US responsibility for El Salvador’s gangs

 

In San Salvador last weekend some gang members set a bus and its passengers on fire.  Everyone’s first question is “why”. Why would anyone find that burning women, children, men, elders, in the middle of a street is  the only way to send a message? Why is it that these people (gang members) don’t have a respect for human life?

The gang situation in El Salvador has been out of hand for years. the newspapers abound with stories of gang related violence. In the past they would only target other gang members and the violence would be a result of their retaliation to others. Now, they direct their violence to literaly anyone. The known reasons they have for doing so range from killing someone who would not give them money,  to drug related disputse,  to taking people’s lives as a requirement for new members to join the gang.  They do things because they can.  They rape girls that they can get their hands on, they literaly knock on people’s doors and ask for money or else they threaten to come inside and.. well, they would commit murder just because it is a past-time of the gang, a dare between members. One of the hardest parts of controling the gangs is that they really have no set agenda. Although their behavior seems to be like terrorists, it is way more unpredictable.

The bus incident has been one of the last things to call the attention of citizens that gangs have become a real threat to all.

A lot has been said already about the roots of the gang problem and adjudicating blame on historical causes is not the best way to solve the situation but it can help us understand it. We had a war 20 years ago and people fled to the u.s.  Displaced youth in the u.s. formed gangs as a way to assert and re-create their identity in a place where they felt as outsiders. Displaced youth were deported back into El Salvador. Whalaaaa…. gangs become an imported good. In 2007 alone about 20,000 were deported back to El Salvador — according to data, there are 13,500 gang members in the country and the numbers keep growing.  Although not all are deported due to criminal records, the reintegration back to a place they don’t know without their families or support system often leads them to join a gang. Here is the case of a man who didn’t want to return to El Salvador because of his tatoos which would probably leave him no choice but  to join a gang en ES  so he could have protection.  Here, another brother asks how deporting his brother will solve gang problems in the US or El Salvador.

In this day and age I think we should start to acknowledge that actions in one country will have an effect in another. It is outrageous that the US continues to enact immigration laws without taking into account the way that they will affect the neighboring countries. I mean, since very little we are taught that our actions will have consequences and that we should thnk about them before we act.  Since when does nationality allows us not to give a shit about consequences?

I don’t mean to merely point fingers at the u.s. but seriously, it is time someone is made accountable. The US policies of immediate deportation of criminals back to their thirld world countries, that don’t have a well developed legal system or enformcement capabilities… is a mistake that is costing the lives of innocents.

I don’t understand how a a country like the US will continue with the policy of deportation trying to hide under the excuse that it is not their problem. Really?  How much longer will we negate the interdependence of our world?  The concept of nation-state has changed dramatically and no one is insulated from each other’s actions. And honestly there is no reason we should be insulated. For once,  we can be able to empathize with crisis in different parts of the world and look at each other as human beings instead of as americans or  salvadorans. But with this acknowledgement also comes responsibility. To say that we are responsible only for “our” people allows us to become irresponsible when it comes to our actions. As long as the people under “my” flag are happy, I don’t have to weight the consequences of my actions to those  who are not americans? 

Is this really what Americans believe in? Is it what we believe in? I was taught to objectively asses my own actions instead of granting priviledges to special groups. In political jargon that is called nepotism. Judging from US policy, it seems to me it is a country founded on nepotism and not fairness and equality as they say. Liberty and equality only belong to a certain priviledged few. The rest of us might as well burn up in a bus because it is not “their” problem.

Instead of exporting back those criminals to a country that does not have the institutional and financial capacity yet to deal with them, why not judge them in your great modern prisions for their crimes? Is it more desirable for the US to have them come and burn civilians from someone else’s country than to imprision them in their own system? that is the message the US is sending. It is a message that objectively, makes no sense. The US response seems petty and arrogant.

It is quite ridiculous too, that the US policies against immigrants get tighter each day, considering that by deporting back hundreds of criminals each day, they make el Salvador more insecure… which means more people will try to enter the “land of the free”. Actually even for those who were deported, many continue to go back time after time… simply because the conditions in El Salvador right now are so hostile.

I wonder if all those people in Washington D.C. aren’t able to see how failed their policies are — instead of enacting policies just to please voters, they should educate voters about the consequences of the policies they will enact.

It is time that we start to make each other accountable for our actions.  The US must be held accountable for the gang problem in El Salvador.  People are dying because of this kind of arrogance, and even thought they are not “americans” they are still people.  The dignity of a human being is not based on his race or the flag he sports. The arrogance of the US regarding other countries is unnacceptable because their “patrotism”  costs lives. Sometimes directly as in Vietnam, Iraq, Palestine.. but often times in the form of policies that have an effect on the rest of the world.

The heart is a whore – kind of

What is love?

Recently  I  had news from a friend,. Happy content news where she told me she had a wonderful boyfriend and the might just be in love. The news did not have an impact on me to me because this friend has a tendency for being in love quite a lot. Even after her previous bad break up that had cost her such a long time to get over, now here she is again .. in love.

Is it really love?

Im sceptical of  her perception of “love”. In my experience I have had many good relationships, but rarely would I have concluded that I was in love.  All of them ended precisely because since the “love” component was lacking, I found it pointless to go on.  Later on, I found someone whom I felt in love with and from that experience, well, I concluded that I would not be able to love anyone else.  I’m still with this person and I can’t see my life without them. If this person leaves my life I don’t think I would easily find someone else. Love happens… once.. or does it?

