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!

First Impressions

Hi there,

The following story comes from something that happened to me once. I can still remember it clearly, and it marked a significant turning point in my social life. After I tell it to you, I will explain the backstory behind it, and why I brought it up. So here goes.

I was sitting in the second row, close to the stage, waiting apprehensively. I was listening to Jessica, the girl on stage, playing her guitar, and singing with a big vocal range. She was using the full sound on the guitar, and her voice really flowed up and down gracefully.

Oh, wonderful! I thought. You mean I have to follow that? With my little comedy act? I was waiting to present my passionate interest to the class. This was the second week of my second Fundamentals of Acting semester. The day earlier, I had an idea to share some of the impressions I did with my brother as my passionate interest. My older brother and I use a lot of impressions and obscure references when talking, which almost makes our communication a dialect unto itself.

When I asked Anna, the course instructor here, if that would be a good idea. She said it would be really interesting to see me do them. Later that day, when reviewing which of my "characters" that I wanted to bring out here, I got this huge smile, thinking about the riffs Drew and I had gone on with various different personalities. I thought of our riffs on Jack Nicholson from A Few Good Men, and my uncle from back east, whom I told you about a few weeks ago. Today, as it would be my turn next to share these impersonations for the first time, I was getting those nervous feelings.

Then Jessica's guitar number wound up, and we applauded, calling our approval of her singing and instrumental skills. Lots of the people in the class had musical skills. Now it was my turn to show my observational and humor skills. As Anna called for me to get on the stage at the front of class, I got that nervousness in my throat. My nerves were starting to go, and my heart was racing.

I stood up at the front of the class, waiting for everyone to quiet down. "Well, this passionate interest is from something my brother and I like to do," I began. "We have all these inside jokes we like to do with each other."

Anna asked if my brother, Drew, was older or younger than me. I told her that it's just Drew and I, and he's the older one. "Now, I can imitate lots of celebrities, actors, political figures, and so forth, pretty accurately. I can't do everybody, but I'll let you know, upfront, if there's somebody that I can't do."

My legs were actually starting to shake now. I compare speaking in public and acting on stage to jumping off a tall diving board. When you're standing up on top of the tower, it looks really scary, but when you jump, and begin falling toward the pool, the fear dissipates. You are just moving, swinging your body and getting ready to go in the water. I had just jumped, and now the fear was blowing up like a firework.

The people in the class were asking me who I could imitate. Benji, one of the guys in the audience, asked me if I could channel Sarah, the instructor we had the previous semester. I paused for a moment, wondering if it was okay to do a caricature of a person I liked. I didn't know if it was disrespectful, or a putdown, to do this. Finally I just dove into it.

"Se, I don't really believe you were laughing at that!" I started off, playing on her energetic pace and motions," You were showing me you were laughing, but you weren't really doing it. You know?" I chuckled a little, as Sarah would do when she said that. This was always how she started off telling us to go deeper into our actions. "You just gotta...fuckin'...go in there and laugh your ass off...like this." Then I threw my head back and laughed with my whole body, much as she would have done to show us. The whole class was laughing by now.

"My brother and I like to go off on all these tangents," I went on, "Like we have all these lines and actors we riff on. Like one time, up in LA, we saw this flag for Google,  and we went on this tear about how Google was taking over the world. So we went off on this Jack Nicholson speech from A Few Good Men. So we said," I began my impression of Jack Nicholson's facial ticks, with the eyebrows and forehead, and the authoritative delivery as the bad-ass Colonel in that movie. Watch the speech below here.



"Yes, God Bless Google, son! I have neither the time, nor the inclination to explain myself to someone who lives his life under the auspices of the knowledge that I provide, and then questions the way in which I provide it! I would rather you just said thank you and moved along!" I then went further with the "God Bless Google" line of thought, and added this thought I had recently to it. "So when you say your little prayers tonight as you tuck yourself in, you just thank Google for enlightening your SORRY ASS!"

"You do a mean Jack Nicholson there!" Anna exclaimed to me.

