, who need take no interest in the spirit, whereas the life of the spirit would be the business of churches, which would have at best only a negative interest in the body.  In the same way we began to see nothing wrong with putting the body –most often somebody else’s body, but frequently our own –to a task that insulted the mind and demeaned the spirit.

Thus, Berry connects problems with our health in body, mind, and spirit, to the specialization of work –and particularly, people’s lack of involvement in the growth of their own food.

Anyone can tell you that another major component of our decline in health as a nation relates to what we’re eating: what is cheapest to buy at the grocery store, what is subsidized by the government, what we are serving in our childrens’ cafeterias, etc.  Frequently when entering this conversation, it becomes impossible not to talk about Big Agriculture, The Evils of Factory Farms, The Evils of Pesticides, The Evils of Soil Erosion, The Evils of GM, The Evils of Monsanto, etc.  For many, stories like the following are nothing new.  I’m just pulling these headlines from the back corners of my mind in no particular order:

• Genetically modified corn linked to organ damage in ratsExcess nitrogen from farm run off causes algae overrun in the Gulf of Mexico
• Pigs with their tales burned off, chickens grown without beaks stacked on top of each other in huge tin buildings
• Deadly E. Coli in the food supply chain in not only meat, but also in vegetables now like lettuce and spinach
• Monsanto sues small time farmers over use of “seed cleaners”, alleging conspiracy against their patented seeds
• Monsanto sues small time farmers who have their patented plants growing on unlicensed land as a result of cross pollination
• Hormones such as Bovine Somatotropin remain in our food supply despite reports from the media and many scientists that they cause cancer.
• Round-up resistant weeds cause Monsanto to subsidize use of conventional herbicides (in addition to round-up) on 10-20% of Round-up Ready Crops to maintain high yields with their patented product
• A shrinking supply and shortage of fresh water all over the world.  In America we see a falling water table beneath Kansas due to use of irrigation techniques and a drying Colorado River, among others.

(For a longer list, feel free to read such books as In Defense of Food, An Omnivore’s Dilemma, or watch movies such as The Corporation, or Food, Inc.)

There is a common theme in all of this.  With each decision that is made about our food supply, we seem to be wanting to squeeze that extra 5-10% out of the supply chain, without any thought to if it is wise to do so.  But I think the main question is: Why?  Does any one really need an extra 50 cents in their pocket to spend on God Knows What.

When you bring up these items, the frequent criticism from believers in our food system is: Yes, but what about that cost?  Vegetables are more expensive than Sugar-O’s at the store.  You know that growing things organically is more expensive than with newer techniques, don’t you?  We can’t possibly feed all of our cattle grass, can we?  The reason things are this way, is because they are more efficient this way.

This is the mantra of the Capitalist oligarchy:  Good Health requires plenty of expensive medical machines beaming our bodies with radiation to see if there’s anything wrong, and plenty of patented medicines being dispensed by pharmacists.  By the same notion, if you don’t want us all to starve, it requires thousands of tractors burning petrol, millions of gallons of pesticides and herbicides, and a thousands of scientists splicing genes to find the most efficient corn plant.  (Since 1920, we have gone from twenty bushels of No. 2 corn per acre of Iowa soil, to a freakish 180!)

But there is an obvious problem with this logic; these types of questions assume our current methodologies are sound for long-term use, as in, use for our grandchildren.  It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that if we keep on using more water from the Colorado River than God puts into it, eventually it will run dry.  If we keep on pulling more water from the water table under Kansas, it too will run dry, and Kansas will again look a lot like the it did during the Dust Bowl Era.  If we keep on dumping nitrogen run-off from farms into the Gulf of Mexico, the dead zone, full of nothing but algae, suffocating the indigenous fish, will grow larger.  If we keep on tilling the rich top soil of Iowa and never replenishing it with anything but manufactured fertilizer, eventually the top soil will run out.  And this all assumes we don’t run out of the natural gas that provides the nitrogen for the fertilizer in the first place.

But let’s set all of this logic aside for a moment.  Let’s assume as many economists do, that in the long run, everybody’s dead anyway.  We’re just trying to live day-to-day, after all.  And these farming methods allow us to feed more people, do they not?  They do allow us to grow more food, and allow the world population to grow larger, right?  And food is cheaper for everyone than it’s ever been, right?

