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. 

Fundamental Solitude

Among the many pressures that people face these days, there lies one that seems evolutionarily unprecedented. I am talking about social pressures and fears. We've all felt the pressure to conform, ascribe, look a certain way, talk a certain way, and in short, be something seemingly for the sake of other people. 

I could write a ton about the benefits and drawbacks and debate near endlessly on whether they are good or bad, perhaps even propose a solution that society should work towards in order to retain the things we want and mitigate the things we don't. However, I don't want this post to be about that. 

I want to talk about solitude. Solitude is often seen as neutral quality, something that certain people possess. Solitude seems to transcend being alone, falling more in to stoicism and sometimes contentment. Of course, anyone who is alone is most often scorned by society, but that's no fault of society's. The social nature of society is obligated to look upon that which does not contribute to it as bad. But many great human beings have found something worthwhile in solitude, from Emerson and Thoreau to Odysseus. People perhaps think that it's because when you're in solitude, you have the freedom to focus on yourself, but I find this not really to be true. I prefer to think of it differently. When one performs a solo with an orchestra, that is a form of solitude. They are lot alone, but they are singular- no part doubling to hide behind, no one to help you count your rests. And when someone is performing a solo, it's rarely only to showcase how good a player they are. The focus of the soloist is not on themselves, but rather the music. This is the nature of solitude. It brings you out of the situation where other people may mandate that certain things be done a certain way and leaves the solidituous with the task itself of simple existence. 

Take, for example, the fanatic debate between those who place their toilet paper roll with the end falling towards or away from you. There's a startling amount of near fanatic passion especially on the internet. People rant on and on about why their way is best and how those that don't agree are tantamount to monsters. However, if you strip away what this debate has become. You are left with only the dilemma: which way should the roll go? Ultimately, it matters very little, and you can decide based on logic. Try it both ways and see which works for you. Or use both. No one but you cares, and you can pretty well decide for yourself what works. This is solitude. It's taking out all the hype, all the pressures, all the expectations, all the neon and noise from your life and focusing on one thing: living it. 

Why Fish Didn't Invent the Fishbowl

I was recently in some deep thought about a very simple question, which is why fish didn't invent the fishbowl. Surely it is of more utility to them than really anyone else. For them, the fishbowl could revolutionize their way of life. For us, it is merely an amusement at the dentist's office to stare at while dreading being probed with an ice pick then told to use a softer toothbrush. If the fish could make somehow manage to figure out how to make a fish tank it could effectively some of the means needed to colonize the world. New World Order via Goldfish. 

Having said this, I would venture to say that the fish hasn't invented the fish tank of bowl or even the canon used to launch horny adult salmon upstream because they're way too dumb. In fact, the next closest thing to the fish bowl in terms of tools usage by a non-human species is a stick chimps use to dig ants out of a nest. Let's get this clear for the sake of understanding. While goldfish have been given a bad reputation about having 6 second memories, which to the best of my knowledge they do not, the goldfish still lost to a stick. By human standards, a goldfish's IQ would be so low that it would not only be technically be considered profoundly retarded, but if anyone were to do what the goldfish does (stare at things all day and blow bubbles), they would be declared dead*. And that is why computers will never take over the world. 

[abrupt segway]

If one considers the intricacy of a modern day cpu, the kind one finds at bestbuy, they will soon find that although it may do quite well the things it is designed to do (facebook and the obligatory Crysis on full), it does not at all do anything else. A quad-core i7 has about 1,400,000,000 transistors. How much of that is taken up to manage the "autonomic" parts of the computer, such as running the fans, managing the power supply, etc? Honestly, not too much. In fact, barely any. However, for the goldfish, a significant portion of it's neurons are taken up in moving the tail to stay afloat or getting water to run over its gills. It does this, but on a higher level. It's vision is better than Microsoft kinect, it's homeostasis is better than the temp monitor in a laptop, and it's much better at finding food than a computer is at finding electricity. Well then what about the rest of the Cpu that's running your video games and social networks? Well, what does a goldfish do besides stay alive? One simple thing. It makes decisions. Now from experience, I'm sure we can all agree that the ability to make a decision does not make you smart (*cough, politicians*). However, the ability to make forward thinking, decisive, and effective decisions does. And it's quite clear, that if a goldfish were not capable of making such decisions, it would be extinct. I am indeed now implying that a computer can not make such decisions, and it is an implication with intention. Surely, someone out there is thinking of an objection that somewhat follows the lines of "Oh, but a goldfish just follows its programming too. It gets stimulus, and reacts to it according it's instincts and what not." I don't know much about programming, but from the amount I've gathered by osmosis from my compsci friends, I think I can reasonably say that the way programming works is that a computer is told what to do in the event of what. Basically, conditions are described, and a response is coded for it. Imagine now, if you had to code for the life of a wild goldfish. Could you make it swim in a straight line? Probably. Curves? Yeah. Okay, could you have it recognize the outline of the shadow of a predator and be alert but not alarmed because it might just ignore you but surreptitiously position yourself for a fight or flight response wherein all the muscles in your body will aid you in the preservation of your life and you're shutting down digesting lunch because that's not needed right now so all the enzymes need to be reduced as much as possible which relies really on what you had, but at the same time the heart rate is going up and everything is getting tense because here comes a huge fish and you're just a stupid goldfish oh and this all has to happen in an instant because there's no loading screen on the food chain? I'd say that's a bit more of a challenge. But surely, at some point, the computer could get so smart that it programs itself, right? Goldfish do that too. It's called guess and check. The ones that guess wrong get checked by something that thinks it's delicious. In short, a computer doesn't make decisions concerning it's wellbeing and preservation. Should you try to code it to, the world's best effort will still fall short of the decision making power of a orange sliver the size of your thumb sold in plastic bags at the county fair. 

