Velvet Verbosity

I lifted this speech from Sid’s blog (thanks num-num) and Sid lifted it from I don’t know where.

It’s sad that great leaders and great visionaries have been saying these things forever, and we just don’t listen. Maybe it’s because they all get assassinated before we get a chance to? Just sayin’.

In 1968, three months before he would be assassinated, one month before Martin Luther King Jr. would be assassinated, Robert Kennedy gave an address at the University of Kansas.

“We will find neither national purpose nor personal satisfaction in a mere continuation of economic progress, in an endless amassing of worldly goods. We cannot measure national spirit by the Dow Jones Average, nor national achievement by the gross national product. For the gross national product includes air pollution and advertising for cigarettes, and ambulances to clear our highways of the carnage. It counts special locks for our doors, and jails for our people who break them. The gross national product includes the destruction of the redwoods, and the death of Lake Superior. It grows with the production of napalm and missiles and nuclear warheads…. It includes Whitman’s rifle and Speck’s knife, and the broadcasting of television programs which glorify violence to sell goods to our children.

And if the gross national product includes all of this, there is much that it does not comprehend. It does not allow for the health of our families, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It is indifferent to the decency of our factories and the safety of our streets alike. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of public officials…. The gross national product measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile; and it can tell us everything about America—except whether we are proud to be Americans.”What’s more chilling, is that he also said this earlier in the speech (from www.jfklibrary.org):

“I’m glad to come here to the home of the man who publicly wrote: “If our colleges and universities do not breed men who riot, who rebel, who attack life with all the youthful vision and vigor, then there is something wrong with our colleges. The more riots that come out of our college campuses, the better the world for tomorrow.” And despite all the accusations against me, those words were not written by me, they were written by that notorious seditionist, William Allen White. And I know what great affection this university has for him. He is an honored man today, here on your campus and around the rest of the nation. But when he lived and wrote, he was reviled as an extremist and worse. For he spoke, he spoke as he believed. He did not conceal his concern in comforting words. He did not delude his readers or himself with false hopes and with illusions. This spirit of honest confrontation is what America needs today. It has been missing all too often in the recent years and it is one of the reasons that I run for President of the United States.

For we as a people, we as a people, are strong enough, we are brave enough to be told the truth of where we stand. This country needs honesty and candor in its political life and from the President of the United States. But I don’t want to run for the presidency - I don’t want America to make the critical choice of direction and leadership this year without confronting that truth. I don’t want to win support of votes by hiding the American condition in false hopes or illusions. I want us to find out the promise of the future, what we can accomplish here in the United States, what this country does stand for and what is expected of us in the years ahead. And I also want us to know and examine where we’ve gone wrong. And I want all of us, young and old, to have a chance to build a better country and change the direction of the United States of America.”

Still, I retain hope. There is always hope, and once again Robert Kennedy puts it well exactly two years before the date of his death (again, www.jfklibrary.org).“Few will have the greatness to bend history; but each of us can work to change a small portion of the events, and in the total of all these acts will be written the history of this generation…It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is thus shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.” Day of Affirmation Address, University of Capetown, South Africa, June 6, 1966.

Thank you Robert Kennedy. Now, let’s all do our part to bend history, eh?

Please take anything you read from Wikipedia with a healthy dose of skepticism. If you really want to know facts, there are better places. I link to Wikipedia articles as a launching pad and for my convenience.

Woman Remodeled posted about PETA, the objectification of women and her views on pornograhy. I had already been thinking about posting on the topic, but now I have to. I’m one of those people that WR refers to as “not ok with it”. When I was younger, pornography was available but someone had to go out, in public, and buy it, or wait for it in the mail. For most people it wasn’t worth the bloody effort. And getting hold of more hardcore, deviant, or illegal stuff was no easy task.

But isn’t the internet a beautiful thing? Just turn on you computer and ask yourself where you want to go, and you’re there, instantly, cheaply, and anonymously. Addicts call this the three A’s. “Accessible, Affordable, Anonymous”.I don’t share Woman Remodeled’s laissez-faire attitude of porn. We share no cross words over it, but we’ve had many long conversations exploring our own views on it. I’m against pornography, not blanketly, but against the allowance of it being so prevalent and so easy to get. My objection to it is not moral or religious. I am thoroughly dismayed that the few people who are blogging against pornography do so from a heavily Christian slant. Unfortunately, that only furthers the case for the proponents of smut because they can easily draw a clear line in the sand.

