So, how is it trying to separate us on 9/11? By burning a Quran, of course, as a symbol of a hateful, warlike religion that’s all about converting or destroying the heathen non-believers. Separate, separate, separate. It’s a good thing all of those religions are all about finding peace, love and acceptance. As I thought about this little act of fiery protest, I couldn’t help identifying with it, though. The only difference is that I would take it just a tad further. Maybe there should be a ritual burning on every 9/11…maybe that’s just what the world needs. But I would say that ritual burning needs to be of all the religious texts. The Bible, the Quran, the Torah (technically covered with the biblical burning, but just for symbolism), the Bhagavad Gita, the…Tao Te Ching?, I dunno…any book that seeks to control your life and threaten the lives of others. It would have to be up to the individual. Burn Oprah’s magazine, or The Secret, for all I care. But burn the book that controls you, rather than the one that controls others.

I would like to stress that I don’t advocate burning books to control information. And I don’t want all religious texts to disappear. I want their control over their followers to disappear. What I’m talking about is a ritual cleansing. A ceremony in which people decide to cast off religious isolationism and proclaim their new-found acceptance to the rest of the world.  To stop saying “us and them” and start saying “we.” What better way to prevent future events like 9/11, than to cast aside divisive theology?

I think I know just the place for the ceremony, too!

Imagine no religion.

                          

Is it any wonder that I find this mentality….lacking? No one who knows me is surprised, I’m sure. I hate everything, I’m told.

What is the world, though, when the completion of tasks is more important than the task’s purpose? As usual, I can’t help but ask, “why?” Naturally, this goes over like a lead balloon in the harried, “efficiency-driven”-yet-woefully-inefficient corporate bureaucracy that is my workplace. Where the motto is “I need it yesterday no matter how impossible and no matter how completely I botched the process before handing it off to you.”

As new crises and “challenges” trickle into my inbox, I’m struck with a deep-seeded need to find the root problem. I can’t help but stare into the mountains of miscalculations that led to the inevitable crisis we now face and ask why those errors were made. I can’t help but suggest ways to avoid those errors. And yet, I’m faced with “git ‘er done.” There is never time to address the root cause, because we are so harried with a need to resolve the issues caused by the root cause. It’s frustrating, is all.

It’s like Superman arriving upon a disaster scene and being told to work crowd control. “Or I could make the earth spin backwards and prevent this disaster from ever happening.”

“…just make sure these folks don’t go under the tape, hot shot!”

Would a little introspection be remiss in the modern world? Would it hurt if, instead of asking what we are going to do, we instead asked why we are doing what we do? To what end? For what purpose? And for what need? Albert Einstein said that “bureaucracy is the death of all sound work.” It’s possibly true for a creative process, but I can’t help but think an efficient bureaucracy is the last defense against the failings of any non-creative process necessarily involving humans.  And efficiency is achieved, not by doing without question in order to “git ‘er done,” but by evaluating each action for it’s value before acting.

Unfortunately, my bosses don’t agree.

                          

The myth of the NYC Park.

Picture a serene scene. The most serene scene you have ever seen. One in a park of lovely green. (Forgive the Dr. Seuss treatment. I’ll stop.) Anyway, the grass is soft, the breeze light. Above you, the Brooklyn Bridge stands like some granite colossus, straddling the East River. It is majestic and powerful, enhancing the beauty and serenity of the surrounding park through it’s monumental architecture. A tugboat sounds a wistful horn in the distance. A gull soars overhead, starkly white against the bright blue of the sky. You are alone in a city of 8 million….lying cradled between the soft, cool grass and the warm midday sun.

Now, as you picture this wonderful scene, picture also a family of five. They stomp onto your soft delicate lawn, bickering, dropping litter, and dragging an assortment of towels, loud radios, kids, toys, lotions, hats, smells, and Teddy Grahams. They are a hurricane ravishing your oasis. They are a monster truck, tearing across your field of wildflowers, leaving a scar of mud and a cloud of diesel fumes. They march across the vast openness, and plop down, still bickering, right beside you. Your fortress of solitude is invaded, and you have been rendered powerless by the red sun of Krypton. (Okay, nerdy metaphor, but stay with me.)

Soon, a young couple arrives. They are ill dressed in spiky clothes and gothic makeup. They lie mere feet away from you, alternating between sharing a 7-11 slurpee and making out luridly. They smell funny. Their uncomfortably-tight yet trendy-in-some-circles clothing slips about to reveal rolls of fat and unsettling bulges. They grope and straddle each other openly in simulated love-making poses. You become sandwiched between them and the family of five.

Now imagine the entire park filling with more and more people. It’s overflowing. A sea of bodies covers every inch of grass, leaving each blade matted and struggling for life-giving light beneath some mass of flesh. The previously warm sun has been made sweltering by the combined body warmth of hundreds of glistening, sweaty, people. They jostle and grunt at each other like so many walruses sunning together on the rocky shore of some coastal inlet. The only oasis is a steaming concrete path that picks it’s way among the corpses, and meanders to a parking lot of weeds poking though cracks in the surface, broken bottles, and upturned garbage cans…a paradise of quiet compared to the populous garden of adipose tissue that it leaves behind. You run-walk to escape the clamor.

To be fair, at no point was my experience at the park today as idyllic as I described in the beginning of this post. It was gross from the get go. I thought I would go try to enjoy some nice weather, get some air, some sun, maybe relax a bit. No dice. The citizens of New York City will never cease to amaze me in their ability to be around one another and be seemingly oblivious to each other’s presence! It boggles my mind, because I am painfully aware of every person around me at all times. Meanwhile, they all seem to long for it! At a nearby ice cream parlor, New Yorkers happily queued patiently in a line that must have stretched 100 yards out the front door of the parlor. No ice cream is that good. I was repelled, but tot he contrary, New Yorkers seemed to instinctively join the line.

So, is solitude dead? Has it come to a point where we can only escape one another by locking ourselves away in our closet-like rooms? Even there, we jostle, and stomp, and make ourselves known to each other through a series of movements, noises, and actions…intentional or otherwise. The world becomes more and more populous, and I can’t help but think of the scenes in Soylent Green, with stairways littered by bodies, and streets so crowded that people need to be lifted into garbage trucks to clear space. Are these images to be prophetic?

The most frightening thing, to me, is that the crowds which I face daily here in New York City are nothing compared to some other places. India and Japan come to mind. The thought of a world rapidly filling with this kind of population density is anathema to nature. Will the State and National Parks of the US someday be the last remaining empty places? And will they be empty? No doubt vast throngs of tourists from overpopulated cities will surge into them upon their daily opening, leaving behind their tattered picnic blankets and single-serving meal cups. Worse, will the world sooner remove their protected status in favor of an unfettered population? Can mankind ever be saved from himself?

This post brought to you by Trojan Condoms.™

                          

I guess I’m being a little purposely obtuse, because I know that people mean it to say that things were better when they were simpler…when our focus (as a nation, as a people, as a culture, as whatever group you’re addressing) was narrowed and purposed! When people lived simply and had simple wants, needs and desires! Of course, I know that’s what people mean. But is that really what we’re after? Think hard on that. Do you really want to take what humanity has wrought over the centuries and chop the tree off at the stem? What else is “getting back to our roots.” It’s conservative code for the status quo.

So lets look at civilization’s roots. There is the lowly hominid, scraping a living from the world around him, hunting gathering, sweating, running, and dying. Perhaps living a little too, though surely not as we know it. Not with civilizations, legal protections, homes, monuments or schools. Or what about the United States’ roots? A fledgling nation, wrest from the arms of a clutching parent-nation though the violent act of revolution. A tiny group of men, wearied by war, scraping together the foundations of a nation on hopes and dreams. But was their hope really so pure and noble? Did they go home to servants, slaves, and wives all who had no voice in their future’s making? Didn’t this root reach upward to sprout leaves in the form of new laws, amendments, and ideas such as emancipation, and suffrage?  Should we ignore the fruits of hundreds or thousands of years of progress? More importantly, were those people sticking to their roots? Weren’t they taking their footing and using it to cultivate new ideas? Weren’t they rather progressive for their time?

Alright, I know….preachy. But think about the hollowness of the “back to our roots” sentiment. I don’t want to go back to the roots! To run with the plant analogy (near and dear to my heart), I want the branches and leaves and fruits! And some might say, “ah, but even with all those things, the roots must survive for the plant to live.” Well, sure. I can agree with that. But growth is growth. Lets not forget what the goal of laying down roots is. Let’s keep growing as a people, as a country, as a culture, as a society. I want new ideas to replace old and withered ones. I want new science and technology! I want new government and new legal protections. I want new paths and new thinking. And the old stuff, that is still healthy and green and bearing fruit…we can keep it. But the old withered stuff? We need to prune it, dammit! And maybe, if everything works right, that fruit will drop and leave seeds to germinate and lo, and behold, new roots!!