In which I argue with our collective conscience.
Everyone’s pissed off at BP.
They’re so mad they want to put the company out of business right this goddamned instant. At protests, their posters say things like, “BP gets rich, the people and the planet pay the price” and “Seize BP’s assets!” (1)
The heartbreaking images of birds covered in muck stir them to a seething rage. They’re instigating anti-BP groups all over the net(2). They’re pissed off, and they want you to do your part and boycott BP stations beginning right freakin’ now.
I humbly submit that these people are all being ignorant asshats.
What? What?! You’re wondering how I, your friend and previously non-insane person, could possibly think that? Well here’s the deal, people:
BP is our fault.
A 42-gallon barrel of oil(3) only produces about 20 gallons of gas. The rest of the barrel is used to make virtually everything in your home. And I mean everything: umbrellas, pillows, thermometers, Scotch tape, snorkels, ear phones.
Poker chips, insulated boots, Q-tips, prescription glasses. Bubble bath. Coffee pots. Glad Ware.
Vacuum bottles. Patio furniture. Garden hoses. Caulk. Brake fluid. Crayons.(4) I don’t care how crunchy and “green” your life is. If you’re in society at all, you use oil every single day of your life.
So this BP disaster is our fault, because BP exists to obtain the oil we need to make the items we buy every day. We buy a lot of toothbrushes and Crayons, because we’ve increased the world’s population by over two billion people in the last forty years(5). BP didn’t make us do that.
This event is not only a terrible environmental disaster, but it’s arguably the mother of all public relations problems. BP is losing money hand over fist, something I feel safe assuming they don’t like to do. This was an accident, not a calculated insult to the world’s ecology.
Most sadly, it’s simply one more accident in a long, long list of horrible accidents(6) that we’ve all ignored.
The reason us rich white folks are galvanized right now is because this disaster is in our rich, white backyard. We don’t even know that Nigeria is a toxic wasteland due to our endless need for oil(8).
The insult we’re perpetrating on the world, in my opinion, is that we’re not even smart enough to use our extensive education and wealth to do this indignant reaction thing right, we’re just slapping up toothless boycottbp.org websites and feeling smug about our FB groups and about how committed and pro-active we are, and then we go on using all the petroleum-based products we always use, and don’t even bother to learn that they ARE petroleum-based products or what they cost the rest of the world.
People are standing around in their clothes made of oil derivatives in their houses made of oil derivatives with their oil-derivative toothbrushes in their mouths screaming, “Fuck BP, those motherfuckers, look what they’ve done! They’re evil!”
Well, they’re not evil. Greedy, maybe, and lazy, and rich, but they hardly did this on purpose. They’re a big goddamned nasty clusterfuck of companies, sure, but what they’re doing is getting oil out of the earth so you can live the way you like. Your sputtering outrage and indignation makes you look foolish, don’t you see, because you choose not to understand that you’re culpable, you yourself. It’s not a them-versus-us issue here: BP is not the villain in some kind of thin little morality play. WE’RE ALL THE VILLAIN, everyone who buys pretty much anything, ever.
Of course we didn’t mean it, of course we didn’t mean to destroy 120 miles of gulf coast, but it happened. Of course we want to do something about it. But. Boycotting BP is a horrible idea because it lets people believe that they’re making a difference when they most assuredly are not. Boycotters will buy their gas across the street from their local BP franchise, and then they’ll go shopping at Walmart, not even knowing that most of what they’re buying has some oil-derivative component in it. Then they’ll go to bed at night feeling smug, while small franchise gas stations have to lay off their staff. What steps are we taking, with this boycott, to reduce or oil consumption? Um, none.
The salient point is that BP doesn’t even own the majority of its gas stations. They’re all franchises(7). Come on, people, you’re boycotting your community members and neighbors. During a recession. In what universe does this even make sense?
The screamers and the outraged ones seriously need to go home, shut up, and take an honest look at how oil affects their lives. If they want to give up all that stuff, fine: they need to find a way to do so and thereby change the market. I’m all for that. If they don’t, they need to knock off the bitching and vitriolic language and figure out grown-up ways of expressing their grief over the gulf, like getting trained and going there to help, or helping to draft new safety regulations and responsibility caps, or deciding where not to drill, or giving their money to brain trusts who can figure out how to replace oil’s ubiquity in modern life.
