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2.07.2004
Saturday, February 7, 2004
This is a great piece that Apple wrote and that appears on the walls of some of its stores. I wish I knew exactly who wrote it. I find it very comforting and inspiring. It reminds us of the value of our own weirdness in a world that wants to wring all weirdness and differences out of us and make us all the same.
"Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can praise them, disagree with them, quote them, disbelieve them, glorify them or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They invent. They imagine. They heal. They explore. They create. They inspire. They push the human race forward. Maybe they have to be crazy. How else can you stare at an empty canvas and see a work of art? Or sit in silence and hear a song that's never been written? Or gaze at a red planet and see a laboratory on wheels. While some see them as crazy ones, we see genius. Because we think the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do."
2.06.2004
Friday, February 6, 2004
Something to add to yesterday's post. We are in a national uproar on the assumption that children have been emotionally scarred for life by the sight of Janet Jackson's breast, but have no concern that children are, with no assumptions necessary, physically scarred for life by AIDS, by hunger, by land mines and by violence every day throughout America and throughout the world. Worse, we have less concern about the fact that they lose their lives to these things.
We are afraid of breasts, we are afraid of honesty, we are afraid of reality, we are afraid of anything different. And we use children to advance the cause of our fear. It is an unconscionable manipulation and exploitation. We don't care about children. We care about our own childishness. If we really cared about children they wouldn't be dying in droves every minute of diseases for which we have had cures for decades.
Some will say, "where's your positive attitude about humanity Dan?" I'm sorry, now's not the time for a positive attitude about humanity. Now's the time for some healthy anger, because it is the only natural human reaction to a society that cares more about protecting children from the sight of a breast than from death.
Thursday, February 5, 2004
Can someone please tell me why it is OK for us to show pictures of the latest blackhawk helicopters, of nuclear bomb test explosions, of the latest AK47 automatic rifles, but when an image of a woman's breast is exposed to the public there is a national uproar and people are barred from the Grammy Awards? Why is it OK for a child to draw all of its sustenance from a woman's breast but not OK for that same child to look at it? Why is a woman's nipple offensive but not a man's? It's so absurd I can't even write about it.
Janet Jackson, don't apologize for a thing.
2.04.2004
Wednesday, February 4, 2004
Great thoughts from Thomas Merton that I read today in his "Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander" Try not to let the male references interfere:
"And yet in the name of liberty, man is enslaved. He frees himself from one kind of servitude and enters into another. This is because freedom is bought by obligations, and obligations are bonds. We do not sufficiently distinguish the nature of the bonds we take upon ourselves in order to be free.
If I obligate myself spiritually in order to be free economically, then I buy a lower freedom at the price of a higher one, and in fact I enslave myself. (In ordinary words this is called selling my soul for the sake of money, and what money can buy.)
Today, as a matter of fact, there is very little freedom anywhere because everyone is willing to sacrifice his spiritual liberty for some lower kind. He will compromise his personal integrity (spiritual liberty) for the sake of security, or ambition, or pleasure, or just to be left in peace."
Tuesday, February 3, 2004
Yikes! Just learned that the messages some of you send in on the website haven't been coming through. We've fixed the problem, but if you sent something and got no response, please writer again. Sorry!
2.02.2004
Monday, February 2, 2004
More and more we are encouraged to be the same. More and more we are encouraged to fit in. More and more we are discouraged from showing any sign of difference or uniqueness. We are all asked to get our sandwiches at Subway and our pizzas at Dominos, to wear Nikes and Diesel Jeans, to watch CSI and listen to Britney Spears, to feel patriotic, to drink Fiji water and Budweiser, you name it. We are event taught to be different in the same way. If you wear a nose ring you're different. This is still a herd mentality. This is still the mass mind, even if it be the minority mass mind, telling us how to be, instead of allowing us to tell ourselves. Despite what the Constitution says, we are not all created equal. We are all created differently. We come out of the womb different from one another and we are born into totally different circumstances from one another. What we have in common is that we are born uncommon - each of us wholly unique. What makes us equal is that we all start off very different from one another. What a shame if modern society irons out those difference and makes us the same. We must rebel against the requirement to conform. We must find that in ourselves that makes us a misfit. We must find those unique passions and drives and intuitions and imaginations that make us special in all the cosmos. This is what will contribute to the richness of life and of humanity. In a society that constantly discourages differences we must struggle to embrace that which makes us different. "God bless the freaks," the old bumper sticker used to say.
All the things that we are taught about fitting in - that it will makes us happy, that it will give us a sense of stability and belonging, actually make useful less and less stable, less and less like we belong to ourselves, less and less special, less and less magical, less and less unique, and less and less happy. And against that standard, we study the ways we don't fit in, and we use those deficiencies to beat ourselves over the head with unending criticism.
The world has got it all wrong. Do something crazy tomorrow. Shake up the world, like Muhammad Ali said. Be who you are, instead of who every one else wants you to be. If God wanted us all to be he same, do you have any doubt that we would be, and that we would be born that way?
2.01.2004
Sunday, February 1, 2004
Ninety million people will spend three or four hours watching the SuperBowl today, and advertisers will pay from $1 million to over $2 million for a 30-second television spot. Mostly we will see ads for sodas and beer. Our task must be to move people toward a world where 90 million people will watch a three-hour documentary on the state of hunger and hunger-related disease in our world and be inspired to step onto action to eradicate the problem. And a world where interspersed in the documentary are 30-second commercials for various organizations and bold endeavors that people can sign onto to get into action. People have no idea how much happier this will make them than the SuperBowl. It is a deeper, more meaningful, more fulfilling kind of happiness that I am speaking of, not the superficial kind of adrenaline-driven distraction that we have come to think of as happiness.
In that world, we can have the SuperBowl too, and we can eat potato chips and escape into it for three hours. It is about finding a balance between fun and duty. But to live in a world where we have superficial fun while other people starve and suffer in horrific physical pain, at the very moment others of us are watching the game, is a world utterly out of balance, and in a world utterly out of balance, humanity cannot find true happiness.
Perhaps during the commercials today we can pray for the dying. And in the year ahead, we can begin to get into some serious action on their behalf.
That's what I plan to do.
Saturday, January 31, 2004
"Therefore the sage is guided by what he feels and not what he sees." Lao Tsu
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