Wow!!

 

Photos cropped from a kid's talent/variety show on CCTV (China Central Television), around a year ago or so.

Saving the World, one bicker at a time

Sometime last spring, I was having a Facebook "conversation" about some political thing or other, and, as sometimes happens when friends of friends start putting their two cents in there into an online forum, it turned into a Facebook argument shortly thereafter. Well, not an argument, exactly, but a heated discussion, carried on fairly intelligently, considering it was limited to bursts of 140 characters or less. Such is the life of an American political junkie in China...

I don't even remember the topic that we were discussing, but one comment that I do remember was something along the lines of "What's the use sitting around and discussing what's wrong with the world, anyway?"

...and I started to think, "Wellll... if we all could agree with what's wrong, we could all start to fix it, couldn't we?"  You know, how a flock of birds hangs out in a clump of trees for days and days, some flying off, and then all flying back, and you can hear them chirping and bickering for miles around.  And then one day - pow! - their collective mind is made up, and off they fly.  Together.

So, if we go with the idea that all of this chatter about what is wrong with this or that or the other thing in the world at large is really just the noise of the global flock making up its mind, then the individual conversations start to take on a greater meaning, don't they?  What may seem like an isolated argument on someone's Facebook page may actually be an artifact of the human community struggling to come to terms with its most pressing problems, in the same way that the chirps and hops of individual birds at some point add up to an action taken by the flock as a whole.

Don't know if this Tipping Point argument (see Malcolm Gladwell, et. al.) is true or not, but it does become an interesting way of looking at global change, politics, and the world at large.  From this point of view, discussions of issues among friends on Facebook are not just so many tempests in so many teapots, but our species' way of building global consensus, hashing out our issues on a molecular level.

A bit grandiose, perhaps?  Maybe.  I have certainly become increasingly suspicious of any kind of "Save the Word" argument in the last couple of years.  After all, the world has gotten along just fine without us for the last 4 billion years or so, and it will do just fine for the next 4 billion, regardless of whether us humans are on it or not.  But as a species, I'd like to think that in spite of everything, we're still worth keeping around.  Or worth improving, to put it more accurately.

Maybe our mantra should be, not "Save the World!", but rather:

"Hey everyone, let's all keep bickering back and forth good-naturedly for a while until we all can agree on a couple of simple ideas that are slightly less idiotic that our previous ones!"  

Yeah, yeah, it doesn't scan quite as well, does it?  But it does become more catchy after you repeat it a couple of times.  Give it a try, and let me know what you think.  I'll be posting the best results onto Facebook.

On Diversity, Labeling, Hospitality and Gratitude (Being a Short Treatise and Encapsulated Rant upon the nature of Difference among Peoples)

For your leisurely perusal:  A list of the people and organizations who hosted Xander and I in America this summer, in chronological order.  (In parentheses; religious affiliation, where applicable)

• A graphic designer and a writer, with one child; currently talking care of their mother with Alzheimer's. (agnostic / whatever?, culturally Jewish)
• A geography professor and a freelance blogger, with two kids (Jewish)
• A guest house for families of hospitalized children, run by a charity arm of a multinational corporation (Capitalist)
• A children's hospital run by the Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine (The Shriners), a Masonic fraternal organization.
• A German / American couple - an archivist and an IT specialist, I think..? - currently living away from their home in Berlin and volunteering for the Mennonites, two kids.  (Mennonite / Protestant)
• A (Catholic) doctor and an (Episcopal) priest, two kids.
• A healthcare management professional, currently laid off, and an administrator at a nonprofit agency, three kids (Catholic) 

I would draw your attention to the labels involved.  All fairly ordinary, right?  And fairly boring, come to think of it.  They're all also fairly arbitrary.  Consider the following list of people, who we likewise encountered:

• A Polish-American soccer coach and beer distributor.
• A Vegan activist who recently adopted a poodle/terrier mix.
• Two lesbian Republicans with Libertarian Ayn Rand-inspired leanings,  heading a bi-racial adoptive family.
• Predominantly white males in their late fifties and early sixties, who are mostly known for wearing red fezzes and driving miniature cars in parades.
• An expert in the history of milk in turn-of-the-century Chicago
• Two gay men in a committed long-term relationship. One from the Canary Islands with a passion for gardening, and one a former architecture student who was, at one point, making a pipe organ in his basement.
• A salesman of orthopedic hardware, recently relocated from Florida.  Single, mid-fifties.
• A former East German draft dodger, who was once arrested while trying to escape on a train to Sweden.