I don’t have the answer. I don’t know how to fix it. I live as lightly as I possibly can: I don’t own a car; I consume less than the typical amount of resources most Americans do; I don’t eat 200 lbs. of animal flesh every year; I reuse my baggies and Ziplocs and even take-out containers… that’s what I do. That’s all I know how to do. But most people don’t live like me [seriously, I don’t blame them]. Most people need Crayons, and insulated boots, and refrigerant, and Glad Ware. Who the hell am I to take it away from them?
Nobody. That’s why I don’t try to. Besides, it’s not like I don’t have a netbook, and earphones, and CDs and DVDs and prescription glasses and contact lenses and toothbrushes myself.
Yes, it’s a mess. We all get that. Now: since we’re done with our silly “Boycott BP” thing, how do we fix it?
1 BP Oil Spill Protests
2 Boycott BP
3 Barrel
4 A partial list of products made from Petroleum
5 Total Population of the World by Decade, 1950–2050
6 Oil Spills and Disasters
7 Punishing BP Is Harder Than Boycotting Stations
8 Nigeria’s agony dwarfs the Gulf oil spill. The US and Europe ignore it
In which I share a little revelation I had last night.
While chatting with Mel over IM, I made an offhand comment containing that famous axiom from 80’s flick War Games: “The only winning move is not to play.”
And then I realized how very much I believe that.
If I find myself in a situation I do not like and that I think I can’t change, I just… stop playing. Quit. Move on.
This is why I didn’t finish my undergrad at MIU, and my only reason ever for quitting jobs or leaving relationships. Most of the time, the axiom protects me: if you’re married to someone you have nothing in common with, you can play for the rest of your life and never do anything but lose. Clearly, not playing is the only winning move. But sometimes, a more sticktoitive attitude would probably have served me better: it was hardly brilliant to drop out of college during my senior year just to make a political point that no one heard.
Is it possible that my very-low bullshit tolerance was fostered by a movie?
Eh, probably not. But maybe! I remember feeling such relief when Joshua realized that some shit was too stupid to waste one’s time (and/or processor cycles) on.
Today I live in a spare bedroom and can fit everything I own into the bed of a small pickup. I just plain don’t do or have what everyone else does. Is this because I’m a quitter, or because I simply have a different agenda than my peers?
The only person I know who has less property than I do is Corby; if his stuff is packed into his jeep he can actually see over it. (I should follow his example and get a tent and a 4WD vehicle, better to camp on your lawn with.) Everyone else, even my spiritually-inclined friends and my migrant father, have accumulations of belongings that indicate, to some degree, their stature. They own houses, furniture, Cuisinarts. They have deeds and titles and certificates. Most of them had a much higher bullshit tolerance than I ever did: they finished school, at least. Is that what enabled them to accumulate so much property? Or would they have done so anyway?
Even my father has a home full of objects, it just happens to be on wheels.
I can’t figure out what this means. I have no interest in buying a house and filling it with stuff. I remember really wanting to, once, but that desire is gone now, burned up. I don’t want to find a lover and build a life together anymore, either. It’s as if my brief stint as a married person absolutely finished any karma I had in those areas…
Oh. Hmm. Maybe I’ll be a renunciate in my next life. That’d be cool.
I wanted so terribly much to fall in love and get married. It was my primary goal as long as I can remember. I wanted to have the coolest house in the world. When someone finally proposed, I felt as if my life had finally done what it was supposed to!
Except being married and keeping house for yourself sucks. I didn’t like it. It’s like chaining yourself to the earth. Every new item that you acquire makes your soul heavier. I couldn’t find the desire to go into debt buying stuff to make my house nicer than functional. Who would that benefit?
But I have wonderful, inquisitive, spiritual friends who live in houses with spouses and possessions and it doesn’t fuck them up.
I don’t feel suited to the regular world any more, but at least I can pass. That’s something to be grateful for, yes?
In which there’s a short story, apropos of nothing.
1.
His name was Randy and he was a total pud, but he was so big and lurking and earnest that putting up with him had the advantage of keeping all the other jobless, vid-playing puds out of my personal orbit.
