Race to the Finish

Before I begin talking about this topic, I think I need to first establish a disclaimer: anything I talk about here, or really ever on this blog, unless otherwise indicated, is almost always a matter of my personal opinion and based on my experience. My interpretation, while functionally irrefutable, is also highly subjective. I ask that any reader realize such, and judge accordingly.

When discrimination is brought up, I immediately think of the history of the American south, the Rwandan genocide, or the indian caste system. These are all prime examples, I think, of discrimination. So compared to this, people talk about discrimination in America, my first reaction is that I have no idea what they're talking about. Well, The truth is, I discriminate. Against most people I run into. A lot. However, I don't discriminate on the basis of race. I don't think anything could be so errant and idiotic. I discriminate based on things like intelligence and mannerism. The truth is, time and energy are limited resources, and I like to hedge my bets on the people that I think both mean the most to me, and that I mean the most to. However, just because I internally discriminate in this way against a rude fast food employee who speaks to me with aggressive flippancy and shoves my change at me, the extent of my discrimination goes no further than a mental note that in the event of a zombie apocalypse, I wouldn't want him or her on my team. I still try to say thank you, make eye contact, and conduct myself in a generally amiable and proper manner. I don't think that, while "discriminate" is an ugly word, people object to this particular form of it. No, racial discrimination has a different flavor entirely. But the matter still remains that when people say they've discriminated against, they hardly ever mean that they were denied the right to vote, or that they were denied service in a store or restaurant, or even that someone spat at them or cursed at them, or stopped their child from playing with theirs on account of their race. Now, I'm sure that there are still instances of this going on, and the recent trend of reports of police brutality certainly prove this to be the point. But where I happen to be now, on a college campus in an affluent corner of the american northeast, so far as I am concerned, there is no racial discrimination of this type. However, people that I've talked to have said that there is discrimination here amongst the happy pretty stone buildings of this campus, and though, as a minority, I personally haven't felt much if any discrimination against myself, these people whom I've talked to, so far as I can tell, are reasonable, well meaning, intelligent, honest people. That leads me to wonder why it is that their conclusion is so startling different from mine. I see no one's civil rights or liberties being infringed on, I see no segregated bathrooms or drinking fountains, a great number of people that I run into on a daily basis are minorities, and they seem to be doing well enough. This leads me to conclude that the claim that racist discrimination is still a problem is invalid, at least for this place and this time.

I don't want to do that, because while it would be easy for me to dismiss their claims as the byproducts of narcissistic acrimonious pedantry, I do respect them as people and friends, and I very much want to respect their views; I think that that alone is enough premise to warrant a little more consideration. So in an effort to understand their claim, I decided to really look at the kind of actions that they find themselves subject to, that they label racial discrimination. And I found that what they mostly referred to was a very real phenomenon not of anything like denial of rights, but rather a separation between people of different backgrounds. When I say different backgrounds, I mean, of course, race, but also things like socioeconomic status, as well as customs, traditions, and upbringings. As diverse as this can sound, I think it's well recognized that there is a correlation between race and these other things. And while it certainly bears to mention that these other issues warrant address and solving on their own, the one I will continue to pursue here is the matter of race. The separations caused by race are a real issue, because if a person observes that everyone of their skin color or physical appearance is isolating themselves from the larger collective, they are more likely to do so. Once they do so, they are likely to be expected to do so, which leads to them being encouraged to do so. Given America's history of not being so nice to certain minorities, for instance, African Americans, it is no small wonder that this separation is perceived to be vestigial of that time and mode of thinking. Especially if a child grows up in such an environment, these minorities are in effect socially conditioned to accept this as a fact, a status quo that they are expected to follow and fear the repercussions of deviating from. This expectation leads to adherence, and adherences perpetuates the separation. Separation is a problem, because in many ways, self-segregation is no better than segregation. When a group of people share such an identity as a common minority race, it's difficult for people outside that race to see past that and very easy for them to dismiss them for it. While individually, these people may be recognized in conversation to be the fine, upstanding human beings that they actually are, when they are seen together, the are slapped with the label of racial identity. Once this happens often enough and for long enough, this sense of being labeled transcends the social behavior from whence it came, and people are often seen as only their race, and thus are still treated as isolated even when they're not actively isolating themselves. This is the racial discrimination that people are facing today. It's not being condemned to sit at the back of the bus anymore, it's being condemned to sit alone. And that is a real problem.