And with all their computational prowess, the goldfish still can't figure out how to put together a freaking fish bowl. What chance then does the computer have at taking over the world? If a goldfish makes a braindead vegetable of a human, then a computer surely would make a dead dead rock of one. Now according to Moore's law, the day is quickly approaching where there will be computers with as many transistors as a human has neurons, but still it will only be able to do what it has been told to do. Indeed, the aforementioned intel core has more transistors than an adult zebra fish has neurons (I tried to look up the number for the goldfish, but wikipedia declined to share that information). In light of this, it's safe to assume that the intricacy of life lay not in the algorithmic complexity of the some brainiac processor, but rather in how it works. According to Neil deGrasse Tyson, there are about the same number of neurons in the human brain as there are stars in the galaxy, so I daresay that computers have a lot of catching up to do.

*In some countries, being braindead constitutes being totally dead

Chivalry and Propriety

I hear a lot of people say these days that chivalry is dead. This statement isn't really wrong, as a definition of chivalry primarily equates it to knights and noblemen, and these days, people get knighted for writing books or being actors, and nobility definitely seems more and more simply a distinction of heredity rather than character. However, while my pedantic soul is satiated, my practical soul is not. Chivalry, as the popular definition goes, is a set of mannerism that pertain primarily to the social operations of a male and dictate that he do things for other people for no apparent reason besides that he can, in his small way, make being alive suck a little less. This, people claim, is dead.

Is it really? Because to understand this concept, one should break it down. Chivalry, according to what people seem to think (when they bother), is made up of two parts: doing things for no reason, and decreasing world suck. Surely, no one would argue that people are any more prone to adhering to reason now than they have ever been. On the contrary, many would argue just the opposite. Likewise with decreasing world suck, many people do many things that decrease world suck, even if some would say it isn't enough.

No, Chivalry isn't dead. Propriety is dead. By propriety, I mean quite simply, acting properly. Acting properly should be a social norm, like letting people step off a bus before getting on, not standing in the middle off a walkway, or moving your bag from the seat next to you so someone else can use it. This is what I mean by propriety. People haven't forgotten to be nice to each other, as the bewailed death of chivalry may suggest, we know full well exactly what nice is. What we've forgotten is what it might be like to be someone besides ourselves. The death of propriety, I believe, is one of the major reasons society today has gone to the dogs of hedonistic degradation. I hesitate to assert that people now only think about themselves and and only that, because your average person, my optimistic self wants to believe, is quite a kind person (or at the least, neutral in this regard). But there is a reason why while the individual can be affable, empathetic, and relating, groups of people somehow transcend all sense of moderation and often go to extremes and polarize themselves again and again to the side if illegality, rambunctiousness, belligerence, and most often, downright stupidity. This is because we no longer have a sense of propriety. We don't have what it takes to conceive of another person's mind, and thus, riots of people destroy everything they contact with their caustic hostility and hive mind. Senseless destruction of private, commercial, and even public places have become a norm, for the riots of this day and age.

Honestly, I have no propositions on how to solve this problem. All I know is that if I do my best to not give in to the tunnel vision of vanity that I have come to despise, maybe my life and that of those around me won't be as terrible to live. And perhaps, if we all believe this, that would be all we need.

