back to the caves

i get my news largely from the newspaper and from online news sources like the new york times, the guardian and the huffington post, but also from radio station P1, the danish answer to NPR. i am also a devoted fan of jon stewart's daily show, which we get here in denmark, only one day behind. so, like many, i get my news from sources where i am likely to agree with the slant that's presented. and that's a problem of this increasingly online world we live in...we can isolate ourselves in enclaves of people who share our beliefs and our interests. less and less do we challenge ourselves to listen to views not in line with our own. i'm as guilty of it as anyone.

and so views and the expression thereof become increasingly strident and dramatic (see the streets of london, the recent massacre in norway and the behavior of the so-called "tea party" members in the US congress). and i'll admit that as an educated, liberal-thinking, left-leaning sort of person, i continue to think that arguing with those extremes is still somehow not worth it. the beliefs they spout seem to be so ridiculous as to be beneath argument ("intelligent" design? a new knights templar? a congressional "super" committee? please.).

but those of us who are educated and have the power to reason and articulate good arguments are going to have to start arguing. because what a lot of these groups appear to want to do is to completely turn back modernism and possibly even all of the gains made after the enlightenment, taking us back to something resembling the dark ages, but with really cool electronics.  

take just the tea party conservatives....they're against abortion, homosexuality, humanitarianism, taxes, welfare, the environment. they're for the bible, guns, the death penalty, censorship and the general surveillance of society. what they preach is a fundamentalism not unlike the fundamentalism preached by breivik in norway and even members of al quaeda, who are also largely against that same list of things. and what's worrying is that, like al quaeda, the tea party appears to be shouting loudly and are well-funded.

if we're not careful, we'll find ourselves clubbed over the head and dragged back to the caves by our hair. i don't know about you, but i'm not keen on that...

does it preserve sanity?

living in a windmill would definitely preserve my sanity.

a friend, who lives a similarly freelance life, mentioned to me the other day the question she often asked herself as she was about to embark on an activity: does it preserve sanity? and i came across an activity today that i realized most decidedly does not preserve sanity. at least not my sanity. and it got me thinking about what components an activity has to have in order for it to preserve my sanity.

~ i have to be able to understand it - the process, the steps it takes, how it works.  it's perfectly ok if it takes some work to figure that out (see next component), but there has to be an underlying discoverable logic.

~ it has to challenge me. if it's immediately easy and i get the hang of it quickly, i get bored.

~ it has to seem fair. i have to have an equal shot at it.

~ it has to be what it appears to be. if i feel it's somehow a lie or not what it seems, the sanity (and the patience) go immediately.

~ the activity has to give me a sense of satisfaction - either that i accomplished something that i can see, got something out of my system or built the foundation towards something else.

~ if it involves other people, i have to think that they are intelligent at a level commensurate with the activity (sadly, this is where the sanity bit often falls apart).

~ it has to make sense (this is different than whether i am able to understand it) - again, there has to be an underlying logic at work, one which is ultimately transparent.

it seems a little bit weird to be pondering the preservation of sanity while the world melts down around us, but on the other hand, perhaps that's the perfect time to do so.

how do you preserve your sanity?

where to begin?

another rainy day.

it seems like the world is full of turmoil and uncertainty. stock markets are down. starving people are meandering across africa. the syrian government is killing civilians. there are riots in london. fundamentalists of all stripes are getting bolder. the polar ice caps are melting. and the US congress is behaving like an unsupervised kindergarten. no wonder our television screens are full of senseless "reality" programs - we need escapism. because the world certainly looks hopeless. and it doesn't seem like there are any true leaders in the world with a single clue about getting a handle on it.

we had a lively conversation the other evening about whether it's even possible for individuals to make a difference anymore. i know i certainly can't think of anything that i could do (tho' i did spend some time today wondering if there wasn't an app in it). and a friend, whose job in television puts her in a position to have an effect on the wider culture, admitted that making denmark's next prime minister would be considerably less fun than making denmark's next top model.  and while it made me laugh (i do like me some cynicism), it also hits on a truth...if things aren't fun, we simply don't really want to do them. and saving the world would be some seriously hard work (unless there IS an app for that).

it seems like such a hopeless mess that setting whether or not i'm having fun aside, i wouldn't have a clue where to begin. it seems like even a small amount that you might give towards hunger in africa never makes it to those who need it...the big aid organizations have such a bureaucracy behind them that the vast majority of a donation goes to support that. we talked the other night about if it were possible to get even just a fraction of the food we are wasting in our part of the world to the people who need it, what an impact it could have. but so many regulations and rules and laws and transport issues stand in the way that we talked ourselves out of it before we even discussed it properly.

it must somehow be possible to somehow harness all of these social networks and all of the thoughts, ideas and innovations going on and channel them towards something good, don't you think? but where to begin? (maybe we should ask steve jobs.)