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 the Tennessee Tea Party Made a Serious Mistake

Hi there everybody,

Well, it's back to political issues again. I just had to share this little tidbit with you. The reason I am putting this up is because this goes back to the tone of discussion I would like to set. This is a tone of honestly, a willingness to talk about the issue, with all the truths of the people and parties present, however uncomfortable or jarring they may be. To me, this also requires a tone of compassion, of understanding accepting the other, whether you push back on them, call them out, or even take some action against them.

Anyway, the Tennessee Tea Party has demanded to the State's Legislature that, as well as rejecting the Affordable Care Act of two years ago, the history of our "Founding Fathers" and the country's development, be "more truthful," to use their terminology. According to them, the characters of the Founders have been "distorted," treated "unfairly." Huh? Really? Somehow, in Tennessee, of all places, Washington and Jefferson are getting a bad rep. I didn't see that one coming. In all seriousness, I believe that the Tennessee Tea Party here has made a huge mistake (like G.O.B. has below). Here's why.

This re-writing of history (because that's what it is, no matter what anyone wishes to call it) creates a convenient fiction. It promotes a simplistic, almost childlike, view of our history, our heritage, as a country. It just erases facts, important facts about what happened in our past. Don't like some aspect of our past? Just write it out of our textbooks.

This reeks of Ministry of Truth-style renderings of historical knowledge. That's why it is scary to think that one ideological faction could bend, knead, and press history into whatever shape or narrative they wish. If this is the case, how can we have freedom? How could anyone have real freedom? The freedom to explore their world, and reach whatever ideas or conclusions they believe to be right. The truth is, the children of Tennessee would not get the variety of perspective they need to be truly free to see our good work, our mistakes, and ultimately our potential as a people.

A dangerous aspect of this is that the "Founding Fathers" are turned into Gods on Earth, this time at the expense of the non-whites in the America of 1776. The submitted request to the Tennessee Legislature explicitly said this. "No portrayal of minority experience in the history which actually occurred shall obscure the experience or contributions of the Founding Fathers, or the majority of citizens, including those who reached positions of leadership." What this means is that the petitioners here want the curriculum to take out people and incidents which bring to light the white population's oppression of slaves, or their transgressions against the Indians.

Another criticism of theirs is that "the constitution created a republic, not a democracy." I find that interesting. The emphasis here is on the Constitution as it was first ratified back in 1787. They believe that the Constitution must never, ever change from the way it was first conceived of back then. It must never move toward a more democratic framework or expand to "create more rights." Here is the problem with that mindset. In that version of the Constitution, slavery was perfectly accepted, and runaway slaves were even required to be turned in. Slaves had no worth of their own, yet were counted as just three-fifths of a person. Indians were required to be hunted down, butchered and killed. Women were given absolutely no rights outside the home.

The sad truth is that many of the Founding Fathers (with the notable exception of Thomas Paine, who was a real visionary) had slaves of their own. There was, in fact, much concession to the slaveholders in the South, particularly Virginia and Georgia, in the drafting of the Declaration of Independence. The Slave trade was at its height right in the late 18th century, around the time that revolutionary spirit caught fire in what became the US.

The Tea Party people down in Tennessee, as well as Texas and other places, will not accept these parts of our history. When Michele Bachmann intimated that the Founding Fathers ended slavery, she wasn't joking, and she wasn't just being stupid. That is what she, and many other people in this country, do believe, and want to keep believing: that the Founding Fathers can do no wrong. That America can never do anything wrong.

The danger of this belief is that it ignores, or even tries to justify, the very real wrong things done in the name of America. Like the systematic destruction and genocide of the Indians, their ethics, and their way of life. Or the violent uprooting of millions of Africans, tearing apart their culture, and stripping them of their humanity in a land where they were beaten down for the sake of profit and goods in America and Europe. Or the deeply entrenched cultural animosity, across history, towards the French, the Germans, the Eastern European Jews, the Irish, the Italians, the Chinese, and now the Mexicans. If these are ignored, we are blind to our mistakes, and we will be doomed to the same cycle of animosity that has played out since America began to exist.

However, you can't blame the Tea Party people much. Well, you can if you choose, but it would be wrong. After all, seeing the shadow of something you hold so dear is tough. It would be very easy to simply not accept these facts, wish them away and , when given the chance, to simply write them out of history. It seems like you've defeated the issue, the knowledge of the transgression just disappears. However, the animosity does not. People not in the favored race or class will remember it, every time the subtle contempt comes at them.

Facing such unpleasant, even painful truths of our past is a part of growing up. It is a part of viewing our own heritage and society in a mature way. Being patriotic has nothing to do with being blind to our past, or our country being without flaws. It comes from knowing this country, its victories in the quest for truth, justice, freedom, and its downfalls. To me, it's similar to how you would love a member of your family. You would not pretend they were perfect, you would know they had flaws, but care for them, and help them heal anyway.

Paradoxically, it becomes easier to live with and love somebody when you don't have to pretend they are perfect. This goes the same with the United States of America and its people. Like I said before, I think there is a discussion that needs to happen concerning race and class history in this country. We must confront the ways, individual and systemic, intentional or unintentional, that we have marginalized and ignored the poor and the immigrants. This requires us not to blame each other excessively, but rather, to see our abuses for what they have been, in all that it entailed. We must see the dark flip side of the early prosperity of our country-the campaign against the Indians' culture and the slave trade, for all the suffering they caused.

Recently, I have been reading A People's History of the United States by the late Howard Zinn. It shows, through extensive and unknown research and documents, how the beginning of the United States was not a 100% new, radical declaration of the freedom of humanity, but a continuation of many cultural defects of old-racism, sexism, slavery, contempt for the "inferior" (i.e. native) cultures. It is absolutely required for a comprehensive understanding, what is contained in it.

I think that this also misses something, though. There are two strains of cynicism; one says that because we are the "right" ones, whatever we do must therefore be right. the other says that because what you see is not as pure, wholesome and clear cut as it seems, real transcendence is not possible, and it is pointless to try to achieve it. These are both ideas you must be careful of. I think the Tennessee Tea Party is trying to shut down this type of discussion at the very time it is most needed. Thankfully, there are a small number of people who realize that while we do not live up to our own mythologies, we nevertheless have our drives of compassion and a longing for connection.

Wow! That went on way longer than I expected it to. I always promise myself, Okay, this is just gonna be a short entry. Then, sure enough, it just comes out, and then I've written several paragraphs. Thanks for reading. I hope you bear with this, even though it can be hard to focus on these long entries. So, what do you think? Does learning about, for instance, our history with slavery scare you, or upset you? Do you believe that it wasn't really as bad as they say? Or were some of your ancestors perpetrators, or victims, of our country's racial or class divides?

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!