To combat this, one must first distinguish the fundamental differences between these types of discrimination. Whereas the first kind, let's call institutional discrimination, is perpetuated by social creed and often by governments (officially or unofficially), who if not out right support it, enable it by turning a blind eye to the issue. Institutional discrimination often takes the form of concrete denial of rights, different treatments and opportunities for the groups involved, and dismissal of human integrity on the count of race. The discrimination I described earlier, the discrimination of today, let's call implicit discrimination. This is often takes the form of social norms, perpetuation by figures of authority, such as teachers and administration (by the turning of a blind eye to these issues), different opportunities for the parties involved, and a dismissal of a person's human qualities on account of their race. Seems similar doesn't it? Startlingly so. However I have found that the biggest difference is this: institutional racial discrimination is a product of hatred, and implicit racial discrimination is a product of fear. There is no stronger human impulse than the urge to fear things that are different from what you're comfortable with, and more so different from yourself. It's no small wonder, then that in this day and age, when so much emphasis is put by nearly every society on clothing, and hairstyle, and general matters of appearance, that that's all we often end up seeing. After all, skin is only skin deep. The matter here is not to try to overcome this racial divide and shallow perception by combating hatred. In many a judicial case, crimes perpetuated by racism are often classified as a "hate crime". Judicial rulings, laws, prosecutions, and in general the judicial and legislative systems of government are effective ways of dealing with hatred. That's not to say that they can stop anyone from feeling hate. One of the side effects of living in a country with freedoms is that anyone has the right to be a bigoted racist if they want. The laws, however, can prosecute and ensure that no bodily or civic harm manifests from that. But like hatred, everyone is free to fear, and there's no authoritative figure that can really influence that to an effective degree. I believe that the way to combat this fear is through fostering personal relations between people from which we have nothing to fear from except fear itself, i.e. people simply different from us. If we want to solve the problem of implicit racism, we need to create a society that doesn't value how someone's hair looks, what clothes they wear, how big their biceps or how slender their legs are. There needs to be a society that sees people as first and foremost human. These qualities of physical appearance should not be understood to be diminishing of human worth, but rather additive to it. Nothing about how a person looks, speaks, lives, eats should change the fact that they are fundamentally human, and while they may not make the short list for your zombie survival team, they should make the long list of brothers and sisters in humanity.

Family

When someone is asked who are the people they love, family members will almost always be named. Most commonly a parent, but quite often a sibling, uncle, aunt, or grandparent will appear too. From my limited exposure to the world, this seems to be the case regardless of culture and creed. Everywhere you go, there is not only this understanding of more or less what a family is, but also that you should love them. I don't believe that anyone is explicitly taught that they should have a family and love them.

A family, typialy, contains an ableistic and temporal hierarchy between a "parent" generation and an "offspring" generation. At the beginning of their lives, the members of the offspring generation are entirely dependent, more often than not on the parent generation. Throughout their upbringing, the parents provide the offspring with more than just care and materialistic provision, but rather with characteristics that differ from parental unit to parental unit. Things like moralistic values, personality traits, arguably even sense of humor. Regardless of genetic predisposition, most commonly aided by the nature of the biological parenthood, these qualities and characteristics are undeniably exposed to and often imbued in the offspring. In this way, the keeping and raising of a family can seem entirely narcissistic, i.e. you only care for others under the condition that they are very much like you, and that their preservation is in essence tantamount to yours. Many a scientific mind would probably explain why so many animals across so many branches of the phylogenetic tree exhibit familial behavior. However, I speak here not of the lions, the wildebeests, and the swans. I speak of humankind. We, with our artificial shells of concrete and bureaucracy have in many ways transcended the need for simple food and shelter, and yet the family is still as integral a part of our civilization as ever. In a the pseudo-welfare state of this country at least, there are many places where one can find the means of physical provision. However, that is not enough. The need for family is more than the needs for physical things.

I firmly believe that within each human being, there are two impulses- an impulse to good and an impulse to evil (a yetzer hatov and yetzer hara, if you will). The impulse to evil thrives in differences and isolation. Consider the atrocities that have been committed when people are divided into "us" and "them", or blended into the camouflage of anonymity. When looking at the differences between another human and you, it's easy to disregard their humanity, and thus easier to no longer treat them the way you otherwise would. Conversely, the impulse to good dwells in seeking those common bonds between all mankind, to realize the fears and loves in tumultuous conflict inside each beating heart. Seeing this is what can make us kind and loving, human and humane. There in the family, is one of the deepest manifestations of this phenomenon. Because the people in our family are often so like us and we are in a position to fully realize that, our impulse to good is obstinately prodded. To look at a family member and their similarities to you is to not only acknowledge their mutual humanity, but to see your humanity in them. What they are, who they are, their dreams and desires, are undeniably commensurate to your own. How then, could you not want to be the best you can possibly be to them? How could you not want to be excellent? How could you not love them? Our families are more than arbitrary groups of people boxed in by societal utilitarianism and expectation. They are the the greatest testament to the human capacity of love that we can possibly find. The love that we want to be offered and offer ourselves is exactly the love that we have a chance to give to those who are the closest to us.

Drip

There’s a special hour in the dying of each day, when the sun pauses in its saundering stride to the horizon, and turns around to look back on the world it’s leaving, as if to promise its return. That’s the quietly magic moment where the trees are framed in gold and the clouds break into their last song as notes of color streak the sky before the impending night. It’s in that hour, that moment of sunset, that instant when the day is done but not finished, that time freezes. The steady ticking, though sometimes a trickle and sometimes a roaring rush, is in that moment, completely in your hands. You can hold your breath, and with every bit that leaks out, feel a drop go by. But the plasticity of time is not a uniform layer. It’s sometimes thick and heavy, like winter wool on the whitest of days. Other times, it’s as light as summer dew and seems to disappear before your eyes. Those who are old are blanketed with time, carrying the weight of their world on their bent backs and heavy hearts, the wrinkles of age filled with their memories of love and loss. The infants, on the other hand, fight time with all their strength. They flail and kick their legs and scream their pink faces, but in the end find themselves tempered by its swaddling. They grow up under the weight of all these layers pressing down, grounding them to a world they were not always bound, what we call reality. Time is measured by the ticking of clocks and the slow pulses of waves, but it is not kept by these contraptions and devices. They simply mark its passing. No, time is only kept by us, those who hold our breaths at the close of each day, and feel the drip. Drip. Drip. 

Seraphinoff Trumpet Making Workshop

This past week I've had the opportunity to attend a trumpet making workshop in Bloomington, Indiana. The class is centered around using Baroque period techniques to make a period instrument. 

To begin, everyone started with a few sheets of brass that had been cut to a template.

The first thing we made was the tubing. This is done by taking a rectangular sheet of metal and annealing it, then bending it over a steel rod and working it with a wooden mallet until the edges come together. In this picture, the camera decided to focus on my shoe instead of the tubing. 

Then it's soldered together with a torch and silver solder. We made a total of 4 Lengths of tubing this way. 

After soldering, the tubes are burnished on the steel rod to make it hard. They are also forced through a drawplate to finalize the outside diameter. 

Heating the raw brass to such a high temperature oxidizes it, so after the initial annealing and subsequent soldering, the lengths came out rather ugly and needed to be polished.

However, a poorly soldered seam is a poorly soldered seam, which no amount of polishing can fix. 

The bell section came next, and it too was bent over the metal rod. However, the section of the bell that flared was first feathered, then teeth were cut into it to form an interlocking seam which would be much stronger than the butt joints we used on the tubing.  

This was also silver soldered.

The bell then needed to be worked into shape, which was done mostly on the anvil and mandrel. Here's a picture of Bob looking skeptically at our handiwork. 

For the bell to flare out to where it should be, it needed to be pounded on the horn of the anvil. While very ductile, doing this to brass hardens it to where it's unworkable so it needed to be re-annealed every few passes. 

The shape of the bell largely came from burnishing it against a steel mandrel, which really gave it its shape. this is done by sliding the bell onto the mandrel and with a large, heavy, steel rod, just rubbing the living daylights out of it. 

At this stage, the seam has been pounded flat to be the same thickness as the rest of the bell, but the toothed seam is still visible. 

The rule with this is to burnish until you think you're done, then burnish some more. 

Eventually, the bell conforms to the shape of the mandrel, and needs to be polished up. The hammering leaves marks that are very difficult to remove.

The next piece we made was the garland. It reinforces the bell and holds the bead. It begins as a sheet of brass like this. 

And can often end up quite ornate. Here's one that Bob engraved. 

This also needs to take the shape of the bell. So after being soldered closed,  it is burnished on the mandrel. In this case, with great violence by Michael and Rick. 

Here's a dry fit of how the bead and the garland, bead, and ball go on the bell. I decided to file grooves along the radius of my bead, which both took forever and looked awesome.  

The ball is another period decoration that we made. According to Rick, no one knows what function it serves, but every instrument from that era had one, I decided to make mine a little more unique, so after soldering it I filed little facets into it instead of polishing it smooth. 

The garland, bead, and ball are all really more decorative than strictly functional, and at this point I was far enough ahead on my work to have a lot of spare time to work on my garland. I decided to do a sheetmetal working technique called chasing repousse, which is done by raising material in certain places and "chasing" it in to define the desired shape. I decided to do a music staff going around the bell. Here's a roughed out treble clef. 

Around this time, I realized how long it would actually take me to complete this, and the instructors were kind enough to let me borrow the tools I needed to finish in my hotel room. After about 8 cumulative hours, I finally finished.

I really need to mention here my gratitude at Michael's expertise of instrument making. Given the nature of the piece, this garland couldn't be fitted to the bell like the others were. however, he made it work. 

Over time, troughs in the design darkened and the notes and the staff really started to stand out.

The garland is crimped down around the rim of the bell.

Some of the tubes that we made needed to be bent to form the crooks, and that is done by filling it with Wood's metal, an alloy with a melting point lower than water's boiling tempreture, and bending on this jig, then burnished for hardness and final shape.   

And with that, all that was left to do was the cut the tubing to length, make end joints, and start putting them together. 

Once assembled, the tubes are bound with vivacious cordage around a block of wood, and the trumpet is completed. 

I found it ironic that we had gone through all this trouble of doing everything by hand, including polishing literally every bit of the trumpet with a 10 inch polishing wheel sitting on a table where we worked, but then decide use synthetic cordage.

  

I had gotten to the end and on the last day, realized that I hadn't put my maker's mark anywhere on the trumpet. This is unacceptable. Anyone could mistake it for theirs! I thought about doing it as an engraving on the bell, but decided against it, with the relief of the repousse, it wouldn't stand out as much as I would have liked. I decided to do another repousse piece to fit on the bell. A friend of mine in the class wanted one for his bell to, so I obliged. They were soldered on.

   

Thank you to the instructors Richard Seraphinoff, Robert Barclay, and Michael Münkwitz, as well as everyone in the class who made it as splendid an experience as it was.

Strength

Anyone who has ever been in an english class has heard of the Hemingway Hero. Traditionally distinctly male, he has long been held as a staple of the literary world. This representation of stoicism and internal solitude invokes the image of strength through the ability to remain uninfluenced by the world and its orbital stochasticity. Eons come and people pass, and yet this hero stands firm not only in what he believes- his principles, but rather firm in what and who he is. It is the nature of such a figure to remain undaunted in the face of probability and despair. The strength of this type of character comes not from adaptability or inventiveness, but rather an ability to defiantly remain in the fortress of oneself- an ability to face whatever comes and say "I am greater than this". However, the Hemingway Hero is neither the most common nor the most prevalent type of strength one runs into, probably because it isn't the most relatable. Few people have this disposition to not internalize, but internally mitigate the complications that loom over their uncertain futures. Rather, for most, strength is found through dedication, either to a person or a cause. How many stories that permeate our culture depict runners who push themselves past rigor mortis to win a race, soldiers who sacrifice themselves to save their squad, or teachers who put up with their unruly students because they believe in their potential? This kind of strength is directly opposite of Hemingwayic stoicism, and rather relies on one's ability to cling on to a principle that they believe to be harmonious with a greater good. This dogged cohesion originates more in the ability to say "this is greater than me". This kind of strength relies on placing the highest priority on something besides him/herself, often in something they very strongly see as good or true. 

I believe that the majority of us live somewhere in the middle of the two. We look at the pillars of solitude and magnanimity and desire to have their resolution, as well as to those who against all odds will not give up and desire to have their dedication. However, inherent in this is a contradiction. When it comes to the violent chaos of tumultuous life, we must look to something in which to abide. Those who find strength in themselves will detest those for whom the object of their determination lies extrinsically; those who find meaning and purpose in a cause outside of themselves will always resent the blasé indifference of the Hemingway Hero. 