"That's as good as it gets!" I answered, still in voice, and with the impression. This had been the most daunting part of my act here. For me to step into this role as the ultimate authority figure, the ruthless Colonel defending, here, the huge search engine, seemed like the most daring place to inhabit for that. Like someplace I didn't belong, but I did it anyway. I switched gears at this point.

"Sometimes, I like to do these impressions of family members of mine. For instance, I have this uncle who owns a farm back east, and he has these games he likes to play with people. He has this gift for finding exactly the, you know, button you push, and it drives you nuts, and he pushes it again and again. Particularly, if we're all eating dinner, he'll say," Now I imitated his low, grumbly voice, "What's the most embarassing thing you've ever done without telling anyone? Starting with you, Caterina." I pointed at Caterina, the girl in class with whom I'd worked on our final scene the previous semester. She was flustered "What, me?" she seemed to be saying.

"That's just an example of the kinds of things he likes to do. And then he has this very unique laugh, it sounds kind of like this. HA HA HA HA!" I mirrored his distinct laugh, which has a loud quality to it, and sounds almost like a repeated quack. People in class asked me to do it again for them."You know that part at the end of the Michael Jackson song, Thriller? Where he says "No mere mortal can escape the evil of the thriller?" and then he cackles? That reminds of how he laughs." Then I did an impression of him saying to us, "No mere mortal can escape the evil of the thriller, Drew! HA HA HA HA HA!" That got another big laugh from the class. People were asking me to do more imitations, but Anna warned them not to ask me to do too many, at the risk of mocking others, perhaps in the audience. I had shown my passionate interest by now.

I can still remember that clearly in my mind. That happened just over a year ago now. It was my first year of studying acting at this university I go to. It was one of the first times that I got on stage, and got involved with something I was excited about. Back then I was not used to doing it. Since, I have started applying that philosophy of exploring the impulses and images that excite me. Back then, I viewed the role that I was stepping into as being so far away from me, that doing it felt like it didn't fit. Still, there was something that made it worth doing. It was just too fun a challenge not to take on. I went up there and showed it, though I was nervous. I was getting the sweaty palms, quick heart rate, I could feel my knees shake at one point, as I said.

Back then, I wasn't used to showing this to people. I had only done it in short bursts with my brother. However, in the year since, I have gotten more creative in what I show, what I talk about, how I talk about it, what I explore creatively. I have habitually begun to go after the impulse, the thing that excites me, to show what I am thinking and feeling. When I do this, it really changes the way I go through life.

So have any of you had an experience like this? Have you ever had a time when you revealed some attribute or talent of yours that people hadn't seen before. Did showing something make your way of life shift? I'd like to hear any responses, because these moments of revelation are what make this blog really come alive. I'll have some more material for you guys up soon.

See ya, and keep wondering, folks!

Terrorism Hurts Everybody

Hi everybody,

As you may know, today marks the 10th anniversary since Daniel Pearl's death. Pearl was a Wall Street Journal international correspondent, who broke many stories around the world, including an incident where a US airstrike on a supposed weapons factory in Sudan actually hit an aspirin factory. In early 2002, he was sent to Pakistan to search for al qaeda moles in the Pakistani government, was subsequently abducted by one, held for demands from al qaeda, and then murdered by beheading.

When I learned of this act in depth, it was the barbarism of the acts that made me so mad about it. It was a feeling of simultaneous anger and disgust at the act. You know how he was killed? He was decapitated (head cut off), then chopped into ten pieces, and thrown in a ditch someplace in Pakistan. What other word is there for an act like that but pure animal savagery. It's just a horrible thing to do to anyone of any nationality. When I hear about groups like al qaeda carrying out acts like this against people doing their job, I almost understand the kind of guttural anger that drives people like Dick Cheney to want to bomb countries out of existence, or Rick Perry to have criminals executed, even if they are in fact innocent of murders.

It's not that I would ever do these things, or condone them, in any sense, it's just that sometimes, events in the international arena of news sometimes make you so upset that you do get to that point. You do get that level of intense anger, terror, despair about your species, cynicism, a thirst for vengeance. It can be (and sometimes has been) so overwhelming that it scares you. It scares even me how much of that emotion I have sometimes.

