Senseless Evil

Hello fellow seekers of truth and life,

Well, by now, we've had a few days since the horror unfolded in Colorado early friday morning. Normally, I don't like to do topics right after an event just for the sake of being topical and up-to-the-moment. Certainly, as with anything of this awful nature, everyone and his brother is giving their opinion on it, and I don't think just giving an opinion would be worthwhile. I believe this culture of disaster media has gone way too far in giving out all the details and tidbits of the crime, and we need to give the victims space. That said, there are a few reactions I have had in the days since, and I think they merit me putting them up here, and you reading them.

First off, we (my family) had relatives of ours come in from Colorado the last few days. I wrote an email to them that said that between the fires, and this, Denver has not had a good year. Add to that the heat wave and drought that nearly all of the country has been experiencing, and life in this country has been tense this summer. Sadly, this is the second time they've had  a mass killing of this type. The sad thing is, there have been so many shooting sprees since. The only worse thing than how shocking this is, is how unshocking tragedies like this have become. In just the last 5 years, there have been mass shooting and killing sprees in Virginia Tech, the University of Alabama, Fort Hood, Texas, Oakland, California, and, of course, Tucson, Arizona, as well as the terror killings in Norway a year ago. I'm sure there's some that I can't remember right now, and we're not even talking about the infamous Trayvon Martin death this late winter/early spring. Just last Fall, a crazy guy walked into a beauty salon down in Seal Beach, close to where I live, and killed 8 people, and wounded 1.

In the aftermath, people search for meaning to this tragedy. This is only a human thing; we all want the events in our lives to have meaning. This is what distinguishes humans from animals without higher brain function. So it stands to reason that people would look for an explanation, an easy answer that people can latch onto, and act on. I'm sad to say, I don't think there are any simple or easily explanable answers to events like this. I've been racking my brain for many years about what causes people to be so senselessly cruel. I haven't had an answer. I don't understand what kind of madness would drive a person to do this horror, and to be honest, I don't know if I want to understand it, because that would mean that I could conceive of such horrible corners of the mind and heart. I don't have the stomach for that.

Predictably, political factions both left and right are framing this with their own answers on the issues. On one side, you have the reflexively pro-gun guys. No amount of guns is too much for their liking, any kind of gun will do. They'll argue that our Second Amendment Rights are being infringed. They argue that if only we all had the right to either concealed-carry or open-carry gun laws, we'd all be safe. To be honest, I'm sick of hearing people say "If everyone had a gun, there'd be no criminals." They use patronizing, simplistic slogans like "Gun control means using both hands," "When you make guns criminal, only criminals will carry guns."
Apparently, the few states that do not allow you to take a gun anywhere and everywhere, and shoot someone for any reason, those states are now infringing on the essence of our freedom. Because we know how well you will be able to see the perpetrator in a panicked, fleeing crowd. What if 30 other people all pull their guns, too? Will they all be able to tell who the original deliquent gunman is? What if the cops show up? How will they know who the bad guy is, when there's just a whole bunch of people shooting at each other?

In this culture we assume that weapons equal safety. That's only true in the same way that drugs make you happy. In the beginning, you get the high of power and control, respect and safety. There will come a day when one gun is not enough to scare off or kill all the bad guys, because they've got guns too, so you need more guns, more powerful ones, but they get more guns, and so you need tasers and poison gas to really keep the bad guys at bay. It becomes an arms race, a quest to demonstrate ever-growing power. At that point, your weapons become property that also needs to be protected. The hope of being able to shoot your problems away can only last for so long.

We all have this fantasy that if only we could pick a gun, we could be a cowboy and go in there, shoot the bad guys and put a stop to it. This idea stems from the time we're kids. What are we told to do with a bully? Punch his lights out. That way, he'll never harass you again. After all, a man takes care of his business, so it's only natural that we assume that superior force equals superior strength. Not only does this have holes in it, but it reinforces this blame-the-victim ideology so prevalent in our culture of "the self-made man."

It's as if you deserve to be killed if you can't shoot back. I also have no use for this lethargic argument, made by both the right and left, that it won't really do anything to have any limits on gun purchasing and who can own guns. As if, "We can't stop every bad person from getting guns, so let's not even try." Having some limits won't stop every bad person from getting a gun, but will it stop a lot of crazy people from getting guns that shoot 50 or more bullets at a time, allowing lots of people to be killed? Yes.
By the same token, there is the other side that calls for more gun regulation. They say that assault weapons can't be used to hunt (unless you're hunting a 25-foot-tall elk that can only be taken down with 50 rounds), and therefore guns need to be gotten off the streets. They tell you the chances of someone breaking into your home are very small. So the solution is to make it illegal to buy them if you can't meet certain criteria. Most of them are on the losing end of the argument, because they're dealing rationally with an issue that is not a rational one. It's not about guns, it's about having the power, authority, protection and control over your life that owning a gun represents.



This is why I have come to realize that arguments over gun laws and regulations are just missing the point. Do yourself a favor: watch the above video, and ponder most of the media discussion on the Aurora shootings. What are they talking about? What could they be talking about, but aren't? Also, if you're in a more edgy mood, you could watch this video, which makes the same points in more vulgar terms:


Though I beg to differ with some of the points this guy made, it did get me thinking deeper about the issue. Is it really about guns? Is it really fair to assume that guns are inherently destructive, insane, or evil? Are they to blame for all the violence and destruction in the years since Columbine? Or is it that the killers have this drive to cause pain and destruction? Even if we were somehow able to make it so that no violent criminal could get a gun, they would find some other way to hurt, maim, or kill the person or people that they hated, or kill for some nihilistic sense of control in an often unpredictable life.

Guns are really a tool. A gun has no determination in whether it will kill, or whom it will kill. Nor does a canister full of serin nerve gas, or a drone bomber. The decision has to be made by a human with control over the tool. Now, unlike many other things you could use to kill a person, a gun is only designed for that purpose, nothing else. Referring to what this man said above, Licoln Town Cars are not trafficked by dealers to places like Syria or Colombia for the purpose of killing and fighting wars. I couldn't throw 50 knives into a crowd of people and kill 50 or more people doing that. If you picked up a hammer and decided to bludgeon somebody to death, it would take a minute or so, if you were able to work quickly, and if the victim hung around long enough. There's only one thing that is designed to kill a mass number of people, at close range, as quickly as possible, and that is a high-round automatic.

Having said that, to argue that guns are the only problem here, and that if only guns weren't around, we wouldn't be killing each other is a simplistic argument. Moreover, it distracts us from the other part of this problematic equation, the part that happens before the gun and bullets are acquired. This relates to what I said earlier about this kind of madness. Even thuogh we don't know the level of it that would make finding a weapon and killing several people in a movie theater, we need to understand a few things about it.

When faced with questions like this, we also hear a lot of talk about violence in entertainment and media. You hear a lot of people say "Oh, movies and video games are so violent these days. They're causing our kids to be more aggressive." Actually, mass communication scholars back in the 1970's came up with a theory that a greater danger was that people would believe that the world was a scary, dangerous place. So sure, some wackos will copycat violent acts they see in the movies, as Holmes did, but most people will just resign themselves to it.

This relates to our culture's role in all this. Why do all these massacres happen? Is it the guns? Is it violent movies or video games? Is it the bad economy that's forcing people out of work and home? Is it mental illness? All of these things could push you closer to the breaking point, but none of them is enough to make a person a killer (even all combined). Based on some things I've seen, I posit that it is about five things.

First, the fact that, as I mentioned, our entertainment, news, and the attitudes of our friends foster suspicion of others, and other groups. Second, we tend to be very defensive about our property and status, which necessitates violent retribution to "wrongdoers." Third, we tend to believe superior force equals superior strength (and thus moral strength). Fourth, we have no education on how to solve our anger without beating the other guy down. Fifth, and perhaps most crucial, we have an imminent sense of threat. That last one may be the igniting factor among all the other "push" factors.

Those are just things to ponder. Don't take this at face value, though. Take a walk through any town in the US, talk to people about dealing with violent criminals. Chances are, you'll see these assumptions surface. Now, I titled this post Senseless Evil. Invariably, when some horrible tragedy like this happens, we wonder how there can be any justice (or a loving God) in the world. We wonder how a person could do such cruel, evil acts.

People then say "Oh, they're just evil people." I, however, believe evil is about what you do, rather than who you intrinsically are, or are believed to be. It's about the choices you make in life. It's whether you give in to the darker, baser parts of your psyche out of weakness, cowardice, or ignorance, or whether you allow it to pass. So the only thing I can leave you with is, just make the sensible, fair, wise, morally strong choices in your life. Don't be afraid to take some time, or ruffle some feathers, to figure out what those choices are. I'll have more material for ya soon!

See ya, and don't forget to live!

Tribune to a Genius: 7 Things I Learned from George Carlin

(An interview of George Carlin by Tim Russert in 2005)
Hello Fellow Seekers of Truth and Life,

I want to talk today about a figure who has influenced my creative life in a profound way. I remember the first time I heard George Carlin's material. I had just turned 18, and I found lots of points in the material. However, his material got very violent, which often disturbed me. I am the type of person who just hears about and sees horrible events happen in media and news, and it scares me, makes me mad or sad. It was almost as if listening to it too much would bring the catastrophes he was talking about into being. So I decided to give listening to Carlin's routines a rest.

Two weeks later, I was visiting my grandmother in Virginia. She had the TV on one Sunday morning, and the newscrawl underneath proclaimed that George Carlin was dead at 71 in Malibu. I remembered that was the same guy that I had been alternately amused, inspired and taken aback by just two weeks earlier. Although I didn't think much about it at the time, it turned out that this man's 50-year body of work would help give my ideas a framework, a means of expression that I hadn't known was possible.

First of all, the reason I am writing this is because we of the anniversary. Not only was this past Friday, the 22nd of June, the fourth anniversary of Carlin's death, but it would have been his 75th birthday. I meant to write this on Friday or Saturday, but it just got so hectic around here that I had no time until this afternoon to write. There are many passages I could write about the life and work of the late, great George Carlin. For simplicity's sake, though (or so I don't bore the hell out of you), I will make each of my main points in one of the following seven bullet points.
Here is my list of seven things I learned from George Carlin. To pay tribute to the common comedic form, I will present them from last to first.

7. Language is an amazing thing, have fun with it. Have you ever taken the time to take apart a word, and then wondered where it came from? The fact is, every word is an interesting and unique concept that came from somewhere. Language is something only humans can use and understand, it is the reason we don't spend all day grunting at each other.

Allow yourself to notice, and be amused by, the ways that words and concepts line up, contradict, make sense, don't make sense, sound similar, sound different, cover up and reveal things. Now if all this sounds too academic for you, remember that Carlin, the guy who took all of this language play into new territory, dropped out of school in 9th Grade. Clearly, you don't need to be an academic to do this.

To give an example, just yesterday, I was grocery shopping, and I picked up a bottle of Extra Virgin Olive Oil. This name baffled me. First of all, what does the term virgin even mean in this context? Is it uncured, unsaturated, not heated up? And second, have you ever come across a bottle of virgin olive oil, because I never have. Your only choices in the grocery store are olive oil and extra virgin olive oil, which leads to the third point. What does the extra virgin mean? I always thought that something could be either virgin, or not virgin. There aren't degrees of virginity, it's something you have or you don't, it's that simple. My grandfather first brought the term to my attention, but it is little phrases like this that George Carlin made we who listened notice.

6. It matters which word you use to describe an object or concept. Whatever you may believe, the words you use actually do matter. One of Carlin's running themes was his love of tearing down euphemistic language. When some idea or thought makes us uncomfortable, we try to soft-pedal description of it, so we don't experience the full brunt of what is happening. This is a natural human urge, we want to protect ourselves from the idea of harm. Often, we also want to ignore the idea that we could be wrong.

While this is a natural urge, it does us great harm. It is dishonest, and it hides us from dealing with life as it is, and often, it keeps us stuck in a place that may feel comfortable, but robs us of life force, insight and genuine compassion. For instance, we love to say "I'm getting older," rather than "I'm getting old," because we don't want to face the fact that we will grow old and die too. Such a thought shocks and frightens us at first, but it could also help us treat others with honesty and decency. After all, if we are going to die, too, that means everybody else will die at some point, so we share this "marked" fate, terror, and sadness with everybody else.

I'll give you a macro-example from the Carlin files. After World War I, soldiers would experience a condition of terror, anguish over past battles, regret, and a mental fraying over what they had seen and experienced. This was called "shell shock." A simple name, that told you what you needed to know, with vivid language that gave you the sensation. After World War II, the same state was referred to as "battle fatigue." That name seems to hurt less, like you just need a good night's sleep for it. Then after Korea, it was called "operational exhaustion," a highly mechanical term for a human condition. When soldiers were coming back from Vietnam, they got "post-traumatic stress disorder." This word dilutes the original meaning with several superfluous academic terms, when "shell shock" works just as well.

In fact, such a convoluted term hides a key reality of war from us. Even if you survive a war, it takes a toll on your psyche. I'll always remember one line of Carlin's: "I'll bet if they were still calling it shell shock, a lot of those Vietnam Veterans would have received the attention they needed." Think about the soldiers coming back from Afghanistan and Iraq now. What do they have? P-T-S-D. Now they don't even bother to come up with names anymore, they just give it a meaningless collection of letters. Since about the mid-1990's, our language has gone progressively more and more toward abbreviation. This is an example of how dangerous it can be.

5. Producing violent media doesn't make you coldhearted or cruel. As I mentioned above, I was initially turned off by Carlin's repeated wishes for people's deaths. As I grew, I also grew to dislike movies that were excessively gory or violent just for the sake of being excessively gory or violent. This made life tough when everyone around me was thriving on movies like 300 or Inglorious Basterds, and playing war-themed video games, while these were a big turn-off for me.

However, Carlin was different in that he didn't mind if carnage happened closer to him, where there was a chance he could be hurt or killed. I later saw this and understood the conscious nature of what he was saying, and the conscious nature of the audience's laughing in approval. While it still scared me that people could be so blaze about such material, I knew that the intent behind it was to call our attention to something. There was something inherently violent and ignorant in our human societies, particularly in the United States.


Remember this segment from Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine? This had to do with the scapegoating of violent media and video games in the wake of that tragedy. The reason I included it is this discussion of whether violent entertainment is really the boogeyman everybody claims it is. The fact is, there has always been some sort of violence and cruelty out there. Are supposed to just not  talk about it, and hope that'll make it go away? Carlin spoke of the dark urge to see someone hurt in people. If we don't address that, how will we ever move forward.

Whatever you may think of Manson or his music, listen to the last thing he says."I wouldn't have said one word to [the Columbine victims]. I would've listened to what they had to say, and that's what no one did." The people you hear on TV are constantly telling you how to think, and what to do. When you get hurt, in a small- or large-scale way, there is always someone there telling you what to think and do ("You need this product," or "Violence is rampant, and this group is to blame"). This is all to sell a neat narrative about the world, that you must always accept. Because of Carlin, and what Manson said above, I don't think the problem is violent songs, comedy routines, or movies themselves. I think the issue lies in intent. There is being shocking to pander and boost sales revenues, and then there is being shocking to prove a point, and offer insight, which I will talk about in the next point.
4. Take the things that piss you off, and convert them into creative insights about life. You may have noticed a lot of "angry rants" on this blog of late. Believe it or not, I think anger can be very productive for solving problems and helping people in pain. The problem is that people rarely deal with anger in a positive way. Most of the time, people deal with it in the most destructive way possible, by choosing scapegoats, rallying around "heroes" pinning all the bad in the world on the scapegoat, and then taking out their anger on them.
Unfortunately, people either handle anger this way, or cut themselves off from the anger entirely, trying to deny or destroy it. Another way would be to look at the anger, and keep asking "What is behind this?" You could explore what it is about the things that bug you or make you angry. Sometimes it might be insignificant, but other times, there might be something behind it. Carlin routinely talked about things that made him angry, exaggerating the anger for comedic energy, and it usually lead to some insight about life that you hadn't thought of before. Some people were threatened by this, but for many people, including me, this was the insight I needed to grow.
I've lately began making lists of things that bug me. One thing is people with earbuds in their ears all the time. Going to college, I see this all the time, people walking around with those blank looks on their faces, with the damned white headphones in, as if to say "I don't have to pay attention to anything." What bugs me the most is when I see people with headphones on skateboards and bikes. Focusing on this singular annoying thing led me to some creative insights. It led me to think about how people shut down reflexively, was there anything I did that was an easy way of shutting down, getting stuck in my own world. Here, an annoying occurence became an opportunity to reflect and grow. By the way, the things you complain about also apply to you, as I will discuss in a moment.

