Category Archives: Thought

An all out effort

February 15, 2015 6:12 AM , Leave a Comment ,

Pressure builds and keeps on building.  That’ just the way that life is.  The more you do, the more you have to worry about and the more reactive and proactive you have to become to keep everything going at the same time.

More than once in a while things will blow up.  I think it’s inevitable.  Then of course you have to scramble to assess the damage and to try to fix things.  Nothing is ever easy.

In the course of all of this effort you might suddenly find that you’re not feeling all that great.  Maybe one morning you will wake up and you can’t quite pin it down but you know you’re not up to 100%.  The rest of your day is thrown off by this and over the next few days and weeks you start going downhill.

This type of generalized fatigue is common.  It’s the sort of thing that can’t be pinned down and will slowly but surely seep in and affect all aspects of your life.

So what can be done?  You obviously have to address this before you can continue on with any of your other activities.  But you can’t just stop everything.  Luckily you don’t have to.

The problem lies in the way you live your life and how you are living your life and the solution is also found there.  Not in one aspect of your life or one activity but in all of it.

Stopping one activity or one part of your life will not get rid of your fatigue.  I mean maybe one part may be more directly responsible than others but I think it has to do with your life as a whole.  You have to modify everything you do to cure this disease.

So in no particular order.

Exercise – Maybe it’s time to cut down one part of your exercise regimen or change it up so you focus on another exercise.  Then again maybe you’ve not been getting enough exercise.  Add up all your weekly exercise hours and think to yourself “Is this too much or not enough?”

Diet – We all eat crap.  Sometimes it’s unavoidable.  You get invited out to too many meals with clients or family or friends.  Sometimes we indulge in a little treat and before you know it that treat becomes a regular meal.  Sometimes you find yourself eating “lunch” at 3PM and dinner at 10PM.  Try to exercise a little diet discipline.  On the other hand eating the same healthy foods all the time may make your system acclimated to a certain energy level.  Shake up your routine.

Work – The 40 hour work week is a poor joke to those who want to get ahead.  But 80 or even 100 hour weeks?  Come on!  Realize that there are only 168 hours in a week.  At some point in each day the line has to be drawn and that line cannot be crossed for anything.

Other work – You may have some outside interests or some other venture going on outside of work.  The same advice from above applies.  Remember that this was supposed to be a side project not the main focus of your life.  Treat it accordingly

Personal life – The main problem here is lending too much weight to this aspect of life. Sometimes you may have a problem in this aspect of your life and this bleeds over into other parts of your life.  You have to either address this problem or compartmentalize it.  Although I don’t advise doing the latter too much as it will inevitably escape out.  The other problem concerning personal life is that sometimes you don’t have one.  Focusing on work or exercise too much will over time lead to a hypnotic like state where you really don’t what you’re doing.  Break up the monotony.  Take time to do something pointless just for the sake of doing something pointless.  See some friends, talk to complete strangers.  Get another point of view in your life.

None of these suggestions will work on their own.  Rather it will be a combination of efforts in several different fields at various levels of intensity all working in concert to keep you balanced and working at the optimum level of efficiency.  There’s no one solution or one single therapy that will work universally.  What worked last year may not work this year.

All that I can advise is to keep vigilant and constantly reassess your personal needs with relation to your life.

 

Posted in: diet, environment, exercise, health, illness, life in general, rest, thought

Altruism

February 13, 2015 6:58 AM , Leave a Comment ,

7th grade spelling bee competition.  I get the word Altruism and misspelled it.  The proctor gives me the definition of selfless concern for the welfare of others and told me “you will never forget this word”.

Well she was right in that respect although I still maintain that I did spell it correctly.  I’ve tried living my life altruistically as possible in all aspects.  In some aspects perhaps too much in other aspects perhaps too little but overall I think I’ve done a decent job of it.

I haven’t done this in expectation of rewards.  To me this just seems the way to live my life.  Volunteering for something, donating to a charity, or even just giving a couple of bucks to some beggar on the street.  None of it really benefits me in any way yet I feel the compunction to do it.

Several years back I read up on George Price’s work on the Price equation which seem to suggest that altruism was in reality a long-term evolutionary tactic developed to insure species survival and increase the odds of reproductive success.

Interestingly enough Price himself spent the remainder of his life trying to disprove this theory by looking for examples of truly altruistic behavior.

Is it really all just an elaborate tactic that we all play?  That on some deep sub-conscious level we plot and strategize to increase the survival of the species and we try to insure our own reproductive success or improve the lot of our offspring?

Can we find that one example that turns this all into a lie?  Can you look in your life and find that one true altruistic experience?

Posted in: charity, life in general, thought

The point of it all

February 7, 2015 7:11 AM , Leave a Comment ,

Whenever you do any activity for an extended period of time you will eventually get to the point that you start asking yourself some  deep questions regarding that activity.

Just doing the activity used to be enough for me.  I do miss those days when just doing was enough.  I find myself getting wistful for the simplicity of those times.  But as you age and progress you get more time to sit and consider your situation then I guess such questions are inevitable.

So, there I am sitting writing and I hit a bit of a stumbling point in my writing.  The sentences all look wrong, the paragraph structure doesn’t make much sense and I’m wondering where this is all going.  Not so much where this particular story is going.  That I have a handle on but where am I really going with this whole writing thing.

Is anything that I write really all that worthwhile reading?

I’ve been dallying and switching back and forth between science fiction and literary fiction for the past couple of years and I’ve been thinking of combining both into the sub-genre of literary science fiction, a really rarefied form of literature that would be quite difficult to produce.

In my local writing groups I’ve seen a couple of younger writers plunging on and taking their stories to their editors and looking for publishers and generally getting on with producing their work. They’re totally committed and fearless in moving forward.

Meanwhile I’m sitting on 2 stories that I could at the very least send to an editor and get some honest feedback before moving on to the next stage.  But again I have to ask myself what is the point of this whole exercise?  Am I doing this just to exercise my imagination and my typing fingers or do I want to get something published?

I don’t think I want to keep all of this private and to myself.  I do want to share what I am writing with a wider audience.  Being in contact with actual writers, with editors, and other writing enthusiasts has broadened my horizons considerably in the last few years.  Particularly in the last year that I’ve spent with members of the Houston Science Fiction writing group.

I don’t think that I will ever make a fortune writing or that I will even make a good living but I do think that I want  to release some of these ideas out to a wider audience.

I am currently thinking that my focus should go back to what I know best and that my first story should be a familiar theme that I know well and that I am more confident in.  A nice “easy” science fiction story that I can work with my editor on and get ready for publication.

I wish I could do something more literary as my first effort but if I’m going to take the plunge into publishing I think that I need to do something where I can build up my confidence and my experience first before tackling something more substantial.

Posted in: goals, myths, thought, writing

Comparisons and contrasts

February 3, 2015 6:40 AM , Leave a Comment ,

So there I am sitting on a bench waiting for my turn and feeling somewhat nervous.  Waiting for what? For indoor skydiving.  I know I’m not jumping out of a plane at 10,000 feet and that it’s totally safe but still…

 

As it turned out it was quite a lot of fun.  It’s just one of several new things that I’ve tried in the last year and that I will try in the coming year. I am trying to stretch out to try several new things (rock climbing and free running are next on the agenda) and so far they’ve all been quite exciting and fun.

During my vacation I tried out several new things including surfing (I would need 6 months of continuous practice to become an adequate surfer), ATV driving (somewhat terrifying) zip lines (fairly fun).

 

The Author, hanging on for dear life.

The Author, hanging on for dear life.

