The Global Hometown

I'm gonna try something a little new today, which is just to write an essay that's honest and disjointed and coming out of various thoughts I'm having at the moment, without too much concern for how it adds up or whether or not it even makes sense. Which I guess means that I'm going to write the way I talk, full of half finished thoughts and grasping ideas and a sort of arbitrary direction. Enjoy (and if you get tired of me, skip to the end, there's a video you'll like):

As some of you who've seen me recently already know, I've been rather cynical the last few weeks. Partially it's the move to L.A., and the adjustment to a new phase of my life - my traveling days are over, my working days are ahead of me, and even though I enjoy the path I've picked, that doesn't make it any less intimidating - and partially it's been my overwhelming sense of hopelesness. There is so much that we are facing as a world these days, so much carelesness and injustice and potential for gross, global calamity. I've thought for the past few years that educating myself would show me the path that we can take to save ourselves from our uncertain future, but instead I've essentially come to see how screwed we all probably are.

Being someone who's tended to write from a place of hope, of belief in the future and in our world, that sort of left me in a strange place, helpless, disconnected and mute. I had lost most of the force that's been driving me over the past few years, which was to grow within myself and see the world around me grow as well. I'd begun to feel that all of that growth was essentially going to be for naught, as we were moving far too fast as a world, hurtling towards the edge of a cliff, locked in our own strange version of the fabled buffalo jump, the mixture of suicide and sportsmanship that provided food to the Lakota Sioux.

There is this amazing book that I was talking about with someone at a party last night, Jared Diamond's Collapse, which is essentially a companion piece to his previous book, Guns, Germs and Steel. Where Guns was a study of how civilisations came to be, how differing environmental and geographic resources influenced the development of human culture and society, Collapse is a study of how societies fall apart, how once great empires can crumble into ruins, how people can be absorbed by neighboring culures, or else dissapear completely. Diamond is writing it partially to challenge our own society to consider our longevity, or lack thereof; as he points out, many of the societies that we look back on as "failures" actually lasted for a longer period than our current society - by which he means Western Europeans in America - has so far managed to survive. It's a sobering thought.

By Diamond's reckoning, the major factors that determine a society's failure or success are the environmental resources at its disposal, its relationship to its neighbors and, most importantly, the way that it responds to its collapse at the moment that it's happening. Cultures which survive the edge of collapse - and there have been many - are the ones that manage to utilise their resources, their power structure, their belief systems and their allies to adapt to their new economic or environmental realities, and through that find a more functional and sustainable way to live.

When I first read Collapse, nearly two years ago, it was something of an intellectual abstraction: what would happen if the world - which is now one large, interdependent society - were to fall apart. Now, after a winter that saw bizzare weather across the globe, with the newspapers full of reports on warming and the underground abuzz with concern about petroleum sources being depleted, this collapse doesn't seem so abstract after all.

It seems to be happening.

It seems easy to be cynical in the face of this, and to be angry as well. It's easy to question whether we will graciously accept a change in our lives, our comfort levels, and it's easy to consider that very comfort to be the sickness that will keep us from making the change. It's easy to speculate about famine and drought and diease, about whether or not we'll be able to take care of a global population when our growing zones change, when animal populations die off, when the rain forests of the Amazon turn into a bio-diesel fueled desert.

It also seems easy to point at scientific solutions, genetic crops that will grow in harsher conditions, desalinization plants that will turn sea water into fresh water, so that we can still take care of our gardens when our rivers dry up. It's easy to say that science will take care of us, somehow, or the market will, or some other unseen force. It's easy to question whether we deserve these things, and also to presume that we do.

And what is the answer? Well, the fact is no one knows. Maybe this is what's so incredibly depressing about it: we truly are walking into a vast unknown, and once again, our future, our very lives are in our hands, not only to do things that are going to be positive and helpful for generations to come who will have to live with the mess that humanity has created, but also to help all of the people who have to live with the mess that is right now.

What I do know, though, is that being cynical sucks. I've tried being cynical with humor, being cynical with hedonism, being cynical with passion, and being cynical while doing yoga. And at the end of the day, no matter what I try, I still wind up feeling like I'm not really feeling the way I would like, that I'm not experiencing my life in the way I wish I would. And, you know, if it is all collapsing, then all that really remains is to enjoy it. If I fail at that, then what else is there?