3. All people are hypocrites, and contradictions in people are a part of life. What was interesting to me is that George Carlin's career grew out of anger toward the Vietnam War, and the culture of Reagan, where it became good to do evil and evil to do good. However, Carlin was not kind toward the people in the government, the corporations. He hoped they were hurt-the same thing he attacked them for doing. As I watched his material later, I saw he was also lashing out at causes and groups usually defended vigorously by the Left of the 60's. Earlier in my life, I had believed that you had to support one set of ideas or another, but this changed my mindset. I realized that my own gut feelings mattered, and I shouldn't ignore them, or try to stuff them into a conventional wisdom box.
I had also assumed that because Carlin had this rough-edged, biting persona on stage, he must have been just bad to everyone he met. Not true. At least, not according to his memoir (which was transcribed by a friend of his after his death). In his memoir, he had only positive things to say about his fellow comedians at the time, and often worked with them anonymously to help their careers. He certainly said what he felt at a gut level, but some of it was brutal, some of it was very insightful. It was all very genuine. I also learned how to disagree. You don't have to accept or reject some point of view across the board. I used to believe that people had one persona about them, and that was what guided their life. I now know that what we say, and what we do, think and feel, often contradict each other. I have begun using this as a part of my life, rather than rejecting or trying to bury it.

2. Beneath race, gender, class, religion, nationality, et. al., there is a common experience we all share. You may have noticed that under labels, I will often include the phrase common experience. This is what  that refers to. I don't know a great way to describe it in words better than this: there are things in life we all have to go through, trials, joys, heartbreaks, and most importantly, those little awkward moments, and the little things you succeed at that make you go "Yes!" Let me let the late, great Mr. Carlin do the explaining.



Truer words have not been spoken.

1. Life isn't nearly as serious as it pretends to be. In life, there are many things, concepts, ideas, entities and processes that pretend to be so important, the most important thing in the world, in history, ever. They aren't. Part of Carlin's buzzsaw approach was exposing life, particularly human life, as a game. We really aren't as important, noble, or paramount as we make ourselves out to be. There will come a time when everything that is here now is dust, invisible particulate matter floating around somewhere. The room you are in, the laptop or phone you are reading this on, your house, your body, all of your possessions, all of that will disperse, and the same is true of me. It's a scary thing, isn't it? It often scares me.

However, our egos have become so inflated by the things of the world that we believe we are the only important thing. What can bring us up, can also tear us down, so the highs and lows of our lives lead to the same illusion of importance, permanence. What George Carlin did was to tear down this idea that human well-being is paramount. Ironically, this urge came from a deep, deep anger over the injustice faced by many people, and it led to many people, including myself, actually discovering something in life. George Carlin once said that each person, by him or herself, is an amazing thing, but once they start to form groups, that's when the bullshit starts. Beneath that statement lies lots of truth. There has never been, and will never be again, something that replicates you. It is imperative that you realize both that you are not as important as you believe, and that you can discover more than you ever thought possible.

This is why I wanted to pay tribute to the late, great George Carlin on what would have been his 75th birthday. Because he took comedy into a whole different dimension. He used to to make us realize things that you couldn't just tell a person. If you tried to tell them, it would end up a confusing mess. If you use humor, that opens people up, and that gives them an experience they can remember, and they can think back and realize, "I had never heard that before." This is what I hope to do with you, dear reader, of this blog, in my own small, humble way. If I can give you that, and you take that gift, open it, and are amazed by what is contained inside, then this blog is worth all the work I put into it.
I'll have more good stuff for you to sink your teeth into soon.

See ya, and don't forget to live!

The Artistic Response to Group Hatreds

Hello Fellow Seekers of Light and Truth,

Well, I've found yet another thing that pisses me off. I'm gonna have to add one more thing to this list. I know that I can't focus too much on anger, and that I've got to be positive. I know this, I understand this. However, I cannot sit idly by while wrong is done. This time, said wrong is especially insidious and horrible, because it is packaged as "truth," and "virtue," and "religious freedom," and "family values," and then taught to children as gospel truth. Here, the children who are victims become the villains.



You might have come across this video. It comes from Greensburg, Indiana, from a church called the Apostilic Truth Tabernacle. The sickest part of this video is the orgy of applause that the adults, and how they egg the kid on after he is done gleefully exclaiming that 10% of the population deserves to DIE and GO TO HELL. This is the kind of vile public attack on a group usually reserved for Taliban country, or some hideous fascist regime from the 30's, where the Jew was the predator that was corrupting  our fatherland. And don't try to argue on this point because, Oh, they're not calling for anyone to be killed, or They don't hate anybody, they just don't want their kids to think it's okay.

First of all, even if this group hasn't called for anybody to be killed, others have called for it. Listen to Pastor Curtis Knapp from Seneca, Kansas's New Hope Baptist Church.



What sickens me the most is that these men bully, berate, and demonize an entire population, and then they run and hide behind God and Scripture. They don't even have the courage of their convictions to own their hatred and prejudice. While seeing the child's glee is sickening, it is ultimately the adults who are the most at fault. It is the preacher for denying his own insecurity, and flawed nature, by condemning innocent human beings to death, damnation and public contempt just because of who they are driven to love and marry.


This is another truly disturbing video, shown on Saudi TV. If you'll notice, the 3-year-old girl is spouting the same ideas about Jews' alleged guilt as have been used through the millenia to rationalize pogroms, barbarian attacks, and ultimately the Holocaust. This hateful ideology, once again, sung sweetly into the innocent ears of a child, makes me feel nothing but rage. Rage because I know where this leads. This leads directly to genocide, it happened in Germany, it happened in Kosovo, it's happened without much notice in many other places.

I have to be honest, as I watch this kid sing, and as I see the adults riotously applaud, there's an animalistic part of my brain that wants to go, and punch and kick everybody in that audience. The only thing that sickens me even worse than seeing a person hurt, is seeing injustice, cheered and affirmed as righteousness. I used to have a big problem with anger, and sometimes I still get overwhelmed by it. I would only hit another kid in anger, hard as I could, then I would feel really bad for him when I saw him in pain.

There is something visceral about the anger I have when people cheer the beating and attacking of the helpless, the innocent, the righteous. This is just as much violence against a people as going and lynching them. Remember Tyler Clementi, two years ago? He was the Rutgers Student who was outed having a gay affair by his roommate, and then killed himself because he was embarrassed by his peers. They gave the roommate a joke, slap-on-the-hand sentence. Here, the humiliation, the damage, and the no doubt the permanent demonization in the minds of some of his classmates is the key component of the violence done to him, that destroyed him to the point where he felt only death would save him. As far as I'm concerned, if you cause that to happen to a person, you are directly responsible for his death.

I might have told you this, but I first read the book 1984 when I was 15 years old. It was a dark, confusing time in my life. I deeply identified with the struggle against a great tyrannical order. What was even more terrible about this, was that they had the people in their minds and hearts, the people who would surely know this was not just, fully believed that it was the only justice. Even the protagonist was defeated in his own mind and disowned himself, giving himself over to the lie. For a while, because of this, I lost faith in humanity. If we could be conned and taught to embrace such evil, what hope was there? We are all guilty, no matter what our nationality, religion, or societal structure.
Later, I began to learn about Eastern spiritual principles. What has stuck with me about these is that they de-emphasize the doctrine of it, and are more in tune with the flow of life itself. I later came to realize that it was the doctrinal, rhetorical emphasis that lay at the roots of this collective sin, at the risk of getting religious here. When I reviewed literature on Orwell's life and work, five years later, for a review of literature I was doing for Comm. Studies, I realized that what he was attacking was the lock-step behavior of people when they gather in groups.

Groupthink is a term that's come to be used often because of Orwell's work. I've come to use it often myself. Here, we need to ponder a lot about what it means, because I believe it holds some answers. What it means is when people get into groups, their collective behavior and thought process tends to focus on the group's preservation, rather than individual well-being or ethics. In other words, it becomes about how do we win rather than how do we care for each other, and what is the best for everyone. 1984 was an extreme example of this, but the disturbing thing is, all societies embrace this groupthink to some extent.

Think about why the parents gleefully taught this kid to desparage "the homos." It was because, at this church, the doctrine says that gays are evil. That's what the Minister preaches. It is similar to the "two minutes hate," shown in 1984, in that it trains the churchgoers to hate them as the sinners from whom all of the world's problems originate. Then they are trained to praise a "hero" who destroys the "villain," in this case, the child who is taught that when he damns people with his words, he will be rewarded, affirmed. Let's not be ambiguous here: this is violence. This is the reason so many gay, lesbian and transgender kids are killing themselves. This social torture makes them feel so rotten about themselves. When you are told you are worthless, dirty, and evil over and over again, you begin to feel dead inside, to internalize the pain.



So why would I be talking about all of this on an arts blog? Over and over, I have thought about what I would say to the question "Why do you get so political on an arts blog?" Well, as I have alluded to, I used to be much more overtly political and ideological. In fact, not long ago, I thought about getting into politics myself. I was always tense, on edge back then. I would spend hours arguing with points of view in my mind. This made life less enjoyable and more tense and argumentative. Long story short, I realized that there was something about the human experience that I saw, that demanded more than just political activism and struggle. In the last few years, the times when I have learned the most about how to heal people, is when I have explored life without judgement, with a creative eye.