“I’m going because it’ll be like being a cowboy,” he enthused. “Like the wild West. Real men, real women. No fuckin’ rules!”
“I’m going because I can’t find a job,” I said for the hundredth time. “Just like you.” I studied his flat, bland face again. He looked like he lived in his mother’s basement and delivered pizzas for beer money, but he’d passed the tests which meant he had to be at least as competent as I was. “I’m telling you, it’s not a video game. It’s a planet where you can’t go outside without a space suit. It’s gonna be rough up there, man. And we’re never coming back. Do you know anything about Mars?”
“Yeah, I watch FoxComm,” he said. “It’s a great opportunity. We’re colonizing a whole new planet!” The guy was utterly sincere.
“Whatever, kiddo,” I said, and turned back around to face the front of the line. If it was such a great opportunity, I thought for the thousandth time, the rich would be going instead of us lower middle-class meat baffles.
I’d originally presented for emigration in Omaha, where I’d passed the primary entry with flying colors. It had consisted of three days of basic testing – reading comprehension, basic math, grade school science – with number two pencils, a lot like sitting through competencies in high school, and an afternoon of pushups and jogging that had neatly cut the obese who had made up well over half the applicants. Then I’d received about three pounds of paperwork on actual paper that I was admonished not to lose and spent three sticky, smelly days on a bus in a convoy of obviously retired Greyhound busses on the way to the south.
In Texas we’d been issued pup tents and MREs and directed to set up in orderly rows in an abandoned football stadium. I’d been taking PTA baths in a bathroom sink for 72 hours and was seriously thinking of renting a motel room with the last of my money just for a real shower. At night, they showed educational videos on the stadium’s screens so we’d know how to operate airlocks and what death by Martian exposure was really like.
Most of the males continued to look at the whole thing like a glorified video game. I don’t think they really understood that Mars was a real place, and that dying there didn’t include respawning back at the base for another run. Most of the women were like me: single, childless, squeezed out of various obsolete corners of the tech industry. We chatted amiably enough in the bathrooms, but it seemed none of us were really prone to networking. The men outnumbered us ten-to-one.
“Man, this line is long,” Randy said again.
Continue reading »
In which there are a few unrelated things.
Good news! I got half of my CAT/TB response back in the mail already, and my CAT application has been approved! This means that I no longer have to look for work, they’ll just give me my UI benefits until May of 2011.
Yesterday I logged into WWCC’s financial aid portal, and they seem to think I need $16k for three quarters of school. Weird. Tuition and books shouldn’t cost more than six grand.
I also found a list of grants to apply for. Maybe I’ll get lucky and not have to borrow anything at all. How awesome would that be?
My bedroom – the room in which I spend the vast majority of my time – is clean: ALL of my laundry is done and put away, the bed is made, and the trash has been emptied. It’s lovely and coherent up in here.
My awesome currently reading list is awesome.
In the interest of full disclosure, I must report that I’m having a relapse and need to quit smoking. Again.
In other news, my dog is also awesome. Just sayin’.
Update: I’ve been approved for EB (extended benefits) too! This is sweet!
Being a running list:
In which I share the story of my 2010 pilgrimage to Mother’s feet.
Guru brahma gurur visnuh
gurudevo mahesvarah
guru saksat parambrahma
tasmai srigurave namah
(I prostrate to that Sri Guru who is Brahma, Vishnu, and God Maheshwara, and who is verily the Supreme Absolute Itself.)
At the very front of the archana book, there is a 3-and-a-half page manasa puja. I read through it once several years ago.
I don’t remember having any particular response to it other than perhaps the vague opinion that it was a simple or childish form of worship.
Now it elucidates my longing so much that I wish I’d written it myself.
. .. … .. . .. … .. .
The Seattle programs are awkward. There’s a public program, then a paid retreat, then a public program. The only way to get to both public programs is to be in Seattle for three days; if you’re going to be there anyway you might as well sign up for the retreat. And, if you can’t afford the retreat, well, only one public program for you then.
I couldn’t afford the retreat. Hell, I couldn’t even afford transportation to Seattle. The only reason I was able to see Mother at all this year is because a friend, Toni, saw my sad complaint on Facebook and offered to drive me across the state.