Much more interesting, no?  But here's the thing: most of these descriptors actually apply to the same people in list one.  And most of these labels, while factually true, are utterly useless when it comes to describing the people I want to describe.  (Unless I want to pat myself on the back for knowing such a diverse group of people - but that's condescending, to both them and me.)  No, the labels are useless because they ignore the most important commonalities, namely that:

• All of these people went out of their way to help us in some way
• All of them have a belief in something much bigger than themselves
• And most importantly, all of them have taken that belief as inspiration to do something to make their small part of the world a little bit better.

And that's the thing about labels - they mean everything and nothing.  Everything, because, wow, if I try to imagine any of the people above without those characteristics, they wouldn't be themselves, would they?  Each phrase represents some essential part of a person's identity.  And, pardon me while I go all patriotic here, one of the best things about being in America was savoring that richness of all of those different lives.

And of course, the labels also mean absolutely nothing.  I'm sure that my friends who recognize themselves on the list are inwardly cringing right now.  "What do you mean, I'm a traditional English folk dancer who can repair accordions and is now working in the IT department of a law firm?  Is that all that I am to him??"  Well of course not.  A label, by its very nature, is a gross oversimplification of something far more complex.  Labels are simply tools that we use to make sense of a world that is far more complicated than we can wrap our little minds around.

Diversity and labeling have been on my brain lately, as I'm back to being on campus in (fairly provincial) China.  There's a new crop of freshman wandering around, which may explain why I'm hearing exclamations of “外国人, 外国人!" (Waiguoren, waigouren! = Foreigner! Foreigner!) all the time lately.  And no, there is no revival of a certain seventies pop band over here - that's me they're talking about.  Just this morning in fact, while crossing the little bridge on the way to Ysa's kindergarten, a clump of several girls walking by exclaimed "Waiguoren!" three times.  In unison.  

And you know, my reaction wasn't angry, or defensive, or hurt, like it sometimes is.  But neither was I interested in being very sympathetic to them.  It was more like feeling sadly embarrassed for somebody's total ignorance.  Like when your dad would walk around in plaid shorts and sandals with socks.  Black gold-toe socks.  And sunburned knees to boot.  But this was the opposite, generationally speaking, and I tried to throw in a little sip of optimism, because, hey, you never know, those kids may learn something about the rest of the world at some point in their lives, right...?

Not that it's my intention to start feeling smug about my culture's fine and noble sense of Diversity and Tolerance for Others.  I mean, after all, I did grow up in labeling central, rural Illinois.  And then there are articles like this one (seems like the FBI is schooling their agents to pigeonhole an entire religion. Good work, guys) that keep popping up all the time.  And don't get me started on the current political climate (this is where we've chosen to focus our national discourse?  Seriously??) in the Land That I Love.

But here I've spun off track a bit.  It was originally about gratitude, and about how here, there, and everywhere, I've been incredibly blessed to find amazing people.  Of all sorts and kinds, and I'm all the richer for it.  This may sound like a canned soapbox speech from the Obama campaign (hey, everyone, remember when he was actually inspiring?), or a Coke commercial from the seventies, but no, it's been my life, for real.  And any time I forget that fact, I find that I regret it sooner or later.

As for all that labeling that I was ranting about?  Take a close look.  Regardless of your political, social, religious or ethical affiliation(s).  Are you doing it to anyone?  No?  Good.  It's just embarrassing.  Really.  Stop it, already. 

I mean it.

Two Years Ago - the signs remain the same

2009:



2011:



2009:



2011: