One thing I’ve always liked about Americans is their ability to protest peacefully and creatively (most of the time).  This doesn’t happen in many parts of the world.  When I was in Chile protests occurred frequently, and often involved fires, tear gas, and water cannons, as well as massive interruptions of the public transportation system.  Some might say that Americans have it pretty good and there is little to get really riled up about.  In response to that I must point at the Civil Rights Movement.  I would have honestly understood if African Americans had gotten really ticked off and started lighting stuff on fire.  They dealt with a lot of crap from the government and if anybody has the right to protest in that way, they did.  Instead, the Civil Rights Movement was largely peaceful, and accomplished a great deal.

This brings us to the Tea Parties of April 15, 2009.  Sometimes it’s nice to see Conservatives protesting about something for once, and you have to admit the whole idea of the “Tea Party” is fairly clever.  However, can we just do a little side-by-side comparison?  The Boston Tea Party of 1773 was mostly a protest against taxation without representation.  The dumping of the tea was symbolic and principled- Americans would rather go without this tea than pay the unfair taxes.  It involved a certain sacrifice, and it marked the moment where the people finally got fed up enough to take action.  It was an iconic movement that helped launch a Revolution, and I am convinced it is a major reason why tea does not hold the same status in America today as it does in the UK.

The Tea Parties of 2009 are protesting taxes, sure, but it is hardly the same idea.  Whereas the tea dumping had a very clear and specific meaning for the colonial era, this meaning has become much more abstract today.  So, when 2009 Tea Party-goers dump fake barrels of tea in the water, I am not quite sure what they are trying to say.  The bailouts make me very wary, too, and I am nervous about the amount of debt we are getting ourselves into.  However, these protests aren’t going to mean anything if they’re all talk and abstract principles.  Dumping fake tea isn’t going to have as much of an impact because it’s irrelevant.  If we were willing to repair our own GM cars when the warranties sink along with GM, that would be more significant.  Sometimes with capitalism, things fail, and maybe that’s ok.  It sucks that we can’t get a loan to buy that $500,000 house, so for now we’ll just have to stay in our 2-bedroom apartment that most people in the world would kill for.  But you know what?  It’s ok.  It really is ok.  We just need to convince the government that we can handle it.

So why aren’t we dumping our GM vehicles in the harbor instead of fake tea?  I submit that we are really not all that pissed off.  Yet.

How I loathe thee, construction barrels.

There are a few images that will be burned into my brain forever.

A woman came into the place I work yesterday night.  We had about a half hour until we closed so the other two workers and I were starting to clean up and prepare to shut the place down.  There was one other customer there waiting for his food.

Then this lady walked in.

The first thing I noticed about her were her eyes.  She had enormous bags underneath her eyes, and her irises were the craziest things I had ever seen.  They were like, sparkly, or something.  I don’t know if she was wearing contacts or this was some weird effect of drugs, but this lady’s eyes were scary.  And dead.  Her eyes were dead.

This woman walked up to the cash register where I was standing, and asked me if any of us employees smoked.  I had to ask her to repeat herself because I was so taken aback by her eyes.  She repeated her question.  I said “Um, no.  Sorry.”  She walked out.

Everyone in the store stood frozen for a split second, then we all went back to what we were doing.  This lady was clearly looking for something more than a cigarette.  This was a woman whose life had been destroyed by drugs.

And I can’t get the image of her eyes out of my head.

I’ve never done drugs.  I’ve never had the desire to.  And it’s not because of the D.A.R.E. program I went through in elementary school, or the slide shows in high school health classes.  I’d say it’s probably a combination of my faith and the types of people I hang out with.  But it’s also because I have seen firsthand the ravaging effects of drug addiction.  I’ve talked to addicts and I’ve heard their stories.  The desperation, the abandonment, the poverty, and the purposelessness of a life that only has one goal: the next hit.  It starts and it ends with a needle.

Don’t do drugs.

I turned on the TV this morning (I’m on Spring Break so lots of sleeping, reading, and TV for me this week) and Walker, Texas Ranger happened to be on. Walker was roundhouse kicking some guy, and his deputy was asking some other guy if he wanted a “Hawaiian punch” while dunking his head into, you guessed it: a bowl of punch.

The bad guys depicted on Walker, Texas Ranger and in television and movies in general are so one-dimensional. They’re always the same. They wear dark clothes and they always have scowls on their faces. You never find out if they have kids or what their childhood was like. That pile-drive to the gut isn’t as fun if you know Junior’s waiting for daddy to come tuck him in when this is all over.

There is a big philosophical debate over whether people are inherently good or inherently bad. Personally, I am intrigued by the Christian concept of the “fallen nature” of human beings. We were created good, but somewhere along the way we get corrupted. It just seems to be the best explanation for what I see going on in this world. Despite what Walker would have us believe, I don’t think there are really “bad guys” in this world. These one-dimensional, almost cartoonish caricatures that are only ever focused on doing evil just don’t really exist.