Maybe the heart is a whore. They say once you lose your virginity then it becomes easier to have sex. You lose the fear, the misconceptions, the self-consciousness, and you start to enjoy it more and more. So it makes me wonder if the heart also loses its virginity when it comes to love.  I have to admit that I only have one “love” experience and I have been luck that it hasn’t ended.  I’m still with the person I lost my love virginity to. But what if it did end? Would I just as easily be able to latch onto someone else due to my past experience in doing it? Love them with the same intensity?  doesn’t love just comes once in a lifetime?

So either the heart is a whore, or people *think* they love someone when they really don’t.

Things however are never black and white, they can’t be so easily put as “either or”. My final theory is a mixture of both answers. I think love only happens with a special person. However, given the world’s population, there might not only be one special person. We are all different. I might feel love for Mr. Black sparked by the specific combination Mr. Black’s and my experiences and traits; but then Mr Black dumps me and I find Mr. Orange and then again there are new sparks. The sparks cannot be the same as the previous ones, and the feelings of love produced will be entirely new. So I guess it is a combination of the heart being able to give itself to many special people – but not all. Mr. Pink might come by and try and be a gentleman and all, but nothing might happen. With this I would have to conclude that love is very unique and every love is different.

In that sense I guess my friend has been very lucky to have found love many times. Her portfolio of experiences I’m sure is rich with descriptions of how different one love was from another and how different the sparks felt like… and how teach experience felt new.

Can we stick to one love or should we go around letting the heart get laid with different hearts enriching the scope of its understanding of what love is?. The one love approach works if you are completely fulfilled in all the ways possible. Also it reduces the insecurity to be out there in the field trying to find a significant other. At the same time, there is no guarantee that there might be a lot of people who can click with you or maybe there is only one. Most people only find one through their whole lives.  Im certainly glad to have found mine, for there is always a chance that there only is one for me.

What do you think?

Evidence, Belief, and Choice

If a hard core atheist is presented with proof that there are forces in the world that cannot be explained naturally, the atheist will still adhere to his own beliefs that even if now we can’t explain them, someday with the adequate tools and after further studies, we will. The explanation that there are forces that do not obey the natural laws, will not be accepted… even in the face of factual evidence.

This tells me everything biols down to choice. Belief is not just a matter of showing someone the evidence of something, but it is a matter of choice. I can show the atheist a person levitating and he will still deny that the levitation occurred beause of the power of the mind (for example), or he will doubt his own sanity if he does see a person floating in meditation. The atheist chooses to believe that if he is witnessing an event that appears to fall outside of natural explanations, it is either because he has gone mad, or because the explanation is not there *yet*.

Religious people likewise, even when presented with evidence about the causes of things, also choose to continue believing in supernatural causes. Tsunamis and earthquakes are not seen just as natural events with explainable causes, but as the hand of god trying to accomplish a purpose.

Both the faith infused, and the atheist argue that they want “evidence” . The religious often accuse the atheists of saying that “something came out of nothing” , asking the atheist to present evidence for the forces behind the big bang or of life itself. The religous seem to want evidence and yet they reject it when scientific evidence is presented.

The atheist likewise seeks evidence for events, but in the case of witnessing an event that has no natural explanation, he will always argue that there has to be one, that there is no possibility for something outside of nature.

Although there is no problem to leave each one to make his choice regarding what kind of evidence they will accept and how they will judge it as long as we can all tolerate that each choice is subjective: the problem does arise when we talk about how research is done and guided. Research into different topics is guided by our subjective desires and questions. As a collective for example, in the social sciences, right now there is interest in research on democracy with a lot of optimism. Research done on the positive aspects of communism for example, is often dismissed in light of the vast amount of evidence that says communism is bad. We don’t have to make evaluative judgements about the systems, but we must take into account all sorts of contending evidence. Likewise I feel that in our scientific age, someone who says they will do research that proves that that a miracle did not have natural explanations will be dismissed easily, as that miracle might represent a .000000000000001% of the cases where natural causes proved inadequate. But it doesn’t mean we should automatically dismiss it as irrelevant, does it? Sometimes in those very rare exceptions we can find very interesting answers.

Personally I think that there are very few, if at all any, events that can be attributed as being outside of nature’s commands. However there are still questions about consciousness, such as the existence of a soul, the power of thoughts, etc; that have not been answered and that at one moment or another if we do witness their effects, we should consider that maybe the reasons we can’t explain them are because they are outside the realm of natural causes. I advocate for scientific research and an open mind not to reject the assumption that the super natural might exist. The atheist assumption otherwise, is already that it does not exist therefore all answers will point towards natural causes. Assuming that *there is* something else , allows us to direct research towards causes that have been dismissed by many. Can we find the soul? First we have to assume that it is there. As long as we can do that, we can try to *find* it.

A group of Princeton Scientists for example have taken it upon them to research these questions and have made experiments and test hypothesis regarding the existence of a “global consciousness” and the interactions between mind and matter. In the early 1900′s some guy called Douglas MacDougall did some research to try to find the human soul. He recorded a loss of weight of dying patients before and seconds after their death, finding that there was a very distinct loss of exactly 21 grams. A series of causes were dismissed (such as air escaping from the lungs) by running different tests. Apparently the phenomena of such loss was only evident in humans, as animals did not lose any weight after their death. However to this day no one else has take up his findings of continued his research and his research was found as not having an impact. Why isn’t anyone researching this?