Where we find our strength, I believe, is a most integral part of who we are as human beings. It is a dichotomy, not a spectrum. That's not to say that people can't feel both ways about different situations that they find themselves in. In fact, most people will probably find different sentiments within themselves over the course of a day, let alone a lifetime. But rather that upon a single issue, one cannot both be a wave worn pebble and a tenacious barnacle. In which way we are strong, then, can also be in flux. Someone who always finds strength in themselves can suddenly realize that the end to which they are working towards means more to them than the process through which they make themselves work. Conversely, someone who always takes pride in productivity for the sake of influencing the world around them may one day find that the work they produce is as much a reflection of them and their inner nature, and therefore should be the fundamental basis for their proclivities. However, by and large, people either tend to be one or another (this claim is made from personal experience, and like most other things on this blog, probably is inconsequential in relevance, if not in truth). The dividing line, then, when the fecal matter comes into contact with the motorized oscillating blades of a home closed system ventilation device, is where one most often finds their strength. Those who find it internally would deem attachment to be unacceptable and contrary, therefore as weakness. Those who find their strength externally would deem indifference as contrary, and therefore as failure. This creates a situation where judgement is often passed from one position against the other, and accusations arise out of inconsiderate malunderstandings. But seeing as all of us can either only take on one of these views on any given situation, it's important that an attempt at least is made to recognize either inert inaction or impassioned demonstration to be an attempt to rally one's will to persevere against trial and tribulation. Because this strength taken away, we are all left the same- beating hearts in search of something more from a wandering life.

Flowers

From when I was young, I was taught that flowers were beautiful. It’s a funny thing, teaching a person something is beautiful. But I guess at that time, I didn’t know what beautiful was. At the time, I didn’t know that flowers were the way they are because they want to make babies before they die, or that everything appealing in an instinctive sense was actually built that way so we favor it, might it be pursuit of beautiful women, or love for cute puppies. All I knew were that flowers were beautiful. So I studied them. Of course, in 3rd grade I learned about pistil and stamen, about anthers and pollen, and how male and female parts made seeds and fruit, but I studied them by touching. By smelling. By collecting pocketfuls of them and arranging them into larger flower patterns, a fractal of flowers, if you will. Or perhaps, fleur-ception. In art class, we learned how flowers come in different shapes and sizes and that a flower could be many things, so I started wondering, if many things could then be a flower. Drips of paint, splashing down onto blank paper kind of looked like flowers. So did the blot a sharpie makes when you hold it for too long against the paper. Well, this I guessed because you always got yelled at for wasting sharpie ink and bleeding through the paper.

What if I dripped a flower on top of another? a double flower. A smaller one, perhaps within a larger one, perhaps slightly to the side of a smaller one, just overlapping an even smaller one, all within a huge one. You had a flowerfield. A field of roses without the thorns, thistle flower heads without the barbs, tiny dandelions that would never spread their soft dandruff across your yard. The splotches of paint and marker, the concentric pattern of ink on my paper came to mean the best of the best, all that was beautiful nature could offer me. They became ideas. Big ideas, small ideas, bright ideas, simple ideas, sharp ideas, well rounded, centralized, spread out, deep, dark, heavy, ponderous, lithe, fluffy, frivolous ideas. All overlapping each other, interacting, combining. Blue ideas when inflected with yellow ideas became green ideas, red ideas and white ideas made ideas so hot it hurt my brain to consider their implications.

It was also about this time, that I learned that a boy could be ridiculed for loving flowers. And this was the time when a boy could also be ridiculed for having ideas. A boy could be ridiculed for seeking, loving, and beholding beauty. So I let my flowers fade, and I started drawing spaceships and rockets, blasters and lightsabers only in pencil, using only grey and brown and black legos, liking movies that were about soldiers in olive drab taking brown islands, wearing blase, monochromic colors. Why? because that’s what grownups did. That’s how things were in real life. Steel and blood. Earth, brick, fire, stone. Concrete, cement, dull, flat, asphalt. That’s how things were in REAL life. My world  became a white-washed, sand-blasted, world. Everything was the same. A Berlin wall of dull interest and fleeting fascination.

But the flowers were there. under the paint, under the surface. There will always be flowers. When the paint starts to flake and chip, when it curls, and peels, and falls to the ground, the flowers will be there. A glimpse of one is all it took. I found my flowers, or rather my flowers found me, or rather I found myself in the flowers. Your flowers may bud then bloom, but mine erupt. They explode out of near nothingness. They suddenly just are. So much so that sometimes I wonder if they always were, and if anyone could have found them. But I know my flowers are mine, and mine to share. That’s why I write. That's why I play music. To share my flowers.