This is not the first time I have given issues of an international scope much thought. I came of age, spent my preteens and teens, in a world shadowed by the spector of terrorism. On the morning 9/11 occurred, I was 11 years old, overwhelmed at starting the 6th grade. So it isn't like I've had much choice in what I've become aware of. In past decades, like the 80's or 90's, you could get away with having little or no opinion in international strife and conflicts, because it didn't have a tangible effect on people's lives here in the US. On that Tuesday morning in September 2001, that perception ended abruptly and shockingly.

Since that day, I've felt like there has been a progressively more urgent nature to what happens to people in other countries. So this issue has been on my mind a lot over the years, even though I am still very young. Since I came across this information on Daniel Pearl, I was looking for a way, in my art, to deal with it. I know that won't have an effect, but it will help me express how I feel about this whole issue. Hopefully, just my sharing it with you will have some small effect.

On the one hand, as I said, I do have that anger and fear, but on the other, I do care about other nations, countries and cultures. I want to protect the people of America and the West, but I also don't want to see people on countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, or Iran, shredded, incinerated, then written off as "collateral damage." Sadly, a flipside of our American optimism is this our blindness to the damage our foreign policies, and wars, can cause. If we are an exceptional country, surely we could never kill someone who didn't deserve it. So I get that there are bad people abroad, but I also think we need to take a look at our own soul.

For a while, I racked my brain to try to come up with a way to express this. The phrase "terrorism hurts everybody" went through my mind, but I wanted to come up with a picture that represented it. That is how I express what I find through art best. I wanted to draw up an image that got at the universality of having life ripped from someone you care about. I got the idea to do this drawing.

I was inspired to do this from the Pan Am Flight 103 bombing. On the night of December 21, 1988, the plane, Pan Am 103, was blown up as it was heading from London to New York City. Everybody on the plane (259 people) was killed horrifically, and when the plane hit the ground, it destroyed several houses in the Scottish town of Lockerbie, and 11 people in Lockerbie were killed. The attack was carried out by two Libyan Intelligence agents, one of whom was imprisoned, later released and returned to Libya. There is also good evidence, from official sources, that it was planned within the Libyan government.

Again, the horrible, terrifying way those people were ripped from their lives is gut wrenching. Hearing of it makes it all the more distressing that the perpetrators "got away" and one was sent back home. Again, I had dark thoughts about what I would like do to inflict pain on the people resposible, only to try to take them back soon after. In one account I read, they reported that some christmas presents that the plane was carrying back to the US lay smashed in Lockerbie. That heartbreaking image really stuck with me.

So I decided to make this image as broadly applicable as I could. I wanted it to be about the feeling of a loved one ripped from life. Just the shock, horror, and pain, is something that unites us all. I decided to make this a jarring image of the keychain of a close love falling out of the side of the plane into the darkness. I included the jettisoned christmas present alongside it. This makes it about what terrorism really costs us: people we love, care about, or know. People who don't deserve to be a victim of political or religious hostility. Thus, it applies beyond just the bombing of Flight 103, or terrorism from the Middle East.

It becomes about us all. What do we lose from terrorism? We lose fellow human beings, we lose humanity. By the way, the majority of victims of Islamic terrorism are themselves Muslims. 30 of the victims of September 11th (a full 1% of them) were Muslims, including people on the flights to Los Angeles, and Firefighters, Police Officers, and Paramedics in New York.

Listen to this beautiful video, done by Queen Rania of Jordan, about victims of terrorism who live in the Middle East and pratice Islam.

This inspired me to make this more of a universal statement. That's where I came up with the statement "Terrorism Hurts Everybody." While focusing on this "clash of civilizations" that has claimed many lives, we lose sight of those things in common that give us our humanity. We need, therefore, to reclaim this sense of common experience across borders or cultures. We need to understand that when one act of violence is carried out, someone always suffers, lives with pain for weeks, months, years afterward.

To return to my starting point, Daniel Pearl was killed because he was doing his job. He was doing his work one day, and then he got killed in this horrible way. The same could be said of nearly all other victims of contemporary terrorism. It's just that his job was to highlight goings-on in the world few of us ever encounter. His job may be one of the most crucial in this world.