One thing I noticed during my zip line experience was how the zip line trainers were so at home in the trees that they were nonchalant and self-confident hooking themselves up to the lines and would fling themselves out into empty space without a second thought.  I suppose it’s due to the fact that they’ve done this so much that they’re accustomed to it now and they’ve lost all the reticence that first timers like me have.

I noticed the same attitude with the sky diving instructors.  They all had more than 5 years experience with the wind tunnel and with actual sky diving so that they could now just meander around the wind tunnel effortlessly and launch themselves up and down with just a slight shift of their body position.

On the drive home I started thinking about them and the zip line guys.  Basically they were doing the same job, providing safe thrills for tourists while doing something that they really loved.

I then started thinking about one of Leslie Farnsworth’s blogs about rat races not just here but in other countries.  One group of guys working in an ultra modern indoor wind tunnel, the other group working on a tropical paradise among the trees.  Who’s to say which group is luckier or has the better job.

The main thing though is that both groups get to do something fun, they get to meet a lot of interesting people while doing it, and of course they’re able to make a living doing it.

I think that’s the key thing that most people are looking for in a job or a career.  No matter where you live or what you do for a living you want to be able to do something that you will enjoy.

When you find that career or job that you like then the location really doesn’t matter as much.  The working experience more than makes up for any differences in salary or where the job is located.  Your working day becomes something to look forward to rather than a chore.

Sometimes when I’m working away and it’s a particularly rough week I have to step back and think about the times when work is a joy and when things were going well and remind myself why I got into this line of work in the first place.

 

Posted in: activities, career, jobs, life in general, thought

How late is it?

January 26, 2015 6:32 AM , Leave a Comment ,

Last week a relic from a past age made its presence felt once again.  The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists (BAS) moved the doomsday clock forward to 3 minutes before midnight.  For those too young to remember the cold war, the BAS, first introduced the Doomsday Clock in 1947 as a way to inform the public of their belief of how close to a global disaster that we were at.

My watch, set nowhere near to Doomsday.

My watch, set nowhere near to Doomsday.

Over the decades the Doomsday Clock has moved forward or backwards depending on the combined opinions of the BAS governing board primarily with regards to the Cold war.  Recently however the BAS has expanded its scope to include such things as terrorism and global warming as possible factors that may lead to a global disaster.

I have to wonder however if the Doomsday Clock is still relevant or even all that accurate.  The governing board of the BAS has stated that the clock is not meant to track all the everyday ups and downs of the world situation but meant to track overall trends.  Not so much a clock but maybe a barometer or perhaps even a farmer’s almanac of doom.

The Clock has two problems.  Firstly, the global situation can change so quickly sometimes.  Sometimes these changes are substantial and the Clock misses these.  I know that they want to predict the overall threat of a global disaster occurring but minimizing or even disregarding these changes makes the clock less accurate.

Secondly the Clock has an image problem.  The general public has become somewhat immune to the Clock’s dire predictions over the years and announcements from the BAS are treated as pretty blasé and unimportant.

If the BAS intends the Clock to be more impactful, then they have to announce the meetings to change the time beforehand and make the deliberations public to let the general population know what they are thinking.

Short little notes like the ones that they currently release cause a flurry of news activity for a few days or weeks but overall they do nothing to affect change.

Really if they intend the Clock to mean anything then they need to change the way that they present the information to the public.

Posted in: current events, politics, science, thought

living with your choices

January 24, 2015 6:45 AM , Leave a Comment ,

32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37 strokes.

1 stroke over from my last lap.  Have to reach farther with each stroke on the return lap.  I’m in the Memorial Athletic Club at 6 on a Saturday morning.  Outside it’s freezing and I’m the only one here swimming laps.  I’ve been assigned to swim laps by my trainer for the next 3 months.  Something that a few years ago I would not have dreamed of doing. Not because I couldn’t because frankly I just wouldn’t.

Sometimes you just have to do things for yourself.

I’ve had friends offer to set me up with trainers and recommend clubs and regimens to get fit but none of it seemed quite right.  I mean I’m sure the trainers were great and the facilities were top-notch and the exercises probably work but it never seemed to be quite right for me.