When In Doubt, Pick C

I posit that there has never been a generation that suffers more from fear of the indefinite than mine. In a world where paralysis by analysis is seemingly a norm, it is ever harder to be man or women of action and initiative. To illustrate this, think of all the times you were at a restaurant or a place that serves food, and either thought or heard someone express their lack of knowledge concerning what they want to order. "I don't know what I want." But in most cases, they do know what they want. If you were at a Burger King and you turned to a friend and itemized every ingredient that was available and asked them to respond with yes or no, you could almost always come to a logical deduction of a food suited to their taste. However, when someone expresses this sentiment, often what they mean is not that they don't know what they want, but rather they don't know what they want most. We, the children of the multiple choice age, have been trained to think deductively. We try to consider that of all the choices on the menu, which one would bring us the most glutto-oral pleasure. Instead of walking in and thinking "I would like bacon" and choosing an option that has bacon, we walk in not thinking very much at all and staring at the menu and thinking "bacon is nice, but so is chicken, and I want something with onion rings, or maybe lettuce and tomatoes; both sound good, but not together." This then manifests itself into "I don't know what I want." And that is a problem. It's not at all because we aren't an opinionated people. We have no problem whatsoever with naming the things that we dislike. any parent that has tried to feed one  of us will attest to that. However, stand the same child in front of a supermarket candy rack and tell them to pick just one, and it would not be surprising if he or she broke down and cried. The problem is that all or lives, we've been offered choices to choose from. Mothers tell kids that they can either go to the beach or the park. Teachers tell kids that they can either play with legos or crayons. The problem with this, is that this format of simplification extends beyond things that they can have or do. It spills over into how children understand consequences. For instance, you can either clean up your room, or get a time out. You can either be nice and share, or be scolded. You can either not cheat, or get sent to the principal's office. 

This is not an intrinsically bad thing. It allows kids to understand cause and effect, and the results of their actions in the context of their situation. However, what happens when a child grows up strictly understanding the world in this way, is that it might limit his or her ability to anything besides that. The result is that life is reduced to a multiple choice test, where options are presented, and although some are outright wrong, some are a little right, and some a neutral, there is always a clear, justifiable, most correct answer. And this bring us back to the menu. There is no most right answer to the question of what you would like to eat. There are wrong answers and mostly wrong answers (food that you are allergic too, and foods that you find disgusting, respectively), And sure, there will likely be foods that you don't dislike, but don't really care for either. But for the most part, when I walk into a restaurant, everything sounds pretty good about the same amount. And so our brain are scrambling, taking in information trying to find the right answer when there isn't one.

People talk about seeing the world in black and white, but my generation grew up comparing shades of grey. The problem is that as we grow up and are told to be more and more independent, there are very often more than fifty of them. The way your brain works then it is trying to decide whether to fill in the blank with "refute","repudiate" or "decry" on an SAT question (ignoring of course "embargo" and "confer") is completely different from how your brain works when you're trying to decide what to do after college. The first is a highly deductive process, taking your choices and discerning what should be selected and what should be ignored, and the second is a process of creation, balancing your hopes and dreams with reality to carve out a path between the two.

In recent history, society has put a lot of emphasis on choice. If someone wants to be any kind of sexual orientation, or have any kind of hair color, or drive any kind of car, the option is there. This kind of freedom is good for very many reasons. But to the teenager out of high school for whom the most difficult decision he faces on a semi regular basis is what clothes to wear or buy, this is frightening. 

I don't know that I have a solution to this. Normally, I'd like to end a piece like this with some inspirational conviction that spurs on those who do good in the world and persuades the apathetic to take a stand (which is ironic, because I'm fairly positive that no one reads these things anyway). But when it comes to such a systemized, methodical, formulated, and institutionalized practice of raising kids, I have no solution. 

Desire Street

Over the first week of March, the Intervarsity chapter from my School sent a group down to New Orleans on a mission trip called ServeUP. While many interesting, remarkable, and perhaps even extraordinary things happened there, one event in particular burrowed into my mind. The people I experienced this with believe that this story had to be told. This is the story of our encounter with the man who lived on Desire Street.

Desire Street

There are moments in one’s life when you can feel your life change. No matter what has happened before the moment, what events transpired to get you there, no matter what men or angels pushed and pulled your feet or heart so that you are held on this patch of earth by its ponderous pull, that is all besides. What matters is that you are there. These were the wondering thoughts that raced through my head as my feet walked down the wooden steps of decked stairs that reached into the sky. While I descended from that Sinai, I looked up and beheld the clouds, and thought of the clouds in the eyes of the man I had just left. They were the first thing that I had noticed about his face. The streaks of white in his hair and the marking lines of age drew the eye to where a broad flaring nose met a laden brow, to those eyes. There were clouds in the man’s eyes. Not clouds of storm or rain, but rather clouds of a bright sunny day, the kind every child longs to reach up and touch. The first one was nearly completely white, both iris and pupil veiled by the punishment for hard years of sight. The second eye was not quite so definite, but rather showed a glimmer of the most brilliant blue, over which a softer cloud drifted. But these eyes, though blinded, were not without purpose, and still translated the will of a defiant stare that permeated space like a hammer’s blow. And that is how I first saw Mr. Harold Brown.