Then comes along a study like this, “The Progressive Increase of Food Waste in America and Its Environmental Impact.”  This study is enough to condemn the most religious of the Big Agriculture believers.  It finds that one quarter of our total fresh water consumption is consumed per year to make food waste –that is food that goes to our landfills in some form or another– and roughly 3% of our annual oil usage or 300 million barrels of oil per year–roughly the amount of oil leaked from the Deepwater Horizon well so far– is wasted in the process.  A damning 40% of all food produced domestically is estimated to be wasted either in harvest, warehouse loss, market spoilage, restaurant trash, or typical household discards.  This is the “efficiency” of Big Agriculture.  (Those of us who have worked for larger corporations shouldn’t find these numbers surprising.)

The amount of food waste produced by Americans per year is growing, and this isn’t to mention our growing waistlines.  Economically, this means that there is some proportional sum of money that we are collectively paying for this waste each time we go out to buy our groceries or pay for our trash/recycling.  Let’s just assume it’s –conservatively– an additional 30% to produce and haul away this garbage.  Would this give us an acceptable margin to begin to grow foods organically, or to consider farming animals humanely?  Furthermore, what would happen to the cost of fruits and vegetables if those who could had their own gardens, or fruit trees?  There is quite a bit of land that is underutilized.

We seem caught up in an idea that good food needs to be expensive, if isn’t then there’s something wrong.  The arch nemesis of Big Agriculture is Trendy Local & Organic.  Rebecca and I went to a restaurant in town last weekend (that wishes to remain anonymous) that specialized in “local” ingredients, supporting “local” farmers, and only used the “freshest” ingredients.  This particular restaurant was an editor’s choice for the Best New Restaurant in St. Louis for 2010.  For the low, low price of $15 dollars, two bites of fish skimmed from the coast of Oahu –thousands of miles from St. Louis– and a couple, and I mean two, “locally grown” asparagus spears were mine.  An equally tiny $8 dollar salad (when lettuce is in season locally) was also consumed at this same sitting.  Meanwhile, guests raved of the interesting and complex flavors.

While the flavors may in fact have been interesting and complex and perhaps some of the ingredients may have been produced organically by small farmers –some of which local to the area–the cost of the meal relative to its size was prohibitively expensive for any but a very few.  Since when did local become something for freshly-pressed white people to enjoy before they go to the opera?

The original point of a backyard garden was its simplicity, that it eliminates reliance on a complex and wasteful system while simultaneously offering an inexpensive and readily available food source.  Lest we forget, people planted Victory Gardens in World War II for these same reasons.

I think we need to reevaluate what expensive food is, and why it is that way.  But beyond that, we need to consider that all costs are not inherently monetary in the short term.  For that very reason, we should either monetize the more serious environmental costs, or prohibit them by law before it’s too late for our grandchildren.  Taxing carbon is really only a small piece of the puzzle.  We should be taxing high water consumption, especially in irrigated areas.  Forget about cigarettes and alcohol, there are greater evils among us.  Let’s think critically about the Colorado River drying up, while we use its water to water lawns and fuel Casinos in the desert.  We must live within our means for our childrens’ sake.

Finally, I would argue, the problem with Capitalism isn’t that people end up starving, like in communism; it’s how quickly people become gluttons in the name of short-term gain.  For some reason, we seem unaware of this, but the writing is all over the wall.  We see it in our energy policy, the wars we involve ourselves in, in our food, and in our healthcare.  Resources are quick to have a price tag placed on them.  The problem is, if we use everything with a price tag on it, not only is there nothing left for anyone but ourselves, but there’s also nothing left for our children, either.  Somewhere, there needs to be a balance.

On Friedman: A Spiky World and Individual Action

According to Thomas Friedman, popular columnist for the New York Times, due to globalization and expanding communication networks, the world is becoming “flatter,” essentially leveling the playing field for all members of the planet, broadening opportunity for all and increasing their wealth.  This is the central thesis of his book, The World is Flat: A Brief History of the 21st Century.  I, however, along with Richard Flordia, author of The Rise of the Creative Class, have a completely different assessment of the situation.  Flordia writes in his book Who’s Your City that the world is becoming “spikier” –in terms of wealth distribution, opportunity, economic activity, you name it.  An excerpt from his book reads as follows:

A Chinese student of mine summed it up succinctly: ‘In Shanghai , regular middle-class people live better than those in the United States, while in the countryside, just outside the city, people live what can only be described as precivilized conditions.’  His impressions are borne out in statistics: 17 percent of China’s population lives on less than a dollar a day, almost half lives on less than 2 dollars a day, and 800 million farmers cannot afford to see a doctor.

