Selma: The Problem with The Problem

I have always believed that these are not the worst of times, nor are they the best of times. Nostalgia, like selective memory has always struck me as misguided, at best. Not that a story like Selma could be called nostalgic by any stretch. But upon watching it last night it stirred up a lot of mixed old feelings nonetheless. Mostly personal, even though my life experience could not possibly be any further away from Dr. King's. And yet, I have considered him one of the great ones ever since I first heard his "I have a dream" speech.

Great speeches tend to reveal great minds, as long as you're not easily impressed. When famous American writer Gore Vidal passed away a couple of years ago, it prompted me to revisit the way his mind worked.  I looked up a speech he gave in '92, "(The Great Unmentionable) Monotheism and its Discontents".  As I began reading the text, I was reminded from the start what made him a great writer.  But as I read on, I almost had an out-of-body experience:  a part of me was transported back to the 90's, while another part refused to drink the Kool-Aid of nostalgia.  One side of me was cheering Vidal's speech, feeling that adrenalin that kicks in when someone stirs up passion within you, and the other side was left looking at the angry young man I was twenty years ago.

When I use the word angry, I feel I need to qualify the context: I was not "Hey Joe, where you goin' with that gun in your hand" angry.  I was more of Billy Joel's "with his foot in his mouth and his heart in his hand" angry.  And apparently, I also enjoyed a touch of Gore Vidal cynicism.  Who knew. But either way one thing has become clear to me: most people I meet eventually reveal some level of anger in them, and they tend to refuse to call it that.

I've been dedicating a significant part of my adult life to understanding the nature of anger and/or cynicism (a sanitized form of anger anyway). And one thing I've learned is that it doesn't matter who or what the target of anger is, the source is always within. Must be that silicon chip we all have inside our heads.

As in any life-consuming addiction, anger will inevitably dump you in a ditch on the side of the road.  Whether that's literally or not, it doesn't really matter.  Either way you wake up one day asking yourself the same question: how the @#$ did I get here??

The irony to me lies in the observation that my own cynical judgments were full of causes that paid plenty of lip service to freedom: freedom from oppression, freedom from violence, freedom from entitlement. You name it. Just add the word "freedom" in front of it.

So why is anger in the name of freedom an irony? Well, I finally realized that something life-changing happens when you are able to free yourself from anger. Dr. King brilliantly reminded me of it again last night: when you overcome anger you begin to understand what freedom is, for the first time in your life.

And therein lies the paradox... the more that injustice affects people's lives, the more difficult it is not to sympathize with the anger that it generates.  It seems to me that black Americans experienced a tipping point moment during the civil rights movement.  At that crossroads, a great number of them were faced with the decision to line up either behind Malcolm X, or behind Martin Luther King.  Fight fire with fire, or take the higher road.

MLK must have known something that only a handful of men and women throughout recorded history have truly understood: that anger is the ditch on the side of the road of humanity. And as some of the brutal images from Selma were flashbacked again on the big screen, it hit me: when anger reaches its boiling point, it becomes hate. At which point you cannot tell it apart from cowardice.

I have amassed an impressive artillery of cynical things that I can say about all the economic, political and social dysfunctions that bombard us every day.  Whenever I happen to stray and choose that beaten path, I notice the usual dead-end results: some people get angry alongside with me, others get angry at me.  And pathetically both sides are wrong.  

Every time I'm confronted with a problem, I try to remind myself of a simple lesson I've learned from the likes of MLK: anger is the problem with the problem.  Figure out how to remove it, and you are left with a clear understanding of what the true challenge is. 

***

A Tribute to MLK:

I Have A Dream / Amazing Grace

If unable to view on YouTube, click here.

Freedom's Just Another Word

A friend and I were talking about the strengths and weaknesses of Europe and the U.S., when he happened to use the “f” word. No, the other “f” word. “Free” is a word that comes up frequently in the U.S., often in context of democracy and liberty, but it extends heavily into economics. My friend was referring to the economic kind, as in “free” education, healthcare, and other social net services. At which point it hit me: freedom has to be one of the most prostituted words in the history of mankind.

Semantics is where we often park our words when we’re too busy surviving. The complication is, some words represent the dearest values in our lives – as in “love”, “happiness”, “freedom”, and a few others. We might be able to survive for a while without the presence of those basic values, but we can’t prevail without them. And the difference between surviving and prevailing is too important to dismiss, as William Faulkner once pointed out. Yet it seems we constantly run out of time to understand the true meaning of those words, never mind agree on their significance. So we throw our arms up and agree to disagree, at best, or frequently contradict ourselves. All of this takes a serious toll over time when it comes to the quality of our lives, which… is where that elusive prevailing comes in. It’s all just semantics in the end anyway, isn’t it?

