[365] Swing Swing Swing

I suppose one way to say it is that I'm after “the drum beat” of culture. If we think of a university setting. Even with thousands of kids from all walks of life, whether you join a rally, run a naked mile, quietly do your homework, or network your way into a lucrative future, the underlying pulse, purpose, and utility of a university is to set kids up to “do better.” It's the place to learn academically and hopefully about your roles socially or in the realm of personal responsibility.

Now, arguably, what the modern university has become given the costs associated, the little reason to think you'll find work when you're done, and the corporatization of once essential public rights and goods, the needle has moved away from that underlying logic and expectation, but for the analogy, pretend we graduated before the mid/late 70s.

If you're constantly looking for culture, it feels natural to gravitate towards big institutions. “Corporate culture” is certainly a thing that ranges from open plan utopia-esc tech firms to Dilbert hellscapes. But you still manage to see hundreds or thousands of people plugged into a system where they start to act and think alike, to varying degrees, about the nature of their work and their role in it.

Religious institutions tend to have straight forward enough agendas. Those that want to quietly worship or believe in something garner their small flocks and maybe never step onto the world stage beyond a bake sale or charity event for a sick member. On the other hand, huge swaths of tea-baggers and evangelicals actively shut down women's health clinics in every spot but one city in the entire state of Texas...

But I only pick these to try an contrast the Bigger Conception of culture I'm after. I want the Human Drum Beat. I want, to as best as I can measure, the actual likelihood or possibility of getting the future I'm after. I know there are millions of people that I would describe as “bat shit.” But, I don't know for sure there aren't millions + 1 who could stand in opposition and “win.” More importantly, win in a way that sustains objectively positive and life-affirming changes beyond the whims of the bat-shitters.

Eventually, most retreat to the realm of anecdotes. I have as much a “Bloomington friend group culture” as much as I have a conception of “most people my age I've engaged with culture.” They both provoke me to say something about what I think the world would look like maybe 30 years from now if this is the level of circumstance and discourse I'm generally presented with. If my disposition is any clue, it's not simply less than reassuring, it's almost explicitly the opposite of what I think needs to happen in order for things to change for the better.

I've stated previously things to the effect of “I don't have hope” or “If I have hope, it's in the endless void of information and potential I have no real way to quantify yet.” What's notable about these statements is that they aren't deliberately trying to avoid snippets of positivity and potential I see every day. They come from staring into the void. They come from the struggle of trying to rip out of people something more resembling what I want.

Immediately I want to say, “It's not about what you want.” But if it's not about what I want, then who's it up to? I can draw a pretty clear line from many things I didn't want that I nonetheless have to live out the consequences of. I think my reflexive response is a symptom of the sickness of our current invisible culture. So then, it seems more appropriate, if not obvious once it's pointed out, of course it's about what I want. Perhaps, in a very important sense, that's all it's about.

So then I become intrigued by what other people want. Surely, I can't hope to achieve what I want without assessing their variables and seeing if there is a mutually beneficial plan or path of least resistance to getting there.

And here is where I run into the difficult music of the current drum beat. All I think I'm hearing is “main-tain, main-tain, main-tain.” You need to keep doing what you're doing to keep the bills paid. You need to buckle down and power through school. You need to keep certain discussions off the table because the sliver of happiness or expectation you've cut out of life is paramount. On the surface, this seems so taken-for-granted as not a problem, it's almost flatly ridiculous to even point out. So why do I think it's exactly the reason we're going to lose the game?

People want to “be happy,” no? I'm to call their happiness wrong? It's my place to pretend I know what's best for someone else? My advice, my perch, my street cred in the realm of thinking and bitching truly accounts of the nuance of all human behavior?

I'm going to skip over unpacking all that. It's simply the typical gut-reaction or classic kinds of responses when you talk of overhauling a system. For those who can't see through the superficiality in asking such questions, run along and play.

While I don't try to go out of my way to be an emotional bitch, when I do feel things they tend to swing rather dramatically. I'm still really confused about nights where I'm having an amazing time only to, in the last ten minutes, feel like I need to hit things and write something angry. My initial speculation is about how I tend to think of “the game.” Part of the reason I tend/ed to run so selfishly is that things become extremely simple. But what happens when you invite complications?

Say I wanted kids. What planet am I leaving them? What lesson about “politics” do I hope they get to fall asleep with at night? How soon do I want them to learn that “things just are this way” as if they would “just be” had I not made a decision to bring them into the world? The advice can't be, “hunker down and ride it out. I brought you here so you could feel desperate and cut off from your fellow man. I thought, when the world starts to burn, you'd get a kick out of how high the flames really got.”

Look at “climate skeptics” aka ignorant deadly cancers to society, if you want to see what happens when you Maintain at the expense of everything else. These are people that can't be persuaded to read a thermometer, or that ice melts. As you'll learn over and over again, they're “happy” to believe in their god, their “facts,” and carry on promoting their ideas because, after all, in their not-so-humble opinion, “it just doesn't seem right to them.”

Less dramatically, I think about the level and nature of conversation or discourse. When you maintain what you like to talk about, and nothing else. There are as many consequences of that waiting for you psychologically, financially, or otherwise as well. It's not the planet running out of oxygen, but I always, somehow, can find people who eventually notice it's getting harder and harder to breath about something.

I think it's increasingly unreasonable to assume, unsustainable, unacceptable to pursue, and unlikely to be achieved “what it is you want to do” at the expense of something larger. I recently heard something to the effect of, “show a man that he's part of something more, and he'll realize he's capable of anything.” I don't get the sense that people do things in service to the larger picture. Or if they're trying, it's not sufficient. I think there's great utility in even burdening yourself with things you don't yet know how to fix as opposed to “not caring” or “moving on.” It's like stepping in shit and then leisurely strolling through your house pretending not to notice the smell.

And here's the next point of “hope from ignorance.” In one on one conversations, sure, you get people who have read a lot. You get people with a cause. They use their anecdotes or their classes and have this motivation to step out there and change something for the better. It's where the most insidious facts about their effort lie. A burning building isn't quelled one bucket of water at a time. You need a fire hose, or ten. Sometimes, you have to let it burn out and build a new structure. The fire cares not about your good intentions, your personal resolve, moral certitude, or stress-reducing novel philosophical take on fires. It's just going to burn.