Random Thoughts.

It is humbling that my poor past post is missing altogether. Flagged down, perhaps? Or worse, did I do something clever, like forget in my haste to confirm the posting?

There is today a growing gap between the rich and poor. Convenient as it might be to point fingers at America, our recent crises have only served to humble us help us to share a plight with the entire human race, rather than politely acting as saviors and liberators, always pausing to wash our hands when we finish. If complete and total economic ruin is required to remind us of our own humanity, so be it. It is a priceless lesson that we all must learn.

The struggle to either clarify or eliminate the gap between rich and poor is an ongoing and repetitive conflict, and to not see it playing out in American politics requires blindness or silliness. In the United States, it takes the form of corporate blundering and dehumanization.

America wasn’t always in its current state of division, but one of the most fundamental principles, that of a tendency of certain individuals to accumulate material wealth, is an inevitable outgrowth of a thriving financial system, America being no exception. Our country, our economy, and our culture act together as a living entity, in a constant flux of change and growth, and a perpetual slide of theater and distraction.

Thinking on a grander scale, how far we have come as a race, and ultimately ours is a shared prosperity at the end of it! Once, in the dim mists of antiquity, ours was a collective struggle between the haves and have-nots for our very survival. There were times when those with the power of fire survived, and those without perished. More recently, we moved to a point where those without resources discovered that it was possible to violently overthrow those with a monopoly on resources and violent force. A subtle shift, but it was critical that we begin to rediscover the power of the masses.

Now we have made another brilliant discovery, the notion of non-violent non-cooperation, the simple realization that slavery ultimately requires the cooperation of both captor and slave.

Ghandi listed the fundamental principles of non-violent revolution, elaborated on its benefits, and ultimately proved its effectiveness. His basic principles can largely be summed up as elminating the notion of “us vs. them”. When we can all, rich and poor, understand that our common adversary is the chasm between us (cultural, financial, educational, or otherwise) and not one another, our prosperity will be a shared one.

Martin Luther King, Jr. emulated the philosophies of Mohandas Ghandi with great success, but any continuing gap between black and white highlights the fact that while the actions were similar, he failed largely due to the lack of a corresponding cultural shift on both sides, due no doubt to his assassination. While healing a partial rift in the south, people still walk around with a notion of “us” and “them”.

We must evolve our ways of thinking to achieve peace, or we will remain no better than violent animals. We must challenge our basic assumptions to achieve cultural literacy, or we will develop no further than a masked and decorated feudalism.

I can hear my own parents now, wondering why their son has turned to new-age feel-good warm fuzzy togetherness after being brought up to know better. It is this very tendency to try to educate our young to think in those terms that must be overcome.

Someone once told me that true change takes several generations: one to stage a revolt, one to tolerate the change, one to begin to live the change, and finally one to be born into a completely new way of life.

We need to begin reading our Ghandi.

There Ought to Be a Law!

One day, Locke, I’ll be happy to wield the tiniest (and most kind) bit of power from orbit, and allow you to be the ruthless but practical face of the future. It amazes me how strong our friendship, in spite of (or because of) how completely opposite we are. I’ve been blogging this whole time and basking in my complete lack of an audience, practicing writing without public opinion to lend a hand, and thought it high time I do some good.

But to the point!

Chicago is pushing for a camera on every street corner, much the same way Clinton once spoke of a cop on every corner. Perhaps in an inner-city war zone that sort of strategy might make sense. In an occupied territory, that might make sense. Many things make sense in the heat of battle that seem inappropriate elsewhere.

One could quickly and easily argue that in the relatively civilized and polite city of Portland, an over-abundance of trigger-happy officers, armed to the teeth and eager to shoot someone in the face to break the monotony, proves ill-suited in a host of ways. They impinge upon our freedom. They intrude upon our privacy. Their tendency for bullying makes the streets less safe than the presence of the criminals they claim to thwart. They feel themselves to be above the law, and thus damage the rule of law, making Portland a little bit less civilized by their daily choice of behavior. A paranoid, ill-tempered, well-fortified security force might be the solution to the streets of Kabul or Mogadishu, but Portland is a different city. I don’t have to be judgmental or high-minded to suggest that other places in other circumstances call for completely different approaches to the question of security.

