The one question I have is…

WHY? Why do people feel the need to take it that far? Why do we want to be so immediately connected to each other that when our friends and colleagues decide to make themselves a sandwich or blow their nose, we want to know about it?

And I ask that question not entirely out of judgment or disdain. I’m truly curious about this phenomenon, and yes, there’s that part of me that wonders if I’m just a moron (or worse in my line of work, “Web 2.0 Stupid”) because I can’t understand the motivation to spend that much time sharing so little useful information. There’s some urge to try it out to see if I feel any different, like maybe there’s a secret chemical that’s released into your brain when you tell the Internets about crossing the street or visiting the bathroom. But I can’t imagine that it does anything other than to further isolate people from meaningful face-to-face interactions, or to further destroy the collective attention span of humanity. As one person said today in our office conversation, “Twitter is like blogging for people who can’t concentrate long enough to complete a three paragraph blog post without getting distracted.”

Three paragraphs! Three paragraphs is a tome compared to 140 characters. Has it gotten that bad? Why, when I was blogging back in the day –

Wait, what was I typing about?

Oh yeah.

So, I’m thoroughly perplexed, and I don’t like being thoroughly perplexed about things that lots of people are doing. It’s scary, scary like realizing that everyone around you just became a flesh eating zombie and that they might be looking for food soon. I understand why people smoke, watch the Super Bowl, and pick their scabs, but I don’t get this. Maybe I just need to try it out.

If any zomb–er, Twitter users out there want to try to justify this insanity to me, please do so below…I expect more than 140 characters.

It was poorly written, poorly directed, poorly acted, and poorly edited. The dialogue was fluffy and cheesy and delivered with little authenticity. The cutting of the scenes almost made you wonder if they’d randomized their order and lost a bunch of footage along the way. The story barely made any sense to me and I just finished the book a few months ago – I pity anyone who came in off the street wondering what it was about, even with the artificial backstory narrative at the beginning. The action scenes were boring and confusing. And so on.

The one redeeming quality was the computer-generated graphics work that brought the characters` “daemons” – animal manifestations of one’s soul that travel alongside – to life. It was integrated very smoothly into the action and some of the detail and nuance was excellent.

But that was not enough to save this sinking ship – The Golden Compass is an unfortunate mangling of a perfectly good story, and a total bomb of a movie.

And yet, Pepsi will continue to promote the unique benefits of their Water(TM) – 0 calories, 0 sodium, 0 carbs, hooray! – just as every other bottled water maker will continue to sell their product as one of the best possible ways we can consume Water(TM). Consumers will probably continue to buy large cases of plastic bottles with plastic caps filled with Water(TM). Public drinking fountains will continue to be replaced by vending machines that glow into the night.

It would be easy to rant about the environmental impact of this trend: all that plastic, much of it not being recycled, that wasn’t in circulation before this latest fad caught on; all of the resources used to ship, fly, and truck the water from one place to another. And so on.

But instead I thought it worth highlighting a piece of information I recently learned from some long and in-depth research on the web: life actually depends on water. Not like, “oh, it’ll really suck if we can’t have access to a good crop of water this year” like you might say about your garden harvest, but as in “oh, we’ll actually die if we don’t have access to water.” What does that have to do with Aquafina? It’s a manifestation of a dangerous trend to toward making the basic components of successful human life – food, water, shelter, community, love – products that we have to pay for instead of resources we have access to and responsibility for maintaining.

When we outsource and abdicate our role in obtaining these resources to increasingly non-local, for-profit entities, we put ourselves at risk of losing access to the resources altogether. Resources that we literally cannot live without. Yes, most of us are still paying for the water that comes into our households via municipal systems, but at least in most cases it’s drawn from a local source, managed by local people who depend on it too, and recycled within the region. The diverse and localized nature of these systems insure that we’re not subject to the whims of the global water market, the unexpected contamination of a far-away water source, or the inability of this week’s water shipment to reach us because of bad weather. Just as with fuel, produce and groceries, and housing, when we decide that we will cede control over the source, availability, price and quality of these resources to the world of big business, we eventually find ourselves wishing we had not.