Flordia’s thesis is that globalization is creating huge disparities.  Large cities/regions the world over are developing expertise in various industries, and people are flocking to these regions, leaving others behind, in order to keep pace with the global work place –to go where the jobs are, essentially.  Friedman believes that the global work place is anywhere there is a laptop or a mobile phone, but this is simply not true.  Jobs are concentrated in cities like New York, D.C., the San Francisco Bay Area, London, Paris, Berlin, etc.  Globalization and cheap oil just make it easier to relocate to these places.  How crowded our airports are on holidays speaks to how many people live where they or their family grew up.

Wendell Berry noticed this trend in the year 1970 in his book of essays, A Continuous Harmony.  In one titled, “The Regional Motive” he writes of what we have lost with this system:

[In The Woodlanders Thomas Hardy writes] though a place “may have beauty, grandeur, salubrity, convenience,” it still cannot be comfortably inhabited by people “if it lack[s] memories.”  And in a letter to H. Rider Haggard about the effects of migration of the English working people, Hardy [states], “there being no continuity of environment in their lives, there is no continuity of information, the names, stories, and relics of one place being speedily forgotten under the incoming facts of the next.”

….

At present our society is almost entirely nomadic, without the comfort or the discipline of such memories, and it is moving about on the face of this continent with a mindless destructiveness, of substance and of meaning and of value, that makes Sherman’s march to the sea look like a prank.

Without a complex knowledge of one’s place, without the faithfulness to one’s place on which such knowedge depends, it is inevitable that the place will be used carelessly, and eventually destroyed.

And so Wendell Berry connects our migration patterns to the leaving behind of our connection to land, place, memory, which is ultimately responsible for our destructiveness.  Since we are attached to so few places, it makes large scale destruction seem small because it is –in large part– unseen.  Most of us don’t live in rural areas anymore.  We live in alleyways and cul-de-sacs.

Of course, that’s not all it does.  It also creates forgotten people such as the rural Chinese mentioned above in Flordia’s book, and the American Farmer.  Less than 2% of our nation’s population produces the vast majority of our food.  With the help of Oil, the average farmer grows nearly 500 acres, according to U.S. Census statistics, as the marketplace makes it harder and harder to grow less and support a family.

A tale that might be even more close to home is that of our mid-sized cities where more and more businesses are merging or are being acquired, presenting fewer and fewer job prospects even for the more educated among us.  Those who are lucky enough to have a job are presented with strange situations where teleconference calls are orchestrated across world time zones in the name of “efficiency.”  Have any of you experienced this?

Mergers and acquisitions replace small businesses in the name of short term profit.  A high stock price floats the transaction, shareholders are happy with their profit, and the resulting company floats the debt into the resulting company, thus causing downsizing, or as many in corporate America call them, “synergies.”  But is it more efficient to have you coworker on the other side of the planet, where you cannot have a face-to-face meeting with them, where their natural language is likely not your own.  All this reminds of a certain story in Genesis 11:

¹ Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. ² As men moved eastward, ^[a] they found a plain in Shinar ^[b] and settled there.³ They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. ⁴ Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth.”

⁵ But the LORD came down to see the city and the tower that the men were building. ⁶The LORD said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. ⁷ Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”

⁸ So the LORD scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. ⁹ That is why it was called Babel ^[c] —because there the LORD confused the language of the whole world. From there the LORD scattered them over the face of the whole earth.

Tower of Babel, 1563

According to Genesis, the reason we do not speak the same language, the reason we were scattered across the globe is because good things don’t happen when we are living in one place, speaking a common language.  We build monuments to ourselves, and hence (my own interpretation) we don’t understand our natural connection to the Earth.

The economic forces driving us more and more to our cities are the same ones that are driving our farms to become larger and larger.  A farmer who cannot remain profitable gobbles up his neighbors farm, to attain more short-term revenue.  But in the long-term, maintaining a larger operation can produce so much debt, that he as well will be ruined if he’s not careful.  The equipment necessary to maintain such a farm is expensive.  A combine, for example, costs more than a typical farmer’s house.

