8 posts tagged “society”

Can fellow New Zealanders give Janette any advice? She’s a Kiwi who has lived abroad since 1999 (in Canada and Costa Rica) and is due to head back there. What changes will she see, especially in Dunedin, where she’s heading? Please hop over to her blog and post your thoughts.

[Cross-posted] Sometimes I surprise myself on what comes up in blog comments. In a thread about the Iraq war and the short memories of nations over on Vox, I wrote the following. And as I wrote, I believed this to be a possible truth.

To go forth in the future we need to discover our past, a hard thing in an age of short memories as you say. … Leadership might not come from size but from those nations that have steadfastly refused to give in to the prevailing decline in so many places. Switzerland, for all its refusal to join the EU, has managed to maintain one of the greatest gun ownership rates in the world yet not have a single gun-related murder attributable to its own in most years; Singapore, retaining its Confucian philosophies, manages a city-state with limited natural resources.
   Their example needs to be communicated to the world, as well as the positive aspects of certain parts of the US or China—they exist, but they are hidden.
   This is one reason to like blogs because they can cut through the shield of the MSM and government propaganda. I do not think that we have reached any critical mass among netizens, networking citizens together in a form of moral leadership. … [T]here are pockets of good people everywhere as you and I have witnessed, just that we are not necessarily visible.
   But that critical mass can come—and if warfare now is at a terrorist, guerrilla level in so many places, I suspect moral leadership itself will come from a grass-roots base.
   The system needs idealists like us, reminding people of their short memories, and maybe change will be effected not through top–down governmental, propagandist methods or the MSM, but through one-on-few communications from each of us.
   I would rather hope that the next superpower, therefore, is not a nation or even an ideology, but a collective of humankind cutting through the BS and revealing the truth. Who says the ’net cannot be a force for good once more? If it can propagate hate and porn, it can just as easily propagate hope and truth.

   I get reminded of this every now and then by others who feel the same way: Chris, at the Edutainment & Convergence blog, wrote to me privately and inspired me. And when I think back to books like Beyond Branding and Typography & Branding, I think there was a great deal of post-9-11 optimism and the desire to build a better, more understanding world. I find passages of my Typography & Branding inspiring, if an author is allowed to be inspired by his own work, and I can’t have been this cynical back then.
   It’s a good zone to be in and I haven’t felt this hopeful about the potential of the ’net in about a year.
   Last year, I was bemoaning the decline of the blogosphere as it began looking more and more like the darker parts of society, with gossipmongers and rude, anonymous commenters finding their way on to it. Where were, I asked, the globally minded idealists of the 1990s?
   On the other hand, their entry into this world surely puts them closer to the hands of the idealists who can now shape agenda, creating more hopeful sites and messages.
   And maybe channelling or finding the above message from my subconscious helped me put things into perspective more. If indeed the state nation is less relevant and change is better effected by people helping people directly, because technology has now made that possible, then the moral vacuum caused by various changes in society can be filled.
   All it needs are willing participants prepared to get together to make the world a better place, regardless of their political, cultural or religious stripes.
   That’s really why I got into media.
   If we agree on this target, then the rest must follow.

Fifth school shooting in a week? Astrologers do say that US school shootings do happen more often during Mercury retrograde, which we are in now.
   I imagine that there are some out there who feel isolated, unloved and pressured by society, a society that has gone off the rails from their perspective.
   The sort of society that sees, for instance, the whole Code Pink mess happen in front of its own eyes. Or corrupt politicians who have no understanding of the rule of law. Or a decline in values, Christian or otherwise, in most of the western world.
   This is nothing to do with weapons and the Second Amendment. I keep pointing out that the Swiss are far more armed than the Americans per capita, enough guns for every man, woman and child. And you do not hear of Swiss kids going to their schools and blowing other kids away.
   It tells you that there is something wrong with the environment these people are in. You can use the same argument to explain why some countries have more of one race in prison than another. There’s a disharmony, a hopelessness, for some, for which the only way out is to make a statement by taking others’ lives—and their own.

Over the last few days, Timothy and I have been discussing the objectivity of al-Jazeera, mostly on his blog. And while we disagree, I have to say that was probably the nicest disagreements I’ve had on the blogosphere.
   Too much disagreement or argument today is about slamming the other side so badly that they relent, and the victor goes, ‘one–nil. Ha!’
   After our discussion, in which he quoted his arguments, linked back to my responses here, and stayed on course providing each other with information, I wound up respecting him even more than I had done previously.
   The perspective mattered. We realized we were disagreeing on a single TV network and we agreed on bigger issues like our value systems.
   So when two people have that in common, most of the other stuff is just trivial filler.
   We were both prepared to do this openly and in an environment of civility.
   And when contrasted to politics or even the modern workplace, you wonder where the Timothys are: the people with whom you disagree on a tiny issue but you walk away respecting the other person a lot more than you did prior.
   I am blessed to work with some of them but I have had the misfortune in the past of working with some of the touchy, small-picture, negative types who lack basic ideas of human values.
   I can tell the phonies a lot more easily now, fortunately, which is what experience has blessed me with.
   And by and large, there seem to be very few phonies here on Vox, which is probably why I’ll stay blogging here.