I don’t say we should easily ascribe supernatural causes to things we dont know. We should definetly keep looking. But we should look with the right attitude. Right now there is a man in India, a “spiritual” man, a yogi, who has been fasting for what he claims are years. Doctors decided to put him unders study, check his vital signs, etc. Now, this man I say is an exception to the rule and probably less than 0.0000000000001% of the cases! I think it is great that doctors are taking the time to check and study him and not just say he is a lier or say “well we know it cant happen, there must be something easily explainable going on anyway, so why bother with this”. Instead their belief that someting ELSE might be going on, drives their desire to learn from it. If we all know that it is impossible to go without food for years, why bother with someone who claims the contrary? Unless we assume that something *super natural* is possible we wont be able to find it. Like those doctors, we must first have to make the choice to believe that there might be an alternate explanation, a force outside of natural law. Unless we make this choice, even if the evidence is placed in front of us, we wont believe.

Here is one of the many videos documenting what some doctors think of the holy indian man who claims does not need water or food to survive. Supernatural?  It is your choice to decide.

The Way and The Truth

Although I have no reason to believe in the absoluteness of any particular religion I cannot refute with certainty the existence of a supernatural force, being, or energy. I believe that there are truths in life that exist within every religion and outside of every religion. Truths that we can grasp with our hearts and only our hearts. I blogged about Karen Armstrong and her research on the teaching of the golden rule as found in the main monotheistic religions, as a way to find what “truly” is valuable within the religions, plucking away the often ridiculous arbitrariness in the texts.  Love as expressed in the golden rule , for example, is one of those things that I consider contains an idea that comes from beyond our own hearts. Why “beyond” our hearts? Because such truths are often not practiced easily, they require that we “fine tune” our senses or our consciousness to keep in touch with that energy that expresses itself as Love for us. But to say that Love is a specific God from a specific religion violates the very concept of love itself. Declaring the absoluteness of a religion automatically contains damnation for the rest and for others, it is the seed of hatred, intolerance and separation. I cannot conceive to worship a god that would cause these things to harbor in our hearts. A god that breeds self-righteousness and the arrogance of saying “I am right, you are wrong” is not a god that is wise for if he knows  our human nature he would not have represented Love as the property of a specific religion for such a representation will lead to what was mentioned before. It is also not a god that is loving. The attempt to place god under our own human made descriptions , as religion does, is foolish and incorrect.

I cant condemn the ancient founders of religions, those scribes who sat down and after some “encounter” with the supernatural, attempted to put down their experiences into words. The bible men such as moses, buddah, mohammed.. . It is very hard to refute that *something* happened to those men at some point in their lives that made them fill up with the desire to impart it to others. It is very hard to argue with someone who says they have had a “personal” experience with god, and whom you can see changes their lives around because of some personally revealed truths.

The problem is that our senses and our words are not enough to describe the so called divine. The supernatural is beyond our reach, descriptively. If I were to have  a face to face encounter with an angel, how can I describe him when all I have to describe it are the words assigned to natural things? It is so foolish to bring those personal experience and translate them into doctrine, for as doing that, we are already corrupting the divine and turning the supernatural into mundane.  The “words” of god have already been filtered by those scribes  who attempt to translate a supernatural experience through natural means and capture it with reason. Texts are no longer sacred. The are nothing but a human made attempt to communicate the incommunicable.  Unless the word of God appears written by HIM directly then we must consider that other works written by men have also been tainted by men. This is irrefutable. Defenders of those texts cannot prove it otherwise.

So what should we think about the texts and the experiences that people try to communicate to others? To begin with it should not be turned into doctrine. If a supernatural being does speak to us it is something we should keep in the depths of our hearts as something that we just *know*, as a sort of unexplainable intuition that we might want to consider divine. But can we honestly take the responsibility for telling others that *their* experiences and intuitions are wrong?  Religious leaders that assert such monopoly on the truth should be somehow responsible for the effect of their actions and for the loss of many followers for really being able to find a true connection to a divine entity.. personally.  A lot of souls are lost in religion without ever experiencing enlightenment precisely because they were never given the freedom to search. Everyone should have the freedom to pursue a personal connection with the divine.

But, can we really fine tune our limited natural senses to perceive and connect with an unlimited supernatural being?  Perhaps the only way left for us in the natural world to find traces of the supernatural is, in this myriad of variations, individualities, multitudes of perceptions of the world, the only glimpses are found in the common ideas of what we in our hearts, for reasons we cannot explain, have found to be transcendent,*sacred* and true; such as love.

We don’t have to put the divine into words, love often eludes description or explanation, it is something that just *is*. We don’t have to make teachings out of them. We don’t even have to attempt to understand them. All that is left for us is to be open to be touched  and fulfilled by all those things that we have come to conceptualize as “noble”, wherever they come from and however they are expressed is irrelevant, for in the end “the way” to any truth is personal and unexplainable.  Believing that they do exist is a step to being able to tune our lives into a direction that leads us to be at peace with existence, ourselves, and others.  Our search should not be conditioned by someone else experience. Openness should not only be ascribed to the possibility of the existence of a truth in itself, but most importantly  to the means of attaining the knowledge of it.

A glimpse at death and life

How long was it since you saw someone die? Driving through the streets of El Salvador today I was witness to a car accident. Actually I did not have the chance to see the moment of the collision, I was there moments afterwards. A lady was screaming desperatly for help. A teenage girl lying on the ground convulting, her eyeballs turned white, shaking her contorted body uncontrollably. “She is dying!” were the words of my father, who was driving our car, then we stopped to join the others who were there trying to lend a hand somehow. But we were all helpless. We couldn’t do much to help the girl hold on to her life, we could not contain the spirit of her life in her body while we hoped with all our might that the ambulance would show up soon.

The experience made me cry. For me and the rest of the spectators our only relationship to the woman and her daughter was the fact of being human and having love for existing. I had never seen someone die before my eyes. I had never felt that desperation of not being able to stop the force of life from leaving a body. It was baffling. I felt anxious and impotent. There is no antidote to death. In my mind I kept having the filling of a spilled glass of water, or a broken bottle, life being the water keeping us alive, spilling out from the girl slowly and sometimes in gulps… gushing out leaving behind only a broken body.