Still feel like a jerk for not taking what they offered but in the end it’s me that has to put in the effort, right?  I have to be comfortable with the choices I make and then follow through with them.

Return lap, I get a nose full of chlorine water, snort it out and keep paddling.

Another good example, I got into the real estate game last year and another friend offered up some contacts in the Sugarland real estate market.  Sugarland is a nice place to live, probably lots of good houses and opportunities and probably a good investment but I just don’t know the area.  I don’t know how the traffic patterns run, what the school districts are like or where most people like to shop and a myriad of other things.  Whats more I don’t have the time to research it all so I said thanks but no thanks and went ahead with an area I did know.

You’ve got to have confidence in your choices.

If you go in with confidence in your choice then you are much more likely to engage with that choice once you get involved and you are much more likely to make the best of it.  With a choice that you don’t have confidence in you will likely be tentative, you will be slow off the mark and lose time, you won’t get the full advantage of your decision.

Walking back to the locker room.  So cold.

So is it the old dictum of “A good plan today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow“?

Sort of.  More like a “A good choice you can work with is better than a perfect choice you can’t live with”

Or something like that.

Posted in: activities, business, decisions, health, life in general, thought

Trying too many things at once

January 20, 2015 6:25 AM , Leave a Comment ,

The year began with a flurry of activity on all fronts.  I wanted to make 2015 a better year than 2014 was.  I planned it out before the start of the year, I got things lined up, and was all set when January 1st rolled around.

But then a couple of things hit me by surprise and I had a rough start that got me all panicky. I’ve now settled down and am trying to make the plan work.

The main issue now is trying to get everything resorted and going again.  I went back and reviewed my goals for the year and came to a couple of realizations.  Firstly that it’s 18 pages long.  How did I get that complicated? So many goals and sub-goals and extended goals.  Looking at the totality of it all it seems daunting.

Secondly that although the plan is overly detailed in some ways that in other more important ways it’s totally not detailed at all. Things aren’t organized by priority or have specific dates or have specific goals or targets.  As a consequence I’ve been trying to do it all at once and I don’t think I’m utilizing my time to the best advantage.

With everything that’s happened already I feel like it should be February but I look at the calendar and it’s barely the middle of the month.  At the same time I feel that I am falling behind.  I am definitely having to review my goals more than last year.

But I think if I am going to make any progress at all that I have to step up and stress myself.  I don’t mean failure stress, that is to stress the system till it breaks down but definitely stress the system more.  Only in this way will I make any forward progress.

I have to remember that I have the whole year to get some of these things done and that things will get done.  Things are getting done.  I just have to be more patient.

Posted in: activities, goals, schedules, thought, time

Are we closer to or further from racial equality?

January 18, 2015 7:15 AM , Leave a Comment ,

[Author’s note:  This is the next in a series of writing challenges first proposed to me by Leslie Farnsworth.  Leslie has organized and expanded the challenge to include a larger group of excellent blog writers.  Once per month, one member of the group will propose a topic and we will all give our own unique take on the subject.  I proposed the latest topic.  You may want to look at the other bloggers listed below to see what they came up with.]

I suppose that I am fortunate that I’ve only really felt the sting of prejudice a couple of times in my life.  Most of the people who I know or associate with are open-minded individuals that look past the outer shell of their fellow human beings and don’t care what the outside looks like.

But I also know that my experience is for the most part unique and I am aware that in some situations that my race will come into play.  Every Latino or Black male knows what to do during a traffic stop.  Hands firmly on the steering wheel or on the front dash-board, no sudden moves, always answer “yes, sir” or “no, sir”.  Never give them a reason to hold you or to draw their weapon.  Police interactions with minorities have been unfortunately too well documented in the last year.  What you look like does make a difference in the way that an individual policeman or the justice system in general will deal with you.