And it's hard, believing in that strange thing called hope, which Emily Dickinson reminded us is a thing with feathers, presumably because it flies away, but also, perhaps, because you can stuff it in your pillow to help you sleep at night or in your coat to keep you warm in the winter. Hope is one of the opiates we use to get through the day, but it is also, in some strange way, one of the steroids we can use to actually inspire action. Neither of which I would recommend as long term solutions.

What I do still believe in, maybe the only thing I still believe is, is personal growth, personal awareness, and personal change. My last boyfriend counseled me up and down that there is no such thing as the personal, and my Faerie Sister (seriously) will talk you blue in the face about how individuality and self-exploration are inherently destructive ideas. Well, you know, I'm a rebel I guess, because I still do believe in the personal journey, in the individual experience, because I believe that they are a way to reach the communal, to come together in a group and be at peace enough to engage. And I believe that community is the one thing that might save us, or at least make life bearable as we sink. I believe in the villages we abandoned long ago, even if, living in L.A., I seem as far removed from a village as humanly possible.

I woke up this with this thought today, running through my head, and it was the first positive thing I've thought - from a political standpoint - in quite a few weeks. This is from my journal this morning:

"I think that what is interesting, in talking about collapse," - yes, I actually woke up with this on my mind, this is the sort of sleep I have - "is that we live at a time of unprecedented widesoread information, widescale collective knowledge and memory, and the ability to share that with each other. We live at a time when, for those who have access to computers and the freedom and knowledge to use them, borders are breaking down and nationalistic myopia is slowly falling by the wayside. We live in an era where we can easily and critically assess information, comment upon it, and then spread it to others.

"The societies that Diamond looked at tended to be small, limited in the resources they had to respond to these problems, and limited in their power structure." - As a quick review, some of the societies that Diamond studied were small islands at the end of the Micronesian chain, which had limited populations and either a top-down hierarchy or a small scale village-style collective. They also tended to lack the appropriate resources to constitute survival on their own, hence they relied on each other to provide necessary and missing elements. So that when collapse came to one island, it came to them all, and they quite literally had no room to invent or adapt a new way of life; they were living in the only way they could.

"Without people always realizing it, we areliving in a time where we're natually shifting to more 'I' centered and 'We centered social perspective - 'We' being 'My Group'. As information moves laterally, as friendships are built through wide reaching virtual communities, as global politics become more entrenched and people become more invested in supporting or challenging that system, we're stepping into an age of new village relationships, only villages that exist outside of geographic isolation.

"If we have a chance of challenging the global decay - and realizing that we're only doing it in the short term anyway, only doing it for our quality of life, not our longevity of existence - it will come through stepping outside of the old order, and stepping into a new reality altogether."

And what I mean by that reality is that, through the internet, through social networking sites, through the exchange of photos and sounds and videos of foreign cultures, we are able, in a way never before available, to actually connect to people around the globe. There are all of these search engines and news feeds and widgets and wikkis that collect and diseminate information, and eventually the lead story of the New York Times is how, while global warming will affect all of us, it's going to fuck over Africa worst of all. This isn't per se a new story - it's Web 2.0, and it's also information overload - but it is the potential, if used well, to create new village structures, ones that span the world, ones that span a variety of social and economic backgrounds, and ones that will spread awareness like wildfire, so that we can actually do something beyond just waiting around for hope, that blasted, beautiful thing with feathers.


While looking around CouchSurfing today, I came across a series of links that eventually took me to the video below. It's from a new web series about young Iraqis in Baghdad, and attempts to show a variety of slices of life, from eating with their families to not being able to go outside because there are bullets flying through the air. At a time when the mainstream media here in America still has een hekel of showing footage of life in Baghdad, of showing what is happening over there for the real people this is an amazing series. What it shows is a mixed bag, some of it frothy, some of it harrowing, and most of it is focused on the English speaking, educated children of the Iraqi middle class. But everything it shows is a slice of some sort of reality, and the potential it creates, for dialogue and understanding and connection, is immense. It's attempting to do what I think many of us are doing in this day and age: create a new global paradigm, where rather than one city or one country being our home, it is the entire world that winds up being our village. If there is something to hope for, maybe that's it.



For more of this series, go check out Hometown Baghdad, as well as Chat the Planet. Thanks for reading, y'all.