This experience made me realize how precious it is to be alive, to have a body that is working well, how important it is to protect each human life. What was worse about the accident is that it could be avoided. A wreckless driver led to a loss of life. A perfectly good teenage body, in its moment of prime growth, beaten up by a car until it could take no more.  One thing is to ackowledge death as the inevitable consequence of the deterioration of our bodies through time; another is to have some asshole take it away when we still have time.

Wars and violence can be avoided. We can stop the glasses from breaking, the bottles from spilling, the guns from taking a life. We can avoid death until its due time.

I’m kind of in shock. That girl should not have died.

Life is frail. Our bodies can only take so much. We are frail. Often times we marvel at life when we see a newborn baby, but maybe a more powerful realization is to see a dying child. Then we can develop a respect for existance. Whatever our consciousness turns out to be (some spiritual magical force or just the combination of chemicals) a respect for life comes out of our acknowledgement of its fragility.

It doesn’t matter whether there is a reason for our existence or not. The fact remains that we are here, and not every cell made it. We are here , and all we have to stay here and to experience life are our fragile bodies. A careless driver, a bullet, an unexpected fall, anything can come and disrupt the workings of our bodies and our minds, eventually stoping out ability to stay conscious and thus experience reality.We are fragile.

I would like to think that the girl’s spirit left her and went somewhere beautiful where she could experience things again, perhaps wtih a new body. In this sense maybe, if we were certain, then death would be a happy/peaceful event. But to me, all I could see was a body that was impacted so hard that it stopped working. Her head suffered a concussion that caused her to convult, and eventually the bodily funcitons could not be restored to normality on time.  I did not see a spirit. I saw instead the end of a body, and thus, the end of a life. I saw the fragility of our existence. I saw with respect, how precious this existence is; precisely because it is fragile.

Eventually the police and an ambulance showed up. The woman cried and it was unbearable. I heard people try to comfort her saying her daughter was now in a better place. That it was God’s will.  Those words comforted her. And she was able to steer her sight from the lifeless body on the ground.

Me and my dad drove off. All I could think of was that this event could have been avoided, how unfair it was for a young, able body to end up lying there on the ground because of someone’s carelessness. If there were better driving laws, if there was justice, if the driver hadn’t been careless, “God’s will” could have been avoided.

Development of East and West worldviews

Although it is quite obvious that there are cultural differences between “east” and “west” which lead to different ways of thinking, it is sometimes difficult to make an assertion that the differences amount to a significant difference between easterners and westerners. Political correctness and a desire to find a common ground usually mad me and my friends avoid the assertion that our differences were real and not just social constructs. A friend used to go as far to claim that asian girls had an “asian way” with men due to the asian value of submission. Claims like these were of course unfounded, but … how so? Although I reject stereotypes, and I am aware that there are asians who seem very “western” and viceversa, I also wanted to recognize and value the inherent differences in cultures and wold views. Not valuing one over the other, but acknowledging that that it is true that life can be seen in different ways, through different logics and to be able to understand one another we must know what they are looking at.

In this aim to understand the observations and experiences given to me by Japan I bought the book “The Geography of Thought – How Asians and Westerners Think Differently… and Why” by Richard Nisbett. I’m quite pleased and amazed at how accurate the theory is to the practice. The things that me and some friends puzzled over from Japanese culture, seems to be explained, and our assertions that the “Japanese are different” (from us).. well, are true.  There is a different in cognition and perception that goes beyond cultural expressions in religion, food, dance or aesthetics. Cognition – as the way information is processed and interpreted, is different. Two loci of thought are analyzed as the origins of eastern and western values : China and Greece.

Nsbett’s assertion starts by first outlining the “social origins of the mind”.  His theory rests on the assumption that physical factors (ecology) help explain cultures, and ultimately the shaping of the mind. First, ecology shapes the development of an economy and social structure.  Environment in China consisted of fertile plains, low mountains and rivers. This environment favored agriculture. Environment in Greece consisted of mountains and favored herding, fishing and trade. Greece did not develop agriculture until 2000 years after China did. So now you have two different structures of society. One that is fairly easy to control through a centralized system (agriculture) and which requires cooperation with other fellow farmers cultivating land close to one another; and another in Greece that was more de-centralized, where harmony was not necessarily needed as most people in Greece were not living in stable communities in order to make a living.

Social structure then leads to social practices.  The Chinese were necessarily attuned to their environment and social world. Relations to their peers and to authority was important.  “Attention to the field would encourage recognition of complexity and change as well as contradiction among its many and varied elements” (Nisbett p. 36). The Greeks on the other hand had to focus on objects and their own individual goals and not just people, they were not constrained to people in order to attain goals. The greeks developed a need to focus on the attributes of objects allowing them to predict their behavior and thus control it. So there was different target of attention. The greeks on individual objects and their properties, and the chinese on the environment and the relations between things. One worldview develops of the world as fluid and of the world as a substance, the other one of the world as full of objects that can be controlled.

Finally this leads to cognition. For those who see that events around them, as well as relationships play a role in outcomes, then the “processes of attention, perception and reasoning will develop a focuson detecting events and discerning relationships among them”. For the Greeks , the world was more “simple” focused on objects alone, but this lead to developing processes of formal categorization of objects, and the discovery of the rules that govern such objects. It is to no surprise that the Greeks developed a system of logic in order to rid themselves of contradictions. Lately scientific reasoning develops easy from this way of analyzing the world. You see an object, you abstract its caracteristics, you find which rules apply to its behavior.

