What Everyone Wants

“The one thing that everyone wants is to be free…not to be managed, threatened, directed, restrained, obliged, fearful, administered, they want none of these things they all want to feel free, the word discipline, and forbidden and investigated and imprisoned brings horror and fear into all hearts, they do not want to be afraid not more than is necessary in the ordinary business of living where one has to earn one’s living and has to fear want and disease and death…The only thing that any one wants now is to be free, to be let alone, to live their life as they can, but not to be watched, controlled and scared, no no, not.”

So wrote Gertrude Stein in September 1943 while living in the rural countryside of Nazi occupied France, but read out of context, her words resonate still because they cut to the heart of the nature of living creatures, humans as well as animals. Deep down, all living things want to be free.

We live in a world where levels of controls are in place that prevent many if not most living things from living freely. On almost every plane of existence, living things are controlled. We are captured in space, we are surveilled and monitored, our work options are limited, our speech is curtailed, our sense of our own value is diminished. We exist as data points now and the source of future data points, employed for the profit of some and a means of control for others. Our safety is threatened but not guaranteed. We trade our freedom for safety out of fear. In the end, we are extinguished as living beings, wild and free. We are worse than tame — we are cattle in a data farm. Is there any longer a reason to exist at this point?

People everywhere want to be free, but everywhere they are in chains — of their own forging.

Why We Need To Practice Creative Expression

4/30/2011

For decades now, it’s been impressed on us moderns that art is a frill, unnecessary and usually unaffordable.  This view has always struck me as patently wrong, but I’ve never had a ready answer for it until now.  You can try to explain why art is not a frill, or you can simply answer the question “What would life be like without art?”

If you’re really strict with yourself and strip out every form of art there is, you may start to see what a gift art can be — a gift of joy, beauty, inspiration, and pleasure. Read More

On Personal Sovereignty — Do We Have Any?

12/12/2010

Short answer: no. We no longer have personal sovereignty. What does this mean? It means we are free nowhere. Why does this matter? Well, some would argue that people need freedom to live authentic lives.

What do I mean by freedom? I mean the ability to feel that there is some space in the world to call our own and where we may be openly ourselves without risk of suspicion, intrusion, or fine. We don’t have that anymore.

Let’s look at some examples, kept deliberately general so as not to get caught up in pesky details and starting with where we live. Read More

Putting The People Back Into Democracy

6/29/2010

For a decade now, we’ve been watching the unraveling of nearly every institution in which we the people used to place our faith. One by one they’ve toppled in our esteem, leaving many of us to conclude that most of the institutions that run our world are utterly hollow if not rotten to the core. With this loss of faith in the bastions of society has come a commensurate feeling that the government, which was supposed to protect us from bad institutions, did not always do so, at least in part because government itself is subject to those same institutions.

To recap, first there was Enron and the accountancy scandal, the pedophilia scandal in the Catholic Church, the discovery that the American military practices torture, the scandals in the mortgage and housing markets, and then the lending market generally, ending with the collapse of the entire global economy two years ago. To top it off, Barack Obama, for all that he isn’t George Bush, is not what many people hoped he’d be, and so there is that disappointment. Now, still in the same decade we began, BP is dealing with the reality that they are slowly destroying the Gulf of Mexico. Read More

Is Anyone Else Freaked Out?

Originally posted: 6/1/2010

I was sitting outside with my mother last night, enjoying the gloaming after a pleasant and peaceful Memorial Day barbecue, when it suddenly occurred to both of us to look for the Last Judgement chapters of the Gospels.  We read a passage out of Mark about apocalyptic earthquakes, famine, and destruction — “When you hear of wars and rumors of wars, do not be alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come.”  I think I just laughed but it was nervous laughter. At no other time in my life have those words sounded so apt for the times.  And that freaked me out

But I was already freaked out.  I had a mini nervous breakdown this weekend, created by a variety of factors —  exhaustion, stress, Gulf oil spill disaster, financial market weirdness, strange storms that take down trees, and probably most of all, the need I’ve felt to continue to carry on with my life as though nothing were happening.

Read More

The Limits Of Capitalism

1/22/2010

My argument, such as it is, is that Capitalism may be good at providing hefty benefits to the few, it’s no good at providing satisfying lives to the many.  And yet it dominates the lives of people worldwide, determining what work we will be able to do, how much we will be able to afford, what things will cost, and by extension, what kind of life we will be able to make for ourselves.  Capitalism is like Calvinism — it causes many things to be predestined.

As the moneys trickling down to the masses dwindles, we’re finding just how pervasive Capitalism is.  Everything we do is predicated on money and since the rules that govern money in America are predicated on Capitalism, we the people are forced to apply Capitalist principles in our lives, whether they really work for us or not.  Read More

Whither The Artist?

10/1/2009

I was musing today on the ongoing boycott of the Jay Leno show and it got me thinking how few avenues there are in modern life for creative people.  For those not in the know, television workers in LA are annoyed that the Leno show will effectively pre-empt five weekly, primetime shows and all the staff that would have been necessary to produce them.  According to the disgruntled, running the Leno show at 10:00 PM  is a cost-cutting measure that allows NBC to replace these five shows — and the artists and technicians employed in creating them — with one host and a skeleton crew. 

Nothing against Leno who is an affable and innocuous guy, but if you assume that it takes 50 to 100 people to produce one original, prime-time hour of television, that’s a lot of creative people who potentially don’t have jobs right now.  Read More

When Is Health Care Reform Not Health Care Reform?

9/18/2009

When is health care reform not healthcare reform?  When it comes on the backs of middle class Americans who already can’t afford it while providing a huge benefit to the very industry that caused the healthcare problem to begin with.

I have been reading along on the healthcare debate, mostly not liking it, and today I read in the Washington Post that there is now concern on Capital Hill that healthcare reform will be too expensive for middle class Americans to afford, especially for the many millions of uninsured.  I have to ask — are they’re just figuring this out? Read More

The Great Healthcare Debate

8/24/2009

Although I’ve witnessed a lot of great debates in my short time on the planet, the current discussion of healthcare going on across the country is probably one of the most compelling.  This time, it isn’t some weighty matter like war, elections, and impeachment that has us talking.  Instead, it’s a policy issue that just happens to affect us all.  Not surprisingly, most Americans are following along and many have opinions to offer.  So here’s mine, in a nutshell:  if we don’t insist on better healthcare, we’re never going to get it.  Conversely, if we say we’re ok with crappy healthcare, then that is what we will get.  It’s that simple. Read More

How Will It End?

4/7/2009

A long, slow, grinding decline — that’s what I fear more than anything.  My grandparents were in their early 20s when America entered the Depression; indeed, it must have been depressing after the boom of the Roaring Twenties to encounter such hardship.  The Depression dislocated people, mentally and geographically.  Unlike today’s fall, where at least some of us seem to think we had it coming, people seemed more shocked by the economic upheavals of that earlier era.  And yet there are optimistic investors driving up the stock market on the hope that if they can somehow make those indices bigger,  the dark and looming larger problems will go away by themselves.  As if  it were that easy.    Read More