Changing Pastimes

I have a lot of free time on my hands and have had so for a long while. Our culture has a cure for free time not just one cure but many different cures. Music, television, books and my personal favorite video games to name a few. Recently I've been persuaded to get away from that particular medium.

It's really just because I want to do things that other people can appreciate. I've found that the best feeling that a I can get is positive feedback from other people.

Next to that is the feeling of creating something. It's gratifying to have an object that you have made, or participated the creation of. I've appreciated the work of many people when I've played video games but I'm finding that I just end up spending more time than I originally intended when I pick up the latest title.

So I'm trying to wean myself of the habit slowly. It's not something that a person can easily quit cold turkey. Good games absorb your mind more than anything else I know. Part of the fun of them however is sharing the experience with others and nobody else I'm talking with now is gaming so it's naturally falling away.

For the next couple or so I'll be building a model airplane as I feel like I should be making something but as an art student school takes up most of my creative ideas. Refilling the mind juices on doing something someone else has designed ought to improve my artistic skills and detail orientation.

Part of this the feeling that I seem to always have that a person needs to strive to be improving at all times. I think that our global culture promotes this idea. At least until a person has been recognized as one of the best. Then everything is in it's maintenance.

And now that graduation is near and I'm looking to start off working wherever I can I feel like I need to up my art skills so that I'm more marketable. Having something to work on helps.

I'll sign off asking what it is that you like to do with your free time. Is there something that helps you unwind?

To defend the Constitution

I just listened to the a debate on how to treat terrorists either as enemy combatants or as criminals and one point came up that I thought was excellent. Millitary members vow to support and defend the constitution of the United States. Not to defend the people.

This demonstrates the power and importance of ideas. The point was that we as a people need to hold to our highest ideals because they are what make us great.

On the other hand without the people there are no ideals to hold up. It is important then to realize what our military is meant to defend, the ideas and ideals of a nation. And the role that you need to take in the forming of those ideals. The fact that it takes so long for something to become constitutional is a testament to how important a government and its workings are to us.

I think what I thought was most right is that people are not as important as the institutions they serve and the ideas they carry. It seems to me that the two are inseparable.

I should just quit information it's a bad drug.

I listened to a this American Life Podcast today about living after one's actions may have caused people's deaths and how people cope. It's good story-telling and within the show talked about how people who suffer from post-traumatic stress isolate themselves and become fearful because they feel that they are at the whim of the universe.

At the same time I think that their are people, even highly capable people who suffer under this notion and haven't experienced any traumatic event except perhaps being isolated. My brain made this connection between death and isolation perhaps because I listened to the audio of the Jonestown suicides and thought of the isolation necessary for people needing to gather like this in the first place and the isolation necessary for this to occur.

I shouldn't have listened to the audio, just as I shouldn't have listened to the audio of the 9/11 emergency phone call but I did. It's been awhile since I heard the former but the latter was the day before my previous post. I did these for a sense of understanding, and perhaps because the internet allowed me to be a rubbernecker without slowing down traffic.

I wouldn't forget these recordings easily, not for their content, but for the sinking feeling that I got when I heard them. Part of human nature wants to analyze bad happenings so that they can be prevented in the future. It seems that part of the nature of the web that we can now be not only passive reviewers such as books and video were before but active reviewers of information and events. This allows for incredible advances in hobbies (just look at some evolution of dance videos) but also creates the ability for a person find content that leaves them incredibly cynical.

In any event I think parts of our national conscience are shaped by the time of year, and by our need to remember things so that we can improve or at least attempt to. But there is a need to move on I think and coming back to the ptsd cases shows this.

Sigh

If only life were simple.

Morals...

Our world is becoming more secular. There are still mega-churches and cathedrals and people proselytizing one religion or another but I tend to think that church is a hard sell in a modern world. Maybe it's always been this way but I wonder how one sells God to someone who sees no reason to believe.

At one point churches sold by threatening those that didn't belong and to a certain extent some still do. But I think that government has put a check on that activity around the world. Once politics became distinct from religion government became the one with the most bite.

Churches exist to fill some need for people, a sense of community, or reassurance that good will happen in the world, etc.

However I don't see that in the future that churches will be a place that people turn to for moral authority. With people in my age group, and at my school I don't know many that attend a service and if they do they are generally Mormon and female. Church doesn't seem to be a guy thing.

So I think that people are turning to government for the function of what is good or bad right or wrong. There seems to me to be two competing moral codes when government is the decider of what is right.

The first is a moral code for optimizing individual powers. Basically whatever an individual does as long as it hurts no one else thus compromising individual rights should be the way to go

The second is a moral code where whatever is best for the group is the way that things should go. Individuals don't matter as much as the collective and we need to optimize for our group.