No, it isn’t. Look, I realize most of us manage to not lose much sleep over words. But I'm not talking about the words themselves, I'm trying to point out the force behind them. And if we can agree for a moment that the force behind words like love, happiness and freedom is what we hunger for the most in life, then it might not be so crazy to take a closer look. Seems a bit unorthodox, I'll admit. But challenging our mindset every now and then might be worth a try, considering the upside.

So let's take that mindset back to the word “freedom” for a moment. While the pursuit of freedom is an inalienable right, the pimping of freedom is an unfortunate political manipulation, one which we have allowed to linger for too long. Consider the following observation: the use of the word free in “free market”, to imply that a government does not interfere with price and competition, is a borderline insulting reference to the essence of freedom. A truly free marketplace would be one where everyone has access to it – including the significantly disenfranchised. You can't appropriate the word "free" and then ignore people who can't even touch the marketplace, through no fault of their own (for those who may be need further definition of what "no fault" means, try abused or neglected children and elderly, mentally ill, significant physical handicaps, etc. In the US that count is in the millions, not in the thousands). In that regard, Communism and Capitalism are ironically a negative and positive of the same image: Communism tried (and so far failed) to insure that everyone has limited but equal access to goods and services, with an elite that has unlimited access to the goods. And Capitalism insures the same for the elite, while everyone else has unlimited but unequal access to goods (unequal meaning in some cases none). Meanwhile, nothing in the Socialist middle is free: it is shared by consensus.

These clarifications are not semantics. They are truth-seeking definitions that filter the noise from our perceptions. We can argue politics all day long about which economic paradigms are or should be "free". But it can be far more sobering to challenge conventional wisdoms every now and then. Ask yourself tougher questions. Hell, ask everyone tougher questions. If they kick you out of your church for asking tough questions, you were in the wrong church anyway. As The Lion King's Rafiki would say: look clooser... Freedom is an abstract that we wave around frequently, but it will remain dysfunctionally abstract until we realize what the true driving force is within it. Whichever system you subscribe to, figure out its true meaning first. Don't just defend it blindly, challenge it and make it better. 

We take these very important words and distort them in an endless string of careless arguments, until we render them meaningless. Then we wonder why we’re not happy often enough. Or why meaning eludes us. Or why we’re often in survival mode, where prevailing is just a dream. And I'm not just talking about survival or freedom of the economic kind here... but hey, they're only words. Or not. Your choice. 

Kris and Janis were right: freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose... and nothin' don't mean nothin' hon' if it ain't free.

....

Fear Nation

"Danger! Danger! Danger!"

America, we have a problem. This is a problem that you won't find on the news. So if you wait for your favorite news channel to tell you what the problem is, you'll just grow old. And most likely scared. Either way they won't tell you not because they're hiding the problem, but because for the most part they haven't a clue. Yes, there's irony in there somewhere. But let me use one of the many recurring bad news subjects that they report about frequently, to find our problem.

In 2007, a Harvard Law article concluded that there was no proven correlation between gun control and murder or suicide. I'm surprised I have not heard the pro gun lobby promote the article more. But regardless of where you stand on the issue, here's my problem with the logic used by the authors of the study: one of their central arguments revolves around the United Kingdom, and the fact that the UK already had a relatively low gun death incidence before tight gun control laws. Therefore, the fact that after tight gun control they still have a low incidence compared to the US disproves a correlation. The problem with that logic is that it ignores a different kind of law: that of supply and demand.

The US has one of the least restrictive marketplaces in the developed world, something at least half of Americans see as a global competitive advantage. In many ways I believe it is a healthy competitive advantage. But I am also convinced that when you elevate any man-made system into demigod status you've just set it up for failure. There is a reason the American founding fathers set up a system of checks and balances: no one, not even the free market, should ever be above scrutiny.

So let's scrutinize the market for one moment: a basic marketing course teaches that to penetrate a market with as much of your product as possible you have to be able to touch at least one emotional trigger in your customer-buyer. One of the most common emotional triggers is fear. The business of fear is one of the most lucrative businesses in the world, but especially so in the more deregulated marketplaces. 

In case you're not familiar with emotional branding or fear-based selling, here is a short list of industries that thrive on it: insurance, pharmaceuticals, retirement / financial planning, alarm and security systems... you get the point. Now, to be clear: just because you work in any of those industries does not make you a bad person. In fact, a lot of good comes from those industries, no doubt. But just like all individuals are imperfect, so is the marketplace we create.

One more free-market dynamic before I tie it all together: private media cannot exist without advertising revenue. So for example: in America, if you frequent travel channels on television you will notice a lot of advertisement from airlines, hotels, and related travel products and services. And if you frequent news networks like FOX News and CNN, you will notice a major amount of advertisement from fear-promoted products and services. Firearm manufacturers don't advertise on mainstream TV in the US, but they benefit vicariously from 24-hour fear-based news programming. Without any significant restrictions, the average American can go from a FOX News Special Report to an AR-15 assault rifle in about an hour. 