So it’s a good thing that people are talking more about supporting local resources that already exist and recognizing the bottle of Aquafina for what it is – someone making money by selling something you already had reasonable access to before, just with a nicer label on it. When we move in that direction, we have a much better chance of creating a sustainable life and culture for ourselves.

It’s too bad, then, that we often seem to be trending toward the further diluting and replacing of a strong public life, especially for our younger community members. In Richmond, the Common Council recently decided to enact a new curfew that restricts people under the age of 18 from being out past a certain time of the evening, and threatens to fine the parents of those people progressively higher for each offense.

As with most laws that say “if you’re under a certain age, the government requires that you do or do not ____”, I think it’s yet another unnecessary and misguided transfer of a community’s power and responsibility to decide how it wants to live away from the community members themselves (especially parents and children) and to the government and accompanying police state. (Do we still honestly believe that the time elapsed since birth is such a precise measure of maturity, self-discipline, ethics or responsibility?) But in this case, it’s one of those particularly draconian measures that says “you, human, must stay in this particular physical space from this time of day to that time of day.” Do we really want that kind of imperative coming from lawmakers who don’t live with us, who don’t know what our private lives entail?

I know that one argument for this kind of curfew is that it helps keep order in the city, reducing the amount of policing that has to be done. The implication here is that (A) people under the age of 18 are the predominant cause of disorder, and (B) a form of order that involves restricting our public lives by threat of physical force and economic hardship is a desirable one. I would suggest that neither A nor B are generally true, and that by trying to relieve the burden of policing our streets during certain hours, we pursue outcomes that are far inferior to creating a community where the streets are a positive part of a healthy public life.

It’s putting a band-aid on symptoms and avoiding the deeper conversations we could have about why we don’t think we can live together well without a curfew. It’s an example of a world run by old minds that think “how can I keep these bad things from happening?” instead of new minds that think “how can we best create the world we want to live in?” And it makes you start to think about what other programs are in place that artificially hold us back or keep us confined, when there are much more important things we should be spending our time and energy on.

Doug, unfortunately, became the target of my antsy-ness. He had fallen asleep in one of the beds, and as 2 AM rolled around, I suggested to Brandon and Scott that we play a prank on the poor boy. All clocks were set to appear as 6:50 AM, the alarm clock was set for 10 minutes later (our prescribed time to start getting ready to go), the rest of us got into bed, the lights were turned off.

BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP, the alarm went. The three of us laid there trying not to laugh, and Doug eventually started to wake up, hitting the alarm, moaning and bleary-eyed, probably with a strong sense that he hadn’t gotten enough sleep. “Doug,” I fake-grumbled, “time to get up. You can have the shower first.” Doug appreciated this gesture, and went through the motions of getting ready to go. His confused state of mind was exemplified when he poked his head out of the bathroom at one point and said something about seeing a deer in the shower.

Perhaps a less-mean friend would have ended it there, but we took it to the next level, setting all the clocks back to their proper 2 AM-ish time while Doug was in the bathroom, and then complaining about all of the noise he was making when he came out, dressed and ready to go. “Dude, what are you doing, it’s like 2 in the morning!”

Doug spent the rest of the night on a chair backed into a corner of the room, sleeping with one eye open, not very happy with any of us. Can’t blame him. At least he was clean?

Gah, what a lousy thing to do. Perhaps I can make it up to him somewhat by pointing you to his musical group’s website? Why? is a full-fledged, touring, news-making, album producing band whose work is released under anticon. records. Doug is the guy on keyboards and guitars. I always knew he would be a part of some sort of sweet musical venture – you can even watch them on YouTube.

Sorry if I slowed you down any, Doug.

[tags]adventures, music, audio, bad_idea, friends[/tags]

But the bottom line for me is that that our system of education in the US is almost entirely broken, ill-conceived in the first place, and that calls to make incremental improvements to a broken system feel largely like a waste of time.

Old minds think “how do we stop these bad things from happening?” New minds think “how do we make things the way we want them to be?” If education in the city of Richmond, the state of Indiana, and the U.S. is to be improved or fixed, it will be with new minds, not new programs put in place by old minds.