But that could just be outdated attitudes within governmental structures and those kind of structures take time to readjust and change.  In general are we as a society or just as individuals beginning to get past racial differences and treating each other equally?

On the surface I would say yes.  I mean you really have to search hard and roam far and wide to find the most backward and out of touch corners of the country with people who openly use racial slurs and pridefully display their prejudicial attitudes.

For the most part people who engage in reprehensible bigotry in our day and age are routinely pilloried and lashed by public opinion.   That type of racism is a dying institution.

But does that mean we’re there? Do we live in a colorblind society? I wish I could say yes but I routinely encounter what I term “passive racism”.  I’ve been in office buildings where I was mistaken for janitorial staff just due to the way that I look or sometimes people will assume that I don’t “hablo Ingles” and start speaking to me in a pidgin English to try to communicate with me.

Are these people doing these things in a mean or spiteful spirit?  No, of course not.  But they have been raised in and live in a system where they see a particular skin color and make some assumptions based off that and sometimes the results are not as benign or merely annoying as the above examples.  Sometimes the results of this type of attitude can mean that certain opportunities are closed off even before anything happens or sometimes the consequences can even be deadly.

Will it get better?  I think so.  More than ever before mass media is homogenizing the culture and its message reaches out in every direction.  The message being broadcast is that despite any outward differences that we are all humans and carry the same type of problems around and are all looking for the same type of solutions to those problems.  It will take time of course but given time and honest effort I think that it can happen.

 

 

 

Posted in: life in general, prejudice, racism, thought

Staycation 2007

January 16, 2015 6:49 AM , Leave a Comment ,

[Author’s note:  This is a reprinted blog from 2007.  Sorry about doing 2 reprints in a row.  I had a late meeting (ironically about blog writing and one of the topics was how to plan my blog more efficiently) and had to scramble for a filler post.]

September

Work piles up. It always does no matter how far ahead you think you are, you’re never really ahead. Clients in Canada, Germany, India. All of them want their products and want them now. The boss wants a proposal ready for one of the companies biggest clients and wants it today so you drop all the other urgent projects and work on that.

22 miles to work and 22 miles back and always traffic, always, no matter if its 4:30 AM in the morning or 4 PM in the afternoon. 240 hours driving per year, which works out to 10 solid days of nothing but driving.

It all boils down to stress and plenty of it. It’s been a rough year. Not financially but physically and mentally. Specially mentally. I’ve gotten to the point that I sometimes try to open the office door with my house keys. A Freudian psychologist would call that a slip and a sign that I have begun thinking about the office as my real home.

Whereas last year I was excited about exploring New England, this year nothing appealed to me. When the word vacation came to mind all I could think about was plane schedules, taxi cabs, hotel checkout times, renting cars, all the garbage that comes with a trip.  Made me exhausted just thinking about it. I put it off and waited till finally I said “Screw it. I’m having my vacation at home.”  A new trend becoming more and more popular.  The staycation.

Houston: The new capital of the southwest

I usually make fun of tourists that come to Houston. It’s not much of a touristy city. Oh sure it’s as modern as any in the US. The hospital system is the best in the world, giant buildings downtown, hundreds of miles of freeways, and it has all the requisite major sports teams. But when you come down to it, that s all it has. There’s no Hollywood hills(there’s no hills period), or Times Square, or Golden gate bridge or anything.  We ourselves don’t have a beach or mountains or hundreds of years of accumulated charm and history. It’s a modern factory town (with office buildings replacing the factories). A nice place to live but you wouldn’t want to visit.

But like any big city dweller there are things out there that you could do but somehow you never end up doing.  I suppose you take them for granted and tell yourself that you will do them another time.  So I had that in mind for my staycation.

My body woke me up at 4 AM Monday morning as it always does. I tossed and turned but it’s no use. So I wandered round the house and finally decided to get breakfast but not in the house somewhere that I would never go on a weekday. I went to the 59 diner on highway 59 and Kirby, about 15 miles from where I lived in the suburbs.

