Why I Am Leaving Facebook

   Facebook is that social wildfire that has caught us all up with the people from our past and keeps us ever aware of the shiny trinkets of civilization that grab the attention of our friends, family, and acquaintances.
   What have I learnt from my time on Facebook?  First, my Facebook friends and I really don't hold the same views on much of anything. Some unfriended me early on when my liberal values appeared on my timeline, but others just decided to edit what they see and exclude me from their timelines.  We don't see each other's postings, and that includes all the neutral things like outings in the park, trips to faraway lands, and even those cute photos of my darling cats. So why stay Facebook friends?  
   Facebook is just reflecting real life. We grew apart and lost touch for reasons that our Facebook moments just iterate again and again.  We have little to nothing in common except that we attended the same college or the same high school or served in the same unit in the army or worked in the same department.  The memories are both good and bad.  Did I think Facebook would erase the bad ones or make new good ones?  I think I did.
   Reflecting on why I started doing Facebook, it was probably curiosity mixed with nostalgia.  Maybe some part of me thought it was possible to pick up where we left off all those years ago.  That's unrealistic, and I should have known it.  The past is what it was and can't be frozen and thawed later like a delicious lasagna.  Each one of us moved on in the directions we chose.  Our paths crossed once for a time, but then we crossed other paths, and the web of our social intercourse grew with a life of its own, mostly out of our control, widening every year the gaps and chasms between us.  I need to let the past be on its own terms.  It's foolish to impose my current condition upon what was, hoping to relive a happy moment here and there.
   There is another reason for me to leave Facebook.  I have never been able to make solid social connections.  I can't build lasting personal relationships.  It's a flaw that a very small percentage of people have, and try as I might, it's just not going to get fixed.
   Facebook gives me the illusion of social connection.  It is a sort of plaster over my flaw that allowed me to pretend I had personal relationships with these people.  The reason I can't build personal relationships isn't clear, but it manifests itself with impatience and impertinence, often with acerbic attempts to make myself look clever or even better than others.  The people on my Facebook should not be subjected to my little insults, my partisan banner waving and condescending attitude toward their religious faiths.  I love them all, but they would never know it from how I behave.
   Leaving Facebook is from disappointment with myself and my lack of discipline.  There are many places online where a person can be partisan, join in political debate, be a loud-mouthed asshole and ridicule the ideas of others.  Facebook is not that place, but I did it anyway.  I was the drunk uncle at Thanksgiving dinner ruining it for everybody else, and it pains me.

   On New Year's Eve, I'll post something on Facebook for the last time, a farewell of sorts, though my online presence isn't disappearing entirely, though.  Just Facebook.  Withdrawal will be a bitch, but I'll work through it.

The Really Green Party

The Really Green Party

or

Why a Green Party Webpage Banned Me

by

Mike Raymond

     Several months ago, when I spoke up and suggested that our party leader, Dr. Jill Stein, not run on a Green Party ticket for President because Senator Bernie Sanders holds nearly identical views with Dr. Stein, I encountered a number of Green Party supporters who castigated me soundly for that position. My defense was that we should focus our resources on support for Green candidates at lower levels of government and not compete with Senator Sanders for the White House since he has a better chance of winning that race than Dr. Stein has. My rationale has been that Bernie Sanders can take our Green causes and ideals to a national stage whereas Dr. Stein more than likely could not.

     The Democratic Party race and convention will be front page news next year, and if a candidate speaks up for Green ideals even though not being in the Green Party, I thought that would be a better way to help more people see the value of causes such as the preservation of our environment, stopping war and teaching peace, ending government corruption, eliminating the theft of wealth by the one percent, healing the rift in race relations, and improving the health and stability of the working class in America.

     The causes and ideals that the Green Party represents are what I feel is in the best interests of the future of the United States and of the world in general. I speak up for these causes; but I am not under the illusion that these noble ideals must be wrapped only in the Green Party banner. 

     If a Democrat, Libertarian, or even a Republican were to say, for example, we must stop polluting our water supplies and dumping oil in our oceans, I would cheer and support that person in that endeavor. As the old saying goes, “The proof of the pudding is in the eating.” I don't care if it's served on a ceramic plate, in a wooden bowl, or wrapped in a newspaper. 

