...About My Favorite Things?

I had gone back to the University of Louisville with every intention of earning a teaching degree. I was quickly reminded of the miserable educational experience I had endured. I find great fault within the system, and after a good amount of waffling, I decided that it was not a system within which I could survive. I slowed down my schooling, opting for a couple of the required general education classes each semester, until I figured out what my next move would be.

Fast-forward to the present. As I’m writing this post, I’m roughly two weeks away from beginning two of my final three gen-eds, and I’m still as clueless as ever. The clock is winding down, and I absolutely need to decide on a major soon. Problem is, I can’t see myself in any sort of “big-boy” job. I’ll be visiting the career counseling center on campus, taking personality tests and visiting career fairs, but I’m not holding out much hope. All of the advice I’ve seen on the topic generally boils down to a simply idea: Do What You Love. With that in mind, I decided to take stock of the things that I love to do, and see where that gets me.

I. Consuming Great Media

    A few days ago, I watched Christopher Nolan’s Inception for the seventh or eighth time, three of which were in-theater viewings. Despite an intimate familiarity with the plot and dialogue, I still felt a rush of excitement during the action scenes, and lines of dialogue still sent chills down my spine and coated my arm with goosebumps. I can recall distinct instances when songs would unexpectedly cause me to choke-up, and hold back tears. There have been movies and television shows that have made me laugh until my sides hurt, bawled openly in public, and ponder very real questions of morality, justice, philosophy, and humanity. At the conclusion of some movies or books, I sit motionless and silent for a few minutes, in awe of what I had just experienced.

   

    There isn’t much time during an average day that I’m not consuming or discussing some kind of media, and I love every second of it. How people don’t wait with baited breath for the newest Scorsese film, Joss Whedon’s new show or Lupe Fiasco’s new album, I’ll never know.

II. Playing Games

    I see games as unique sets of challenges, a series of wagers that you can’t do something. “I bet you can’t use this army to capture my King, while I simultaneously try to do the same to you”, “I bet you can’t throw this ball into that hoop more times than I can”, or “I bet you can’t work with a team to rid the globe of these four diseases while outbreaks happen in different countries at once”. Overcoming these obstacles rewards the player with a distinct and wonderful sense of accomplishment.

    In addition to a fun way to spend an hour or two, games are tremendous educational opportunities. Most great games encourage creative thinking and strategic discipline. Athletic outings offer very obvious benefits to one's’ health, while promoting teamwork and good sportsmanship. I’ve experienced few things better than teaching a new game, and then watching as people piece together gameplans and strategies in real-time, their eyes lighting up with all of the possibilities, rising to whatever the current wager may be. “You bet I can’t? Just watch me.”

IV. Working With A+ Kids

    Anyone that works with kids and tells you they like them all the same is lying to you. I’ve worked for the Y’s before-and-after school program for almost a decade now. Each year, there are always some kids that stand out above the rest. I’m not sure what it is. They aren’t always the best behaved. They aren’t always the smartest, or the most polite. For whatever reason, though, these A+ kids are just much more fun to interact with. I can think of nothing that has impacted me more than getting to work day-in and day-out with those kids. Getting to watch them grow has been amazing, and it gets harder every year as more and more graduate and move on to new schools.

    There have been fewer and fewer A+ kids as time marches on. Maybe I’m getting burnt out on the job. Maybe, when I started, Bowen Elementary simply experienced an abnormally high number of these kids. I dunno. I was fortunate enough to spend this past summer with some of these A+ kids from the past few years at a summer camp for teens. It was easily the best summer I’ve had with the Y, and only helped to solidify in my mind what I had already began to suspect: I didn’t like working with just any group of kids; I liked working with awesome kids.

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Now, someone tell me how to combine all of that into a career, and I’ll be good to go!

Humanity Unchained

The last day of Black History Month accompanied by the recent run at the Oscars by the motion pictures Django Unchained and Lincoln catapulted me into a deep reflection of the past and my often debilitating  “white guilt.” Since the liberation of my mind brought on by drugs, sex, and rock ‘n roll I have often found myself wrapped up in a mindset that could be characterized as masochistic while thinking about slavery, the treatment of Native Americans, and the imperialist dominance of the Western Hemisphere. I often have prophesied that “white people got it coming and they deserve it.” Not only is a shameful mindset about the past, especially a past one had nothing to do with, fervently unproductive, but also disrespectful to the very thing which has induced the shame. Knowledge of the past serves no purpose if it only makes one pitiful, sorrowful and regretful. We do not make our lessons of the past practical by lamenting but by changing our behaviors in the future. Now that I have spent a paragraph telling you how I just learned a lesson you probably grasped at the age of twelve, let me present you with my “great” opinion of the day.

Slavery, in my mind. is the single greatest example of why learning history is important. Are we doomed to make the same mistakes? While there are areas of the globe where people are forced to work for less than a dollar a day with a gun pressed not so gently to the back of their head, the literal act of slavery is not the repeated mistake I wish to discuss today. After all what would be the point of talking about it? I have no idea how we stop it or change it or how to even make anyone care about it, seeing as it has gone on for decades now and the shopping malls which contain the products yielded by this profitable labor are only becoming more prolific. I would be a hypocrite regardless, I surely own a t-shirt made in a sweatshop and enjoy the spoils of cell phones, computers and televisions as much as anyone else. I gave up changing the world years ago when I learned that throwing a frisbee and cracking open another beer was far more fun than lengthy speeches about preventive action to pursue peace, and actions you can take to attack the authoritarian order of capitalism. I digress.