As time goes on, and this move towards Big becomes Bigger Still, the metrics for understanding what is efficient in terms of our resources, our time, or even wise in the long term are lost.  According to Berry, we can only take back what is being lost one person at a time.

For most of the history of this country our motto implied or spoken has been Think Big. A better motto and an essential one now is Think Little… the discipline of thought is not generalization, it is detail, and it is personal behavior… the citizen who is willing to Think Little and accepting the discipline of that, to go ahead on his own, is already solving the problem…. A man who is willing to undertake the discipline and the difficulty of mending his own ways is worth more to the conversation movement than a hundred who are insisting merely that the government and the industries mend their ways.

There is an awful lot of power in each individual person’s actions.  We shouldn’t forget it.  We all still have power to work within our own contexts.  The important thing to remember is to not give up the fight.

Bad Heuristics and Bad Education

Part of being human means dividing our lives into neat little boxes, boxes that are easy to look at and understand from the outside.  It comes as a matter of course that in order to simplify what would normally be complex decision-making, we must reduce the complex world around us into categories.  This can sometimes be extremely helpful, but in many ways, it is horribly painful for everyone.  The most obvious negatives are the tragic ones: like racism, political extremism, ultra-nationalism resulting in wars and conflicts.

The goal of those who wish to control us, our minds, our thoughts, our money, make it their business to reduce complex decision-making to very simple emotions.  Nowhere is this more evident than the super market aisle.

A Fred Meyer's Supermarket in Portland.

What is it about the small, repeated decisions in life –why do they lend themselves to being made with little to no thought at all?  When most people buy a car or a large appliance, they take time to read the reviews, they research how and where it was produced, what the quality standards are for it, what makes one cost more than another.  But when it comes to food, there are simpler, more primal heuristics that take over: what did I eat last week, what do I like the taste of, what packaging do I like?  Something I find even stranger is that one is more likely to also be made fun of, or ridiculed for having standards for their food –e.g., “Why do you want to eat grass-fed beef, does that make you better than everyone else out there eating meat from a factory farm?”– when having standards for an automobile engine or brake pads is perfectly practical.  How many would question a friend if they had used brake pads for their car that were from a junk yard because they were cheaper?  Most would because they feared for their friend’s safety.

Yet, I would argue that food has just as great of an effect on us, our bodies, as do brake pads.  What do we have a more intimate relationship with than food?  It is the only product that most of us buy that we put into our body!  It is one of a handful of necessities in life that without it, we would certainly die.  And yet most of have no idea where the food we eat comes from, how it was produced, how we would make it if we needed to.  In fact, there are many in our great country who have advanced degrees who do not know how to grow their own food!  Yet, this is not seen as the least bit ridiculous.

Ursula Franklin Academy in Toronto, Canada.

This goes on to one of my bigger “beefs” (no pun intended) with our current school system, which is intent on pushing certain subjects as “necessary” and “required” which are a complete waste of time for most.  If we want to look at the reason why we have so much class division in America, we need look no further than our schools, which are intent on making an Engineer out of every child.  They teach “Math” and Geometry without teaching basic carpentry skills, or how to balance a checkbook, or how to invest your money.  They teach “Verbal” –whatever the hell that is– without teaching Literature.  And they teach “Science Reasoning” without ever engaging a child’s mind with Nature, Astronomy, or Navigation techniques.  Maybe the reason our children cannot concentrate in school, is because the content we’re trying to push in their brain is completely useless outside of an SAT, which many people will never have the chance to take.

If we are serious about a commitment to our children in America, it will not mean an overwhelming commitment to standardized tests, and raising metrics.  It will mean a complete reordering of the way we think about “Education.”  It will be a de-standardization of our curriculums.  (Every school is not the same, as every child is not the same.)  It will mean finding out what is necessary in the world, and focusing on those areas first, before a child is tempted to drop out of school.

For the LOST Generation, the items of highest priority are obvious.  Learning how to provide food and water for oneself seems like it would be high on the list.  Then comes how to build a shelter for oneself.  After these items, come how to earn an income for oneself.  For many in America, the simplest and easiest way to make money is the black-market drug trade and or the oldest profession.  The sooner we recognize and admit to these problems, as politicians are not prone to do, the better off we’ll all be in the long run.