The above video is from a year and a half ago. Joel Burns, a Gay City Councilman from Fort Worth, Texas, decided to give this speech after a rash of young gay kids commiting suicide, just to assure them that they were not alone. Listen to it, please. I couldn't listen to it without tears welling up. It's just a human reaction, I think. This crystallizes what my approach to issue-tackling has been over the last two years. It has to do with working from the experience we have in common, rather than the doctrines that make some good and others evil. Here, kids learn, again, from groupthink strategies, that the only way they can be accepted is for them to either ostracize, humiliate, or physically destroy some kid just because he looks different.

What this blog is about is the experience of life. The heartbreak, the love, the pain, the violence, the redemption. That is why I am talking about groupthink now. It inhibits us from owning our own life experience. We feel like we have to sell ourselves to feel liked, secure, complete. We can't claim our own experience, instead, we are subconsciously taught to hate ourselves in a variety of ways. You know, one thing I was shocked to learn is that when you watch an ad, 90% of what you take in is on a subcoscious level.

This process of melding our groupthink through ads, TV shows, movies, even stories we tell each other, does intense damage to people who are attracted to the "wrong" sex, but I believe it is not just limited to gays. Like I said, I have always loved girls, but what I find distressing is that, when boys get interested in girls, there is a certain unwritten script they expect you both to follow. The girl is expected to be the needy, emotional one who needs protection, and the boy must be confident, able to throw down at all times to protect her, and absent, except for sex. I realized early on that the script wasn't going to work for me. I came to want romance with girls, but something has always bugged me about the blind obedience people have to this way, and the condemnation you face if you ever stray from it.

I could give endless examples. The point is, groupthink kills our potential as human beings. What we need is to find our own way, and find attachments to people and groups that differentiate, in other words, they set boundaries so that we can stay free from the echo chamber that produces prejudices and hatreds against outsiders. We must learn to do this so that our children learn that NO group is sinful or evil by nature of is being different. In order that our children grow up to realize their full potential to live with others, and not claim the contempts of their parents as God's will, remember what I mentioned in the Bully post, the guy who said "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone."

Undoubtedly, some will interpret this to mean that God is without sin, and therefore, God is expressing his hatred of these groups through Christians' discrimination. To me, it means that none of us has the authority to universally condemn another group as intrinsically evil, for the same sins they possess also exist in us. We all have potential to bad, but we are not defined as creatures of sin. That's the main qualm I have with Christianity; all it seems to see is our bad. We need not be defined by our baser tribal instincts, though.

Well, I'll leave it at that for now. Undoubtedly, I'll talk more about this at a future date. I saw this, and as I said I got so angry about it that I decided to convert my angry energy into creative work. It is the same principle I used in my post on Newt Gingrich. So, anyway, I'll have some more good material for you soon.

See ya, and don't forget to live!

Why I Didn't Celebrate the Death of Osama Bin Laden

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Hello Fellow Seekers of Truth and Life,

One year ago, we got some big news. I think you remember what happened. On Sunday night, May 1, 2011, we found out that Navy SEALs had raided a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan (30 miles north of Islamabad, like the Pakistani version of Manassas, Virginia), and shot Osama Bin Laden dead. I found out about it from Facebook comments from people. I didn't believe it at first, because you hear all sorts of things on the internet, but then we turned on CBS, and there was Obama, delivering the following announcement.



When I heard this, I felt all sorts of conflicting, excited emotions. There was the amazing revelation that something I didn't think could ever happen, just happened. The main conflict was between two feelings, the first was a grim satisfaction that We got him. That was my main feeling, that I hate it when the criminals get away. I believe people need to pay for their crimes. I really wanted him to pay for what he did to all those people, all their families, all their friends, coworkers, and all the people who cared about them.

All of them had a huge, horrific whole ripped in their lives that Tuesday morning in the late Summer of 2001. At least all those terrified people who jumped out of the 87th Floor of that building to their deaths, or the people on the planes who made teary last calls to their families, or employees who burned to death in the Pentagon, will not be left behind as a "cold case."

On the other hand, though, I just cannot bring myself to celebrate death, in any way, shape, or form. You might think that's a sappy way to go, but, quite frankly, I am done giving a damn. I used to take a lot of pleasure in the thought of hitting back at someone who wronged me, even if it was only a wrong to me, but I could never stand the sight of someone suffering. It's something that seeps into my consciousness, and I feel this need to make it stop. Thus, when I was about 14 or 15, I decided that hatred was an addiction that I needed to swear off. Ever since, any celebration of death has bothered me deeply. Let me backtrack, though, and talk about how I got to where I am on this issue.

I remember the morning of that September 11 very clearly still. I remember having breakfast, I was having Lucky Charms, my favorite cereal, as an 11-year-old kid, and my Mom told me a plane crashed into the World Trade Center in New York. I assumed it must have been an accident, it must have been cloudy. Mom told me it was a terrorist attack. She said it pretty straightforwardly, without much apparent surprise. When I went to school, I was still a little freaked out by my new setting. I had not been in middle school for a week, even, I had just started the previous Wednesday, and when everyone in class started talking about it, I realized what had gone on.

What I remember most, is hearing the teacher talking about the kind of planes that crashed into the towers. "These were big planes," she said. I found out later that these were not light propeller-driven planes, but huge passenger jets, 757-s and 767-s, both of which are massive. You have to understand that back then, I was a huge aviation geek. I loved machines that flew, and I was especially in awe of those passenger jets we often jump on and take for granted. I must have been one of the few people that got excited to get on a plane. It seemed like such a freeing thing to me.

An example of a drawing of jets that I often do. I have done so many of these it's not even funny.

It seemed bizarre to me that such beautiful, amazing machines could be used for such a terrible, destructive purpose. I spent the whole day not getting what went on, and wanting to get what it was that affected everybody that day. I remember getting scared about it that day when my new P.E. teacher was ostracizing us for talking too much. It was just a confusing day, all in all. After I got back from school, we were staring at the TV news ceaselessly, blankly trying to figure out what this was all about. My Dad finally turned it off and said "It's really easy to just veg out and watch TV, but let's not." Probably a good idea, in retrospect. However, in the dark days, weeks, months and the following year, TV coverage like this was something I saw regularly.



By the way, the point of the above segment was the speech from Donald Rumsfeld. His speech also included a line to the effect of "If anyone says this is an attack on the Afghan people, they're wrong." I remember being so thrilled about the speech, and that the US was bombing Afghanistan. After all, those guys had killed our people, we had to go get 'em. That gets to the central journey I have made, lo these 10-plus years since that day at the end of Summer.

I was a really patriotic kid back then, if only because of my goody-two-shoes nature. Still, I really wanted to get the people that did it. I was an 11-year-old boy, I wasn't about to take an attack from some foreigner lying down. I knew that the bad guys were a group called Al-qaeda (I heard it pronounced "Al Kita" which added another level of bizarreness to it), and the main villain was a guy in Afghanistan named Osama Bin Laden, who was the ringleader of another group called the Taliban. As unclear as I was on who these guys were and what their problem was, I knew we needed to take them out.

At the same time, when my Dad told me we were now at war, I got scared, because I got this image of old-school, nuclear war-type scenarios. Even then, I knew that war meant you could get hurt, you could be killed, and so could your whole family. I got anxious then, as I often did when unexpected things happened to me in my youth.

At about this time, I began to learn about a group of religious people called the Muslims. In the months after 9/11, I heard people talk about "Muslim-this," and "Islamic-that," but I had no idea what any of it referred to. In the 7th grade, our teacher took us through the world's religions. She told us that around 600 AD, a man named Muhammad (I've never figured out how to properly spell this name, forgive me) traveled through the desert in what is today Saudi Arabia, and found a bunch of guys worshipping false idols, and in general, acting quite badly.

Then one day, he went into a cave, and had a vision from God, whom they call Allah, and went forth to spread the word. Muhammad was only a prohpet, a messenger of God's vision. Today, that cave is a Holy Site to all Muslims. There are also five central demands in Islam, called the Five Pillars. They include prayer five times a day, facing the Holy City in Mecca, and at least one trip in believers' lives to said Holy City.

The ubiquitous image of the terrorist we are shown. I did this as a mock-up of a picture you would find on TV news about an international terrorist (hence the made-up foreign intel label in the bottom left). I assure you this was entirely fictionalized, but it does have truth to it, does it not?

I later found out that this religion had drawn a lot of suspicion from people here in the US, and later Europe. Because of religious customs in many Middle Eastern countries, people argue that the religion itself is wrong. I drew the above picture four years ago, to capture the familiar theme we find in the news, of the scary Muslim guy who tried to blow something up. Since the 80's, with the destruction of Flight 103, we've been seeing this picture of Middle Eastern guilt shown to us, over and over again.