      The causes are greater than any one person; the ideals are more valuable than any one party. For comments and questions along these lines, I was thrown out of the Green Party USA Facebook discussions and banned from contributing to or even reading that page any longer.

     Dr. Stein and the Green Party hold high ideals and harbor a love for our country and our world that is rarely matched among us. But let's stop being party shills, break the mould, and start being spokespeople for ideas. It is ideas that have power and yield consequences, not political parties. A political party is a messenger for its ideas, not an end in itself.

     The Green Party presidential candidate wants to be in the presidential debates, and that would be a beautiful step in the direction of democracy in America. I suggest, though, that in the interest of integrity and honesty, Green Party operatives stop punishing their own people for expressing their opinions and offering their ideas. We are not mindless robots meant simply to drone the party mantras.

     We should allow free discussion without resorting to emotional outbursts or excessively legalistic wrangling and nitpicking. If we won't allow free debate among ourselves without censorship or banning each other, then by what right has the Green Party to ask the nation to let our candidate debate the other candidates in a national forum?

Emptiness

   When you stop and think about it, there isn't a thing in the universe that can say its existence is independent.  Matter-Energy is all that exists, and the distinctions we make among the objects of the universe are merely the convenience of language.  I'm now looking at a bamboo flute I keep on my desk.  The bamboo itself is dependent on previous generations of bamboo, a seed, soil, rain, and sun, and each of those is dependent on preexisting causes.  A person cut the bamboo with a knife whose steel was worked in a factory that someone planned and built.  One could go back and back listing all the contingencies that created this little flute by which I amuse myself from time to time.
    For convenience, we say the flute is a thing in and of itself, but the reflective mind knows better.  Its current form is caused by millions of earlier causes; there would be no flute without all these earlier events and conditions. We could presumably say that behind its form and our perceptions of the form and our knowledge of how to use the form there is no flute per se.  This object is a construct of the mind.  This is how we arrive at the knowledge of the emptiness of all things.
    Of course, you have to be careful where you say such a thing.  Someone will smack you over the head with a stick, and while you wince, they'll say, “Looks real to me.”  They don't get that the Buddha's teaching isn't that something is unreal but that it's empty of permanence.  They are not the same thing.  Obviously all the atoms and molecules are here and now joined up into a particular form that we can recognize and take advantage of.   Emptiness is that an object is not in and of itself.  It cannot exist by itself.  There is no Platonic “form” out there somewhere from which each object in the universe is a poor copy.
    Emptiness is central to what the Buddha taught us because until we can perceive that objects have no real nature from within themselves, we will not wake up from the dream of the mundane.  I remember a playful argument in college one day in which a friend of mine and I were out walking and saw that someone had taken an old wooden door and bolted it to a couple sawhorses.  I remarked to my friend what a big table it was, and my friend responded, “It's not a table. It's a door.”  You can imagine how this conversation went on and on about the nature of objects:  it's table because of its use, and it's a door because of how it was originally made.  This is how people become distracted from a true perception of the universe.  We look so closely at particulates that we no longer perceive the whole.
    Apart from the objects we encounter every day, there is also ourselves to take into account.  The eye that sees is not an eye all by itself.  Billions of contingent causes present us our current eye.  The same is true of all our other sense organs.  If any of the contingent causes had not occurred, there would be no sensation of sight, touch, taste, and so forth.   We all know about the proverbial tree falling in the woods without a soul to hear it.  Did it then make a sound?  There is a level of truth in this old philosophical exercise.  Without someone to sense sound, there is no sound.  Without someone to smell, there is no fragrance.  This is the principle of emptiness: everything in the universe is connected and inter-reliant.