Finally, and if it is indeed the goal, we should be looking to think realistically about class ascent.  It cannot mean that all Inner City children born to mothers working minimum wage jobs become doctors.  Perhaps it means something simpler, like being able to learn a trade, becoming an Electrician, learning to build something with their hands. Similarly, maybe Johnny from the Suburbs would be happier being a Plumber, than going to Harvard.  We need to be bold enough to re-imagine the American Dream in our current context.

One of the most refreshing documentaries I’ve watched as of late was one on PBS about the Green Schools Movement.  Green Schools aim to educate students on how to grow their own food, and involve them in activities such as composting, planting, weeding their gardens.  They train high school students to improve energy efficiency standards in buildings by installing solar panels, energy-efficient appliances –to put the items which our Engineers design to work.  The buildings themselves are also designed to let in more natural light and save money and resources.  This is relevant in that many of the buildings in our school system are running on sadly outdated infrastructure and are in need of updating.

This is a good first step towards a new kind of “Education”, one which will become increasingly more relevant as our dependency on foreign oil grows deeper and deeper every day, and the amount of energy we can produce from Fossil Fuels become less and less.

On Hamlet and Good Intentions

The path to hell is paved with good intentions. This is my summation of the masterpiece penned by Shakespeare hundreds of years ago. (I’ll leave the theories on whether Shakespeare really existed for another post.)  Rebecca and I went to go see Hamlet tonight at Forest Park’s Shakespeare in the Park tenth annual production.

Nowhere is the twistedness of the human heart more visible than on stage.  This was actually my first time seeing Hamlet beginning to end.  I saw Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead before Hamlet years ago when a friend of mine appeared in the play.  At that time I had to make due with the 5-Minute Hamlet to understand the play.  But the 5-minute version just looks like a bunch of people randomly killing each other –kind of like a bank shoot-out; you don’t get the full affect.  The power lies in the character motivation.

It’s the work of a true genius, a play where the main deed can appear to be so just, so clear –in this case, avenging a father’s murder– while simultaneously turning it so quickly into a display of a person’s complete and utter ruining.  At first you have no doubt in your mind that the cause is just, that the father’s ghost –who informs Hamlet of his own murder– is real (and really his father), and that the main character’s cause is good, just as the character himself no doubt does.  But as time goes on, Hamlet himself begins wondering if the ghost was the making of the devil, as it seems to have driven him to cause so much pain. In such a case, how could it have been good intentioned?  Or even worse: was the ghost a complete making of his imagination?  In which case, there is no one else to blame.

Henry Fuseli - Hamlet and his father's Ghost (1780-1785, ink and pencil on cardboard)

There are so many parallels to life in a story like this.  I don’t believe I can begin to scratch the surface.  How many ghosts appear in our own lives?  How many of them do we believe at first, and later find them to be wolves in sheep’s clothing?

Needless to say, I highly recommend Hamlet.  Please go before Sunday to see this great production!  8 P.M. at Forest Park.

Anger & Self-Righteousness

There’s a lot of political divisiveness about these days.  I wish I could say that I’m part of the solution and not part of the problem.  Clearly people are frustrated with the current state of the world (we are in a pretty bad recession, after all) and are looking for solutions on either side of the political spectrum.  Some are saying that more Government is the answer, while others are saying less.  Some want to retreat from war, while others say we shouldn’t give up on our troops.  Some want more regulations, others want less.  All of this is fine and dandy, but what does it all even mean… really?

A recent protest in Washington D.C.

Though the media attempts to adjust every event to the center of the spectrum (making large events seem small, and smaller protests seem big), I would still propose to you that these days there is a great seriousness in people’s language, but not in their actions.  I’m going to resist the temptation to post links to particularize my description here for fear of offending people, but I think everyone knows what I’m talking about.  If you have a pulse and an Internet connection, you know what I’m talking about.

But why is this?  Why do we have so much hateful speech, and so little to do about it?  Are we cowards?  Are we too comfortable?  Nearly 40 years ago, people were in the streets burning flags over the Vietnam War, tearing up draft cards –students were being shot by the National Guard over their beliefs.  One hundred and fifty years ago, we fought the bloodiest battle this land has seen over the peculiar institution.  Today, there is nothing more than quiet desperation in peoples homes, drowned out by the sound of talking heads on television.

It wasn’t until I had a conversation with my brother a night ago that I realized how really angry I have been lately.  I spent some time over the weekend scrolling through my old Facebook status messages.  ”Outrageous,” one says.  ”Some heads need to roll,” reads another.