But what in fact is the question of security? A series of assumptions about what the question entails result in the wild variation in the answers offered.

I have been involved with the raising of small children, and one of my favorite techniques when their methods of communication were inadequate was to disallow a particular method altogether. They soon found themselves required to describe a wide array of emotional responses on par with adults when fussing and crying went mostly ignored. They learned that there was no such thing as being “bad” or “good”, only what you do and do not do. Consequently, it was far more effective to have a discussion about obedience or manners rather than just telling them to stop being bad, and be good instead.

In the same manner, let’s drop the question of “security” altogether for now, and focus on describing what we would each like to see accomplished in concrete terms that can be measured and achieved. We quickly see two distinct questions emerge, as different from one another as can be, and both claiming the title of “security.” The first set of goals, shared almost universally, find their voice in the Magna Carta: to be able to maintain ones home and raise a family free from unnecessary interference. This includes notions such as privacy, a desire to avoid home invasion, and personal safety. The other question, one that becomes stickier, and ultimately proves destructive to the first set of aims, is the desire for control. It takes many forms, from neighborhood associations to lawsuits, but boils down to a desire to mitigate the changing world around us, and limit the number of unpleasant surprises we might face.

Different cultures balance these two competing notions in a variety of manifestations, ranging from outright totalitarianism at one extreme to something not unlike the nascent American representative democracy, a miracle of design in the face of technological and informational limitations. But so long as these are all described as a struggle to “enforce” or “ensure” security, there will be confusion.

The more group-conscious will see a struggle for civilization and culture in all its diverse forms. They walk around with a desire to limit crime, to make it difficult and painful to harm your neighbor, to prevent it whenever possible. Others will see it as a struggle for control. These are the types trying to make it more and more complicated to get on an airplane or buy a nasal decongestant. You’ll notice that their efforts in these areas, often costly and intrusive, completely fail to ensure personal safety in any way and seem to be more distraction and obfuscation than doing anything to improve quality of life.

Chicago is trying to put cameras on every street corner, making huge strides in establishing control over an uncoordinated populace, and completely failing to make any conscious effort to make it a safer city in which to live or visit.

Portland and its ilk tend to favor the notion of self-determinism, gently paraphrased as “freedom.” It is this thing alone, not weather, economics, or environmentalism that make Portland the wonderful place to live that it has become. This is what we value, and what we have purchased. We set out specifically each morning to make our home a comfortable one, and that is what our efforts have borne. In a city where individuals set out to dominate those around them, to concentrate their power and monopoly on the use of violent force, what other outcome can their possibly be but an edgy police state?

This is all lovely rhetoric, but I do in fact have an aim.

Ghandi made his big push using “civil disobedience,” another way of saying “polite rebellion,” and we can already see examples in recent history. When it was discovered that Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo were using torture to interrogate detainees, several state legislatures and municipalities passed resolutions specifically making torture illegal, drawing attention to the fact that the greater whole, the United States, had no such law, much to our collective embarrassment. When the NSA began raiding telecommunications companies for phone records, Qwest politely rebelled, refusing as much as possible to cooperate.

I would like to propose, much to the embarrassment of Chicago, a law of civil disobedience. In the City of Portland, it should be unlawful to operate an unmanned camera or recording device on public property for any reason.

Before anyone gets frustrated about the thought of removing dash cams from police cars, ask yourself whether it’s more dangerous at the end of the day to have less police oversight in a freer city, or more police oversight in a surveillance society. Allow me to answer: power-hungry men will control all of the footage every time. Any other result is an illusion. Those who would operate a surveillance camera want control, to prevent you from selling drugs, or demonstrating without a license, or loitering too long in one place. Those same recordings quickly disappear when they might inconveniently expose an abuse of power. It takes breathtaking naivete to expect anything else, here, in Chicago, or anywhere.