When I asked her why she wanted to do that, she said she’d “felt compelled” to take me to Amma. When I sent her a link to amma.org, she cried looking at an image of Mother.
“It happens,” I told her. “If Mother wants to meet you, She’ll meet you.” How lucky am I, that Mother found me a ride?
. .. … .. . .. … .. .
After getting a ride, I got the very last room in the “Amma Tour” room block at the Hyatt, but it was $109 per night. I later found a motel through Priceline for $65. It was five miles away from the program, but at least I could afford it.
So my friend Toni picked me up at 8:45 on Monday morning and drove me across the state in her little red late model car so that I could see my beloved Sat-guru, Mata Amritanandamayi Devi.
. .. … .. . .. … .. .
At the motel I loaned Toni a green punjabi, and dressed myself in a white skirt-and-top set I bought at a Chicago program a dozen years ago.
We looked at the map in the phone book for awhile, then we left to find the Hyatt Regency Bellevue. Toni navigates almost entirely by vibe; when I admitted I hadn’t seen the Hyatt where I’d expected it to be (I was looking at the wrong side of the street) she laughed and flipped a U-turn and drove us straight to it.
Parking, miraculously, was free. (We’d already filled the tank. Between the two of us, we had maybe forty dollars.) We went into the Hyatt and got in line with hundreds of devotees. I saw the clothes and the hair and the jewelry and the tattoos and wondered vaguely why humans like to adorn themselves as tribes… I felt some relief: I feel weird about the way I dress because I’m basically the only member of my tribe where I live.
The line started to move. We got to the hall and were handed darshan tokens. Then we followed the directions across the hall and sat for the puja. Toni has bad knees from a car accident she was in, but magically we were seated on the right side of the stage next to the wall so she could stand up when needed without bothering too many people. There were over a thousand people in the hall. Most of the people around us were wearing retreat bracelets.
I sat and relaxed into the vibe. These people had all spent two days with Mother; was that what felt so wonderful? Or was it my own expectation of seeing Mother? Or was Mother thinking about us? If God is everywhere and we’re all capable of producing this ourselves, why don’t we? What made this different than any other gathering of people in any other room?
Amma arrived. Toni said she had a clear view of the pada puja even though it was all the way across the hall. (I don’t think I even knew about pada puja for several years. Everyone’s experience around Amma is so different.)
After the holy water was distributed, something about the shape of the ceiling magnified the sound of thousands of lids being snapped onto thousands of little cups into this wonderful groovy clicky-popping sound. “I LOVE that sound!” I whispered. “I want to sample it RIGHT NOW!” The guy next to me and I started giggling and couldn’t stop.
“It’s like a crooked Zen koan!” he replied. “Like, ‘What is the sound of many lids that don’t fit?'”
Each time one of us stopped giggling, the other would start again. Silly, non-ironic, joyful, childlike laughter. It felt WONDERFUL.
. .. … .. . .. … .. .
Mother gave satsang. I took notes on my iThing. This is what they say:
Dispassion, three types: temporary, gradual, intense.
The body is like a rented house
Awareness – like a bird on a dry twig (at any time it could snap)
When we develop intense dispassion we get peace of mind.
What is the point of blaming others for our sorrow?
. .. … .. . .. … .. .
When Swamiji began the Ma-Om meditation, Toni, who had had to stand up during the satsang, came and sat back down. Meditating in Amma’s presence was, as always, a lot like stepping
calmly
off the edge of the world
into an eternal abyss.
The rest of the puja completed, Mother went into the temple to change and they closed the curtains. Toni and I went for a walk because she’s not used to sitting on the floor so much and her knees were killing her.
. .. … .. . .. … .. .
Dinner was pretty good (especially the mattar paneer).
I would have had Indian snacks instead, but there aren’t any at the Seattle programs; I guess there aren’t really any Indian devotees in the area to make them. I can’t even tell you how much I was hoping for idli and sambar and pakora. OMG what I would give for some samosas! Srsly.
Our tokens were numbered O-3. I told Toni we wouldn’t be getting darshan until three or four o’clock in the morning. We hit the bookstore. I bought a rudraksha japa mala and a new bottle of Marikolundu.
I got some chai. Eventually Toni went and found a couch and napped.
. .. … .. . .. … .. .
I went up to the stage and stared at Amma for a couple of hours.
