I only know what I read in the papers, so long as you understand that by “the papers” I mean actual news items reported in actual newspapers and the online equivalents thereof and the rumors and rants associated with those along with other “information” produced solely by my own somewhat under-informed, egomaniacal, paranoid imagination.
Along with The Onion, I am a self-proclaimed finest source of America’s news. On occasion my views are loosely based on “real” news, provided that your definition of “real” is sufficiently loose.
There would be little or no value in my mere re-reporting of news stories. The published sources are already there for your perusal. If there is anything at all that I am able to add to the news I’ve read, it is only in showing how the stories have interacted with other stories while they have resided neighbor-like within my spike-haired cranium.
Two stories juxtaposed one another this week in just that manner, both published in the November 13 issue of the Chicago Tribune; a day when I happened to forego my usual eschewal of news-on-paper. I normally dislike the large-scale wastage of paper products that includes newspapers and junk mail, but this past Tuesday happened to be the one day this year when I actually set aside my worries about deforestation and global warming to look at a newspaper.
But seriously…it’s just me: Bob. I used some pseudo-erudite terminology in the opening paragraphs just for a bit of fun word-yoga. Those important-sounding phases can be fun! Online equivalents thereof! Egomaniacal! Juxtaposed perusals! LOL! I’ll stop with the silly words already. Please ROyourF,L-ing yourAO. Spell check is telling me to STFU.
In fact, it was a couple of newspaper stories about internet subjects that caught my eye in much the same way that a story told by a horse trainer about auto makers would pique your interest by its irony—intentional or not. The Web is—after all—replacing the newspaper as a means of mass communication just as electric light replaced gas light which replaced the kerosene lamps that were brighter than the candlelight which was an improvement over the torchlight which was better than sitting in the dark. Nowadays the darkness is shooed away by the light of a computer monitor and you can see your news on the glowing screen without turning any other lights on. Ah, progress!
The world of civilized humanity has for many centuries been deeply involved with the movements of pieces of paper. We are not quite yet finished with the era of paper. Paper comes from trees. Please let me know if I’m going too fast for you.
Trees are not the unlimited resource we once thought they were. These pieces of trees, with the earth-sustaining respirations of their lives removed and replaced by the ink that encodes our presumedly more important information—information more important to us than the sacrificed lives of our planet-mates—is often moved from one place to another in trucks. Trucks run on petroleum fuel. Petroleum comes from the remains of prehistoric organic life and it has to cook underground for a really long time before it turns into the delicious treat that trucks love. Trees are at least a renewable resource. Ancient organic matter isn’t.
The world of civilized humanity has for many years been “addicted to” paper and gasoline.
Do not store paper products near gasoline. If you don’t absolutely have to, don’t store either.
If you think of the combined effects of the shortages of trees and of petroleum and the pollutants in our atmosphere caused by the burning of both of these commodities—more carbon in the air and fewer living trees to breathe the carbon into oxygen—you can easily see just how dangerous it is to use these products at all. It is time to end the era of paper and gasoline.
If we do that, eat healthy, get enough exercise and enough rest, avoid stressful and hazardous situations and find a cure for time, we’ll live forever! Or at least until the sun explodes. Who’s in?
Fine. It all sounds easier than it actually is, but you can’t blame a guy for trying, right?
Chicago Tribune headline: Illegal abroad, hate Web sites thrive here
1st Amendment lets fringe groups use U.S. sites to spread their message around the world
Tribune staff reporter Russell Working wrote an article about it. You can read it online by clicking here
The commentary on the story on THIS page is mine.
Hate is nothing new. Hate has plagued humanity for as long as humanity has plagued the earth. Racial hate is nothing new. To hate because of race is merely one variety—perhaps the most common variety—of the most insidious weed in humanity’s garden of selfish feelings.
I’ve said numerous times and in many different ways that I am not a racist. I would hope that anyone who cares to look could find the proof of that in my life. I am not a racist, by which I mean that I do not discriminate against (or FOR) people on the basis of race. I am making this an “I” statement to show that I am taking full responsibility for my own sentiments. I am not a racist, but I notice race and I have feelings about it. I choose not to act socially upon some of those feelings.
I could have been a racist. Bigotry was the prevailing opinion in the neighborhood I grew up in. If not for seeing myself as a free mind with the option of going against the majority opinion, I’d have succumbed to the social pressure and turned out quite differently than I have. Openness and social responsibility are two of the main tools I have used to keep myself from acting like a racist. I’m telling you—as I often do—too much about myself when I say that I could have been a racist. I am opening myself to the harsh criticisms that I would deserve if I were to act upon my racist feelings.