    Recently I was thinking about my region of northeastern Michigan.  That part of the state was inhabited by Potowatomi settlements before the English and American settlers arrived.  On my desktop I have an old French map from the 18th century of the local places on the two peninsulas, and I recognized several modern place names but with very different spellings.  It occurred to me that these names were the only relics of these settlements.  The aboriginal inhabitants left no structures whatsoever as they were displaced.  When I was a child, they taught us in school about the loggers and French missionaries, but they never taught us about the aboriginal people.  They mentioned them but never taught us about them.  I always wondered about that and learned about them on my own.
    There was a thriving civilization of people in northern Michigan, yet there is no physical trace of them.  Europeans developed a need for permanence and built marvelous edifices of stone to last for centuries and millennia.  You can find houses in France that have had inhabitants for hundreds of years uninterrupted.  There are churches, abbeys, palaces, and forts that are a thousand years old.  But you do not find such things in Michigan despite the many centuries of native habitation.  So I asked myself why not.
    I believe it is because the local people recognized that permanence is impossible.  They didn't entertain the notion in philosophical musing; they understood it as real and incorporated it into their civilization.  Homes were for shelter from the elements and little else.  They were not meant to stand for ever as a challenge to Nature and Time.  What use are monuments when those for whom they are erected are gone and those who erect them will be gone soon themselves?  To live simply and allow the natural cycle of birth and death to continue unimpeded is a much greater monument to a civilization than piles of stone to the memory of people we never knew.
    Sometimes my mind wanders and wants me to play the game of permanence that my European ancestors passed down to me:  A fancy home of granite, my name on a bronze plaque, a monument in the town park.  Of course, it's just a game, and it's fun to play, but fortunately the wiser side of my mind always reminds me that even granite and bronze aren't really permanent.  Nothing is.  And I don't feel deprived because of it.  I feel a sense of propriety, that this is the way things are, and I'm plugged into it no different than any other life form.  It makes me feel connected, and that's comforting. 
    If you ask anyone if there is anything in the universe that is permanent, they'll probably say no.  It's part of some common sense that we all have inside us, but so many people don't like it and live as though it weren't true.  They prefer the dream. 
    Recently I remember responding to someone on Facebook with this comment:  Those who are asleep think the dream is real.  I heard that somewhere a long time ago but don't remember the circumstances.  However, it has stuck with me for a long time and is kind of my personal motto.  In the dream, we can do whatever we like and can guide the consequences to our favor.  In the dream, our loved ones are not gone, our mistakes are forgotten, and we always win at checkers.  But life in the dream isn't real, and when we wake up, that moment of realization contains different emotions.  We can be surprised or disappointed or something else depending on the nature of the dream.  Whatever the emotion, we still get up, get dressed and live our lives.
    Some people do live in miserable circumstances, and the dream world is so much better than the real world.  However, nothing is really ever accomplished in the dream.  It's an unproductive existence. What achievements have you earned in the dream?  What self-improvement have you attained in the dream?  Whose life have you bettered in the dream?  When we pretend that there is permanence and independent existence, it's a dream.  Our growth becomes stunted.  Our path becomes not a way forward but a circuit.
   