So what does this mean ? It means we behave different because we see the world as different. Of course to a certain extent we all know this but maybe sometimes we should really keep in mind that there is no “right” and “wrong” way of doing things. In a university environment of  Japan I often heard my peers(and joined) critiquing how Japanese students were less likely to engage in discussion and how in group projects for example, even the making of a simple power point presentation would take a long time. I myself was part of teacher’s meetings where we tried to discuss what activities to do and usually the meeting would take up to 2 hours without reaching a proper conclusion. No one would contribute, no one would decide upon anything, and the most seemingly irrelevant things were put on the table to be discussed. It irritated me and it seemed to me a waste of my time. So yes, I was aware of the differences but had no understanding of them.

The things is that the cultural development of Japanese worldview leads to a perception of the world that is fluid, and dis encourages individualized thought. This is not to say that people can’t think for themselves, but it is to say that the aim for a world view that seeks harmony with its environment is not to prove ones self to others. In a review of children’s journals from children from China and the US, the american children made three times more self-references than the Chinese children who provided more decriptions and details about the events around them.  The Asian world view is more holistic and he self is perceived as being embedded. As Nisbett puts it,”Westerners are the protagoniss of their autobiographycal novels; Asians are merely cast memebers in moveis touching on their existences” (p.87) . Asians feel safer and more comfortable with being a part of the group, Westerners value the ability to exert individualized choice in situations. A friend told me of her experience with a Japanese friend while they were discussing religion. My friend said she preferred to think by herself, using her own mind. Her Japanese friend responded with “why would you want to think by yourself?”. It is not that her friend might not have had her own thoughts, but the worldview she had made her conclude that the world is so complex, so fluid, that it is more desirable to attain harmony with that world than to “stick out alone” with your own thoughts. My friend, however, seeing the world as objects governed  by specific rules, developed the conclusion that it is important to develop her own self, to grow her own mind as a more developed self and mind would  increase the accuracy of her views of the world, and thus her control over them.

Westerners see the world as Atomized and Easterners as Fluid. Maybe this is why in a university setting westerners get exasperated at the lack of assertiveness in students for voicing their opinions. Again it comes from the western view that fosters debate and the use of logic to dispute contradictions. In Asia there was no such development of logic to dispute contradictions, their worldview allowed them to embrace such contradictions as part of a fluid whole, what was more important was to find a “middle way”.  I wonder too, if someone is really taking into account all the variables and all the relationships between things this probably makes it harder to assert an opinion… after all the world is in constant change and we might say one thing today and realize by tomorrow that the thing has changed. For the greek worldview however, embracing change and contradiction was not desirable for their survival, as it depended on the effective control of the things around them and the notion that “if A is A, it will always be A”. Scientific enquiry is based on this type of logic. This makes it easy for someone to assert his/her opinion as the world is less complicated and less malleable/fluid than it is for the Asian.

Nisbett’s book is full examples of tests done to asians and westerners that provide proof of the cognotive differences between easterns and westerners , concluding that westerners have a view more focused on objects, while easterners focus on the environment and substance. In my experience it was always puzzling to me why someone would choose conformity over individual expression of ideas, or why someone would reject the option of choosing something and instead value being a part of the group where things were already “set” for them. Even in tourism it is easy to see how different a western traveler is, who seeks to explore things independently , and a Japanese traveler who prefers a well outlined tour that tells him where to go and what to see, where to stay, at what time to get up to go see things. Sometimes I would admit to having a laugh at how everything seemed to be “outlined” for me as a student, but now I understand that the value of order that applied to the entire group makes sense when the desirable thing IS to be a part of a group and there are rules that ensure there will be harmony for all the group. I personally would have preferred less rules and more options. It is important to keep in mind that the world *does* look different to peoples from different places, and not just in the usual “cultural” aspects, but fundamentally different and this is reflected on behavior.  It was not right to critique my peers as being “simple” minded because they had trouble making choices or expressing opinions. They probably thought I was simple minded because I was only considering the attributes of some objects instead of their relationships to everything else; and my voicing of opinions and insistence on coherence was not just simple but improper as the importance is not the self, but harmony. At least in a fluid world.And in a fluid world, contradiction is not a problem.

Understanding these differences brings me back to the importance of remembering that all we have is our own perception and it has been conditioned by forces in our environment. Our truths and views of the world come about as a result of environmental forces, and then reinforce the structures again.

A friend left me with the question of “so what happened to the Greeks?”. The Greek worldview led to the inquiry of the world through the development of logic and scientific reasoning. It gave us formal logic, debate, democracy, and development of scientific ideas. What happened to them? Now we see China and India on the rise , with an entirely different world view catching up with the U.S. and its individuality. I think that the world has become more interconnected through economy and communications and that connections increasing the complexity of things. If the tests are true, the Asian world view is more able to grasp the complexities of the world than is a western world view that would isolate events trying to put rules to them. Western world view is like tunnel vision, and while it led us to progress in many areas, it also blinds us by creating a misconception of control over things, a misconception of simplicity.  Asian vision is more global and in its analysis of the world it is more able to embrace the complexities and contradictions inherent in the world, and perhaps this is what is necessary to be more competitive in the world. Their understanding of the world might make the more equipped to take over due to their cognitive focus on environment and relationships as forces of change in the increasing complexity of the world.

“We can never go back” – on returning to the homeland

I write this sitting in the yard table next to my 93 year old granny. She is trying to read but her eyes do not let her. She asks me on and off what the doodles on the page read. She curses the “light” and her old pair of glasses and refuses to acknowledge that at her age, the problem is not in the world around her, but in the deterioration of her own eyes.