“If you’re on that side, clearly you’re a prude, but if you’re on THIS side you’re fun and free and sexually LIBERATED!”

If only life were that simple.

I object to pornography in the same way I object to fast food, or factory farming, or excessive consumption. It’s not about “right” or “wrong” morally. To me, it is about the health of a nation and its people, and since WR brought it up, I’m going to spend a few posts talking about it.

Neither the hardcore supporters of porn or the religious “prudes” are right on the issue. There are other reasons to think that free, easily accessible pornography coupled with anonymity isn’t such a good thing. I have several points to make but today, I want to point out one of the serious flaws in the proponents’ argument.

Most supporters of pornography will tell you, “it’s just images, it’s only fantasy, therefore it’s harmless”.

Blink. Blink blink.

Oh how I love this argument. I do so wish I could stand on a debating podium and rip this one to shreds in front of a live audience and then walk home with a big fat trophy leaving my opponent to weep over her big plastic boobs.

Ok, that was harsh. I digress.

Seriously, if images had no impact on the human psyche, if fantasies could wield no influence over human decisions and actions, then WHY would the business world spend BILLIONS of dollars on marketing? And what sells more? A text-only ad or a full blown, full color, mini-length movie featuring an OBJECT OF DESIRE??

Another argument, closely related, is that there is no direct correlation between watching pornography and acting out sexually. What they mean is that there is no direct correlation between watching a violent rape pornography scene and then going out and raping a woman. This is more or less true, but not entirely true and I’ll cover those stats tomorrow. But neither is there a direct correlation between watching a commercial and jumping up to go buy the featured product. So why would marketers continue to make commercials? Because there is an effect, and it is cumulative. It happens over time, and it happens by changing people’s minds slowly, slowly and surely. You probably don’t have the slightest clue how insidious, clever, and powerful advertising is. Even if you don’t feel like you’re being affected, you are. Somewhere, sometime, some advertising is going to plant little seeds of desire in your mind. Marketing plays on the basic human condition of dissatisfaction. Dissatisfaction=Desire=Survival. This formula got us this far, and marketers now know how to plant suggestions about what particular things we should desire next in order to survive.

Like cars. Do we really need them for survival? We sure think we do. I bet your first thought is, “But Velvet Verbosity, you NEED a car.” Do I? Do you? Does anyone need a car? Why? To get to your job? So that you can pay for your car? Did we need to build our lives around the dependency on a car? I know lots of people who get around just fine with public transport or bicycles. Desire makes us need a car, not necessity. Desire for mobility, for freedom, for ease of living, for sex appeal, to have an outward trophy of our succes.

The flames of that desire are fueled by commercials, and that advertising worked SO well that our culture is saturated with cars. Cars are so normalized in our culture that we really think we can’t live without them. Really? Would I die if I didn’t have a car? No. I would not. I would find a way to make my life work without one.

Images are powerful. The idea that consistent use of pornography will not have a cumulative effect of some kind is about the most absurd thing I’ve ever heard. Well. Except for that one argument against gay marriage, “What’s next? Marriages between humans and animals?”. Right, because that logically follows. Maybe if you’re a follower of bestiality porn it does.

So, am I saying that if you watch enough rape porn you will eventually go out and rape a woman? Yes. I am saying that. And here’s the rub, it might not be reported, because it’s been normalized in the pornography desensitized mind of the victim through the prevalent, steady, pornification of our culture. Or, if reported, the rapist may not be prosecuted or punished to the full extent of the law, because, as studies have shown, violent pornography makes people less empathetic to the victim and more sympathetic to the rapist.

However, most men will still not go out and perpetrate a violent rape on a strange woman. Instead they will coerce their girlfriends and wives to act more and more porn-like in the bedroom. You don’t think so? Do you think that women decided that learning how to pole dance in their very own home was fueled by a woman’s deep seated desire to fulfill herself by learning how to wrap herself around a pole? Or that women risk their lives going under the knife to have their breasts and genitals reshaped and reworked to look more and more like porn stars because it empowers them?

In 1968 we shouted and burned our bras. In 2008 we shut up and fill em up. You tell me where the empowerment is in that. We women too have been duped, duped I say, by the pornification of our culture.

It is late, and I don’t have time to link to stats and studies tonight, but they are out there and I’ll get them to you.

We all know that the images we see in movies, television and magazines are distorted. We all know that hot beauty on the billboard is airbrushed. Right? RIGHT? Still, reminders never hurt. And showing this video to our daughters and sons wouldn’t hurt either.

