Masochistic Hopes

Can you take that part of me, that's stronger than it needs to be?  Can you take it out and send it packing, so I can get back to the rest of me?

Can you take that yearning, passion, and desire and change their focus to something less here and more there?

Can you just cut off the emotions that stem from this never-ceasing problem, and replant them in the gardens that grow emotions for what needs to be?

Because I am tired of caring and yearning for something that I don't seem fit to have.  Tired of wasting time hoping for something that seems so trivial when placed in the context of the rest of what's hoped for.

I can't help but feel there is a reason for this desire...but sadly, the reason seems more masochistic than life-giving.  More terrifyingly depressing than hope inspiring, which is why I can't help but want it to be gone.  Either that, or let it be fulfilled.  Sooner rather than later.  So the intentions can be met.

Driving in LA

It is sad that culture and ways of living can sometimes create in us a lack of empathy without even really meaning to.

The more I drive LA traffic, the more frustrated I get by my “annoyance” over an accident as opposed to feeling awful that there is an accident in the first place.  Accidents become hindrances to getting places on time or mean more sitting and less moving.  Yet, accidents are also often enveloped in loss, tragedy, pain, hardship, turmoil, and the list goes on.  Even accidents that don’t involve any physical human harm, can be an incredibly harmful thing to a person’s finances. 

All that is behind a car itself, is incredibly difficult.  There is a lot invested in our transportation.  The absence of it could mean an inability to go to work, an inability to get where we need to go.  To purchase a whole new car, for most people, is not just an atrocity, it is an impossibility.

I am writing this as I am actually sitting behind the shining red and yellow lights of an accident on the onramp to the 605 from the 60.  Ahead of me is incredibly potential despair, and my first thought was the difficulty I was going to experience getting home in time to get my 7 and half hours of sleep before work.  The fact that these are my first thoughts and not last, make me very sad. 

Who cares if I get home on time.  Who cares if I get to work on time.  Who cares if I am late. 

I must hope and hope and hope that what is ahead of me is not something awful.  I hope and sometimes pray that the potential tragedy is more lights and attention then is actually possible.  I would sit in traffic until they end of the world if it meant a life or a few lives would be saved.

I can deal with traffic.  I can’t deal with a lost life.

Organized Religion and Refusal to Change

I feel like the person that years ago I would of criticized for not knowing the "truth", but it is for that very reason that I am writing this.

Organized religion, I am beginning to believe, is the antithesis of progress.  After saying that incredibly heretical statement, I will admit that I think beliefs are an incredibly part of society and its functions.  However, organized religion add the "mob mentality" to beliefs that is both scary and insufferable in the face of progress.  When so many people gather together at any time in any place, it is an incredibly powerful and yet also incredibly scary thing.

In some ways, there is very little difference between organized religion and organized protests.  Both have large amounts of people gathered together with raised hands in the pursuit of changing the way the world works.  I wonder if it is why I often find myself gravitating towards organized protests.  They have something that make me feel somewhat at home and at peace because they remind me of the comfort I felt in numbers for my beliefs at both church and school.

I don't know if I will go as far as saying organized protests are the antithesis of change.  Mainly because organized protest often come and go with the wind and are often based in the realm and context of current need.  Organized religion is often based in the realm and context of tradition and claimed truth.  This is what scares me about it.  Organized protests are a response to a refusal to change.  Organized religion represents that refusal to change.

This is of course stereotyping all organized religion into one category, but beyond a few very new and emerging churches, I rarely see a humility to grow within the context of an organized group of believers.  I see it in individual believers, but I think it is very rare that in the context of the Organized as a whole there is rarely a humility that they perhaps could be wrong.  That perhaps their long held beliefs could be false or, at the very least, not wholly true.

My counterargument to myself on this is always, "How are you any different?"  I don't know.  Maybe my refusal to change is just as adamant as organized religion's.

Belief and Bipartisanship

This weekend, when I was at Knott's Berry Farm with my family, I realized how hard it is to believe in bipartisanship.  Our beliefs are such an integral part of who we are, and they are also an incredibly strong part of who we are.  What we believe is what we fight for (in either violent or nonviolent ways).  Our convictions are incredibly strong, and we as people believe that our own beliefs are the right ones.

It then becomes hard to make a cry for bipartisanship, because in my heart of hearts, I don't necessarily want bipartisanship for the things that I believe in.  I do think that there are political and economic things that I do understand a great need for dialogue, but there are social issues like equality (racial, gender, and sexual), poverty, and immigration that I don't want bipartisanship on.  Largely, it is because I feel that while two parties are debating, lives are being damaged.  Our economy is damaging, that is true, but it is also incredibly complex (though I think we have forced it to be so).

However, people's lives and rights are not something that seem complex to me.  Rather, they seem avidly opposed due to a lack of reading and fully understanding others stories.  I always get tentative saying that, because my family is the "bipartisanship" that I have been forced to accept.  Yet, I really don't want to accept it.  It is often times a slowing down of what could be progression.