Coming back home has been quite an experience. 3 years away have done something to my eyes by opening them up to certain things about my environment and about myself. The process of re-adaptation is difficult mainly because, as I am, I do not see the point in re-adapting. In fact, I think it is impossible and un-healthy.

The thing is, that as someone once told me “going back is not an option”, in reference to the mentality carried by the migrants who left Europe at the beginning of the 19th century in order to make for themselves a new life in America. “Going back” not only referred to the impossibility of a physical return but to the shedding of mental paradigms that they were escaping. I use the word “escaping” for the first time in remembrance of a friend’s description of those gaijin who populated japan “everyone is running away from something”. At the time it seemed a bit extreme… but now it makes sense.

Immigrating is an escape whether conscious or not, when we leave our country of origin we are escaping lack of opportunities, rigid class structures, oppressive economies, lack of educational or creative stimulation, etc. Leaving, whether we say “we are searching for something” entails the fact that “we are searching for something that we could not find back home”. We are escaping that lack.

And so it is, I find myself back to “square 1″ wondering why I left Japan when I had the chance to stay and wondering if I am committing a horrible treason to those who migrate in search of a better world by “going back”.Here I am “going back” to that same place that I fled (twice) due to it’s considerable lack of opportunities. The place that millions leave every day in search for more.. millions who will not return.

I wonder if I am at all “smart”.

But then again coming back, does not feel like coming back. My mind has changed and my current self is miles away from that 19 yr old girl who first left her home to go off to college. Going back would mean for me to leave behind 7 years of experiences, of cultural insights, 7 years of broadening my mind to be wiped away to become once again that girl who had never left home. I am not the same.

The change in me now is more drastic than ever. For the first time I am able to objectively see what it is that I really left. I left close minded attitudes and uneducated assumptions about reality. I left a monolithic view of the world. I could not see this before, and now I know more clearly what it is that I was escaping from or what it is that I was searching. It is funny that we only know ourselves in retrospective. I was searching for mental freedom, and though I didn’t know it, I was thirsty for a view of the world that did not claim to be the absolute truth about it. There had to be more … and there was. By leaving home I gained the freedom and the tools to question it’s hold on absolute truth.

In leaving Japan I guess I was also in a way escaping a lack. An entirely emotional decision made without economic logic, I think it was necessary and something inside me tells me it is not necessarily bad. Japan was no longer a positive force in the formation of my character. As forceful as a tsunami, it had the power to destroy fallacies and contradictions in me, and this was necessary, but without the proper roots I was getting carried away and drowning. I needed to hold on to something. This something was in my past.

I needed to come back to where I came from  because after 8 years of change after change, I forgot who I was.  Coming back is solidifying the changes in me providing me with a view of what it is that has remained intact within all these years… my essence. It is also showing me more clearly who I used to be and why those pieces did not stand the test of time.  The past is showing me who I am now, not by imposing itself and capturing my present, but by illustrating the reasons of why I am the way I am.

Coming back does not mean in anyway going back to the previous state of being. I find it inexplicable how some people can return after years of living abroad, and continue to act in the same way as before they left their countries.  Those people never wanted to leave in the first place. It is possible to leave without leaving, or to be there without being a part of it. I am in the last category.

My eyes have changed. I can no longer see this house, this norms, this culture and mentality in the same way as before. Some will say that I was blinded by science, secularism, cultural relativism, materialism… whatever. Unable to see beyond their own views , they will see my view as flawed.  But how can you judge that a certain view is flawed when one has never had the opportunity to question their own view? Someone who doesn’t question their own view is like my 90something granny who thinks the world has gone dark, when in reality it is just her glasses which have gotten dirty.

You always have to start with yourself. I have to be very clear in saying that there are certain places in the world where questioning is not valued by the general population. This is not the case in most multicultural environments where the first thing you ought to question in order to relate to other views is the assertion that yours (or theirs) is an absolute; but you always have to start with yourself.

I’m back at square one, sure. But I’m also going forward into another stage of my life attaining firmer roots in myself. I needed to return to gather the pieces scattered by time and experiences and consolidate them into one coherent whole.  I am going forward, as most of us are…. because for all of us in one way or another the truth is “we can never go back” .  The past fulfills historical purposes, roots fulfill structural foundational purposes; but nothing is or should be a cage to keep us static. Forward and only forward. Adelante, siempre adelante.

katsu-don

“so do you believe in god?”

“what?”

The others’ heads turned in curiosity and to give piercing eyes that would see how far her love for her had gone.

“well i, i .. .i learned how to think, i dont believe in god”

He looked down hiding a smile. She opened her eyes wide “amazing how much influence L has on you”

She chuckled embarrased and questioned herself until the rest of the night. Why hadn’t she answered agnostic? said something along the lines of not approving of the current main religions? why? why didn’t she offer to them a spiritual side – everyone would have agreed that there surely is *something bigger* out there?  … why do people have to ask questions in the middle of a tonkatsu goodbye dinner? why did she feel embarrased?

fuck .

communication is an illusion .every intention is lost in the pathway on the way to the ear canal.

the religous and moral set intently on their need to entrust their goodness and their best praises onto something in order to gain favor and more goodness for more praise! alleluyah! it was all a matter of choosing the right object of worship. The right god. A deity in heaven or embodying with power an earthly possession – a job, a partner , a brother a sister a friend a passion. they worship something, and their choice reflects the impecable quality of their virtues, values, and logic. you don’t worship anything. the embarrased girl has no object that reflects her good judgment. self-righteousness is gone. “poor girl she lacks common sense to have chosen the pathway of righteousness, god spare her soul!”

and the others who had chosen not to worship,  completely unaware as they had set not to be bothered with questions of the purpose of their existance because of the factual knowledge of the mortality and fragility of life. this is all you got, all there will be, so make the best out of it. grounding themselves firmly in the fiber of this world , on life itself  – the unimportant fades away easily and the truths of life emerge : love freedom and happiness. she wondered why, if they really understood about the ”important things” such as ”love” they could be wasting their time asking questions instead of enjoying a precious time together. pass the sauce.