I love technology. No. I do. I would marry my MacBook Pro if it had a pulse. But this technology scares me. The Touchtable - a modern day war table. It allows the military to zoom in on any geographic location and see what happened there over time. If you’re thinking about building an underground bunker, think again. It also allows the police force to predict crime by region and season so they know where to concentrate their forces and when.

If you’re the type of citizen that has bought into the hype of terror (a.k.a “the terror of hype”), you’ll be able to sleep easy tonight knowing that people in uniform can see the world at their fingertips. Knowing that the government has a huge electronic eye that’s watching every move of “the enemy”. Not very different from the Eye of Sauron. Yeah. Because, you know? Dark lords have a tendency to think they’re on the right side.

“Laughter, while it lasts, slackens and unbraces the mind, weakens the faculties and causes a kind of remissness and dissolution in all the powers of the soul; and thus it may be looked on as weakness in the composition of human nature. But if we consider the frequent reliefs we receive from it and how often it breaks the gloom which is apt to depress the mind and damp our spirits, with transient, unexpected gleams of joy, one would take care not to grow too wise for so great a pleasure of life.” -Joseph Addison

I found two different versions of the above Joseph Addison quote. (I hope it is obvious I was looking for quotes on laughter.) The first I came across had only the first sentence, and upon reading it, I thought to myself, “this Joseph Addison must’ve been one uptight dude”. A little more searching revealed the quote with the second sentence. Ah. Now that’s different. Funny that whoever posted the first version didn’t see the importance of including the second part. The part where this guy redeems himself. The part where you realize he’s not an uptight puritan who thinks laughter is bad for you (along with sex, running in bare feet on summer grass, or ice cream). So, it’s not Joseph Addison that’s the uptight dude, it’s clearly whoever posted his quote entirely out of context.

But seriously. Did your mother ever tell you that “laughter is the best medicine”? My mom did. Of course she always driveled such nonsense when I was in ridiculous amounts of pain, like the first time my heart was broken (thanks BW, I still owe you one). I failed to see the wisdom in that pithy little statement while I was wailing into my pillow. Now I’m older and wiser.

Ok. Maybe just older. Cut me some slack, I’m getting there.

Consider the positive benefits highlighted at bellylaughday:

• Even looking forward to having a good laugh can boost your immune system and reduce stress. University of California-Irvine study shows that even knowing you will be involved in a positive humorous event days in advance reduces levels of stress hormones in the blood and increases levels of chemicals known to aid relaxation.
• Laughter appears to cause the tissue that forms the inner lining of blood vessels, the endothelium, to dilate or expand in order to increase blood flow.
• Playful laughing fuels positive energy, creativity and connection.
• Boosts immune functions.
• Increase’s pain tolerance.
• Exercises facial, abdominal and chest muscles.
• Oxygenates the blood.
• Improves brain functioning.
  We are more alert, creative, we think better after a laugh.
• Laughing changes our mood. Boosts Positive Emotions.
• Laughing mixed together with the positive emotions of humor,
  and happiness lowers the stress hormones, corticosteroids and epinephrine. The release of growth hormone and endorphins plays a role in lowering the stress hormones.

Even activating the smiling muscles has good benefits. What did Addison have to say about smiling?

“What sunshine is to flowers, smiles are to humanity. These are but trifles, to be sure; but, scattered along life’s pathway, the good they do is inconceivable.”

To think I almost wrote this guy off as a cynic.

(Image brought to you by http://www.laughternetwork.co.uk/laughter.html)

Today, my daughter’s teacher asked the class if they remembered what they were doing on 9/11. I’ve been thinking about that since she told me casually while we were picking up groceries for tonight’s dinner.

That year we were living in Vermont at a residential Buddhist meditation center. Back then, the community was still set up to have “open days” when the retreat center closed down and everyone was off for the day. We would work for two weeks including weekends, and then have 2-4 open days. The first thing most of us would do on an open day was to go into town to visit the bookshop, the restaurants, or see a movie.

I walked up the long driveway that morning, wearing a t-shirt and jeans. Summer was lingering in Northern Vermont and the sun was shining. When I reached the main house, a couple of people were on the porch enjoying some morning conversation. A car was parked in front and the engine was running. Someone was in the passenger seat listening to the radio. I figured it was Vermont Public Radio because I could hear news. We didn’t have televisions and didn’t subscribe to any newspapers at the retreat center, so we got our news every couple of weeks from radio.