If you ever saw the movie pulp fiction, the diner scene, you got a pretty good idea of what it looked like. Mid century design and lots of memorabilia from that era.  A 50’s menu that hadn’t heard of low-fat diets, and waitresses that were probably here when the diner opened up so long ago.  A large and filling breakfast but nothing special.

Returned home around 8:30, and I saw a pack of teens and pre-teens kids hanging around near my house. At first I thought this was a group of gang kids but then I saw the backpacks and books and it dawned on me they were waiting for the school bus. Then I noticed a lot of people were just taking off for work. How odd I thought. All this stuff happens here while I am at work.  Back at the office I would have been working for over 3 hours by now.

I took the money I was going to spend on the trip and put all of that into my savings account. After that I was out of ideas for the day, so I watched TV and tried to lay around. Suburbs are eerily quiet during the day. I would look out the front door and see nothing going on, and I would listen to the house creak every now and then. Not a healthy situation (from a mental health point of view), so I decided to find something to do.

I took a spin around Loop 610, the main bypass freeway that rings most of inner Houston.  Not just part of it but all of it.  Seeing parts of town I hadn’t seen for ages.  The Astrodome, the east side of Houston, passing by north end and then back by the Galleria.

Wednesday on a whim I went to the Galleria. This was the premier mall of Houston. Other malls were larger but the Galleria was the “it” place to shop in Houston. In the well to do part of town. Back in the oil boom days, the well to do of Houston would come here as they do now and put in a hard days shopping and lunching.

I though it odd since I remembered a story I had heard years back when I was a stock boy in a supermarket. An old Mexican that worked with me told me back when he was a kid in the 40’s that the land where the mall lay was all bayous and forests and his dad used to take him hunting rabbits. Now its all concrete and steel, Jaguars, Beemers, and Mercedes.

Back in my high school days the truant from my school would head here to basically loiter round the mall till the school day was done. I hadn’t been to the Galleria in about 8 years, and I wasn’t prepared for the changes. I always knew it had been a high-end mall but this was pure culture shock. They had expanded the mall, added tons of new shops. It was all gleaming and shiny.

Clothing boutiques of all sorts, jewelry stores with more gold, silver, and gems than was ever dreamt of by any pirate. All the old stores like Foley’s and Joske’s were gone replaced by Macy’s and Nordstroms. And people, tons and tons of people. What were they doing here? Didn’t they have jobs? It was 11AM, why weren’t these people at work? It was a mixture of culture shock and outrage. Was I really so out of touch?

Dining

My life is fairly regimented.  Go in to work, do your job, go home.  Every week day and then on the weekends you can do something different.  Always the same thing every week.  When you have this siege type mentality about your daily life you dream about simple pleasures.

Going out for a simple steak dinner is one such pleasure. The Outback steakhouse is just a step above Chili’s really. But since I hadn’t been to one in so long it was like an oasis for me. The steak was tough and ridiculously over salted, the baked potato was a cluster bomb of sour cream, bacon, and butter but I didn’t care. Such a long-long time. And that was the problem. A couple of hours passed and my stomach wasn’t doing so well. Maybe its eating the same bland diet month after month or just overdoing it. Close to losing it but I didn’t.

Kaneyama, a wonderful sushi place with Miso soup to die for, colorful and tasty sushi and sashimi, and teriyaki steak that seems to melt in your mouth. Kasra’s Persian grill with light pillow bread and a Persian salad. The Palm Club, another steakhouse with over the top prices but with a classic atmosphere that makes you swear you were in a Fitzgerald novel in the 20’s.  So many good places to eat yet I never go to them.

Liquor. My drinking days are past me. I had some wine during the week but nothing else. Back in my heyday I could down a Long Island Ice tea, a couple of shots of three wise men, and a flaming Dr. pepper (remind me to tell you bout that one day), Nowadays….I had a couple of glasses of wine Wednesday night and had a mild headache on Thursday morning.

