Why it matters, part 2

I find myself in an awkward position today. I was planning on referencing Bowling for Columbine and school shootings today, and I find it is so timely it feels almost exploitative. It’s not as satisfying as you might think.

So, I did end up getting the digital copy of the My Chemical Romance debut, I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love. I haven’t listened to it enough to be sure, but I believe my favorite track is “Cubicles”, perhaps because so much of my life has been spent in that world, and they kind of nail it. Just to capture some of it…

And I'm only two cubes down

I'd photocopy all the things that we could be
If you took the time to notice me
But you can't now, I don't blame you
And it's not your fault that no one ever does

But you don't work here anymore
It's just a vacant 3 by 4
And they might fill your place
A temporary stand-in for your face
This happens all the time
And I can't help but think I'll die alone

So I'll spend my time with strangers
A condition and it's terminal

Really, we have some strange quirks about avoiding contact. I wrote about saying goodbye to someone at Regence when I was switching to telecommuting. I had been seeing her around the building for just under two years. I knew she had a dog, a crockpot, and a boyfriend. I know she has struggled with her weight more recently as it has gone up. I do not know her name. Somehow there is this thing where we are reluctant to do that. I think of her as the girl who looks like Christy. At Intel Jones Farm there was a guy I would smile and say “hi” to that was the guy who looks like Ethan Embry. He noticed when I was gone and when I came back, we recognized each other, but somehow, we don’t go through introductions. Even then, that level of friendliness is only possible because we are people who do smile instead of avoiding eye contact, of whom there are a lot more.

To be fair, some of it may be information overload. When I started at the company I was introduced to several people whose names went in one ear and out the other. That was not intentional, but I was being introduced to about fifty new people. I learned the names of the people I interacted with the most, but others I forgot. Sure, everyone wears name tags, but not usually in a way where you can read the small print.

Even with as many people as we met and enjoyed in Australia (some of whom we spent significant amounts of time with, depending on what we were doing), the only people we exchanged information with were two whom we ran into again in New Zealand by chance, and we could easily have pretended not to see them.

Obviously, you can’t be close to everyone, but you can care and be interested in a lot of people. I’ve seen that. Social networking even takes a lot of the work out of it, though what emotions and honesty you bring to it depends on you.

There is an environment of lies out there, but there is also one of hostility, and the two probably go together. Sometimes it gets me pretty down, but I am going to try to make a point in here somewhere, even if I have to draw a lot upon movies and books to do it. Actually, I have a story that involves music, a movie, and Facebook.

I have recently been missing Joe Strummer (lead singer, The Clash, died 2002). I was thinking that what I wanted to do was re-watch The Future is Unwritten, but I couldn’t find it, so I just set my status update that I was missing Joe Strummer, and a former coworker agreed, and he wrote “Without people you’re nothing.”

The truth is, it was that quote that was haunting me. I wrote that I couldn’t find the movie, so was just listening to the Clash, but Stace pointed me to where you could watch the movie online. I did watch the last part, and that did not quite do it for me. I still felt like something was missing. So today I had the whole thing running in the background while I was working, and then it did.

It’s not just what he was saying, but what was pulling at me was a catch in his voice as he said it. There was this underlying emotion that I have been feeling in my own heart lately, and hearing it from someone else helps. So here’s the full quote, but if you can listen to him say it in his own voice, I recommend it:

“And so now I'd like to say - people can change anything they want to. And that means everything in the world. People are running about following their little tracks - I am one of them. But we've all got to stop just following our own little mouse trail. People can do anything - this is something that I'm beginning to learn. People are out there doing bad things to each other. That's because they've been dehumanized. It's time to take the humanity back into the center of the ring and follow that for a time. Greed, it ain't going anywhere. They should have that in a big billboard across Times Square. Without people you're nothing. That's my spiel.”

Well, I’ll go one further than him, and say that it’s without charity that we are nothing, because I think you can have people and get it wrong, not realize what you have, or how it could be, or how it should be. With that concern about the dehumanization though, he is exactly right. And the easiest way to dehumanize people is to lie about them.

I’m not saying that people don’t get rotten enough on their own—I believe that I’ve been fairly clear that they do. There’s just this tendency to vilify now, and people lap it up for reasons that I do not get. The greed mention—I totally get that greed is the motivation for a lot of the people who pull the strings, but why would anyone fall for it? And what bothers me the most is that you have people who consider themselves good people and are good people, but they are building up such a hard edge through the judging and the anger at the sinners and the cheaters and the wasters and all those people whom they just know exist that they are going to lose that goodness.

I’m not going to go into full on religious preacher mode here, though I believe that time is coming, so I just want to make a point from Bowling for Columbine, and I was planning on doing this yesterday, without any idea of what was coming.

There is a lot of talk about gun control now, and as a stereotypical bleeding-heart liberal, naturally I am for that, but one of the interesting points of that Canada has similar gun ownership to the United States, but much less violent crime, and they go over possible reasons, but two that stuck out to me were news coverage focusing on violence and also having a society with strong safety nets, so people were supporting each other, rather than competing with each other.

Well, if our safety nets were inferior to start with, they’re not getting any better, and there is growing resentment of what is in place. I believe that the resentment is largely based on misinterpretation and lies. And greed is an issue.

There is absolutely no reason to believe that additional tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations will create more jobs or improve the economy. Buying into that gives a bad economy, and a bad society, and I do have a problem with that, but it also gives a bunch of bad hearts. I have a worse problem with that. Whatever situation you find yourself in for this life, it is temporary. That heart that you take with you, not so much. That matters. It matters for the enjoyment that you are going to get out of life. It matters for the state of your soul. And it matters to everyone around you, because we are all connected whether you like it or not.