Openness brings me to honesty and honesty brings me to social awareness and this is my path away from being a prisoner of my own prejudices and those of the world I live in. I made a choice to go against what I saw as the social norm. I feel good about my choice. I re-visit and re-confirm my choice regularly.
Many people have some racist sentiments, but many people feel that they must hide these feelings. In most cases expressing these feelings is either illegal or at least socially inappropriate, which means that we can have feelings but can’t express them even simply “as feelings”. I believe that when feelings are totally suppressed, they fester within a person’s subconscious mind and can become very difficult to cope with, while the simple expressing of feelings lets us get them out without acting upon them. Suppressed feeling can become dangerous feelings in the same way that a hidden enemy is more dangerous than a visible enemy. Criminalizing hate speech makes hate invisible, but doesn’t make it go away.
The people in other countries probably wonder why the U.S. continues to maintain the rights of its citizens to speak their minds, allowing them to say things that the U.S. as a political entity does not agree with. This is because the United States is not yet a dictatorship. In principle at least, the U.S. is governed by its people and the free expression of ideas—agreeable or not—is essential to that process. Free speech is not easy and is sometimes quite a bit less-than-beautiful, but it is an essential component of a society governed by its people.
So—even though I personally hate everything that Nazis and fascists stand for—I fully support the right of Nazis and fascists to say what they think. Even though I hate any group that has hate as its founding principle, I support the right of American hate groups to be who they are and say what they want to say, to assemble peaceably and to participate in the democratic process.
I am dealing with the hate in my world by refusing to hate haters. Convoluted? Very much so. But it’s the lesser evil.
I will repeat my main point: a hidden enemy is much more dangerous than a visible enemy. And the most dangerous enemy of all is the one that lives inside me. I will do my best not to be at odds with my own feelings. That begins with an open honesty.
I say what I think. You can like me or not like me, but I will insist that you make your choice honestly. First, you will know who I am; then you can choose to like me or not. I encourage you to do the same so that when someone likes you, they can like the Real You, not some artificial, politically-correct version of you.
As I see it, we are discussing nothing less than the very essence of being a complete human: the inherent right and responsibility to make any choice whatsoever—for good or ill. That—in all its breathtaking beauty and abject terror is what it is to be a person: the sometimes unsettling right to one’s own mind. It gets easier with practice and without practice it withers and dies.
Holocaust denial is a crime in some European countries. Why stop there? If we are going to make denial a crime, why not make all varieties of denial criminal? These are of course thought-crimes. Do these countries imprison people for attempting to revise history? They might need to build bigger prisons.
In an unrelated story in the same issue of the Tribune, staff reporter Patrick T. Reardon interviews Derek Gordon, vice president for marketing for San Francisco-based Technorati in an email exchange on the subject of blogs.
Gordon estimates that his search engine tracks some 109.2 million blogs. Gordon does the math: he takes the current population of the earth (6.6 billion) and divides it by the number of blogs tracked by Technorati to find that there is currently one blog for every 151 people living on earth and one for every 23 people with internet access.
They speculate about whether there will soon be more blogs than humans. Gordon says that it is reasonable to expect that the number of blogs will soon outnumber the people with internet access since many people post multiple blogs. Gordon says that “most blogs are only marginally active (that is, about one blog post a month) and most are used for personal journaling purposes.”
Reardon goes on to ask if Gordon has any idea how many of the 109.2 million blogs his firm tracks get no hits in the course of a year. Gordon estimates that 99% of those 109 million blogs exist in a state of total or near-total obscurity.
I get an average of about one comment per day: many days it’s zero comments and other days there are a few, but over the course of a year, I’d say it averages to about one-a-day.
Sometimes that seems like it isn’t worth the trouble of writing, even though it’s much better than “total obscurity.”
I reach deep. I confront my own fears, show my own weaknesses, wonder about the limits of my own knowledge of the world and of myself and I try to write about something real. It isn’t easy work. Sometimes I’m pushing myself to be quite a bit more open than is really good for me, feeling as though what I’m saying is more than I can cope with, but feeling at the same time that I have to do it because I don’t want to feel alone in the world and feeling that I need to reach out to others who also might feel alone. I write to be real and to send some sort of genuine compassion out into this vast cyber-scape of people who may or may not be experiencing the same things I experience. I write to interact, to feel like I’m part of a society.
I’m one in 109.2 million. I understand if you don’t always find time to visit.
When you DO, please leave a note.