I do not believe in a forced change of believes neither do I want people who think differently from me on issues to go away.  However, I also can't say that I want a continue "bipartisanship" to have an effect.  I don't want to concede on human rights and the right to have life with a family.  My refusal to bipartisanship on my end makes me understand the current stalemates in the government.  How do we get passed it?   I think its time we focused on education and art.  We much learn to change ways of thinking.  Not in a way that forces, but in a way that discovers, and either through that process, I hope I discover a better need for two opposing beliefs on these issues, or I hope that we find unity in our belief so that true progression can be made.

The Working Class

I have now seen two things this week dealing with stories of those from the "working class" - A Better Life which I have already written about and now Billy Elliot.

Each also had their own unique way of reminding me of my personal inaction.  I am definitely more a member of the middle class, and I am reminded constantly of how easy it is to just get in my comfortable groove.  The middle class is really in the perfect mix of having enough to where they have no need to beg but not having enough to the point of slight envy.  This makes the perfect middle of the road, inactive person needed to sustain systemic injustice.

But for those in the middle class who want to see change, the difficulty of this path seems daunting and, some might go as far as saying impossible.  I, of course, continue to say "forever hoping", but the question of how to take control of the system without letting it take control of you is ever clear and foreboding.  It is history proven that many social movements created to topple "the system" just fell straight back into the creation of a new "system' that was often more unjust then the one that was toppled. However, I don't think this means that we should give up.  I do think it should make us cautious, but not futilistic.

A Better Life

Yesterday, I watched A Better Life.  I knew that the story was going to hit me where I think I needed to be hit, my emotional core.  It is one of the reasons I watched it.  I have seen and read many stories of immigrant families who have crossed the borders illegally to find a "better life" here in America.  In fact, I tried to even capture one in my senior capstone project.  No matter how many times I hear the stories though, I never ever feel less compelled by them.

Not because I feel like immigrants need my help or because immigrants have done bad things, but because the injustice of separating families is always something that should compel anyone to take action. We, as Americans, are guilty of an awful crime when we allow our systems to separate families from one another.  Our systemic laws must change, and in the meantime, we must figure out how to make loopholes.  How to change the current path, so that the pain, heartbreak, and consequences of such awful experiences can be ended.  This must be done in a way that provides citizenship too and does not take it away.  This will allow for these families to at least have a better fighting chance at finding sustainable income and pursuits of stronger education.

Education must also be tackled.  The lessons of love must be taught within our school systems.  They must be spread throughout math, science, english, and history, and we must work on fixing the system to allow everyone the best opportunities at jobs, education, and overall well-being.

This is obviously way more than probably even one lifetime could see effective change for, but it is one reason I say that we must be forever hopeful.  Hopeful in a way that is not conditioned by our current climax, but one that is unconditioned and open to any possibility in the future.  Sure, things may have been rough in the past and rough in the present, but we don't have to believe in a cyclical nature of the world.  We can believe in something different.  This is what hope is.  Without believing that things can be different, we become hopeless.

We must hope for a better life for all people, and within that hope, we must try to figure out how to best take action towards and for that hope.

Fatal and Futile Attraction

If I am being completely honest with myself, I am almost one hundred percent completely disturbed by the awfulness of my sexual attraction to another person.  Although I have come to a place where I accept any and all sexual orientations, I still find myself disturbed by who I find attractive and why.  In fact, it blows my mind how shallow my attraction is. 

I am glad that I was completely homosexual for the fact that it forced me to think differently, but I can't help but wish that I was actually bisexual.  More than that, I wish that a person's appearances had no play into my sexual attraction to that person.  I wish sexuality were something that I could look at from a different perspective as a pleasurable experience within a relationship and not something simply driven out of me by what I think is attractive and closed off by what I think is not attractive.  The more I am arguing this, the weirder it is sounding, but weird as it may be, it almost sounds better.

Not because I think that lovers and friends should enjoy in the same sexual play, though some would argue they should.  I do personally find myself drive to the idea that sexuality is something incredibly intimate.  I guess I just wish that it wasn't such a selective part of my search for a match, partner, or lover.  I wish I could fall head over heals for a man or woman, someone muscular or not, someone of any weight, size, ethnicity, gender, or culture.  I find myself sexually attracted only to men, who aren't too muscular, and skinny.  I can't help but feel this is something that was trained within me, and I wish it was something that I could somehow train out of me.

My fatal and overall futile attraction is not only disgusting for what it tells me about my culture, but also what it tells me about myself. 

I am hopeful for a day when attraction is not fatal or futile or simply derived from a cultural standard of beauty, but rather, an attraction that allows us to really grasp the diversity of beauty and all that the word "beauty" should be allowed to envelope.