Words and Wûrds

As humans, we are constantly trying to find ways to express ourselves. The way we dress, speak,  smile and laugh. Or more importantly, why we laugh; rather, what we laugh at. An amusing spectacle, a clever joke, the sight of something loving, or perhaps something loved. I believe that all laughter, all emotion, perhaps all expression, are caused by two things. Words, and wûrds. They sound the same, and in many respects they are, or at least they seem to be. But what they are, how they work, and move us so, is very different. What is a word? A word is something said; something spoken, written, inscribed.  A byte of sound or perhaps sight that holds a meaning all to itself. A banner written in blue text says just the same thing as one written in red. The cloth may be black, white, green, the font may be sans serif, old roman trajan, or simple ariel; the banner may be held high, pinned to a wall, or used as a rug. So long as people can read it, the words say the same thing. their meaning is clear. In this way, words can unite us. They transcend generations. The words of Plato or the apostle John can be read just as clearly in their time as ours. Words are an encapsulation of a feeling that the reader is then in charge if interpreting. A reader of Plato can learn to love his city, or despise it’s citizens. A reader of the Bible may devote his or her life to it’s cause, it’s following, or scoff and reject it. Wûrds then, are just the opposite. Wûrds are a statement of the universe, felt through an expression. A wûrd can be as simple as a color in the mind’s eye, a flutter in the heart, the taste of air between one’s teeth. When man speaks with words, he becomes a orator. A person who rouses crowds or persuades a nation, but when  man speaks with wûrds, he is called an artist. A person whose fingertips dance on keys or strings, a person whose hands beat in rhythm, a person whose throat cries in soaring arches of somber or delightful melody. These things cannot be expressed except by one man’s wûrds, but can be understood by as many as can hear it. Music, paintings, and sculpture are all things that can speak to people from all nations, upbringings, backgrounds, and languages. When these two things work together, great things are born (by great I intend to express magnitude, not necessarily positivity). Where words on a page run together in your mind in chemical reactions, forming wûrds, or perhaps where a singer’s lyric is impressed by the melody and harmonic to which it is sung. However, because humans are human, we screw up even this simplicity. People use music to try to speak in just words, and poetry is excreted into being by people attempting to state their expression. However amid this, some things last the test of time. There are still work around that speak to this greater testament, this greater consonance between the two methods of communication of the universe. Perhaps whenthoughts are shaped, channeled, and outlined; when his feelings and current of unconsciousness can be tapped and bring forth understanding and enlightenment.

The Slow Fade

I remember reading an article in National Geographic a while ago about a nomadic tribe that lived somewhere in the dry bush of Africa. What struck me most, was how the writer finished the article, which was by describing what the tribal customs were concerning the death of one of the members. When one of theirs died, there was no ceremony, there were no dances or rituals, no story telling, no wayward spirituality. The body was simply covered with dirt or leaves and the tribe simply moved on. To my western brain, this felt so... wrong. The fact that someone could die and never have existed seemed so foreign to me. But also somehow beautiful in it's simplicity.

These days, when someone dies, they never die all at one. Sure, there is the moment when they take their last breath, or their heart stops and they are declared medically dead (different definitions of medical death somewhat blur this line), but at that moment, they don't truly die. They die in bits and pieces. In fact, for some people, their funeral ceremony or wake begets more life than they have lived in a while. No, now dying only really begins with death. After death, their body is prepared, and people are amassed together to commemorate what once was. They are stuck in a box in the ground and covered in dirt. But they don't die then. They live on in the memories of those that knew them. every person has a different memory of someone that they knew who died, and those together constitute, together, what the person is now. Then one by one, things are forgotten. Phone numbers deleted, photographs thrown away, the dust from their skin swept up and thrown out. Them all that new him die, and those that knew stories of him die, then those that knew his name, until he has passed out of memory and time. However, is that possible in this day and age? Won't the coroner or city hall always have record of the death? won't there be an online yearbook with his name in it somewhere? Won't there be some hard drive with tax records or credit card statements that just sit there whirling away for decades? When will the dead truly die?

It seems impossible for someone that lives now to ever... die. There will be some version of them out their, some tether preventing them from ever leaving this earth. For this tribe, perhaps a deceased will be named no more than three generations on, and then no longer be. This is something that will seemingly never be granted those who live in a developed nation. Perhaps when the bank we used goes out of business, or there's a flood in the local courthouse or library we will be granted some reprieve, but really, most of us will just have to wait until the sun blows up and scorches everything we know into a crisp, or some alien race comes and trashes our planet.