This despite the fact that, as I mentioned in my post on terrorism on the 10th Anniversary of Daniel Pearl's death, that the majority of victims of Islamic terrorists are Muslims themselves, including about 2% of the 9/11 victims. All you get in our media is images and stories of the scary Muslims who are gonna blow you up or make your country adopt Sharia Law, and when everyone on the TV agrees on that, and all your friends and family believe in it, that becomes your reality.

The first time I realized it was after the Iraq War. In the early winter months of 2003, we began to hear talk of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, and "WMD's" weapons of mass destruction. Our government were telling us that we needed to invade now, before the "smoking gun" became a "mushroom cloud." Yet I began to hear a bigger group of people saying that there weren't weapons, there were other ways of dealing with the problem, and we needed to have the UN verify this to be true. I came to find out later that none of this was allowed to happen.

So the orgiastic beginning of this war was dismaying to me, since I was just beginning to discover that war and hurting could be wrong. My country could be wrong. Our country can be responsible for the deaths of families, of children, of people who do not deserve to die. That's never an easy learning experience.

It is only in the months and years that followed September 11th, the USA PATRIOT Act, and the Iraq War, that I have understood what those events truly mean. I have been just as angry at the terrorists from Al-qaeda and all the related networks as I have been at US Government officials, upon discovering their deceit, and callous disregard for people's very lives. Not only foreigners, these people don't give a damn about protecting us from anything. It is this kind of anger and despair about the world that has propelled me into meditation on this condition of getting shafted called the human condition.

For years, I felt a lot of anger about the world, about all the pain, unfairness, and loneliness I felt as if it were my own experience. I didn't even have the words to say what it was, accurately, much less the will to discuss it with anyone. As much anger as I felt, I felt it all because there was so little connection of people to each other. They were all in their own tunnel world, thinking about themselves, their cliques of friends, race, family, nation, economic status, and religion.

A dark voice inside me whispered, This is human nature, this is how it is, it is part of you, join it, give in. I was not going to give up, I was not going to be just another stooge to power, to nation, to religion, to Groupthink, as George Orwell termed it. I was going to defeat the dark part of my nature, while everyone else gave in to it in the form of supporting wars, killing in other countries, and all.

So why did I not celebrate the death of Osama Bin Laden? Well, because I just don't celebrate death, even if it is the death of a scumbag. Don't get me wrong, what Bin Laden did, not only on 9/11, but in running this collection of bad, bad people in Al-qaeda, and in his Holy War in the US, which included attacking our Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, and our ship in Yemen in 2000, personified what evil means. To me, evil is not about a person, it is about what they do, and how they do it. Bin Laden conducted the killing of human beings with cool, steely composure, and pleasure in his work, the terrible deaths of people.

Yet, what were we doing the night he was killed? Celebrating like rowdy fraternity brothers, celebrating death. Where does that leave us? Everybody I heard in the news expressed sheer delight that he had died. Even Elie Wiesel, who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, said that the death was well-deserved. Rudy Giuliani implied that if you aren't feeling a little gleeful, you're in denial. All they tell you is that it's human nature to take glee in the enemy's death, as if that's all human nature is: barbarism and vengeance. Even Jon Stewart, whom I usually like and admire, joined in the antics.

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What is even worse than him ridiculing the notion that maybe we shouldn't be having an orgy over this event, that maybe it was ambivalent, is his phallic implication at the end, there. That boils down to what most international conflict is about. Listen to a bit of George Carlin's famous Jammin' in New York special from 1992, about the Gulf War that had played out much like this Iraq War did.



You might find this offensive, but I think the point needs to be made that war is about proving who is tougher, who has more might, power or virtue, in other words, whose masculinity is more potent(because, at the risk of making a feminist statement, it is mainly men who are part of wars, but I digress). That's why I believe wars, killing, and hatred are not only destructive, but ultimately futile. After all, sooner or later, you will no longer be able to win power struggles consistently.

Ultimately, these assassinations are more symbolic than anything else. To Al-qaeda, the World Trade Centers and the Pentagon were symbolic of America's power. That's the main reason the terrorists chose to crash planes into them, because they had been trying to attack civilian jet liners for a long time, and several members of Al-qaeda's planning team were showing interest in the Twin Towers as potential targets. To us, here in the US, Bin Laden became the big bad guy. He was the symbol for all that was evil in this world. So I get why people would celebrate the killing of this terrible mastermind.

However, seeing the huge spectacle of raucous celebrations at this raid made me, just, spiritually ill. You may remember the outrage surrounding the picture of Palestinians celebrating as the planes crashed into the buildings.

I saw a picture similar to this one in the LA Times the day after 9/11. Even at my young age, I was coolheaded enough to realize the paper was probably doing it because they wanted war. A war would be good for their news. Yet it made me boil in rage nonetheless. There is no reason to celebrate death. Period. That's what is so awful about these celebrations. It isn't just that we've learned nothing from the errors of the Middle East, it's also that we would spit in the face of anyone who would tell us different from what we want to hear. Remember the story of the girl who trashed the Martin Luther King quote from my post on MLK Day? That to me was the height of arrogance and a willful, malicious variety of ignorance that is so often our error as a culture.

Oh, and by the way, I feel like I should mention this. Not everybody in Palestine was celebrating that day. Below is a photo from a large group of Palestinian students who held a long, silent vigil for their fellow children lost 5,000 miles away. You can find the link to the story here.

You're not gonna see this in the news. It doesn't fit into the neat little narrative that "sells" in the west. Our news outlets like CNN and the New York Times would be terrified of appearing to be "liberal" or "politically correct." So ironically, in their urge to not be politically correct, they come to serve another type of political correctness.

This goes to show that you do not have to celebrate death. Now, there is a difference, I want to make it clear that I know this. I am not defending Osama Bin Laden, and I am certainly not defending anything he ever did or stood for. What he did was wrong and it was evil, there is no dispute about that here.

However, I find it interesting that no one would listen to what the demands of Al-qaeda and all kinds of people in the Middle East are. That doesn't mean we should grant all the demands, that would be unrealistic and would let them off the hook too much. We need to know what the demands are, so we can decide what to allow, and what to stand firm on. We haven't done any of that, though, we've just insisted "They hate us for our freedom!"

The death of Osama Bin Laden was, for me, more a grim relief than anything else. My thought process was "At least he won't be able to hurt anyone anymore." We could learn from this relief, though, rather than go into an orgy of nationalism and machissmo. We must understand that we cannot accept that our government plays power broker all over the world, and expect that it won't come back to haunt us. This does not mean that we are to blame, however, if we stay silent while our government carries out unethical, undemocratic activities, such as the Iranian Coup of 1953, we are implicitly accepting it as normal.

We need to understand that while we, as individuals, may hold certain ideals, when it comes to our culture, the only thing others see, and judge us on, is our actions. We can't expect to keep our governmental status quo going and get more equitable and just results. We also need to have compassion, both for ourselves, and for other national bodies, even as we hold responsible the appropriate power players, be they heads of state, military leaders, or militants acting outside any national authority. Bottom line, if you commit the crime, you do the time, as Robert DeNiro once said.

This grim justice is not a cause to party. It is a cause for a more reflective relief. I believe we should be glad that at the very least, these horrible crimes were answered for. This does not mean that all terrorism has ended. We like to believe that once we "get" the main bad guy, all is won, but remember, this is the "War on Terror," which, by the way, you can't permanently win.

What you can do is root out the desperation and sense of wrong that makes terrorism seem so necessary for the peasants of Afghanistan, Yemen, and so forth. It was rich Saudis that funded Al-qaeda, whom the Taliban gave safe haven. From that, all sorts of people along that barren stretch of land on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border supported the terrorist network. The good news is that Al-qaeda is now on the run, and they are having less and less credibility throughout the Middle East and elsewhere.

The even better news is that most of the people on Earth are not sociopaths at their core. We realize, on some level, that pain is bad. From that starting point, let us learn now that it will not work to simply pin all of the evil in the world onto one man or group, sacrifice them, and believe evil has been purged. This can just as easily pinned on the righteous as it can be on the wicked. Rather, we must realize that there is a part in all of us, from the best to the worst human beings, that urges us to destroy, and to take glee in that destruction.

Often, when we pin evil on someone, putting all that urge to destroy on them becomes more natural, more just. We must face that part of ourselves and say "I don't need that high. I don't need the glee in destruction, even in the truly wicked." After all, working on this projection of our destructive will toward the "evil ones" is what allowed Bin Laden and sociopaths like him to recruit, train, and facilitate real evil. We can step out of that cycle.