God wants us to be Evil

For a long time me I have been caught into debates about whether or not human nature is inclined to good or to evil.  A simple look around the current state of our world gave me plenty of evidence to believe that there is little good in human nature. The will to do good must have to be prodded by laws or religion.  Or so I thought. At least until “Atlas Shrugged” fell on my lap. The book has been challenging most of my views about human nature in an elegant yet entertaining way. I think the reason I had not been convinced before is because the arguments made against my claims , lacked a moral component, that is a prescriptive component of what the world “should” be like – or in other words, an ideal to aspire to. My claims on the other hand were full of prescriptions and “shoulds”, as religion and laws have an easy way of providing that based on the premise that we are all “fallen beings”.

So first I want to follow the premise that mankind is in a fallen state, or a state of disgrace. The validity of a God as a savior and redeemer requires the failure of his own creation.  The first step is then to label the creation as sinful or incomplete. Now, I wonder, how can followers worship a creator of such a failed product? If we are to believe that we need god because we are of a sinful nature, then doesn’t it follow to conclude that the god who created us was rather incompetent?  It is immoral to worship a god that bases his validity as lord on our own failure as a creation. Everything about his creation is dammed : your instincts, your desires, your desicions, even your willingness to do good because (at least in the protestant tradition) it is not good works that will save you, but the grace of god. Good works are meant nothing if they are not done with God in mind.  So how do we ever convince ourselves to be in need of this incompetent creator? By convincing ourselves that we are bad, that our nature is sinful.

Now what if we were to live on the premise that all of our nature is moral? That instead of condemning  our selfish drive to put our interests and our pleasure ahead of someone else’s we would worship that? For those who believe in God, doesn’t it make more sense to worship a god whose creation is to be considered perfect? This means accepting that everyone’s individual drives were put there by god. The drive for sex, the drive for love, the drive for competition, for achievement, for success, for anything.

But religion, and laws, and the premise that we are bad, require us to sacrifice our drives and desires. It sets forth a concept of love that is based on self-sacrifice. What is good can only be good if it entails some sort of difficult sacrifice on your own part. It is not enough to love your friends, you have to love your enemy in order for that love to be recognized as such. How can that be any moral? On what premise do we have to reward those who do bad with our love? Why do we worship such a monstrous concept of love? We accept it only because we believe ourselves to be fallen creatures, and only then do we accept god’s love for us. But if we consider that the existence of a perfect creator would yield a perfect creation then we would see that this “love” is actually deserved, we would start behaving more justly. Everyone would get what they deserve, and would work towards getting that. Success, as well as Love, are things you have to work for. Sadly we have forgotten this and we expect things to come by “grace”, and we diminish our own value by diminishing the concept of love. We should do good, we should love, we should work towards something simply because it feels good to us, because it fulfills us. It is ridiculous to have to go through life making sacrifices and responding to “god’s difficult calling” as if we were prisioners, constant prisioners who have to die a little each day.

There is no freedom in religion. No freedom to be yourself and to acknowledge your choices and behavior. The guilt that moves religious followers also does not allow for the exercise of good, for no one who considers good to be a sacrifice will not be able to be fulfilled by it truly. The fulfillment of doing good towards others comes from the fact that in part, you are doing something that is meant to satisfy you as a person.  The selfish motive behind doing good is what keeps healthy altruism going. In a sense it stops being altruism, and then good becomes just a reflection of who we are. We will help those who help us, those who we love , those who we choose to love. True “good” will be a reflection and extension of ourselves.

I think a creator’s work reflects the creator. A person who is fulfilled, confident, and who acts freely by deeming all of his desires and choices as valid as opposed to condemned, is a person who would truly reflect god. Someone who knows he has the right to exist will behave in a way that has higher morals than those who constantly fight their own nature in order to win that right to exist. Sadly, Islam, Christianity and Judaism do not exalt the creation of their god’s. The abundance of rules and compliance to self-sacrifice on the three main religions only serve to denigrate that creation and the creator.

What other proof do we have of god in this earth other than his creation? But if this creation is to be considered “evil” and in need of a “cure” then could we even call that cure a “creator”?

I think that the biggest denigration of our nature is evidenced in the contempt we hold for the most intimate and vital drive for the survival of our species: sex.  Pleasurable sex is a luxury awarded only to a few species, I think only dolphins and humans have sexual encounters that provide them with pleasure. Lucky us. But so unlucky to damn it as a “lower” instinctual drive that should be suppressed. Religious laws that drill in our brains that we should see the sexual drive as a temptation that leads to downfall and condemnation only serve to denigrate our choices.