The mistake I wish to discuss that we can hopefully prevent from repeating is one of thinking. Ah yes, while my campaigns against the horrific actions of humanity have ceased, I still have some boyhood enthusiasm about the war for our minds. What is more despicable? The act of enslaving another human being, or the rationalizing thought process which allows us to believe that such an act is “just fine” and warranted by God? An answer to that question would be presumptuous at best. But let us dissect this thought process a little further. There was a time in the United States of America which was characterized by the exploitation of an entire race of human beings. The novel ideas of these people no longer being characterized as property, of these people being deserving of property, wages and education was so alarming for the times that a civil war was started in which a conservative 600,000 soldiers died and the Union almost crumbled. Wrap your head around that one.

Not only did we spend our days untroubled about the acts of slavery but when a growing number of people decided that it wasn’t so great, instead of taking our licks, realizing our wrongs, and allowing natural change to happen, we said “FUCK YOU, UNITED STATES!” withdrew from the union and took up arms. If you are able to take a moment to delve deep into the chasms of your own mind, do so and decide if you believe yourself capable of feeling so strongly about any one issue. Do you feel that strongly about anything good and humane? Would you fight so hard and act so defiantly about your children? I hope so. I really, really hope so. The one comfort I get from my reflection is that if a group of people can feel so strongly about something so obviously grotesque and abominable, hopefully when the time comes for us to act in defiance to defend something pure and good we will rise above the call.

I don’t think that I would have been one of the people irrationally defending slavery, I don’t think anyone reading this would have been either. I would like to think I would have been on the front lines with the most adamant abolitionists and that anyone I know at worst would have been neutral. That reassurance means nothing to the reason I decided to write about this subject though. The point is that some of the greatest minds ever collected in one room decided slavery wasn’t important enough to put on the agenda while they were changing the scope of human history forever. I am of course referring to our founding fathers at the Constitutional Convention. When the abolitionist movement finally began to take speed, people who were against slavery refused to support an amendment ending it due to the fear of those wretched creatures infiltrating society. Against all odds once slavery was ended, rampant racism and discrimination continued for more than 100 years afterwards. A war had been fought, many had died, history decided who was right and who was wrong, and we still thought that there were different levels of being human. God did not make everyone equal. There were men, then women, then them.

I cannot comprehend this. I have been guilty of being a sore loser and have even hurled some vicious insults to try to make myself feel better about losing. But I have never set out to create established reminders about how even though I lost I can still impose my will and superiority whenever I choose and however I choose to do so. It scares me. The original act scares me. The original thought process that allowed for slavery as an establishment to come into existence scares me. The proliferation of that thought process scares me. The resistance to change and decent logical thinking scares me. The death of 600,000 soldiers due to the clinging belief that slavery was OK scares me. What scares me the most though is the that after the war was over, the amendments written and the issue decided, this twisted, evil, demonic thought process continued.

Has it even ended today? Well, I am without question not the person to answer that question. I think that there are quite a few structural establishments in law, business, and society which are still inherently racist. I’ll let the guys and gals with degrees in Pan African Studies write the blog posts about the current state of affairs. I want to discuss what we can do with the knowledge of the depraved capabilities of the human mind. There are those that want to contextualize the political and social atmospheres of the slavery era and rationalize exactly what was going on. I’ve heard and read my fair share of these types of historical depictions and they honestly disgust me. There are reasons why it took so long to tackle the issue of slavery, there are reasons in addition to the irrational fear and hate of African Americans why southern states seceded and unfortunately the people of the times did inherit the problem. That doesn’t change the facts of the rationale of large portions of the country.

So to learn from the mistake of human thinking we must learn to think about our thinking. Not only must we examine our own personal philosophies about everything from day to day relations with coworkers, friends, and families, but also the philosophies of those in power in the workplace, community and national stage. Now before I go any further, this is not a political piece. There is nothing political at all about my motivations unless there are any remaining Confederate Democrats who are still sour about their defeat. I am only taking the stance that the greatest lessons we can take from history are the flaws in thinking that occurred which allowed for the travesties to happen.

Especially when there are permeating views of fear or hate we much question everything about the situation. We must consider history and examine if there are any gaping flaws in the arguments being made which usually call for some sort of drastic action. Whenever someone defends inequality, discrimination, or racism I only have to recall the lessons of history to realize the absolute lack of foundation in anything they have to say. Foreign policy, immigration, and gay rights are just a few of the large issues we must listen and discuss on a daily basis in the current political climate. I won’t tell you which side or view to pick. All I would like to see done is when the issues are being discussed, that a little consideration for the past would be included in the development of opinions.

In practice I have found that I end up being moderate about most issues. Even in subjects that I have a very clear and strong opinion about I find myself scaling back the fervor in which I defend my position. This is not only out of respect for the other people around me, but in the belief that justice is only useful when helpful. Merely establishing my point as correct in a dominant fashion does not help change the thinking of others who are of the opposition. I rarely want to argue a specific issue but to defend a way of thinking about issues. Opposition is necessary to prevent tyranny, factions, and oppression. Good thinking is necessary to prevent ignorance, abomination, and tragedy.