The Freedom from being Sold Shit

I signed up for the ING Miami marathon last week. The on-line application had a bunch of mandatory fields. After name, age, address, shirt size and, of course, credit card number, there were three pages of questions that had to be answered before the application could be submitted. Occupation? Annual household income? Are you a “decision maker” at your company? Purchase an on-line marathon training program? Register to win a Nissan Leaf? Up to three trial magazine subscriptions? Would you like to be contacted by an ING financial professional? Clicking “no, goddammit, I just want to sign up for the friggin race” was not an option. So I answered all the questions (as obnoxiously as possible, of course – employer is Cumstein & Smegma LLP, annual income is fifty billion dollars, no thanks on the magazines) and got on with things.

The constant stream of low-level irritants in the modern world is made up in large part of people trying to sell shit. That’s nothing new. Hucksters came onto the scene probably about ten minutes after man learned how to use a rock as a tool – “Ug. Get Thor-o-matic super stone. Limited time. Less hairy cro-magnon ladies think you sexy.” Because hucksterism is annoying, we learn to ignore it. But, like a virus, more potent strains evolve, each one more ignore-resistant than the last. Visual ads become more prominent, more animated and more ubiquitous. As those become less effective, more audio ads sprout up. Airports are saturated with commercial announcements. Some cities have started selling air time in their subways and buses. Boston may be next on the list; the MBTA has started discussions with a company that creates GPS-triggered audio ads on buses that are tied to the locations of advertisers. Trying to read an on-line article usually means scouring the screen to find that tiny portion of non-advertising space where the text is located.

All of this stems from the fact that we are Consumers, and are somehow not offended by being referred to as such. How did that happen? It’s pejorative to say that our work efforts make us “cogs in the machine.” It wouldn’t be too flattering to reduce our sexual lives to their “procreation vessel” components. But we seem just fine with having all of our interests, goals and desires, all of the personal nuances that make us who we are, reduced to the act of consuming. Buying, destroying, throwing out and buying again.

So we’re Consumers, a colossal amount of energy is expended trying to get us to consume, and that’s annoying. Still, it’s possible to find some tranquility. Reading a book is nice. A book is a clever off-the-grid content delivery device that has absolutely no interface through which advertising can be delivered. Music can be relaxing. If you make a playlist you like and pop in your ear buds, you can circumvent the increasingly ubiquitous audio ad assault. There are even a few spaces left – even in cities – where you can walk around and not see visual stimuli designed to get you to buy shit.

Peace and tranquility don’t necessarily come from cutting yourself off from human contact. Interfacing with people is nice. An effective way to decompress is to just take a break from your role as Consumer. It’s not always easy to mute all communications whose purpose is to sell you shit, but it can be done, and it’s worth the effort. I know ING is going to try to hawk me some more shit when I go run in Miami in January. I’ll try to ignore them and focus on the nice views and breathe in some warm air. And I’ll get some perverse satisfaction knowing that they’re sending unwanted magazines to my fake law firm address.

Fuck the Starving Kids in Africa

There's an important meeting in my neighborhood every Saturday morning at 8:00. All the local 3 year-old boys gather in front of the fire station on Centre St. to watch the weekly testing of the fire truck equipment. The firemen raise and lower the ladders, rev the engines, test the hydraulics, sound the sirens. About as good entertainment as exists for a little kid. When I passed by this morning and saw all the action, I though, wow, all that stuff must be expensive. It is. And we're all happy to foot the bill for it. Because when an alarm is real and someone is trapped in a burning building, all that expensive equipment and all those well-trained firemen could save a human life. And a human life is priceless. Or at least the life of a human we can relate to.

This summer, 11 million people in Africa are at risk of starvation, due to some of the worst droughts in recent history. This fact has been covered in a few news one-liners, but has basically not caused so much as a blip in the collective US consciousness. But more on that later. First, let’s talk about global warming, in particular global warming caused by humans. There’s a big debate in the US about whether humans are actually causing global warming. For the most part, there’s nothing scientific about the debate. It’s all just good political theater – a fun and effective little way to get people on all ends of the political spectrum hot and bothered and rallying behind their respective leaders. Easy fuel for the culture wars, inciting the self righteous on both sides of the “debate” to solidify their positions on whether or not to use energy-efficient light bulbs.

But while reasonable people can disagree about which politicians’ narratives resonate more, reasonable scientists cannot, and do not, disagree about whether human activities are causing global warming. They are. There is a legitimate, fact-based scientific dialog going on about just how many additional carbon parts per million will cause an increase of one degree over however many years, but the notion that humans are changing the climate has been established as a fact. The rest of the industrialized world is baffled by the weird alignment of this scientific issue with the particular US roster of political hot button items, and amused and outraged by the willful ignorance it promotes. Professionals in the insurance industry – the ones with skin in the game, the ones who have to directly pay to fix shit when the shit hits the fan – have known for years that climate change is progressing much faster than geological business as usual. They adjusted flood insurance premiums long ago to reflect the fact that things are speedily changing. Like at any casino, the house never loses. The fact that flood insurance in some places is now exponentially more expensive than ever before, or not available at all, is as objective an indicator as exists that people who care only about cold, hard statistical probabilities think that the climate is changing fast.

The people advocating the position that humans have nothing to do with climate change are fake scientists and propagandists enlisted by industries with massive vested interests in the status quo, religious extremists who write off summarily any scientific fact that contradicts what their holy literature has to say, and people who just generally don’t have the time, energy or inclination to pay attention to the issue. This last group is the largest and scariest. If you don’t dig below the surface, any politician or pundit who dresses up like an expert and says that the whole issue is a sham sounds just as credible as any non-photogenic scientist who’s devoted a lifetime to studying the boring details that comprise the factual heart of the issue.