Well, I'm sorry this post ended up taking so long, but like I said, I had a lot of contradictory emotions going on when this happened a year ago. I wasn't quite sure how I was supposed to feel about it. Venting on my knowledge, and my experience over the years has really helped clarify my aim here. As I was typing, all sorts of memories were coming back that I felt I needed to share with you. I feel this perspective was underrepresented in this story, and needed to be shared. Anyway, if you have any thoughts, feelings, comments, or anything on this you would like to share, please feel free.

I included this post on this blog because I believe our artistic experience can help us see the world in ways we may not have before. I hope that discussion on this helps bring a creative, innovative energy out into the world. I'll have some more good stuff for you soon. Thanks for listening.

See ya!

"Bully" Response: Tear Down These Walls!

Hi Fellow Seekers of Life and Truth,

I'm sorry I haven't been blogging for a while. This semester has proved to be much more hectic than I expected. But the strange thing is, I don't mind as much. It's a good kind of hectic. There are good kinds of hectic, and there are bad kinds. So I've been going to classes, volunteering for more things than I have time for, which is okay, because most of those things have not been given to me. Anyway, I'm back because I've got something important to talk about.

This film, the documentary Bully, came out a few weeks ago, and I thought it would be cool to see, but, as with most of these films, it was only playing at a few theaters in New York and LA, not here in Long Beach. Lo and behold, yesterday I discovered it was at a small theater here in town, so last night I went and saw it. It isn't an easy movie to see. Seeing it, I certainly thought back to lots of times when I had experienced abuse in school.

I remember one morning when I was in the first or second grade, in the late 90's. One boy turned to me and just said "Tony, you're a faggot." That was it. Pretty straightforward. No follow-up, nothing leading up to that, he just called me a faggot and that was it. I thought, "Huh, what's that all about?" I had heard that word someplace before, but I had no idea what it meant, or, more importantly, what it conveyed.

In the following years, I grew into an environment where statements like this were among the nice things that happened to you. Statements like "Have you seen the movie (whispering inaudibly) Gay People Say What?" (Calling toward you) "Hey, gay guy!" "Shut up, you're a fucking retard!" were a common thing.

Poster from a campaign against the phrase "That's so gay!"

I focused on gay slurs here because those were the ones that were used as invective weapons. I think those were especially damning among us boys, although I have only my male experience as a frame of reference for that. The two biggest lines of attack were gay slurs and slurs against mentally challenged kids. This was a mystery to me, because I had always been straight. There was never really any doubt that I was going to grow up to love girls, even though I had issues dealing with them. But, for some reason, I got more of the gay slurs than most of the other kids.

It seems like the kids most vulnerable to bullying are the ones who cannot or will not live up to their gender's expectations. For instance, one of the people shown in the film is a teenage lesbian who lived the "butch" role. She lived in a little town in Oklahoma someplace, so of course, upon coming out, she was radioactive. Former friends of the family refused to even talk to, or look at, them. So, if you're a girl who doesn't act and think the way a girl "should" you will be shunned and a social pariah, and if you're a boy who doesn't behave the way a boy "should," you will be intimidated, berated, and physically attacked.

The worst thing is that the adults in the film were dragging their feet to help, and often were not helping. The adults' attitudes and answers often implied, even if unintentionally, that the victims were to blame. They talk as if "kids will be kids," "boys will be boys," "kids are cruel, that's just how it is," implying that it is the kid's responsibility to fit in, to be accepted, and to be like the other kids. The flip side of this is that kids who cannot or will not "fit in" have it coming if they get attacked.

I certainly got messages like this when I was growing up. My parents would tell me things like "The kid who stands out, that's the kid that gets picked on," "You hide in a corner, and when someone picks on you, you go "poor me." Do you want us to pinch every penny and send you to private school?" I'm not blaming only my parents for this, because I love them. The sad irony is that this kind of victim blame usually happens when the event is so awful and that people are so horrified by it. This ranges from treasured young ones being bullied, to women being raped, even when the poor are shafted by a bad economy. Below is a video of presidential candidate Herman Cain discrediting Occupy Wall Street protesters last Fall, and telling the poor to "blame themselves" if they are in a bad place.



What all of this goes to show us is that we have a way of refusing to believe it could be this bad, by internalizing these absurd justifications offered by authorities, and sometimes the aggressors themselves. Most of us internalize these beliefs offered about this. I have internalized many of these things said about me. The worst part of all of this is that if someone can't stand up for themselves, they deserve what they get.

When you internalize these beliefs people throw at you, the terrible things they can do to you start to seem normal. You know, I've learned that about 90% of the way ads, TV and media work is at a subconscious level. You soak up so many things up without even realizing it. This is particularly true of children and teenagers, even in your 20's, this is still going on. Books, movies and so forth tell us that the only way that works to respond to bullies is to retaliate physically. However, this can have bad consequences.

One of the girls in the movie kept getting attacked by the other kids, so one day, she took her mother's gun onto the school bus. She threatened the other kids, but was subdued, arrested. Thank God no one got hurt or killed on that bus. But the sheriff's department held here on, as they determined, "45 felony charges" (this was in Mississippi) and would have faced more than a lifetime in prison.

They decided to have her see a mental counselor instead, but the message was still clear; she would take all the blame, and the kids who were doing that to her would be let off the hook. In this way, she was made to look like the crazy one. We don't know what those kids were doing to her. It could have been something truly terrible, something against which anyone would react strongly. When you've been horribly abused, is it insane to do something to stop it?

That said, I do not believe that anything you do to so-called bullies is okay. There are right and wrong ways to stand up for yourself. I never liked seeing people get hurt, that's why I had a problem dealing with people picking on me. I could never respond decisively, in the way that make bullies back off. However, there were a few times when I "lost my shit" so to speak. This leads to my next point about the movie. The movie focused mainly on a few episodes, around the country, where bullying tactics had led to kids snapping. It had little to do with things we can do about it, which is okay, because there, you get into harsh political territory, but I will throw out some considerations here.

In the last 12 or 13 years, since the Columbine Massacre, bullying in schools has become a political issue of heightened importance. Seeing people abused is a very personal issue for most people, because most people have been abused at some point themselves, but what can we do about it, as a society and as individuals? Well, first we need to look at our educational priorities. We must realize that when you're young, class is not the only place you are learning. You are also learning how to deal with people, how to relate, people are hopefully teaching you good morals.

We have to transcend this public school/private school debate. We have become attached to this one mode of public school that isn't working, or, alternatively, a charter/private school model where everyone has to be "effective" enough, or they will be cut. Life does not improve when everything is run like a corporation. However, our public school model clearly needs to be updated from the gigantic, impersonal model public schools have followed since World War II.

Here's the choice we've got: we could try to beat the Chinese and the South Koreans at their own game. In each State of the Union, Obama has held them up as the ones we have to beat. Sure, we could focus all on our test scores and grades, but we'd lose a lot of our innovative human potential. Here's the other choice: we could take a look at what the Finnish have done with their education system. Below is a report from The Young Turks about the steps Finland has taken in the last 30 years.



Now, I'm not saying we should do everything that the Finns have done, but their approach does touch on some of the concepts I've been ranting and raving about here for months. In the context of countering an environment of bullying, this is even more crucial to our success, and since a few of the kids featured were driven to end their lives, the stakes can be life or death. Now, you might ask, What does education policy have to do with bullying?

Well, a lot, as it turns out. The film showed school administrators insisting they would do all that they could, but then not doing much at all, besides offering words. In one instance, the principal even reproached the victim when both of them were caught in a scuffle. This shows that our school system must be a part of this change.

I remember, when I was back in school, I had to take speech classes because I was not skilled at communicating with the other kids. I don't think it's crazy to suggest that classes on communicating issues, complaints, wants or fears to other kids could be part of a curriculum all young students experience. As it stands, there isn't any standard course in school available on this until you get to college. That's why I decided to major in communication studies, because I believe that if we were able to work through our differences, a lot less pain would be in this world.

So some ideas that come to my mind are having some regular programs in place on conflict resolution, assertiveness, confidence, and responsibility for your own actions. This last one is critical, because it would be easy to assume, "Oh, it doesn't happen to me," even if you are yourself a part of the process. One of the kids in the movie recalled that when he was in second grade, he would join in the teasing and ridicule of the outsiders, but then in the third grade, he took resposibility for his wrongdoings, and that year, he decided he didn't need popularity anymore.

Even though I have been the victim of verbal attacks, I used to join in on jeers, pleasing myself with my inventive use of terms for "gay." I'll just say that now. I've said, thought, and done plenty of things I wish that I hadn't, that I would never do again. I have held racist, sexist and homophobic assumptions. Kids need to learn to accept those insecure tendencies we all have, to explore them without judgement, and take ownership of their insecurity, before the insecurity takes ownership of them.