Korean Government Thugs On A Rampage in Seoul's Rich District

The Korean Model

Recently someone posted on Facebook about how standardized testing in America is not creating the brave new world that well-meaning educators had envisioned.

Children are less and less likely to enjoy unstructured liberty to play and explore what interests them and are more likely to be on strict schedules of pre-designed activities leading toward specified goals.  It's a disaster in the making, and let's hope we oldsters are out of the way when these modern children are ready to take over the world.  The results will be horrific.

This phenomenon is not just American and has not escaped the country I live in, South Korea, any more than any other country.  The Asian model has always stressed testing, so it isn't a huge cultural shift for them as it is among Western people.  However, to put it plainly, it's wrong.  Testing is supposed to measure a person's skill, to inform learner and instructor where more attention must be paid.  It's gone well beyond this simple definition now.

In today's South Korea, testing is not just a measure; it's a purgatory.  It's a trial by fire where only the hardest will come through in tact.  This has extended to my field as well: the English language.  When I was trained in San Francisco to teach English to non-native speakers, the foremost goal always was fluency.  Learners came to us in order to function better in society.  They needed to know how to ask and understand about public transportation, grocery items, weather forecasts, driving instructions, the mundane use of English most of us take for granted.  This is how it should be.

Language is to convey our thoughts to others and to understand in like manner.  What happens, though, when you must learn a language for which you see no need to master?  You end up learning how it works, like how clock wheels make the hands move.  You may be able to answer the question, "What part of a clock allows the pallets to release the escape wheel slowly thereby activating the clock train?"  However, can you take these pieces and recreate a working clock?  Probably not.  Understanding how something works is not the same as being able to use that knowledge practically.

A clock maker test will involve one thing only: Can this person assemble a clock that works?  A language test should do the same:  Can this person communicate a clear train of thought with purpose?  That's often not what we do in Korea, though.  In Korea, we chop up the language into many pieces and ask learners to answer questions about the pieces.  We do not put them in practical situations and ask them to put their skills to the real challenge of communication.  We are not measuring their real abilities to help them improve; we are defying them to produce theoretical results to theoretical questions.  This is a cruel methodology.

Korea has chosen to require all school children to study how English works.   Therefore, student numbers in classrooms are large, too large for language practice, so instructors have no choice but to present theoretical language and measure theoretical responses.  Korea has also grown frightened of the presence of so many foreign English instructors in their country.  They find new reasons to place onerous restrictions on all English teachers, not just the bad ones.  Many of the instructors that do come to Korea are either poorly informed in the field of language acquisition or oblivious to it altogether.  The schools encourage English teachers to get Masters degrees in order to teach English, but it is not necessary for the needs at hand.  A Masters degree will not magically make you a good language guide.

The Koreans are floundering in a sea of English teachers, yet their people are not mastering the language.  They blame the teachers, and in some ways, they are right to do so.  The teachers are not trained in language acquisition skills but once in Korea are given little opportunity for professional development in the field.  Koreans see no need to permit short-term visa holders any time for self-improvement in the field of English language education, and an English teacher is given only a one-year visa with a one-year contract.  This is one of the most destructive aspects of Korea's attempt to learn English.  Their immigration policy for language teachers is nothing short of calamitous.

Most teachers coming to Korea have no knowledge of a second language beyond the rudiments of textbook French or Spanish.  English teachers are not required to learn Korean while here even though knowledge of the local language can do nothing but enhance English language guidance.  "English Only" in the classroom is another ruinous policy with few to defend its continued use.  The learners are not living in an English-speaking country; 'English only' in the Korean classroom is a cop-out for lazy teachers who do not want to learn the local language, and a language teacher who is not interested in learning language raises more than one red flag.

So how do we change this dangerous trajectory?  We provide daily interaction for English-speaking residents to learn and practice Korean language so that they will better understand their learners. We stop this national fear of foreigners and stop passing laws punishing foreigners for wanting to teach here.  We give experienced teachers multiple-year visas to allow them time to settle in and adapt to Korean society. We bring in regular people from English speaking countries, people with and without degrees, families, high school exchange students, FFA boys and girls, scouts, retired people, all sorts of folks who would enjoy the country without the need of lesson plans and syllabuses.  We set up a visa for them that isn't academic-based.  We establish places where they can interact positively with Koreans in real life situations rather than in over-crowded classrooms and cram schools.   We make language learning for everyone a real communicative part of life rather than a grueling chore.

Used Napkins

As a Youtube content creator, such that it is, I've had the occasion recently to ponder the difference between a stalker and a fan.  I've had people show interest in me personally because of my videos, and rather than being wary, I've welcomed it.  My video channel is to express myself, the real me, so what you see in the videos is basically me, after I've edited out the nose-picking and butt-scratching parts.

A stalker can be a fan, but a fan isn't necessarily a stalker. There is a line between an overtly interested fan and an annoying creep, though it probably isn't exactly the same among content creators.  A fan may thoroughly enjoy the topic of the channel and feel connected to the channel creator because the two share the same passions.  Internet etiquette being what it is, I'm sure a fan oversteps propriety now and again in his or her enthusiasm to connect with the person who makes the videos about things the fan really likes.  A fan wants to know about the content maker, wants to see if there are other subjects of interest between them, wants to make a deeper connection than the typical viewer.  Youtube is not really comparable to Hollywood, but if you think of a fan who is interested in a movie actor, the fan spends extra time reading about the actor and learning all sorts of things that help the fan feel connected to the actor.