A hundred and fifty years ago, when the United States was still a largely agrarian society, there was no reason to keep young people off the job market past the age of eight or ten, and it was not uncommon for children to leave school at that age. Only a small minority went on to college to study for the professions. With increasing urbanization and industrialization, however, this began to change. By the end of the nineteenth century, eight years of schooling were becoming the rule rather than the exception. As urbanization and industrialization continued to accelerate through the 1920s and 1930s, twelve years of schooling became the rule. After World War Two, dropping out of school before the end of twelve years began to be strongly discouraged, and it was put about that an additional four years of college should no longer be considered something only for the elite.

It seems like urbanization and industrialization would have the opposite effect – that the system would be trying to put kids ON the job market. But imagine what would happen today if educators suddenly decided that a high-school education was no longer needed. There would suddenly be tens of millions of kids out there competing for jobs that don’t exist. The unemployment rate would go through the roof.

It would be catastrophic. It’s not only essential to keep fourteen-to-eighteen-year-olds off the job market, it’s also essential to keep them at home as non-wage-earning consumers. This age group pulls an enormous amount of money – hundreds of billions of dollars per year — out of their parents` pockets to be spent on books, clothes, games, novelties, music, and similar things that are designed specifically for them and no one else. Many enormous industries depend on teenage consumers. If these teenagers were suddenly expected to be wage earners and no longer at liberty to pull billions of dollars from their parents` pockets, these youth-oriented industries would vanish overnight, pitching more millions out onto the job market.

We all know that most of the modern education system forces students to spend many years of their lives learning things they instantly forget once they’ve passed the tests. People don’t remember things they have no use for. So why do we force our kids to go through this exercise? Because we have to give them something to do during the years they’re being kept off the job market. And it has to look good, like it really matters.

What do people think about the failure of schools? They think the schools are incompetent and underfunded, and that kids are lazy. What stories do we tell ourselves about what the schools would do if they had more money? They could get better teachers and pay teachers more, and more money would inspire teachers to do a better job. The lazy kids? More money would be spent buying new gadgets and better books and prettier wallpaper, and the kids wouldn’t be as lazy as before. And so these new and improved schools would turn out new and improved graduates.

But what happens when these new and improved graduates arrive in the workforce and start competing for jobs that the rest of us are trying to hold onto? The answer shows us why schools do such a poor job of preparing graduates for the workplace (or graduating students at all): they’re doing what we actually want them to do.

People imagine that we want to see our children enter the workplace with really useful business skills, but if they actually did so, they’d immediately begin competing for jobs with their older siblings and their parents, which would be catastrophic. And if graduates came out of school with advanced skills, who would bag the groceries? Who would do the sweeping up? Who would do the filing?

Instead, we produce workers who have no choice but to enter our economic system, presorted into various grades. High-school graduates are generally destined for blue-collar jobs. They may be intelligent and talented as college graduates, but they haven’t demonstrated this by surviving a further four years of studies (that are generally no more useful in life than the previous twelve years). Nonetheless, a college degree wins admittance to white-collar jobs that are generally off-limits to high school graduates.

What blue-collar and white-collar workers actually retain of their schooling doesn’t much matter, in either their working lives or their private lives. Very, very few of them will every be called upon to divide one fractional number by another, parse a sentence, dissect a frog, critique a poem, prove a theorem, discuss the economic policies of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, define the difference between Spenserian and Shakespearean sonnets, describe how a bill passes Congress, or explain why the oceans bulge on opposite sides of the world under the influence of tidal forces. Thus, if they graduate without being to do these things, it really doesn’t matter in the slightest. Postgraduate work is obviously different. Doctors, lawyers, scientists, scholars and so on actually have to use in real life what they learn in graduate school, so for this small percentage of the population schooling actually does something besides keep them off the job market.

The deception here is that schools exist to serve the needs of people, not the needs of our children. They exist to serve the needs of our economy. The schools turn out graduates who can’t live without jobs but who have no job skills, and this suits our economic needs perfect. What we’re seeing at work in our schools isn’t a system defect, it’s a system requirement, and they meet that requirement with close to one hundred percent efficiency.