If you follow the gun control debate in the US, you will notice that the pro gun lobby emphasizes the word "ban" over "control". You will also notice that what follows is a message of fear about freedom lost. In a highly deregulated marketplace, the result is highly predictable. So are firearm sales profits.

So what does any of that have to do with gun control in the UK and a Harvard University study? This: the UK has and always had more market restrictions than the US, and therefore the flooding of its marketplace with any product, including guns, has always been a much more difficult endeavor. All the government of the UK did years ago, as it realized that there was a real danger of its marketplace being flooded with firearms, was to preempt the move.

How is the UK market more restrictive than the US? Higher levels of government involvement, higher overall taxes, higher cost of living, higher cost of doing business, and a culture that has not embraced the marketing of fear as profusely as the US has. Yes, America: freedom does indeed have a price, and blood is not its only currency.

I think it's ironic that Harvard Law did not consult with its top-ranked business and economics school next door. Surely they would have been reminded that the laws of supply and demand almost always predetermine the laws of a government. Gridlocked gun control by itself will never work in the US. Only a paradigm shift collaboration between fair gun control and a mass detox program against a culture of fear-addiction will solve our problem.

...

"The Newsroom":
The Shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords 

(Click on image to view video clip)

"Alive Inside" - A Review and Commentary

Alive Inside: A Story of Music and Memory is a 2014 American documentary film directed and produced by Michael Rossato-Bennett. The movie's website summarizes the film this way: "Alive Inside is a joyous cinematic exploration of music’s capacity to reawaken our souls and uncover the deepest parts of our humanity. Filmmaker Michael Rossato-Bennett chronicles the astonishing experiences of individuals around the country who have been revitalized through the simple experience of listening to music. His camera reveals the uniquely human connection we find in music and how its healing power can triumph where prescription medication falls short."

I have been preaching for a while that the genre of documentaries has come of age in a big way over the past decade or so. In some instances, they have easily surpassed the average fictional movie in quality and critical reviews. Recently I had the unexpected pleasure of attending the local premiere of Alive Inside, which turned out to be yet another instance of documentary excellence. I say unexpected because I had actually braced myself for a very difficult subject matter: dementia and Alzheimer's disease are not exactly the happiest of topics, especially when it hits so close to home (both my parents have been diagnosed with dementia). But as the film gods would have it, something very inspiring happened: Michael Rossato-Bennett has managed to turn the far-from-happy-ending of our fragile human condition into a story of hope.

Before I get to the hope part, let me make sure you understand just how relevant this story is. First, according to the Alzheimer's Association in the US (and I would be willing to bet the following numbers are relevant across the world), one out of three people dies with Alzheimer's or another dementia.  Let that sink in for a moment. Among you and just two other people closest to you, one will die with dementia and/or Alzheimer's. Every sixty-seven seconds, someone is diagnosed with Alzheimer's. 

Like the "Six Million Dollar Man", we can keep improving physical technologies, extending the official life of our bodies with every surgical, chemical, or biogenetic breakthrough. But as for the real life inside of us, we haven't a clue. We know that we have a brain, which we prefer to call a mind, and that it is somehow intertwined with something we awkwardly call a soul. As for any breakthroughs in understanding where or what a soul is, we might as well be getting excited about fire and the wheel. Ever since we began suspecting that our mere bodies were not the real essence of life, we have collectively done almost nothing to understand that essence, never mind be able to extend its tenure inside our physical bodies. Spiritual and religious thought leaders may disagree with me here. But with all due respect to them, our mass warehousing of our elders speaks to the contrary. Meanwhile, the pharmaceutical and surgical industries have been given all but carte blanche to do whatever they see fit with our aging souls.

Enter some hope, via a man named Dan Cohen. Cohen is a social worker and founder of a nonprofit organization called Music and Memory. In order to capture the significance of what Cohen has discovered, try this mental exercise yourself: think of the last time you stumbled upon an old, favorite song or musical piece you had not heard in years, and think about the instant reaction it stirred in you. Now imagine being in a drugged state of partial consciousness, for what could be a month or a decade -- you're not sure. Imagine finally, someone walking up to you, gently placing a set of headphones on your ears, and playing that same song or musical piece... 

Better yet, don't imagine any of this. Find someone with dementia and do exactly that for them (one out of three elders, shouldn't be too difficult), then sit back and watch them come alive right in front of your eyes. Or, make it a point to watch Alive Inside for yourself. My bet is that, either way, you will experience a soul-touching moment.

"There is no pill that does that..."

- Alive Inside