Mr. Brown was leaning on the balconied top platform of his second story home, looking past the trees and the cars, and the highways filled with the noise of pedantic urgency, past the very horizon itself. And though all may guess what his blind eyes saw, none can tell what he was looking for. Nor what he found. But at the command of the swinging drawl of his New Orleans accent, the broken pieces of his tale began to find their place. To say that the storm affected him would be nearly an outright lie. He was marked by the storm. No, he was marred by the storm. what life he had before was swept away and discarded into the filth and squalor of the city streets. He remembered the thunderous boom as the levees that held back the water in the canal broke, erupting in aqueous armageddon. He sees it again and again countless night with an eye more vivid than those in his face and for every night the last ten years has not slept. He can still hear the crash and the bang, and feel the rocking of his house shaking him. He still is haunted by the terror of the disastrous storm, the bodies floating in the water, stinking and bloated. And he remembers the houses that went unchecked for weeks after, with deceased sitting in the homes until the soldiers came in and one by one kicked down doors and marked the houses with bright spray paint. Date of inspection. Body count. And as he spoke, two girls and I stood with him on that mountain top, listening. In our hands, we held buckets and brushes and hammers and nails, but in our hearts we held a wonder, an awe of the storm and the man before us that faced it.

The wood creaked a sighed as Mr. Brown turned around, leaned his back against the railing, and held his face towards the sun. A warm breeze tousled his hair and jostled the collars of his shirt, waving the short sleeves of the boy and girls that stood with him there. And with his hands making strong gestures to the open air in front of him, he recounted the New Orleans of the past, telling of the music and the spirit. Even though he still lives where he has lived much of his life, there is nothing left of the city he once knew and loved. Before the storm hit, Desire Street was filled with commerce and life, but now the grocery story next to his house is just a vacant lot, and the health clinic that once thrived in the next lot over lies fallow in disrepair, the building across the street now the lurking place for heroin dealers. The lower ninth ward was never rich, and many of them couldn’t afford to leave when the storm hit, so with little money to live and no money to run, they stayed. And they watched as lives were swept away. But slowly, as sure as the standing water that filled the streets ebbed away, the people did too. Swaths of land were bought out for near nothing by corporations that coveted the area for its proximity to nearby railroads, shipping canals, and major roads. Lot after lot surrounding Mr. Brown’s was fenced and leveled. Now bulldozer pupils watched with envious eyes at the newly built home inhabited by an old man, waiting. The smoke rising from the machines told the secrets, the hum of the backhoe engine betrayed the tales of corporate payoffs and sly dealings that poisoned the land there against people, evading their return. And there he stood, with his back to the expanse of flat nothingness that threatened to consume him and his mind lingering in better times. After the storm, contractors emerged to fulfil the needs of the people. But the words spoken and deals made meant nothing. They bled those who were most financially destitute dry. What money those hit by the storm had saved or given them by the government quickly filled the contractors’ hands and were exchanged for useless work or nothing at all. Nothing besides promises that rang hollow in the still air.

Mr. Brown had lost fifty thousand dollars to these thieving men. His grandchildren, hearing of this, were outraged. And promising retribution, asked after the people that did this to him. But he did not betray them. He was at peace to abide in the fact that that what judgement came to them would come from God. His soulful kindness was contagious. He told of his grandson who was an artist and had once sold a painting for thousands of dollars. With the money, he bought his mother a van and a brother a car, and when Mr. Brown asked what he had bought for himself, he replied that he hadn’t. Helping his mom and making his brother happy were worth more to him than keeping the money for himself. Mr Brown talked about his old life, those days where he drove the now rusting truck besides his house. He used to be the sole supplier of fish to every market in the area. Now, most times he leaves his house are for reasons to do with his health. The first time we had seen Mr. Brown, he was returning from his stay in a hospital, where they had done preliminary procedures in preparation for his upcoming cornea transplant. When asked, Mr. Brown told us about the medical bills, and how he was virtually paying everything out of pocket, but if he could only get back just a bit of his sight, it would be worth it to him. The money of this world meant nothing in comparison to redeeming what God had given him and living just a little more cloudlessly again. Here he paused, still, standing with his back against a blue sky.