Thankfully, his death was not for nothing. Now our world is getting more and more interconnected, in an economic sense, in a communal sense, in a cultural sense, in an ethical sense. This is made possible by technology like the laptop I am using right now, and the IPhone I currently own. What is diclosed in Washington DC, can now be passed on to journalists in Europe, and can launch an uprising in the Middle East.

The good thing about this interconnectedness is that it makes it much harder for us to kill indiscriminately. At the same time that technology is bringing us farther apart, it is bringing us closer together. Now our humanity is being brought to bear, as cultures around the world are not as far apart as they used to be. I do not believe this is the end-all-be-all of what needs to happen on Earth, but I do think this is the beginning. The beginning of a journey that needs to happen.

Well, more on the subject of 9/11 in the next post. I was thrilled to finally get to see Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close last Saturday night. I would have blogged about it sooner, but for the last few days, I have been tied up with homework, already, yes. I'll have that for you tomorrow.

See ya, and keep wondering, folks!

To Be or Not to Be (In the Theatre)

As You Like It, as performed by CSULB's University Players (Fall 2011).

Hi there,

I've gone back to class today. This is both good news and bad news. First, it is good news because I will be able to interact more, and thus I will have more material for this blog. My daily interactions with people, and with new discoveries, are what power my creative work, and thus this blog. Over the last year and a half, I have gotten to enjoy going to college. It was like, at that time, it suddenly clicked like "Oh, so that's how this whole thing works, and that's what everyone enjoys about this." This was the ability to relate, connect with other people. I began branching out, and enjoying it.

The bad news, however, is that with all the work, I will not have as much time open for this blog. As I have gotten older, I have had steadily less and less time to devote to my drawings and other work. I have gotten more space in college, in between classes, to read and write stuff to myself. One thing about college is that you can have as much as four or five hours in between classes. This has given me some blocks of time where I can exercise my own gifts of expression.

The highlight of my day was going back to my theater class I am taking. I don't know whether to spell it thea-ter or thea-tre, like the old English spelling. Anyway, this was a course called "performance and rehearsal." What this means is that we, the actors, will prepare our scenes and material, and then, the second half of class, a group of directors (undergrads joining us from another class) will enter, and we work with them, we get their notes on the scene.

I'll tell you, when I got there, I got excited to see my friends that I knew there. Half the reason I enjoy being in the theater department is the kind of people that I have met there. Most of the time before I got involved in theater, my encounters with people on campus were passing. I couldn't really connect with anyone. In most of the lecture hall classes (most lower-division classes required are in lectures), you don't have any more interaction with the person next to you than "Is anyone sitting here?" So, outside of a few club meetings I went to, I had few long-term interactions with people where I went. Certainly, I hadn't had anything that moved my life.

I have only been involved in Theater and acting activity for a short two years now. In that two-year time span, my life and the way I live it have had a sea change. This very blog is evidence of that change. At the end of the Fall 2009 semester, I needed 3 fine arts units, so I was given a choice between Studio Art, which seemed like a natural choice, and Intro to Acting. I forget exactly what it was, but something in me was telling me that I should take the acting. So I signed up for it for the Spring of 2010, even though I had no idea how I would survive the first week.

When I went in, we began work off impulse and visualization. Again, the memory is slightly cloudy to me now, but it clicked with me. All the activities we did were to get us interacting, not just for its own sake, but to realize what drove our actions. About three weeks into the class, it started to become the thing. It crept in as the thing I looked forward to doing, come Monday and Wednesday afternoon. It slowly began to filter out into my understanding of others, too. When I viewed people living their lives as characters on a stage, it inspired much more of a connection from me to them. I could see people honestly, and with empathy.

Once I decided to go into the classes that the majors in Theater went into, everything began to shift. I was no longer the same guy I was before. So, over the past year, I have been adapting to my approach to the way I live my life. This was what I meant when I said that 2011 was "The Year of Living Creatively." It meant applying the way I look at acting, and the collaboration of roles, to the way I have interacted with the people I knew and met, with the knowledge that I find, and with what I knew to be true. Slowly, I have been learning to look at the things I used to avoid, to deny, to look away from.