I walked up to the passenger window to say hello to one of my co-workers and community members. She shushed me as I leaned in, then she turned up the radio. It was around 9:00 in the morning. A reporter had interrupted a music show to announce that a plane had just flown into one of the twin towers. Having gotten used to being somewhat removed from the media, I didn’t hang around long to hear the report repeated in a half-dozen different ways. At that time, it sounded like a tragic accident and while I felt sadness I didn’t want to perpetuate it.

I walked up the steps to the large front porch and joined the others already there. I told them what I had just heard on the car radio and for a minute or two this was the topic of conversation, fueled by general curiousity and compassion toward the passengers on the plane. It had not yet occurred to us to think about the people in the building. It had not yet occurred to us that this was anything more than an accident. Abruptly, D came out the front door onto the porch and without looking at us, announced that the second tower had been hit by a plane and another had gone down near the Pentagon. Her skin was sickly white and she was looking through us.

“My son…he works in one of those buildings.”, was the last thing she said before disappearing back into the house.

The three of us sat there staring at the space where D had been just seconds before. We didn’t know what to think, where to begin, what to do. We were stunned, confused, suddenly afraid. We had gathered that the plane crashes were no accident, but rather some sort of attack on the U.S. In low voices we wondered aloud to each other if we were at war on American soil. We couldn’t even conceive of what that would mean.

Dazed we got up one by one and held the door for each other to go into the main house. We found people gathered around a radio in the dining room. Upstairs someone was retrieving a television from a storage closet and later we would gather together in a small room and weep as we watched the news footage. All of us were particularly raw having lived in a small community, many of us for more than a year, and working daily on developing and cultivating compassion. To add to our vulnerability, we had all voluntarily removed ourselves from the bombardment of media. (A year later when I would leave the retreat center, I would find normal television painfully overwhelming…the noise, the rapidity of movement and screen changes, and certainly the violence.)

The director called us to the main shrine room, and there we gathered in the only sane way we could. We did the only thing we knew how. On September 11, 2001, I and forty or so other Buddhist lay practitioners sat in meditaiton together in a renovated farmhouse on 500 acres of Vermont woodland. We cut through pain, confusion, and fear. We sat there for hours without talking, without working ourselves into a frenzy…the kind of frenzy of fear that the Bush administration would prey on to wage their war against Iraq…without perpetuating and prolonging fear and we let the sadness sit fully. At that moment, it was the best any of us could do.

It may seem passive, or in some ways slightly ridiculous that we thought the best thing to do was to just simply “sit”. But what were the alternatives for us in that moment? We could relive the horror, over and over, by watching the news and let fear and worry overtake us. Essentially, become ripe for poor decision making. We could talk incessantly about what should be done and spread fear and hatred amongst ourselves causing the harm done by the terrorists to extend far beyond the lives taken.

We chose instead, since we could do nothing directly in that moment, to at least cease the spread of confusion, hatred and fear. I now feel immensely thankful for where I was that morning.

Commonsense.com has parenting tips for children and the internet. They cover “Communicating” (email, blogs, instant messaging), “Social Networking” (myspace, facebook, xango), “Downloading, and a few other topics.

I was particularly interested in what they had to say regarding blogs and social networking. They recommend that teens be careful what they post because potential employers or colleges could be looking at their profile and make decisions based on what they find there….

(pause)

I haven’t quite processed how I feel about this. Not from a parenting point of view, but as an individual and citizen. I understand that the internet is a public domain. But so is a bar, a grocery store, a restaurant, a park, etc. I wouldn’t expect that a potential employer would send out a spy to scrutinize my behavior in public. Just because it is easy to do an internet search on someone doesn’t necessarily make it ok. As human beings, we ought to be afforded some privacy even in a public domain. In other words, people’s past times outside of the work arena ought to be left alone.

Most of us have a professional persona, and our social persona. They can be very different, or not different at all, but the latter is rare. Would it be ok for a potential employer to call around to all the local bars to find out if you ever stop in for a drink? Would it be acceptable for them to snoop into all your friendships and relationships and then make judgements on your character? Would any of us feel comfortable knowing that letting our hair down after hours could result in termination or not getting the job?

Of course, there are always exceptions. If an employer found out that you not only stop in for a drink every once in a while, but that you tend to stay until closing every night, unless you are thrown out on the street first because of your obnoxious drunken behavior. Or that all your friends happen to be convicts or ex-convicts.

Still…what if these things were so, yet at work you were nothing but professional and on top of your game? Unless you’re a public official, should it matter? Should it?