This leads neatly into the personal goals. There is only so much the Departments of Education can do at a state and national level, or that school administrators can do. Ultimately, it is up to the child, with assists from their parents, to stand on their own two feet. The group of children must learn that being different is not bad. It is not good either, but it is not a sin. People are neither good nor bad, but rather, they are there. If children learned this from their parents' examples, think of how their growth would change. They would get the confidence to stand up for parts of them that aren't the "cool" things.

Now, all of the episodes in this movies happened in Bible Belt Red States, states like Georgia, Oklahoma, Iowa and Mississippi. I found out where these places are located, and all of them, with the exception of Sioux City, Iowa, are remote, rural towns. I guess that makes the bullying even more prevalent, when the town is so close-knit, everybody knows everybody, and outsider types are not welcome. In any area, it definitely is not seen as "cool" to be different. When everybody is faced with insecurity, the "different" ones are made the scapegoats. This is a very easy, human, and common pattern, but it is also very dangerous. When it happens to a society, the consequences can be deadly.

The bad news is that the scapegoat process of school bullying has gotten more dangerous and dire. With technology and the easy availability of weapons to anyone, the actions can be far more damaging. The good news is, the vicious cycle can be broken. When enough people rise up, and refuse to go through the motions of life, the school climate will begin to shift. People can set boundaries for themselves, bottom lines, refusing to do "whatever" to be cool and fit in. But that takes confidence, which a lot of kids don't have. Only bullies themselves generate it by hiding their problems and shame under their aggression.

So we need to set new criteria for what people confident in themselves do. Being confident comes from knowing that you are good enough. People who feel like they are good enough do not have to use others, berate them or physically destroy them, or destroy them inside. People who are good enough can learn from their past faults. The reason I mentioned the "Bible Belt" earlier is because this is a big thing among Christianity. Didn't some guy once say "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone?"

Remember who Jesus spent all his time with? The crippled people, the homeless, the hookers, the lepers. Think of all the most disowned and disliked kids, the gay and lesbian teenagers, the transgender teenagers, the ones with learning challenges, the disabled ones, and the vast array of kids who feel like they can't talk to anybody. Nobody would listen to them. Nobody would care about what they like, who they are, their struggles, their state of being. If this sounds like I'm describing part of my life, it's because I am. I know that I'm not the only one this applies to, though.

Part of this may be a selfish thing, because I often became one of the abuse scapegoats. I think the worst thing in the movie, and the closest to home, was when they told the kid with the odd face issue, "Two to a seat, dumbass!" on the bus. That is the essence of what most bullying is; when someone makes a mistake, they destroy you, and most other kids never really give you a second chance after that.

I used to make all sorts of social gaffes, bear the ridicule, then internalize the shame about myself. But I am older now, and I know that I can get second chances if I do screw up. The final sequence in the film involves parents, children and teenagers holding rallies in their cities and states to bring awareness to this issue. One man, who had lost his son to suicide, implored to the crowd: "Reach out to that one new kid who has no one." The paradox is this: we need to be there with those kids for them to stand on their own. Because we have all been vulnerable, without anyone, at some time in our lives.

It's about time we did the non-normal thing and took a stand for someone outside, because once a critical mass of people does this, bullies will no longer be able to hide their own shame and insecurity behind beating up the helpless people, and they will have no followers to intimidate them. Then, we will all have to face our own insecurity and vulnerability, as the best human beings do. The solution to bullying is, ultimately, not to outlaw words or actions, it is to reclaim all of our humanity.

Please post a comment below, if you have any feelings, stories, or ideas about this issue. If you have been bullied, or someone you care for has experience with bullying, share whatever you feel comfortable with. The point is to show that more and more people have suffered, that you are not alone, that you don't have to "just get over it," and people will listen to you openly and nonjudgementally. I apologize for the sheer mass of this post, but I have had these feelings for a long time, and I have just recently gotten the words to express them. Thanks for listening, and please go see the movie Bully whenever you get the chance. I will have more interesting good stuff for ya in the next post.

See ya!

"The Poetry of Pizza": A Transformational Moment

Poetry of Pizza ran from February to March of 2010 in the Cal Rep Theater.

Hello, fellow seekers of life and truth,

That's a nice opener, isn't it? I think I'll start using that, now. It adds a little more potency to the opening. Anyway, I've got another play-related post for you. This one is multi-dimensional, just like last night's was. Do you remember any moment in your life when things clicked, and your life was taken in a different direction? It may have been a big moment, where some dramatic event turned your life in a 180. Sometimes, though, there are small moments, where you just do one thing, and that one thing changed the way you look at life. After that, everything begins to shift. Two years ago, today, in fact, going to see the play The Poetry of Pizza did that for me.

I remember very clearly the night I went to go see this play, 2 years ago. It was a Wednesday night, March 3, 2010. Yes, I do remember the days of the week that most things happen. Why I know this is a whole different story. Like I was saying, though, I remember that very clearly, because that was the first play I saw as a student in Theater Arts. That evening, I was excited to go down to this theater, located on the permanently-docked Queen Mary. I remember getting going early, having eagerly anticipated this time out. Back then, I lived a much more solitary existence.

Now, I didn't know what to expect from this play. However, it turned out that this play grabbed two parts of me that I didn't know could go together. First off, the action in this play happens in 1998, three years before, well, you know what happened. I remember that time period. Back then, the only people who tweeted were birds, and the only facebook you could find was the one your grandparents were always showing you. Ah, but enough of my waxing nostalgic.

Anyway, Sarah Middleton, who was played by the woman I was studying under, is a 40-something, jaded professor of fine poetic works who has just relocated to Copenhagen. She is under the persistant guidance of her American friends, and the constant eye of a seedy Danish professor. One day, she walks into a pizzeria owned by a colorful group of Kurdish refugees. Sarah finds one in particular, Soran, who is an artist when it comes to these pizzas. When Sarah samples one of these delights, she is taken with this man.

Now, when she talks to him again, she finds out his troubled back story. Even though she is ten years older than he is, as Soran puts it he "feels older than his 34 years." It turns out he and his friends fled from Northern Iraq (an area called "Kurdistan" that encompasses parts of Iraq, Iran and Turkey) when Saddam Hussein began carrying out a murder campaign by poison gas attacks, and many other gruesome methods. This changes Sarah's understanding of Soran's depth. He has not been dragged into the pit of cynicism or nihilism, in spite of the terrible things he has witnessed in life.

As the two grow closer together, a variety of characters, American, Danish, and Kurdish, play out many bizarre antics, Seinfeld-ian in their humor and vulnerability. Sadly, one day, Soran asks Sarah, one day, to shave her, well, bush, as per Kurdish cultural custom. Scared of this, Sarah and Soran mutually decide they are just too different from each other to make it. Their friends are seen telling them to just "let it go." They both feel a hole in their hearts. In the end, Soran and Sarah decide they love each other so much, working through their differences  is worth it to them. In the last scene, the two are getting married in the Kurdish custom, and Sarah samples a very special slice of pizza. All the other characters, and evenly split cast of men and women, discover each other, and none of them are lonely.

Now, normally, this kind of "happy" ending does not work for me. It just leaves some part of the human experience out most of the time. Here, however, it was not blindly overlooking life. It was very life-affirming, and heartwarming. It was something I thought, "Well, that could never happen in real life." Maybe it could, though. People often believe that you need an ending that is as dreary and grey as possible, that takes any hope in your heart, and just squashes it, in order to get people to think. To me, this is not always true. I think The Poetry of Pizza really made that warmth in spite of the darkness and the division apparent.

Now, the woman you see in the photo at the top, was my first teacher at this school that I go to now. She told us that the man who had acted opposite her as Soran had lived in Kosovo back when the War and genocide were still going on in the late '90's. He didn't have to stretch too far to figure out his motivations as a character. Anyway, I only began to realize later how this play had subtly affected me. Theater suddenly became a place of community, of humanity, where you could explore all the pains and heartaches going on in the world, and tell truths in no uncertain terms, but with all the compassion toward a person standing exposed, vulnerable, on the stage. That night, I came to understand what the theater was really about, for me.

I'd like to show you a tribute drawing I did for this play myself, a few months later:

Sarah Middleton boards a flight from the U.S. to Denmark, shortly before the opening of The Poetry of Pizza.

You may notice I have a lot of aircraft and flying machines as subjects in my art. When I was younger, I was simply fascinated by air travel, and dedicated many a visual work to airplanes, helicopters, and such. Anyway, Sarah's looking out into the plane is meant to connote the beginning of a journey into the unknown. It is supposed to be slightly dated-looking, but close to our time, and reminiscent of memories I had of that period.