“a man’s sexual choice is the result and the sum of his fundamental convictions. Tell me what a man finds sexually attractive and I will tell you his entire philosophy on life. Show me the woman he sleeps with and I will tell you his valuation of himself. No matter what corruption he’s taught about the virtue of selflessness, sex is the most profoundly selfish of all acts, an act which he cannot perform for any motive but his own enjoyment–just try to think of performing it in a spirit of selfless charity!–an act which is not possible in self-abasement, only in self-exaltation, only in confidence of being desired and being worthy of desire. It is an act that forces him to stand naked in spirit, as well as in body, and to accept his real ego as his standard of value. He will always be attracted to the woman who reflects his deepest vision of himself, the woman whose surrender permits him to experience–or to fake–a sense of self-esteem. The man who is proudly certain of his own value, will want the highest type of woman he can find, the woman he admires, the strongest, the hardest to conquer — because only the possession of a heroine will give him the sense of an achievement, not the possession of a brainless slut. [...] He does not seek to gain his value, he seeks to express it. There is no conflict between the standards of his mind and the desires of his body. But the man who is convinced of his own worthlessness will be drawn to a woman he despises–because she will reflect his own secret self, she will release him from that objective reality in which he is a fraud, she will give him a momentary illusion of his own value and a momentary escape from the morel code that damns him. Observe the ugly mess which most men make of their sex lives–and observe the mess of contradictions which they hold as their moral philosophy. One proceeds from the other. Love is our response to our highest values–and can be nothing else. Let a man corrupt his values and his view of existence, let him profess that love is not self-enjoyment but self-denial, that virtue consists, not of pride, but of pity or pain or weakness or sacrifice, that the noblest love is born, not of admiration, but of charity, not in response to values, but in response to flaws–and he will have cut himself in two. His body will not obey him, it will not respond, it will make him impotent toward the woman he professes to love and draw him to the lowest type of whore he can find. His body will always follow the ultimate logic of his deepest convictions; if he believes that flaws are values, he has damned existence as evil and only the evil will attract him. He has damned himself and he will feel that depravity is all he is worthy of enjoying. He has equated virtue with pain and he will feel that vice is the only realm of pleasure. Then he will scream that his body has vicious desires of its own which his mind cannot conquer, that sex is sin, that true love is a pure emotion of the spirit. And then he will wonder why love brings him nothing but boredom, and sex–nothing but shame.” – Francisco de Aconia in Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand (1957)

Religion damns us and prevents us from making choices based on a rational validation on our rightful value as human beings. We have value. We do not need laws and religion to be compelled to make good choices. Once we are set free from the premise that we are evil and damned, we will value each of our acts as we will be conscious that they reflect who we are. But if we live a life that tells us that we are indeed evil, we will be condemned to making choices according to our fallen nature – and then the circle is complete when a religious fanatic exclaims that the transgressions occur because the sinner doesn’t have god in his heart yet. As soon as we all convert… evil will be gone from our world. However our fallen nature will stay with us.

Religion does not cure the “evil” in our nature, religion requires for us to believe that we are evil so that it continues to exist. We need to live in constant denigration of our selves in order to believe that we need religion.

The only way to be set free from religion and laws is to discard the premise that fills us with guilt: that we need to purchase a right to exist by exercising self-sacrifice. Love is not sacrifice. Love is an expression of who we are and a moral choice.  It is moral to be the best that we can be. It is immoral to damn ourselves and our identity to in-existence by sacrificing who we are.

Japan Mecca of Courtesy

Today I was the recipient of typical Japanese courtesy, in my experience, in its maximum expression. I started off the day having to go to work because my bike was parked in the center of town. The day looked gloomy and cold, but I was happy to have the opportunity to walk. I was actually looking forward to the walk to the center after work. By the time I got out of work , however, it had started to rain. I had no umbrella. It wasn’t torrential or anything so I decided to take a chance and walk downtown instead of waiting for the bus, or simply head back home.  I started off without an umbrella and hurried on taking a shortcut through a park and through the most scenic route to the center.

I was well off into my walk almost halfway to my destination, when suddenly I see this woman running towards me. She was coming from some parking lot behind the trees that lined the path. I couldn’t distinguish who she was at first because my glasses were covered with water, but it didn’t take me long to see who it was. She was the mother of one of my students. She came towards me and handed me an umbrella “Here take this, you need it”. She didn’t allow me to say no , and given the circumstances saying now would have been quite a ridiculous answer. I gladly took her umbrella and thanked her for her gesture. She then said that it had been my 4 year old student’s idea to come and give me that umbrella. I looked towards the car and there he was sitting smiling and waving.

I was left wondering how long this nice lady had been following me and how long it took her to find a place to park, and whether or not I had detracted her from her final destination. I don’t think I’ll ever find out, but it was obvious from the way her car was parked, that it was not a coincidental encounter, she had followed to catch up with me.

I felt really touched by the courtesy but I was not surprised by it. These sort of gestures are “normal” in Japan and I’m pretty sure that most every foreigner living here has been touched by Japanese hospitality. Japanese courtesy is indeed unprecedented, not in the size of the actions, but in the fact that they occur here so often. It is a society that is considerate to others in ways that at times, can be touching.

Then I remembered one isolated incident back home when I was around 14 yrs old. My dad and I were driving around to somewhere when we spot a very old lady walking on the sidewalk. Her steps were very slow and she looked like she was far away from her destination.  “Pobrecita” sighted my dad while I nodded in agreement. We kept going, but next thing I know my dad makes a u turn and slows down next to the old lady “where are you going? we will take you!”. The woman was shocked at first, and a little embarrased, but it all quickly turned into a smile. She hopped in the car and we drove her, not to the bus station for her to ride to the outskirts of town, but to the outskirts of town. I remember sitting on the front seat with watery eyes, for some reason that was not accessible to my mind, I was just really touched by my dad’s gesture. I had not remembered that episode until today. It was an event so isolated, that it brought tears to my eyes. In Japan being considerate to others can be witnessed on a daily basis.

A place where consideration is abundant makes one prone to receiving favors and generosities from strangers, which not only serves the purpose of warming one’s little selfish heart, but also of melting that self-centered individualism away until – after many experiences with the kindness of strangers  – one also becomes kind, considerate and more “others/you” oriented. The well being of the person walking along the road without an umbrella, is as important as your own – at least in a collective society like Japan.