Well, when I could see Her at all I stared. The devotees doing their various sevas on stage insisted on standing directly in front of me, and I kept crying to Her in my head: “Let me see You! I can’t see You! This is my only time with You all year and this guy has to stand there!” I was feeling extremely sorry for myself that I didn’t get my usual three days with Mother and instead had only a few hours with Her and that guy! Why couldn’t he freakin’ kneel when he wasn’t actively doing his freakin’ seva?! I paced like a caged cat up and down the side of the stage, looking for a glimpse of my beloved Mother. Eventually I perched sideways behind a chair and I could see Her, but it took a toll on my neck and meditating was out of the question.
I went and sat down in front of the stage in a place left empty because the corner of the temple blocked any view of Amma, and meditated for about forty minutes. I’m not sure, but I think I may have fallen asleep. I didn’t nod off or start to fall over – usually a good indication that one has passed out – because I had very carefully arranged my body so that it took no effort to keep it upright, but there was a definite lack of conscious continuity.
Maybe I slept, maybe I had a very deep meditation. I don’t know. The issue caused me to wonder what the difference between “awareness” and “consciousness” might be. Do I have to be one to be the other?
I guess that I possess “consciousness,” because popular opinion and scripture alike say I do, but honestly I don’t know how to define it. I think I’m here and that I’m me, but I can’t tell you why I think that. Am I still conscious when I’m asleep? Can I be conscious without being aware? Can I be aware without being conscious? Most importantly, how do I know I’m me? I don’t have an unbroken recollection of my life; I have chunks of memory bordered by periods of sleep: each iteration of myself as the doer is utterly discrete, and yet I insist that these memories are all beads on the same string. Why do I think that? And how, if indeed at all, does this small-s-self relate to any capital-S-Self I might be trying to become?
I don’t meditate regularly because, honestly, the ever-changing world is more charming than whatever I find inside myself. I understand that the space within is infinitely vast (I can fit a model of the entire universe in there with room to spare), but it doesn’t draw me like the manifest world does. At best, meditation – even in the presence of my Satguru – is no better than just really pleasant, thank you very much.
So it follows that either I’m Doing It Wrong or that I’m missing the point. What is the point? When we see images of saints deep in samadhi, it sure looks like there’s a point. What are they doing in there? And why after twenty years of meditation don’t I know the answer to that question?
. .. … .. . .. … .. .
After a yummy masala latte, I went back to the right side of the stage and found myself a place sitting on the floor directly behind the stairs. From that position, I could see Mother’s face more often than not. (I wanted to be much closer to Her, but everyone was being invited to sit after darshan and between them and the prasad people I figured I’d get booted in a couple of minutes anyway.)
I leaned against the metal banister and rested my chin on the floor of the temple and wondered, as I always do, why She bothers to do this. Why come into the world and do this incredible, endless job of work? Each year She comes, and each year she bootstraps us out of our mess, and we go back into the world full of love and compassion and ready to serve… and slowly, we forget. The next year, She does it again, and so do we. Rinse and repeat. She could just be sitting somewhere in samadhi. Why pour this little bottle of milk into the vast ocean?
“I’m a waste of Your time,” I thought. “These others probably utilize Your grace much better than I. I’m lucky I get even one darshan this year. I deserve less than even this, to sit where I can see You.” I briefly considered leaving without darshan, but even at the time I saw it was some sort of self-pitying ego dance. The mind really is a terrible thing.
“All I care about is You. All I want to do is be around you. Everything else is a waste of time.” I wondered if I wasn’t being a passive Westerner: I have ONLY A FEW HOURS IN HER PRESENCE and am I really just going to sit here? She’s right there! I thought about begging myself onto the prasad list: “I used to be one of the Iowa seva coordinators, but three years ago I moved and now I don’t have a local satsang and I’ve done no seva all year and this is the one and only chance I have to see Mother. How about it, can you get me up there?”
I cried because She’s so perfect and so beautiful. It seems that I had, compacted into my eight hours in Her presence, the same journey I would have had in three days if I’d been on the retreat.