I can’t help but thinking how incredibly unhealthy, how wrong, and how stupid of me it is to act this way.  Hidden underneath it all is a self-righteousness that is obvious to others, but strangely hidden to myself: if only everyone were as concerned as I am, then maybe the world would be a better place.  If only everyone took the time like I do to find out about the injustices in the world! If only people knew as much as I knew about the oil spill and how it happened, if only they’d look at as many pictures of pelicans bathing in petrol as I have….!

Seriously.  Would the world really be a better place if everyone else were sitting at home in front of their MacBook posting self-righteous tweets to their Twitter account?  I doubt it.  There is a lie in the idea that being “informed” makes you a better person, especially when the ratio of information taken in is horribly disproportionate to your action ratio.

Here’s a good question for self-reflection, “How much information do I take in on any given day that I actually (a) care about, or (b) do something about?”  If you’re anything like me, this ratio comes in as almost infinitely balanced towards taking in information.  I hate that its true, but I must confess that this is indeed the case.

A family watching television, 1958

According to Steve Jobs, taking in information on the Internet is better than passively receiving information from the television.  The Internet is active entertainment, but the television is about consuming what someone else wants you to consume.  It’s about brainwashing.  With the Internet, though, you get to control what you watch.  You control the vertical, you control the horizontal.  The television is an inferior device.

Have you ever caught yourself thinking this?  I know I have.  But I wonder, is this really the case?

If I spend four hours a day calling up information specific to my view point, reinforcing my own prejudices, never querying anything new, I probably would’ve been better off watching T.V.  This is the downfall of the Internet as a form of Entertainment.  It creates people who are full of information about their prejudices.  That includes me.

This type of thing is highly addictive.  With the help of Google, there’s no end to the amount of information I can consume about my own selfish views.  On the Internet, the true challenge is learning about anyone other than ourselves.

But let’s get back to this anger problem for a moment.  If I’m so outraged, why aren’t I doing anything about what I’m outraged about?  I guess the answer is that I’m not outraged, and that in fact, I’m too comfortable with my life to do much of anything to change or improve the world.  I’m just interested in being self-righteous.  From Luke 18:

⁹To some who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everybody else, Jesus told this parable: ¹⁰“Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. ¹¹The Pharisee stood up and prayed about^[a]himself: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other men—robbers, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector. ¹²I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.’¹³“But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, ‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’

¹⁴“I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.”

It’s amazing how clear the words are, how easy they are to understand, and yet, how easy it is to fall into the trap.

Over the next couple weeks, I’m going to be thinking about the issues that are closest to me, and how I can re-appropriate the time I spend uselessly spinning my wheels over the current state of the world, and instead act on it in a positive way…. And, no, I don’t mean showing up to some Townhall and cursing people out.  (Who does that really help?) I mean actually doing something.

In no particular order, here are some of the issues that, as much as I can tell, are near and dear to me:

1. Wasteful Transportation - 70% of the oil we use today is used moving our bodies from point A to point B.  There has got to be a better way to organize our communities than around Highways, and a better way to move people around instead of by single-passenger automobiles.  What is it?  How can I help?
2. Preserving the Environment for Posterity – Steam starts pouring out of my nostrils when I think of bridges being built on park land.  But how do I help preserve the parks in the first place?
3. The Growing Gap Between Rich and Poor – Jobs that a person without a college degree can have and raise a family on are becoming few and far between.  How can I help fix this?
4. The Urban Poor – How can I help build others up so that they can feel useful, human again, after living life on the Street?
5. Being Anti-War, at least, but hopefully Pro-Peace – This was a big one from 2000-2010.  Although it seems to have taken a back burner in my mind as of late.

If anyone has any suggestions for how I can constructively contribute to these causes, or knows of any groups that support these values, feel free to comment or send me a mail.  But I’m also looking for small things I can do in everyday life.

Setting Sail

Welcome.  If you are visiting my site for the first time, perhaps you linked here from a search engine, but more than likely you know me, and you got here through Twitter or Facebook.

For some of you, this may be a return to the good old days.  Many moons ago (in college) I had a blog which I posted half-formed thoughts to, and perhaps you visited it.  I haven’t had a blog in several years.  I’m not really sure whether that was intentional or not.  Nevertheless, these days I find myself having thoughts that might be worth jotting down –surprisingly enough!– and thought now might be as good a time as any to create a blog again.