However much I have come to love the theater, there are things about all this that make me nervous. First, I am worried about becoming just the caricature people paint of actors. That is, the prima donnas who only know how to make themselves look good. The fear of it has largely disappeared for me. I assuage myself by remembering that there are prima donnas in every field who have no appreciation for anything that is not themselves. Also, when you know and care for people that are doing it, the stereotypes lose their importance.

Also, there is this fear about commiting totally to a life in the theater. Even with this wonderful thing that has entered my life, I feel this combination of beign trapped, locked into one path (after all, what are you gonna do with a theater BA besides work in theater?), and feeling like this commitment is too much, too soon. I still have lots of things I want to do in this world. It isn't that I have no idea what I want to do, it's that I have so many ideas of things I want to do. Call me the stereotypical male, here, but I've got some commitment issues.

Another issue is the money. Now, you probably know of the term "starving artist." People in the arts do not make a lot of money, and they have very sporadic periods of work. In the case of actors, they always have to be looking for the next role, unless they have some long-term contract and even then, it's tentative. The only way such a career would be recognized as valid was if the actor got famous and rich. So that's a sad commentary on how we treat the arts. They're useless to the society at large unless you can make lots of money and become famous. As a result, the people that tend to make it big in acting are the most competitive, type-A personalities. Unfortunate, since there are many people that have that gift, that have some message in their being that needs to be heard, that aren't great at making it in this type of world.

So what can I do? I am torn between the world that I knew, the world of safe career paths, of clear trajectories, of clear problems and solutions, and that of creativities, where each person I meet isn't just a person, or a caricature, or just a cog in some big machine. Here, it is as if each person has their own micro world that they carry with them, that they share with their friends, lovers, and family. There are things about the world I knew that draw me in, as there are things about this new world that do. It seems that this new view of the world has been with me all along, just waiting for the right influences to cultivate it.

I have currently come up with the idea to major in communication studies, and minor in theater arts. Part of me feels like this is a lame-ass compromise, but I really love both departments, and it feels to me as if that is the deal that will work best. I really do love the communications department. I'll tell you why, simply because I had one lecture class there my freshman year (three years ago), and it was just damn fun and informative. I could have listened to the professor all day. It had a similar affect, albeit on a more subdued scale, as learning how to act. Now, the field of communications is much more broad, in that it can be communications in business, advertising, counseling, organizations, and culture.

I honestly believe that if people knew how to communicate better, the quantity of suffering in the world would decrease greatly. Oddly enough, the theater experience, because it is about an experience, is about communicating too. It is about showing the truth of you, the actor, and the director and the crew have pieces of their truths, their worlds, which the theater needs to operate. The whole thing is happening right in front of the audience. So you have that experience of the actors interacting with each other, elements of the play interacting, and them all interacting with the audience's feedback.

So theater relies on effectively communicating. It involves picking up the tempo of these interactions, which is what drives the audience's interest in the production. It allows the audience to look at the story, the setting, or the characters, think back to it and say, "Hey, remember that thing? You remember it? That just blew you away, didn't it?" It is in these experiences that we grow, that we become better and richer, as human beings in our understanding of each other and this world. It is that experience that I want to give people, in whatever field I go into, whether it's the theater, or something else. As my first acting teacher told me, "It'll never be a waste."

My perception of time unfolding has also changed since I began studying acting. Before, I went to school with the idea that I would some day earn a degree, and then some time after that, I would get a job, which would one day lead to a career. Now, it is as if each semester, every week, every day, has become something significant, alive, important in and of itself. I can feel the change happen. This can be frightening, because so much change is jarring, but there is something wonderful about the discovery. I still don't have a good idea where I'll be in the next five, ten years, but that's not that bad anymore. That's why I sign off each post with "keep wondering, folks," because being able to keep discovering keeps you feeling engaged. I think everybody should have a chance to do that in life.

Well, I've got a few ideas in the works, but like I said, I've got more schoolwork ahead of me now. I'll blog whenever I can, and we'll have a good time. I really look forward to being able to write on this blog. I'm really excited about the direction this is going.

See ya, and keep wondering, folks!