Most people would consider a stalker to be someone who has crossed a line of some sort.  Again, if you look at the Hollywood analogy, a stalker does things like follow the actor around town, intrude upon the actor's private moments with friends, send a continual stream of mail, and even enter the actor's private property.  A stalker may not be dangerous, but his or her behavior disrupts the actor's life much more than a normal fan would.  Do Youtube content creators have stalkers?  Yes, they do, and they are similar to what Hollywood actors deal with. They intrude upon the personal lives of Youtube personalities and their attention-seeking amounts to harassment. 

What is the line then between the two levels of fandom?  First, it's a matter of intent.  If a content creator feels a fan is crossing the line, he or she should say something to get an idea whether the fan has more on the mind than simply trying to relate with the maker of the videos more deeply.  I'm flattered when people who watch my videos send me messages and want to know things about me.  Not everyone feels this way, so those people may need to express where their particular fan line is and understand that exuberance isn't necessarily stalking.  Give your fans a break and say what you're comfortable with and what you're not.

I'm a fan myself of several Youtube content creators, but I don't think I've ever crossed the line into stalkerhood despite my special interest in certain video producers who intrigue me with their skill, knowledge, and personalities.   So give your viewers a break, give your fans a break, because a fan may just be a socially clumsy individual who likes the stuff you do so much that he or she wants to relate on a deeper level.   A stalker wants to steal your used napkins; a fan just wants you to acknowledge their admiration.

That is all.  Return to work everyone!

Turn Off the Television

This year I'm not visiting the United States, but for the last several years I have spent my summers in America. It has given me the opportunity to put real life next to the news reporting that comes off the Internet. I have seen year after year how my home country is declining in every way possible.

Since the Reagan Administration, the quality of life for most families in the United States has dropped considerably. The infrastructure has rusted and crumbled at a constant rate. Megastores and malls have replaced downtown shopping, requiring a motorized vehicle for almost every daily activity. Home foreclosures are running amok; and television, ubiquitous television, that big box in the family room and probably several other rooms in the house that eat up your power bill and captivate you and your loved ones every day for hours on end.

Let's say we have the opportunity for someone to come and watch American culture for a month or so. Afterward, we ask this visitor to give a critique of the culture of the United States, why it has so many problems. I can guarantee you that the visitor's assessment will not mention people in love, gay or not, even once. People in love do not destroy the world. They make it better. They put a smile on our faces. People in love raise loving children and participate positively in their communities. No, love will not be in the visitor's assessment. The critique of American culture's absolute failure will include how television has kept the American people isolated, uninformed, misinformed, fed a mental diet equivalent to pig slop, submitted to a stream of advertisements one after the other whose only purpose is to make people lust for material things, exposed to television programming that runs twenty-four hours a day every single day of the year, tickled to giggle at insults and dirty jokes, prodded to howl like animals at every young body paraded in front of the camera, witness to thousands of horrific death scenes delivered in some of the most bizarre methods Hollywood technicians can create, and the glorification of money, if not excess, the lip-licking greed that drives capitalism.

The next time a respected member of society gets on television to tell you gay people will ultimately destroy America, just think about what medium he is using and turn off your television. Go out and find some gay couples and get to know them. Find out what's what before you run off to fulfill the nightmare prophesies you heard on the idiot box. Television is not your friend.  Even though you will argue, sometimes heatedly, that “there are some good things” on television, you are just grasping at straws. Watch a one-hour documentary on ducklings, and count how many minutes the capitalists inserted their advertisements at strange moments in the program. How can you say you watched an hour long documentary when you in fact watched a 35 minute documentary? The program was produced only as a background for the advertising scheme. If you still watch television, then you are what's wrong with America. You are destroying America, and you're too cowardly and misinformed to admit it. It's just easier to find some people in society that most folks hate and blame them for the ills you are creating. That is the true fruit of watching television: sheer laziness.