So my question is this: do works of art (especially plays, books, and movies) have to be dark in tone to convey a meaningful message? Or could it be (at the risk of asking a rhetorical question) that some happy discoveries in plays and films can change our understanding of life, and shift our sense of what is possible to do? I want to finish this post on that note. I'm sorry it took longer to get done than I anticipated; I was fighting off a fever yesterday and today. I will be back up to speed soon, and hopefully, I'll get some time to blog. Thanks for listening.

See ya, and keep wondering, folks!

"Quills" and Violence in the Media

(Photo Courtesy of The Daily 49er)

Hello, fellow seekers of life and truth,

Sorry I haven't blogged in over a week, but this week, in particular, has been a hectic one. You'll see why over the course of this post. As you know, I have become more involved in theater and play productions over the last year, year and a half. This discovery has been life-changing for me, although I still don't know where I will go from here. Thus, talk about the theater and the stage is something I use a lot on this blog.

Anyway, the reason I have been busy is that I have been rehearsing and preparing this week. Not for a production, mind you, but for an in-depth scene to be done in class. I had been rehearsing this for a few weeks, but this week we did a rehearsal sunday, monday, and tuesday night, to perform the scene Wednesday afternoon.

The scene comes from a play called Quills. The play is set in 19th Century France, when Napoleon was still in power. It presents a melodramatic, chaotic, bizarrely dark and moving fantasy account of the last days of the Marquis de Sade, who died in 1814. For the last decade of his life, he was detained at Charenton Asylum in Saint-Maurice. He was under the care of Dr. Royer Collard, the chief medical officer there, and the Abbe de Coulmier, the main administrator at the asylum.

The latter, as a minister, attempts to change the Marquis, curing him of his sin, and stopping his prolific writings. The asylum leadership is embarrassed by the Marquis's ability to circulate graphic vignettes of debauchery and vice, which are written with eloquent, lyrical verbage. These stories are of people who engage in pedophilia, abduction, rape, bestiality, and necrophilia. As per the Doctor's demands, Coulmier resorts to progressively more drastic measures, ultimately gouging out the Marquis's tongue, dismembering and killing him. Coulmier himself becomes quite deranged, and, to his horror, takes thrill in the Marquis's death. This is the most horrifying revelation of all: that a monster lies even in the most noble of men.

Anyway, in this scene, my role was as this Coulmier, and my "given circumstances" (to borrow a term from actor-speak) were that I had just taken away the Marquis's quill, his writing utensil, and I believed I was on the way to "curing" him. Here, I was being told the Marquis had used the wine he was given to write another story. The doctor was that I step up the physical pressure on the Marquis to stop writing, and I, being the charitable healer, had to defy him, to heal the Marquis my way. The scene involved a flashback to a conversation, and then another flashback to the Marquis writing. My main challenge was to stay reactive, but still, while all these flashbacks were going on.

Luckily, the director had this vision that the girl playing the Marquis using us all as life-size action figures, arranging us all in her liking. It made it fun to be part of her desires, and just go with it, in a way. The best ideas for this came in the last few days. Fortunately, it all ended up coming together well in the scene. Some people though parts of it didn't work, for other people, they really clicked. To a certain extent, that is just part of art: it will click for some people, but not for others. People seemed to think our scene was well-thought-out enough to constitute a worthwhile scene.

Now, when I went to see it the other night, that took the scene and the play to a whole new level. The actors, all grad students and professors of Theater, many of whom I had learned from or am now, had researched it much more meticulously than even I did for this. They pronounced all the French phrases deftly, while we had to go through them a few times to learn how they were really pronounced. Of course, they were able to go all out with the period dress, and they really hammed up the effects of their characters, the broken sadness, the chilling, frightening malevolence, as is the custom in the melodrama in which the play is written.

The playwright, Doug Wright, said that he played up the division between the good and the bad characters, that they were "either kissed by God or yoked in Satan's merciless employ." Even so, I was able to detect qualities in the Marquis, the diabolical one, that were positive, as well as ones in the Doctor, even in Coulmier, that were less than Godly. In spite of the Marquis's resistance to Coulmier, the two actually form a dialectic, in that one's existence actually gives meaning to the other's. There is actually a bond of sorts that connects them, which makes Coulmier's final act all the more painful to behold. All in all, the play pulled out all the stops, and it had more going for it than against it.

Now, onto the implications of Quills. This play had a lot to do with censorship of viciously sexual and violent content in literature. Our instructor asked us to consider why the playwright might have written a play in a given era. Now the play Quills debuted off Broadway on November 3, 1995. In 1989, a homoerotic photo exhibit, funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, prompted fears that such expression would degrade society itself. The pressure on the N.E.A. in the ensuing years became an event known as the Mapplethorpe Controversy (after photographer Robert Mapplethorpe).

In the years to come, the debate over what should and shouldn't be seen in art and entertainment became more urgent, and had more dire consequences. On April 20, 1999, two juvenile delinquents in Littleton, Colorado decided to bomb their high school's cafeteria, and then turn guns on the other kids. 13 people were killed, including a teacher, and the two assailants themselves. In the wake of that event, people became concerned about the increasingly violent video games, movies and music that were cropping up. Now art was no longer violent for a purpose, it was violent just for the sake of gorging itself on the gore.

In a 2001 interview with the Advocate, after the movie Quills was released, Doug Wright was interviewed about violent lyrics, specifically in Eminem's music, for which he won an award the previous year. His lyrics were violently homophobic, "My words are like a dagger...that'll stab you in the head-whether you're a fag or a lez." Wright, who is gay, stated concern without scapegoating Eminem or anyone else. He believed that the words in question were a diatribe that had the potential to help move our lives forward. Quoting him,

"Look at something like the Columbine incident, and you see that volatile teenage minds will express themselves with the tools that they are given. Give them a paintbrush, and you might get a painting; give them a handgun, and you might get a massacre. What's really troubling about someone like Eminem is the very purgative nature of art. If he purges his own demons by creating this kind of rhetoric, then it has a certain societal value, you could argue. And yet how can we as a society educate him sufficiently so that the ultimate result doesn't defile us all, collectively?"

I grew up thinking that violent television, movies, and games were not a problem. Sometimes, it hit me wrong, and really bothered me, but I thought it was cool to watch action-packed sci-fi and superhero movies. I thought it was cool to listen to rappers like 50 Cent and Eminem, just for the sake of seeing what it was like. As I got in to my later teens, I got more and more bothered by the violence, the cruelty, of the words. When I was a teenager, if you didn't act like the other guys, you would get called a "fag," a "retard," and all insults were designed to trap you in gay-looking situations. That banter grew to bother me, once I passed the age of about 14 or 15.

I was disgusted by all the gory, horrible movies, video games, and such that other people seemed to think was a game. Seeing people hurt has always bothered me, but as I grew up, I felt like sticking to this drove me apart from everyone else. That said, though, I do not believe in not showing violence or sex to people in art, or literature, or music. Like I said, there is indulgence and gorging in the gore, and horror, and what not. That has an addictive, druglike quality to many people. However, there are some very violent works of art, film, and literature that have lots of artistic merit, and insight into the human condition.

The reason I chose to show the photo from Taxi Driver above is that I believe it is one such example. It was my favorite film when I was about 14. Travis, the hero, becomes raw, violent, and brutal, throughout the course of the film. However, there is this quality about him that strikes you like a boy of about 12 or 13. With an increasing violent or unstable streak in him, and yet, there is still a childlike, earnest quality to the way he acts.

Also, violent artworks are not necessarily supportive of it, or condemning of it. Quills itself offers actions that support both freedom of expression and suppression thereof. Though the Marquis is lionized as a hero of freedom of expression, when he passes a story of his through the asylum, a madman decides to act its content out on Madeleine, a 16-year-old maiden who is taken with the Marquis, and for whom he secretly feels smitten.

I wanted to show you this work of mine because it has to do with a horrible act of violence against the girl in this picture, who is dying, but because it is reminiscent of the fate of Madeleine in Quills. This comes from an idea I had that was about crime, justice, and the victim. To me, neither art glorifying the criminal nor the law is totally correct. Wright himself said that what makes this debate so potent is that "there is truth on all sides of it." I believe what good art does is show the truth on two opposing sides, in two opposing people.

I think Quills definitely succeeds at this. At the same time, it made me laugh with perverted amusement, made my nerves tingle with the creeps, and cringe with sadness and pain for the people involved. This kind of multi-layered reaction is connection to the human condition. For that, Quills is definitely worth reading or seeing. I'll have more material for you tomorrow. Thanks.

See ya, and keep wondering, folks!