Not a lot of people in New Zealand will publicly say this, even if they think it: thank you to our troops.
   The fear from both the Government and the Opposition is that this simple expression of gratitude will upset the anti-Americans in the country and make them sound like Bushites. We have some chicken-s*** politicians.
   What an intelligent person will work out is that regardless of one’s political stripes, our men and women in Afghanistan are fighting terrorism admirably and have even been recognized by the US Government for their valour. There are those in Iraq helping with the rebuilding efforts.
   I would even go so far as to express my thanks to the entire Coalition of the Willing, wherever the troops are based.
   Again, this should not be a political matter. Even Democratic politicians have expressed this wish. These people are willing to pay the ultimate price for a cause they believe in.
   I remember the civilians who have lost their homes, family members and their own lives in conflicts globally. I remember those whose family structures have been demolished by tyrants. I hope you find peace in 2008 as the human spirit cannot be extinguished unless we let it.
   It may be naïve to say that I wish for world peace, but on a deep level I do.
   Until we are ready to achieve that, we should be able to recognize good from evil and just what values contribute to a strong, prosperous and safe society where we can say to our children, ‘Be happy. Be yourself.’
   In many western nations I wonder if we can make the distinction between right and wrong.
   When we are clear about it, we can defend what’s right. And sometimes, men of peace must become men of war in order to stamp out villainy.
   This need not just be with guns. In the corporate world, in our everyday lives, we sometimes must “wage war” on impropriety and corruption. When we vote for our governments, we are not voting for who gives us the biggest bribe, but who will either restore, defend or build our values, to create the society that we say we want our children to grow up in.
   And to begin, I give thanks to all those who defend those values—whether they are values based in our faith or in our philosophy.

Katharine McPhee at Too Faced benefit

[Cross-posted] With less on the newswires today except for more Sarko and Bruni, we thought we’d put up a few of the unpublished images from the Lucire server. Here are two that didn’t make publication for one reason or another: American Idol’s Katharine McPhee (mentioned by Summer Rayne Oakes in Lucire 20) at a skin cancer benefit hosted by Too Faced Cosmetics in May 2007; and, in the same month, two models at a Diesel function in the same area. These were from Lucire’s west coast editor Elyse Glickman.

DieselCar

Went to a little party on Friday for a friend’s going-away, and you know that you live in a multicultural society when you wind up speaking English, Swedish, French and Cantonese in the space of four hours. There was even a German lass there, but my German is limited to directions, reading car magazines, screams from Alarm für Cobra 11 and ordering food on Lufthansa. Oh, and swear words which my old school friend Karl Urban (what happened to that guy?) taught me. None of it came in handy, and I am thinking that this is one language I might need to improve on.

Sadly, I had no idea of the horrible shooting at Virginia Tech while I was escorting Laural and Sharaine Barrett around yesterday. In fact, I spent most of the day out or at meetings. I learned about it probably 18 hours after most other people. By today, its impact was felt strongly, particularly at Facebook, where netizens changed their profile photographs to a VT black ribbon.
   I join the millions who are sending prayers and thoughts to the victims, and the families of the victims.
   I am no expert of what happens inside the minds of people such as the alleged shooter, Cho Seung-Hui. The BBC paints a picture of a loner who has aways felt distant, even as a child. The media coverage has tended to discuss gun control, before finding parties to blame, with the Virginia campus being a target.
   If I am to add anything to this debate, I believe we need to go past the same scapegoats. After Columbine, we have already asked these questions and these school shootings continue. In a country like New Zealand, where we are not immune from rampages, we do find armed students a foreign idea associated most strongly with the United States. Le Monde says the massacre taints the American Dream. At the same time, I look at Switzerland which has (unofficially) one firearm for every man, woman and child, yet no one seems to go on rampages there—and this begs the question: why?
   Men like Cho seem to be loners, and in this case, the paranoia that grips post-9-11 USA alerted Virginia Tech staff to his odd behaviour. Despite this, the murders of 30-plus people still could not be prevented. Teachers and counsellors were on alert. There is nothing that could have been done because it seems as though the faculty was diligent, delayed emails and text messages aside.
   My guess is that the issues predate any faculty involvement into Cho’s conduct. I do not know about the Korean community in Virginia. If the Korean community is well integrated, we still hear that Cho’s peers left him alone. Perhaps this is the lesson: to not let our peers be. To be concerned with someone other than ourselves. To end a selfish, me-first society.
   Some teenagers go and get boob jobs for self-image reasons. But negative self-image comes from a society that chooses to shun, forcing some to say, ‘Look at me.’ That same society did not reach out to Cho Seung-Hui. They, we, effectively let Cho stir in his own hatred.
   There is much negativity in the modern United States, and that must seep in to people’s consciousness. I wonder if Cho was sickened by the gulf between his traditional Korean upbringing and what he witnessed among his peers. His family were decent, Christian, and churchgoing. If the United States is about values and honour, would Cho have been sickened by the hypocrisy that he saw through his filter? I often have discussions with Asians—Japanese, Pakistanis, or my own race—and this comes up. We identify sexual promiscuity among westerners as one thing that seems out of place with the stated values of our adopted nations, for example.
   Is it the breakdown of societal values, or his perception thereof, that broke Cho on that horrid, dark day?
   Ironically, through that darkness, there was light. Students and professors who shielded others from the bullets. Those acts of heroism were restatements of American values. It is an indescribable sacrifice, how some gave their lives to show that.
   Why it takes the loss of lives to show us the selflessness of some great Americans, young and old, is sorrowful. But let us not let their passings be in vain. 
   I still hear the huge bollocks here in New Zealand about ‘Asians keep to themselves’ or ‘They don’t like getting involved in public life.’ If the US is anything like that, then the US is dead wrong. I have not sensed this sort of prejudice on my Stateside visits, but I have only been to 10 or 11 states. Cho may have cried out in his own way for help but that was mistaken as a preference to be alone. Others may be crying out right now, and it is our job to help them.
   One school shooting this year is enough to last us through the rest of our lifetimes.