As for my reasons:

There seems to be a certain something missing from Facebook.  This may be more obvious to some than others. Maybe it’s the constant political flame wars, or the 5 second status blurbs that are always meant to be witty, but intentionally not thought out.  Then there’s Twitter which is newer and trendier, but in general feeds my ADD, and kind of reminds me of sifting through a garbage dump every time I dive in.  I need some clarity in my life.  I need some sort of refuge from this sea of micro-blogging and political extremism.  I need to set sail, and get out of the Facebook/Twitter city.  And that’s what this blog is about: giving me a space that I can expound upon my thoughts without encountering a character limit or some arbitrary profile limitations which change upon Mark Zuckerberg’s fascist whims.  Let’s raise the sails and wave good-bye.  Bye!  See you later!  Auf Wiedersehen!

Now, turn and look out to sea, and see the empty page.  It’s beautiful, is it not?

Large uninhabited spaces, usually known as “Nature”, always seems to bring clarity to things.  I thank God that the planet we live on is a big one.  Human beings were meant to be outdoors and have some freaking space.  I love my new position at work, and my new ultra-condensed, ultra-trendy, low-walled cube work environment because I’m around fun people, (or at least funny people) a lot who speak their minds freely.  But I won’t lie, it can also be a bummer sometimes because I don’t have 30 minutes of time to space out, and let my mind wander.  It’s these types of situations which are necessary for creative professions (such as mine, as a Software Engineer) to create things that make sense and people actually want and can use.  This is apparently one of the pillars of the book Peopleware which was heavily referenced in creating such places as the Microsoft Headquarters, where every Engineer has their own office with a window.

Sometimes it’s too easy for my wife to think that I’m some sort of urban hipster who loves the city streets and wouldn’t be caught dead in a tent.  Although I take few excursions out into Nature of my own volition, yes this is true, I really do have a profound love of the outdoors.  I think I, like many people, am afraid at the prospect of entering Nature –as if I’m not always in it.

All these thoughts come on cusp of my wife’s presenting a paper at a conference on Media Ecology, “Cultivating Digital Natives in Natural Soil: Language, Perception, and the Physical Word.” We had a conversation a week or so ago about the paper and I found myself defending technology’s role in society, an unusal position for me, as I find computers many times burdensome and usually more trouble than they’re worth.  Nevertheless,–and here’s the position I found myself taking in this conversation– they are the necessary burden for structuring large, spread out communities like ours now is.

There is, however, a dark side of “technology” and by that I mean derivations of the Personal Computer.  There’s been a slew of articles as of late relating to how devices such as the iPhone are altering our sociological patterns, how we relate to each other, our families, our children.  Generally, these devices are destructive to the community which they purport to preserve.  They do create community, but unnatural ones.  People sit with their Blackberrys on the breakfast table and as they read their food is growing cold.  And yet somehow they wonder how every relationship around them is decaying.  Clearly, the digital relationships in these situations have priority and are being preserved over the physical ones immediately near them.

But then I start to think about my own iPhone.  Yes, this is where it gets personal.  I used it this morning to find phone numbers I needed, to get directions, to listen to music.  It’s not all bad is it?  I find myself circling back to the other issues.  America is so incredibly spread out, and people are so mobile, it’s hard to have community without these devices.  Cities are so complex, they’re hard to understand without some sort of device that can sift through the junk.  They were created because of some other problems inherent in our society, and as every other invention, they undoubtedly will create new problems, and are.

But back to Nature.  I think we all agree that it’s something we need, something we crave to have in our life.  We were built for wide open skies and vast wavy oceans, not 326 pixel per inch “Retina” displays, to use the term Steve Jobs and Apple coined this week with iPhone 4.  The iPhone cannot solve all our problems, or soothe the inner longings of our soul the way a walk through the woods can.  All the more reason we should be active in protecting these sanctuaries (I will steal the term from Muir, and my wife, thank you very much) around the world, that still exist and through prior generation’s wisdom were miraculously preserved –the Gulf Coast being no small exception.

The Deepwater Horizon oil spill from space on May 24, 2010. This is probably one of the most shocking pictures I have seen in the past several years. To quote Neil Young, now "I have seen the needle and the damage done."