And though he was sprinting through years in his memories, hours could have crept by while we were on that mountaintop. Feeling the pull of obligation from the world beneath our feet, I asked to pray for him. The circle joined and he began to speak, his old head bowed in pious conference. And though he, the one with more years than us three combined, he who had lost everything to angry wind and wrathful waves, he who found no rest at night, he who could not see anything beyond the clouds in his eyes, he prayed not for himself or those closest to him, not for his children nor his brothers, he prayed only for those whom his calloused hands touched. To God he spoke nothing for himself, but for us, the students from another face of the country. When the prayer ended, and the moment of heed had passed, we looked up to find that rain had fallen from his clouds, sliding down the lines in his cheeks and chin onto the decking and the the world below. That his how I remember Mr. Harold Brown. The man who had seen the storm and heard the waves but now listens to the swishes of our brushes and the resounding knocks of our hammer blows, the man who had lost unfathomable amounts to both lies and storm but asks for nothing back, the man who though his body poor was so rich in spirit, the man with clouds in his eyes and love in his heart, Mr. Harold Brown.

The Early Bard Gets the Words- Texting

I was talking to my political science teacher the other day when we happened along a certain concept that describes the phenomenon that is enrapturing today’s world. It is the Hedonistic Degradation of society. Hedonistic degradation can be attributed to a very observable phenomenon- as society improves, the people of which it is composed seek more and more pleasures. This is not always bad thing, because many of the things they seek are great benefits for mankind. Things like better hospital care, better customer service, and better transportation methods are all things brought about by the development of society. However, there is a side effect that has always shown its face the more a society grows. 

As technological methods of communication are growing more and more advanced, there is an observable trend in the ways with which people interact. What applications like snapchat do is that they enable people to instantly convey a crude embodiment of what they feel to another person. They can make a face, or take a picture of a hand gesture, and send that to whomever they feel they would benefit from observing their emotion. The argument here is largely that this from of communicating is more organic, and that one can make facial expressions the same way one would were they with that physically with that person. While this is not a bad thing, it comes at a cost. The cost is that there is more and more no longer a much needed a filter between how a person expresses what they are feeling, and how they choose to portray that. Before, with letters, one had to think carefully about the words they chose to convey meaning. In that era, communication took the form of writing. Writing; not talking. In the modern age, texting and other forms of communication enable anyone to have a conversation with almost anyone they wish, despite distance. We text as we would talk, with colloquialisms interspersed throughout expressions of laughter and interjections of agreement or otherwise. Texting has also adopted the rather annoying habit of using symbols to create faces, or just sending the faces themselves.

I believe that this is nothing short of slovenly failure to understand the importance of communication and its elements. It irritates me to no end that teens especially and young people everywhere are so impatient to convey what they are feeling in a fleeting instant that they find it necessary to beam pictures of their face terribly long distances and share it. The result is that so little thought is placed into communicating that, well, so little thinking happens. Conversations become a tidal wave of emotions that have no intrinsic value to the person that possess them, let alone anyone else. I’m not here crusading for some fundamentalist revival campaign for writing as an art to overtake other forms of communication. No, what I fundamentally believe in is writing as a practicality. What many growing minds need most desperately in this day their age is to be able to sit down and think about their emotions in a more methodical and analytical sense. Failure to do this results in the infantile and unconvicted pseudo-adults of this day and age, unable to articulate with enough clarity to even understand the rationale or irrational of that they themselves are thinking. 

Anyone who has ever been in a riot or just a likewise crowd of people knows that the thing that happens to be the strongest in situations like those are emotions, but unless the emotion is channeled in such a way that it can bring about change, one might have not had it at all. Feeling angry doesn’t do anything. Feeling angry at a government institution is a little better. Feeling angry at a government institution because of what you believe to be the wrongful death of an unarmed minority is getting somewhere. Feeling angry at a government institution because of what you to be the wrongful death of an unarmed minority that is a demonstration of the innate prejudice that subverts basic human values of equality possessed by those who are sworn to serve and protect? Well that might actually do something. I may be wrong about a lot of things, but I am definitely certain that no matter how many angry faces are sent to the police department of Ferguson, that it will not make them change anything. To simplify what is going on in one’s head to simply an expression or an emoticon is tantamount to trying to use kindling as a chopstick.

The speed and ease which which we communicate is a great benefit to human kind as whole. It allows us to communicate with loved ones abroad or gives us a way to call for help at the moment of dire need. But through its many changes and development, the use of something has been lost to the vast majority of youth and teens, and that just so happens to be exactly what you’re reading now, words.