Nobody holds one or the other exclusively but that seems to me to be the fight in modern society over how we conduct our lives.

Tactless

I just listened to something about the tragedy that happened 9 years ago about this time and I thought I'd be tactless.

We need to forget this.

I thought so at the time 9 years ago and apparently I haven't matured but I think that remembering dark events so that we can hunt down people and hate them and worry about our safety for the rest of our lives is insane.

Remembering people for horrible events and refusing or being unable to move past an event in an individual is a sign of mental illness. Sometimes granted we understand why an event lingers in memory such as murder rape or other traumatic events but the solution to the problems is to get people to move past and not linger on their hurt.

To remember tragedy as a nation seems to me and I will be blunt Fucking Retarded. It solves no problems and causes more issues when we try to avenge or redress the hurt as if there can be a fix to it. I believe that except in one case we've gotten the people responsible and If we focused on that then I might be fine. Instead however we continue practices that treat our own people as not trustworthy and cause issues internationally.

I recognize the need for outlet of emotion. But phrases like never forget piss me off. The type of thinking that has to remember all the old wounds and everything that has ever happened is the reason we can't have peace in the middle east. Nobody can be the bigger nation and forgive.

Constructive thought don't start searching for a people to blame and hallowed ground to bar others off of . Heroism remembered is one thing but we don't remember heroism we remember the pain. Forget it.

Thinking about Respect.

For some reason respect has been on my mind lately. It seems that respect isn't something that comes into play very often as a straight forward card to be played. It's a subtle card one that makes even the bad hand a little bit better. I think it's one that we know flows two ways and I think maybe organizations and businesses have lost. It seems they wonder why nobody likes them when they don't show respect. Or at the very least want some without giving the service that gains respect.

In any case I thought I'd share a story about power and respect that I thought might resonate. It begins on the U.S.S Shreveport when I first checked on with Boatswain Brennen. Boatswain is pronounced as Boson is a title that means man who knows how to run a ship. Similarly the Forecastle of a ship is said as Foc'sle Maintenance, repair, rigging and steering admin and other miscellaneous things a Boatswain knows them all. It's not a title you hear often even though every ship has plenty of Boatswain's mates. I'll use B. to refer to the title from now on

B. Brennan had the foulest mouth I've ever heard. The closest you'll get to him was the Drill Sergent from Full metal Jacket. Creative and liberally spraying out Fuck, Cunt, Cock, Shit and every variant on them and combining them in novel way I admired his way with words. Wordsmiths the world over aren't half as entertaining as he was. I think I'll always feel like I do the words a disservice if I don't use them as well as he does.

B. Brennan was a long time member of the navy. He was going on 33 years when I met him and there was no way that anybody was going to gather as much clout as he had without seriously endangering themselves. He knew his job and he kept people safe. On most ships the captain has the most sway on ours B. Brennan did.

It all had to do with his being upfront with how he did business and that he was willing to do the same things that he required of his subordinates. If his crew was going to be up all night he'd be there to make sure things went well. He had enough rank and experience that if he said something couldn't be done you wouldn't doubt it. But he'd make sure that if it could be done it would damn well be done.

Opposite him on our ship was the captain. The man had a strong work ethic but had spent too much time as an officer and didn't think of the enlisted men as people deserving much attention. It wasn't that he didn't know his job or that he was incompetent. He had been a fighter pilot for much of his career and made the choice to move up in rank rather than stay in the pilot's seat which is a hard decision.

But still the captain was using this post to accomplish other things. You can always tell who's serious about what they're doing and who thinks what they are currently doing is just a placeholder for other options. This post for him was a quick step onto carriers and higher rank nothing to worry about just something to ride out.

In the navy there's a tradition of Standing whenever the captain enters a room. And above the flight deck in officer's country we (the deck dept) followed this tradition. However in B. Brennan's area, below the flight deck there was only one person to get that type of respect and that was B. Brennan.

This I don't think would fly in any other branch but sometimes a ship needs to function as a place of truces. When you're in cramped spaces dealing with the same people in and out every day, if there isn't some structure people can get unruly but if there isn't give and take people fight in a serious way. The captain knew this fortunately. By not intruding too much on the space of the ship where we were he made peace with the people who would make him look good.

So while there might have been a pissing contest or two on board between others, these two managed to maintain places of power without resorting (at least not in public) to pure power plays. Our missions were accomplished without incident and we managed to shine a little here and there.

It's important to let people have respect. They perform well when you show it to them . Without it they'll try and sabotage you. It just seems that organizations don't get this and I wonder how to teach them this.