Eventually, the sign said O-1. I went to find Toni. We got into the darshan line. It moved much too fast for me. I was on stage before I knew it, and in the lap almost instantly. I’d been in line between two first-timers, and had harbored a fantasy about sitting right next to Mother for a couple of minutes. Or maybe I’d get to be in the lap while She did mantras… but suddenly, moments after I got into the temple, She hugged me. I thought, “I love You so much, Ma, and all I want is You,” and started to cry, and then my darshan was over. She smiled at me as She handed me my prasad. She knew me – I quit wondering if She recognized me years ago – but there was no super special darshan for me this year, even though I’d been feeling so sorry for myself about only getting the one.
I got the impression I had been officially weaned off of Her form a few years ago (the first time I had had the “I really need to look within and see what’s in there” revelation) and that She knew I knew that. I mean, I remember it. This child doesn’t get long silly darshans; this one is supposed to be doing seva or meditating.
The sevite near the stairs motioned me to sit on the side of the stage. Toni sat behind me after her darshan. The monitor was making the front row get up and leave every 60 seconds. After scootching forward twice I was behind the assistant prasad person and finally close enough to Mother… a minute later I was asked to leave so the people behind me could get their turns too.
I most emphatically DID NOT WANT to leave, now that I’d gotten where I wanted to be.
I left the stage anyway, because I was supposed to.
. .. … .. . .. … .. .
I considered staying until the end of the program; I could maybe catch a cab back to the motel, or Toni could come back get me… After walking to the car and sitting for a few minutes, I decided it would be selfish not to leave. Yes, I was wasting the four to six more hours I could spend in Amma’s presence, but I didn’t have cab fare and it was clearly unfair to steal sleep from Toni, who had so graciously driven me to Seattle in the first place.
It was four o’clock in the morning. We’d been awake for over 22 hours and had driven for over five of them.
We left.
I imagined Mother behind me, giving darshan endlessly, and sniffled a little. The sky was lightening in the east and birds were beginning to sing.
We set an alarm for 10:30 and crashed for six hours. I slept wrapped around my Amma doll.
. .. … .. . .. … .. .
After brunch at a Red Robin in Bellevue, we drove back to Walla Walla. It was overcast nearly the entire way. I plugged in my iPod and we rocked Amma bhajans the whole time.
I did a lot of japa. I got a mocha in Cle Elum. We stopped at a fruit stand-slash-antique store outside of Yakima and browsed for an hour.
I was starving by the time Toni dropped me off. I nuked a bowl of rice and beans immediately. I tried to stay up until a decent hour but I was so tired I failed. I went to bed around six and slept for a very, very, VERY long time.
. .. … .. . .. … .. .
Today I found the manasa puja in the front of my archana book and recognized in it literally all of my current feelings. “Oh Mother,” it says. “You are pure love. I am too impure to deserve Your Grace. I know that my egoism and selfishness must be repelling to You. Still, bear with me. Mother, please be with me. You are the holiest river. I am a stagnant, filthy pond. You flow to me and purify me, overlooking my shortcomings and forgiving my mistakes.” I miss Her so much, and doubt entirely my ability to do anything at all of use outside of Her influence.
Something wonderful must be going on in there, because why else travel the globe merely to hug creatures like me? If enlightenment is loving all of creation as Self, well, it must be more wonderful than it sounds.
~ Om Namah Shivaya ~
Related links:
Amma’s 2010 North American tour schedule
My Flickr picture set
In which I’ve completed phase one of the Back To School project.
A week ago I went to a training benefits meeting at WorkSource, and they gave me an application to fill out.
In the last week I did just that, then attached about 17 pages of appendices, applied to WWCC and for financial aid, met with an advisor, and requested transcripts from my former schools. It was a pain in the ass, really.
Today I went and submitted my completed application. The soft answer – I won’t have the hard one until Friday – is that I’ll probably get CAT (commissioner-approved training), but not EB (extended benefits).
The yes-to-CAT response means I’ll be able to continue getting UI benefits (without having to do the work search part) while enrolled in school. The no-to-EB part means I won’t be getting an extra 20 weeks of benefits.
It’s lucky, then, that I changed my mind and applied for a 1-year certification course instead of the 2-year AAAS I’d been more interested in, because this answer means I wouldn’t have had enough benefits to pay my bills while in school.
If I am approved for EUC (a Federally-funded additional 52 weeks of benefits) next month, I’ll have enough time to finish those three quarters of school and find job before I run entirely out of benefits altogether.