If our own lives, or the lives of our friends and neighbors and college roommate’s kid who’s blossomed into a really fine young man, were at stake, things would be different. Media serves up the news that we are almost biologically inclined to want to know about. The stories we want, the stories that sell, are about weird, shocking and, most of all, local events. Things that are intimate and familiar are just much easier to process. News that makes us think, “oh my god, that could have been me” engages us. The September 11 attack was in the epicenter of our national front yard. Just about everyone in the country has two degrees of separation from one of the 3,000 people who was killed in the attack. Nothing could be more familiar than an office building where average Americans were just about to get their workaday mornings started. Same with hurricane Katrina. 1,900 regular folks were killed. Wrong place at the wrong time. Could have been anyone we knew. The baby that Casey Anthony killed could have lived on any residential block in the country.

But the potentially starving kids in Africa are too far away. They don’t look like people we know, and 11 million is too big a number to comprehend. Global warming is too abstract. People who are supposed to sort out the facts for us say it might not be true anyway. Fixing it might not work at all and, in any case, could make gas six cents a gallon more expensive. No price could ever be affixed to a human life. No expense can be spared when trying to save a human life. That seems to be true after September 11. We’ve all agreed to a blank check to foot the bill, and even make some meaningful changes in our daily lives, to help assure that the murder of another 3,000 people like us never happens again. But 11 million people is 3,667 September 11s. It’s 5,789 hurricane Katrinas. It’s 11 million Casey Anthony baby murders. And although any politician, pundit or preacher who said out loud that we should value the life of an African child at about the cost of a tall latte would be decimated by the public, that is nonetheless exactly what we have decided as a country.

Each of us has earned our place in the world hierarchy. If we want to drive heavy cars and live in big houses and gunk up the atmosphere with carbon and ignore all the consequences of doing so, that’s our prerogative. And if kids in Africa want to complain about how hot it’s getting and how all their drinking water is disappearing, well they should get a paper route and save up for a plane ticket and move to Finland. If their lives aren’t important enough to make it onto the evening news, why should we care at all? Starving kids in Africa? Fuck ‘em.

We Are Animals: Naked Running and the Destruction of Planet Earth

Running is great. Running in the summer is even better. And running in just a pair of short shorts and shoes is heavenly (for me at least - can't speak for the people who have to look at me). I’d run naked, but even here in super liberal Jamaica Plain, I’m not sure that would fly. The breeze and the sun feel good. Breathing is easy. And it's good to remember sometimes that, underneath our button down shirts and pleated pants, we're really just animals.

The more fancy-pants we as humans get, the easier it is to forget that we’re animals. 99% of our DNA is the same as apes. Some probably large percent is the same as a slug. It's only very recently (relatively) that two evolutionary developments - thumbs and super-sized frontal lobes - gave us the ability to create all the tools and infrastructures that have separated us so profoundly from the rest of the animal kingdom. But at the end of the day, when we step aside from our thoughts and possessions and daily routines, we're just sloshing piles of bones and guts and fluids, same as all our other animal brethren.

You can't really be judgmental about something an animal does. Animals do what animals do. Animals don't make personal decisions about diets and carbon footprints and hits to their personal reputations. They just do their thing – whatever's in their DNA. So how did things get so much more complicated for humans? It seems to me that something big happened when humans made the leap beyond simple subsistence – something no other animal has been able to do. Other animals can't do anything more than survive. They can't do much to save up for the future, other than maybe hide away a few nuts for the winter. And they can't specialize – gain some specific skill that they can barter so that other animals will do stuff for them.

All the complicated human infrastructures that form the modern world – government, economics, skyscrapers, medicine, space travel – developed quickly once our human thumbs and brains evolved to the point that we could do more than subsist. Having arrived safely at the top of the food chain and domesticated virtually every natural power for use in feeding our insatiable appetite for more stuff, we diverged completely from all other animals. The lives we live today in the first world – covering ourselves up with designer clothes, pecking away all day at computer keyboards and driving around in our cars, has almost nothing in common with the way our predecessors lived just a blip back in evolutionary time.

Oh, and no other animal has ever been capable of destroying the world. As the population grows, as more people are able to live industrialized lives, and as the amount of natural resources needed to sustain all those lifestyles explodes correspondingly, we're changing the fundamental composition of the Earth. Whether we're destroying the Earth is no longer even debatable. It's only a matter of how many more generations it will be before we've changed the Earth enough that we can no longer live here. Or, there's always the more streamlined possibility of a few nuclear weapons getting us to the same place in a matter of minutes.

With great power comes great responsibility. It's my fatalistic view that we've thrown nature irreparably out of whack, but that we nonetheless have an obligation to make at least some effort to delay the inevitable. I think we should have the humility to recognize that while we're lucky to have evolved to the point where we can create so much, we also have an obligation to take responsibility for the damages we're capable of causing. There's an easy opposing point of view, I know – that just like any other animal, we should be free to do whatever we can using the powers we've been given. And if living the way we live is harmful to others down the line, so be it. I'm not totally opposed to that line of thought. The laws of physics were set in motion a while back. Based on those, modern organisms evolved the way they evolved. Our planet is one of a billion in a galaxy that's one of a billion, and so on. And if we blow it out of existence, the rest of the universe will hardly bat an eyelash. More intelligent life is out there somewhere. More will come into existence at some point. Earth is just a little flash in the cosmic pan.

Whoa. Heavy shit – a little sample of what goes through my mind when I'm clomping around some Boston path, almost naked, early in the morning. We're a pretty highly evolved species. We've got cool inventions and fancy tastes. And thumbs and abstract thoughts. But we're just animals. And that's a good thing to remember sometimes. Get naked and keep it real!