Maybe some people come pretty close. You could probably make a good case for Hitler or Saddam Hussein being pure evil. At the very least they were sociopaths. But those guys were children once too, you know? There was a time when they were five years old and their days consisted of playing soccer and bickering with their siblings. Then somewhere along the way, they fell into a bad business. Maybe it was a calculated plan, or maybe they just got sucked into something and got in over their heads.

Someday I would like to do an informal investigation on suicide bombers. As much as I dislike George Clooney, I was intrigued by the plot line in Syriana that depicted the recruitment, training, and final mission of suicide bombers in the Middle East. I thought that by going into the psyche of a suicide bomber, it provided an excellent contrast to the classic “bad guys” as they are portrayed in the media. These bombers weren’t just evil men. They were barely even adults at all. They were young men who got sucked into an ideology. They were targeted because of their rough backgrounds. They were given food and resources they never had access to before. Their religious training provided a smoke screen for extremist ideologies. And they were promised comfort and provision for their families after they completed their suicide missions. The process is complicated and psychological, but definitely not black and white.

I just don’t believe people are evil anymore. I know it is very easy to believe this. I know. But you start to peel back the layers, and things get a whole lot more complex.

The gray is starting to close in.

I mailed in a resume and application for a summer internship today. I went to CPO to buy a stamp, and the guy handed over a stamp with a portrait of Jimmy Stewart on it. Since I had gone to a lot of trouble to make the envelope look good by getting a nice envelope from Career Services and printing out the addresses, I was a little hesitant to put Jimmy Stewart’s face on it. I asked the guy if they anything a little more official. It’s not too much to ask, right? I bet a lot of students and staff frequently send out official documents.

The guy responded by saying the other choices were Yoda or X-Men. Here’s to hoping someone at the State’s Attorney’s Office is a Jimmy Stewart fan.

I went to the mall today. I don’t make it to the mall very often these days, and I think from now on I will try to avoid intentionally ever going there again. I really hated it. The second I walked in, I was taken aback by the sheer quantity of middle schoolers. I have a rule that I generally try to stay away from middle schoolers. Remember middle school? Let’s reminisce.

In middle school I discovered sarcasm. It opened up an entire new world for me, and I used it at every possible moment, appropriate or not. My friends thought I was funny- they were middle schoolers too. But looking back I think my sarcastic humor was juvenile and unfunny. I think it was also mostly negative, and sometimes I took it too far and probably hurt other people’s feelings. I have definitely retained a dry sense of humor, but I’ve grown up a lot and it is more controlled.

When I was in middle school, I was pretty sure I knew just about everything there is to know. I thought I was just so smart. By the time I was 13, I was all set, and there wasn’t much left to learn. That was my opinion of my own knowledge until I was about 17, from which point it has been steadily declining. I am now of the opinion that I know absolutely nothing, and the older I get the more I believe that.

I was super judgmental in middle school. Like, the Jerry Falwell, fire and brimstone type. If you swore, if you were gay, if you were pro-choice, if you did any number of certain things I had deemed unacceptable, I shut you out and secretly condemned you to hell. I really distanced myself from relationships with some potentially great people, just because of one aspect I disagreed with. This probably continued until very recently, when I realized all of the awesome friendships I was missing out on.

Physically, I was pretty awkward in middle school. Things started changing faster than I could deal with. I had braces for two years. I also had a pretty strange wardrobe that consisted mainly of ankle-biter jeans and baggy sweatshirts.

I have grown up quite a bit since middle school. Generally I think the changes have been very positive. Two years ago the language arts teacher I had for all three years of middle school invited me and two of her other students to come and talk to her class about high school and college. Like I said, I was a jerk in middle school, but especially to this teacher. When I went back, I could tell how pleasantly surprised she was by how much I had matured. This made me pretty happy. While I generally don’t like reflecting on middle school or being around middle schoolers because it’s just sort of unpleasant, sometimes it’s nice to just compare and contrast the me of today with the me of 8 years ago.

Wanderings and Reckonings? What? I know, maybe it’s a little cheesy. But I thought it was kinda fitting. “Wanderings” for my experiences, “reckonings” for my thoughts. I guess that’s what this blog will be. So that’s where the name comes from- nothing very profound and slightly more anonymous than my actual name. Anyways, why am I starting this blog? I’m actually not too sure. I’ve been thinking about being better about writing in a journal, and I figured I would be more motivated to write in a blog than in a journal. I’m not even really expecting anyone to read this, so if you are…enjoy? But I really just made it to get my thoughts out. So we’ll see if I can keep this up. BTW, the picture at the header of this blog is not just a generic stock photo- I actually took it in Patagonia, Chile (the wanderings part, remember?). Pretty sweet, huh?