The weird thing about the application process was that I submitted my 25-page application on paper to a guy who typed it all into an e-version and submitted it. “Why didn’t you just give us that version?” I asked, pointing at his computer screen.
“We’re in a pilot program,” he answered. “They used to fax the applications in, and it could take up to three months to get a response. Now it takes 48 hours.”
Oh, well. At least they’re getting somewhere, albeit slowly.
Hopefully I’ll get an official yes for CAT on Friday. If I do, and get financial aid for tuition, I’ll officially be a student!
In which I heartily approve.
Yes. Yes, yes, yes. Yes.
If you’re not familiar with the details of the good doctor’s story, Dr. Wakefield is the guy who published the shoddy research that led thousands of people to believe that there was a link between certain vaccinations and autism. I say ‘shoddy’ because The Lancet retracted the paper soon after it was published (the research was bad and no one could replicate the results) but people continued to believe the results anyway. Long story short, the kicker is this: Dr. Wakefield’s research was paid for by lawyers for parents seeking to sue vaccine makers for damages. The anti-vaccines guy? Was one of them. A guy who didn’t mind doing unnecessary tests on children to get a big paycheck. A big pharma asshole with low morals and a lust for money.
Actually, go read this comic. It’s informative. It’s awesomesauce. It’s just plain easier. I’ll wait here.
Okay, are you back now? Great. Allow me to go off for a minute: I’m totally and completely pro-vaccination, even though I know that once in very, very great while there’s some kind of complication. Why accept the risk? Because vaccination WORKS. If you don’t believe me, go look it up. Look at juvenile death rates by disease for the past century, correct for nutrition and education, and then tell me that you really don’t think vaccinations work.
And if you can’t read, go ask someone over eighty: they’ll tell you right to your face that kids “just don’t die as much as they used to.” (G’ma told me that when she was a kid, “everybody knew someone who had lost a child to illness.” I personally know no one who has lost a child to measles, TB, smallpox, mumps, rubella, or polio.)
And it’s not because those germs just went away on their own, people. More kids survive childhood because of the use of vaccinations. Period. This is not a belief, it’s a fact. If you think vaccines cause [insert latest paranoid scare], go find the research to back up your assertion before you let your offspring become a disease vector in the middle of the culture I live in, thank you very much, because many of my own vaccinations are really quite old and I deserve to live somewhere with herd immunity.
In the autumn of 2008, some areas of the U.S. had school populations in which 10% or more of the children were un- or under-vaccinated. “We’ve already dropped below the level of vaccine coverage where herd immunity exists for some diseases,” said Dr. Paul Offit, chief of infectious diseases and head of the vaccine institute at Children’s Hospital in Philadelphia. “At some point, we’re going to be forced to decide whether it is an inalienable right to catch and transmit potentially fatal infections.”
Kids are now suffering from outbreaks of things like measles and – get this – whooping cough because their parents have skipped their vaccinations. The world is small. People bring germs back from overseas all the time. How bereft would you be, seriously, if your child got sick and died from a disease like that? A disease that was, in the not-too-distant past, virtually wiped out? A disease that is preventable?
Remember, before the vaccine was introduced in 1963, measles used to kill on average of 400 kids each and every year. Measles! I’ve never even seen a case of measles. (And, after googling the disease and catching some images, I’m glad.)
If you surf the anti-vaccine web sites, you’ll notice that most of the cited research isn’t linked. The claims that unvaccinated children are “healthier” are unsubstantiated because there’s no such condition. (As far as the medical sciences are concerned, either you’re healthy, i.e. free of disease, or you’re sick. Of course there are gradations – the kid whose mom feeds him a balanced diet and who runs around outside is going to be less likely to have behavioral and emotional problems than the kid who lives on junk food and never leaves his computer – but even if it seems counter-intuitive, there’s no proof that one is more likely to survive a deadly infectious disease than the other. And a slightly better first-world diet is not going to produce an immune system incapable of catching a deadly infectious childhood disease.)
Such sources are rife with emotionally-phrased speculation about how the medical and pharma establishments just want to make money off of selling vaccinations, as if the act of making money immediately means that there’s no reason for vaccinations in the first place. I’m not even going to bother to point out how utterly irrational that kind of argument is, because it’s so irrational it can get your kids dead.
