Choose
Suddenly the issues seem too numerous.
The inevitable end-game for a well-intentioned, but ultimately uninvolved, soul. I've crossed over my quota of "big talk about injustices (no action)" into a different realm. Uncomfortable.
Perhaps a conscience can only withstand so many batterings and accumulated layers of information, so many New York Times articles undermining your blatantly capitalist but not ill-intentioned actions (apartment sold to highest bidder, not one of the building's original long-term residents will ever be able to afford the building again).
After watching the plodding but message-powerful All Quiet on the Western Front the other night, settled into a pained bed conversation that R inadvertently kicked off by saying:
Well, at least we're not at war..."
But, of course, we very much are and everywhere. And it seems like it's incumbent on each of us to choose our war. I know I have to.
But in a country drowning in its own materialism and a shallow false pride in hard-won freedoms that induce the majority of us to shop, and gloat, where exactly to turn your energies and how am I at all distinguishable from the consumers all around me?The causes that have crossed my path recently - all deserving of full energies.
C
The inevitable end-game for a well-intentioned, but ultimately uninvolved, soul. I've crossed over my quota of "big talk about injustices (no action)" into a different realm. Uncomfortable.
Perhaps a conscience can only withstand so many batterings and accumulated layers of information, so many New York Times articles undermining your blatantly capitalist but not ill-intentioned actions (apartment sold to highest bidder, not one of the building's original long-term residents will ever be able to afford the building again).
After watching the plodding but message-powerful All Quiet on the Western Front the other night, settled into a pained bed conversation that R inadvertently kicked off by saying:
Well, at least we're not at war..."
But, of course, we very much are and everywhere. And it seems like it's incumbent on each of us to choose our war. I know I have to.
But in a country drowning in its own materialism and a shallow false pride in hard-won freedoms that induce the majority of us to shop, and gloat, where exactly to turn your energies and how am I at all distinguishable from the consumers all around me?The causes that have crossed my path recently - all deserving of full energies.
- My friend Pintso's school project outside Gangtok (http://www.taktse.org/). Its well-considered goal to educate Sikkim's next generation in a manner that confidently tethers Sikkim's remarkable, but tragic, past to a healthier future.
- My stepmother's NGO (PACT) and its Worth Project for women's empowerment. Giving the women of the world's developing nations the tools to, finally, do it for themselves but with oneanother.
- A pretty home on the Hudson. With uncles Bill & George, joined the powerful gay mafia of the Hudson Valley to bid on dreamy landscape paintings, gossip across grape leaves and raise funds to restore rotundas of an aging Victorian.
- The Reindeer People (Dukha reindeer nomads). (We attended a film on them some weeks back at The Rubin.) A nomad culture on the fringe of the already-threatened Tibeto-Mongol world, their land is being forested and eroded by Russia, their lifestyle is having a tough go competing with that of the villages, the reindeer are in-breeding, the climate changing. I think there were some 200 Dukha left.
- It's flooding in Bulgaria.
- Bombay's afloat.
- There's famine everywhere you look in Africa.
Here's to each and every one of us choosing our method of CHANGE.
C
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