People Watching

People watching is a bad habit of mine. Whether it’s at a mall or a park or at the museum like I did this week. Always on the outside looking in. Hordes of school kids at the museum being chaperoned by a frazzled school teacher and a curator who seems like she’s past the point of total boredom.  Cliques of upper class ladies at lunch in some fancy restaurant in the Galleria next to the skating rink, complaining about how rough life was while next door at a pizza parlor there’s a young couple trying to make lunch out of a single slice of pepperoni pizza for them and their 5-year-old kid.  Little vignettes of life.

Epilogue: Thoughts and plans

This type of vacation gives you a lot of time to think. Is this the type of life I want for myself? Am I just going to count down the weeks till next year’s vacation? Why was it that I took things so seriously while others just seem to cruise through life without a care? After seeing all this can I really go back to the 10 to 12 hour work day with nothing waiting for me at home?

Posted in: Houston, thought, vacations

Charlie

January 12, 2015 6:22 AM , Leave a Comment ,

It bears discussing because the whole Charlie Hebdo attack opens up a whole series of issues and questions concerning our support of free speech, the necessary steps to provide security for citizens of a democratic state, and just how we plan to balance the two.  I don’t propose to solve anything in this post just to raise some questions and maybe spark some conversation.

I deliberately said “we” up above as I think it’s understood that the attack on this small newspaper in France is really more than just an attack on a provocative publication in another country.  The attack was meant to do more than just murder a few reporters and editors.  The attack was an attempt to muzzle free expression and to dictate what could and could not be published.

In that aspect I think the attack largely failed.  The feedback and public outrage over the past couple of days has if anything strengthened the convictions of most of the public and the publishing world to continue freely publishing whatever they want in whatever manner that they want.

Some argue that Charlie Hebdo brought this upon themselves by not moderating or minding who they offended.  But honestly that’s part of the point of such publications.  They exist to elicit a reaction, to bring up a mirror, perhaps a warped mirror, to a situation and ask the public at large to look and discuss.

Charlie Hebdo is an extreme case of course but they act as outliers for mainstream publications that print less provocative material and who would be the next targets of terrorists if the Charlies of the world did not exist.  I don’t like everything that Charlie Hebdo publishes.  I’m not a regular reader but I’ve found some of the things that they have published to be vulgar and offensive.  But it is in guaranteeing their right to exist and to work that we safeguard the right of the rest of the news media to operate.

The attacks may have had some negative effects.  The security agencies in the West will look at this and pronounce that this perfectly illustrates why they need to have more latitude in how they deal with the general population and that personal liberties concerns have to become secondary at least “temporarily” while the terrorist threat is sorted out.

Unfortunately temporary measures seem to have a way of morphing into permanent measures with a disturbing regularity.  I can still barely remember accompanying a friend at an airport while she waited for her flight and seeing her to the very gate before she left.  All I had to do was pass through a very basic metal detector.  Nowadays I couldn’t even go through that metal detector without a valid airline ticket and picture ID.  It will certainly be interesting to see how the security apparatus tries to use this incident in the next year and how far the public will let them go.

An even less savory aspect of this whole mess is how it will affect the religious and ethnic minorities in the West.  People are tired of terrorism and war.  Incidents like this work well for hate mongers and bigots that want to restrict immigration and curve discussions between radically different groups of people.  These hate mongers will inevitably point to something like this and say “See, this is what happens when we open up our borders.”

But I think the counter argument to this is “see, this is what happens when we close our minds, when we stop empathizing with our fellow human beings in other parts of the world and treat them as different people to be feared.”  More communication, more discussion, more freedom is what is ultimately needed here.  Not less.

We cannot and should not let incidents like this close off our minds and make us live in fear of our fellow human beings.  The only way we can solve problems like terrorism is by opening ourselves up to others.

 

Posted in: current events, thought