And for what? Are you really going to feel good about sticking it to the man as you bury your kid?
I mean, think about it. Vaccines work. There is no evidence that any kind of vaccine is linked to autism or any other condition. The people we think of as “them” have children too, and they get their babies poked with needles full of the same stuff: it’s in NO ONE’S interest to continue producing and selling any vaccine that harms or kills, not even for money.
Vaccination works. If you don’t believe me, look it up.
Sources:
Thousands of unvaccinated children enter schools
Demographics of Unvaccinated Children
Unvaccinated Children at Center of Measles Outbreak
The ‘herd’ doesn’t protect unvaccinated children
In which I’m torn between really liking a device that works well, and feeling like I should never use it again.
Last December, I bought myself an Amazon Kindle as a Christmas-slash-layoff present.
I bought it not because I didn’t already have a way to read ebooks (I have four separate ebook apps on my iPod Touch) but because I had device envy: the Kindle was a sleek little number with a 3G connection.
Plus, NLW said I’d like it, and she’s usually right.
The 3G connection was the kicker. I could buy books anywhere – in the car, at the store, in an airport! Imagine how great it would be to finish the second book in a trilogy and be able to download and begin reading the third book without even leaving your chair, man. That’s just plain hawt.
So now I have a Kindle, and it really is a slick little device. I carry it around with me more than I expected to. I currently have 77 items on it, from full-length books to short stories to today’s New York Times and this week’s Amritapuri news.
Since acquiring my Kindle, I’ve changed the Amazon bookmark in my browser to take me to the Kindle store instead of the main page. I have 31 items in my Kindle account, which means that Amazon got much more money out of me then they ever did when all of my ebook money went to Fictionwise and Baen and Mobipocket.
My Kindle works really well. It recently received an operating system update that made it even cooler than it already was. For the first time in all my years as an Amazon customer I started a second Wish List, so I could track the Kindle books and accessories I’m lusting over.
But then there’s Amazon’s party line:
Your rights under this Agreement will automatically terminate without notice from Amazon if you fail to comply with any term of this Agreement. In case of such termination, you must cease all use of the Software and Amazon may immediately revoke your access to the Service or to Digital Content without notice to you and without refund of any fees.
– Amazon, Kindle Terms of Service
Which means, in a nutshell, that Amazon can brick your Kindle remotely whenever it likes. Which means you don’t own your ebooks, you’re just licensing them. (They’ve already mass-erased books from lots of devices.) If you decide to break the DRM and read a Kindle book on another device, you’re breaking the agreement and possibly even the law as well.
Cory Doctorow refuses to sell his works in Kindle format – you can get them for free from his website, but you can’t buy them from Amazon.com: he’s that against DRM and all it implies. He says that book ownership predates even the publishing industry itself, and he’s right. The ideas in a book might belong to the author, but the book itself belongs to its owner.
In the olden days, after you bought a book it was yours. You could read it, burn it, loan it, re-read it, let 11 family members read it, and then sell it: it was YOURS.
Now I’m giving money to a company who can brick my device if they merely think I’m acting funny. I have to back up all my Amazon ebook purchases and DRM-strip them just in case, or I risk the possibility of having rented rather than purchased the works in my account.
All of this pisses me off. I want to use my cool new technology, and they make it really easy for me to do so, but I don’t want Amazon thinking they’re getting away with this. They probably think the majority of their Kindle users are morons, and the more we use our Kindles and the more we accept their crappy licence agreements the more proof they have that we really are.
Yes, I still buy books from the other sites, but it’s just so much easier (and often cheaper, because Amazon sells the majority of their ebooks at a loss) to buy them directly from the Kindle itself.
Read The Future of Reading. It’s short and sweet and says most of what needs to be said.
I’m wondering if I shouldn’t abandon ebook reading on both the Kindle and the iPod Touch and find some other way of doing it. Isn’t it my duty to vote with my money?
In which we take a look at the blue dog for a sec.
Best dog ever, scowling at me for making her sit while I snap her picture with my cell phone.
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Instagram has become unusable crap, so please click the icon below to see my latest pics.
4 random books from my Library!