In grades K through three, most children master the skills that citizens need in order to get along in our culture – reading writing and arithmetic. These are skills that, even at age seven and eight, children actually use and enjoy using. Millions of years of natural selection have produced human creatures who are born with a ravenous desire to learn anything and everything their parents know and who are capable of feats of learning whose boundaries are literally beyond imagination. Toddlers growing up in a household in which four languages are spoken will learn those four languages flawlessly and effortless in a matter of months. Kids will learn anything they want to learn, anything they have a use for. To make them learn things they don’t have a use for, you have to send them to school. That’s why we need schools – to force kids to learn things they have no use for, which in fact they do not learn.

Our schools have been failing for many decades. What do you call a system that’s built on the presumption that people in this system will be better than people have ever been? Everyone in this new and improved system is going to be kind and generous and considerate and selfless and obedient and compassionate and peaceable, and THEN we’ll beat those low graduation rates? What kind of system is that? Utopian.

Old minds think “how do we stop these bad things from happening?” New minds think “how do we make things the way we want them to be?” If education in the city of Richmond, the state of Indiana, and the U.S. is to be fixed, it will be with new minds who want to create a mode of education that truly serves the kids we are educating, not us and our economic systems.

(Many of the concepts and phrases in the above rant are quotes or paraphrases from Daniel Quinn’s book My Ishmael, and I have merely transcribed them here in a format relevant to the local news. Still, I take responsibility for any interpretations or mutations made.)

I caught her mention of aspartame as a common one and started doing a little research. While I tend to avoid looking up medical information on the Internet after previously embarrassing experiences doing so, I found lots of connections mentioned between headaches and aspartame. Who would have thought that ingesting formaldehyde would have negative health effects? Huh! Thanks, Monsanto! I took a brief skim of my pantry and found three products at the front of the shelf with aspartame and related substances like sucralose / Splenda, listed as an ingredient, both of which I’ve consumed lately – they’re now in the trash. Yeah, I know – we can’t just start throwing away everything that’s bad for us to any degree. But I figure that if a given edible substance has to have dueling propaganda websites and panels of experts to talk about whether or not it REALLY causes brain tumors, I can probably live without it to be on the safe side.

Perhaps I can ONLY live without it.

2) Ah yes, let’s look at “Global.” When it was the War on Terror, it was being headed up by the countries that had declared that War, namely the U.S. and the U.K. This meant that other participating bodies could largely avoid declaring War and the average citizen in any given country, being unable to declare War, had to leave the heavy lifting to political entities that can. Now that it’s a Global Struggle, all of us have a responsibility, a duty even, to participate. It no longer observes any political boundaries, and its success or failure is no longer solely under the control of any one nation. The U.S. is doing its part in the Global Struggle, yes, but how can the U.S. alone be expected to carry the burden that all of us should now share? Who isn’t doing *their* part in the Global Struggle!?

3) Fighting terror was a pretty hard conceptual sell from the beginning. How do you show evidence of terror until it happens? Isn’t terror the thing that is created in the victims of a terrorist’s crime? This means that you couldn’t really identify a target as a primary one in the “War on Terror” until that person/entity had created terror. As in, after the deed has been done. Now that we’re Struggling against Extremism, the administration can start to focus more effort on the deeds of suspected targets well before any harm is done. The downside, of course, is that the notion of extremism is much more open to interpretation the standard of proof for extremism is much more in the eye of the beholder than terrorism. Extreme about what? Religious beliefs? Economic models? Home decor and personal hygiene? Certainly, there are some acts that a reasonable majority of the world’s population can agree are “extreme,” but it’s the gray areas that might get us in trouble. And whereas before many Americans might have a hard time believing that a terrorist is anyone other than a middle-Eastern-looking man who has come from far away to create havoc and death, many more of us will be able to think as some of their fellow citizens as extremists, suspects in our own back yards.

I give the administration credit for recognizing, through its phrasing, at least, that current and future efforts against the problem of terrorism must go beyond traditional concepts of war or even the use of physical force at all. But I’m also concerned that they’re trying make us all look the other way when it comes to the culpability of administration officials, policy, and decision-making in getting us to where we are now.

These kinds of changes aren’t done lightly by this White House; it starts with an internal political or policy goal, then slight tweaks in the public language being used, then it becomes partisan talking points, then it becomes a legislative agenda, then it becomes a part of our everyday lives.