Tag Archives: Haiti

Time for Another Round of Current Events and Happenings

Economics, Memoirs, Movies, Politics, Social Networking, Writing, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

1. The Assassination Attempt in Arizona. Okay, there’s really no way of walking around this topic without having to address it head-on. It’s pretty much the main story of what’s going on in the country, and like most current events, it’s yet another one of those that seems to be so out of context practically everywhere it gets reported. What everyone can agree on is that it was a tragic event, and most of us wish such a thing had never happened. However, I suspect that it’s only been a matter of time because there are a lot of crazy people out there, and if John Lennon’s death wasn’t a warning decades ago, we really should have been paying a lot more attention.

You see, there are a lot of people who are not playing with a full deck out there. We run across them each and every day. If you live in a big city, you can’t step over enough of them without running into another. Some are homeless, who stand on the street corners and do all sorts of bizarre behavioral activities, like yell at you, try to pee on you, beg from you, and pretty much anything else you can and cannot imagine. We had to be nuts ourselves if we honestly thought that they’d stick to their little corners and not start to bother the rest of us. I teach at a community college, and in the years that I’ve been teaching, you run across a lot of people who sometimes don’t seem like they’re all there. And you get really worried and concerned. But for the most part, no one really cares, because as long as it doesn’t affect them, why should they care?

The event turned into a bit of a surreal experience when suddenly people thought it was supposed to be a wake-up moment for the problems that have been occurring in our society. There’s a lot of anger and hate speech going back and forth between the different sides of the political spectrum, and for some bizarre reason people actually thought that this event might lead people to talk about these problems and do something about it. Not going to happen because no one wants to admit there’s anything wrong. Well, at least not with themselves. They’ll point fingers and say something’s wrong with YOU or someone else, but never with themselves. But that’s been the problem from the start, and as long as we’re never going to engage that, we’re never going to change the hostile discourse happening in this country.

Sure, it’s easy to blame Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck or (pick any politician or pundit), but the odds of actually opening up a real dialogue so that people actually listen to each other is practically impossible. It’s a nice pipe dream, but pipe dreams are just that. Dreams.

2. Verizon is Getting an Iphone. Good for them. I had one with AT&T and I’ve been very upset with AT&T and Apple for awhile now because of the fact that I can’t stop people from calling me, especially when they’re people I don’t want calling me. Neither Apple nor AT&T were very helpful here. So I left and joined Sprint, adding on a Samsung Epic phone instead. Pretty happy with it. Be happier if it had a battery life like the iPhone, but you take what you can get. Now that Verizon has an iPhone, I don’t really care. It’s still a phone from Apple, and Apple requires that it maintain control over its walled garden. Not a selling point for me.

3. Golden voice Ted Williams. I saw this coming a million miles away. The media jumped on this rags to riches to rags to riches story and thought he was the next best thing to sliced butter. Well, I kept wondering, “when is the other shoe going to drop” meaning when is the media going to turn against him? Well, now he’s kind of gone of the deep end because of personal problems, which no one could have ever expected would happen with a guy who has been living on the streets after throwing away his previous life. I mean, who would have thought something like that could happen? Anyway, sarcasm aside, he’s now heading to rehab and was arrested in Los Angeles. We’ll see how this story plays out, but I’m not expecting a lot of happy endings.

4. Unemployment has gone up again. Of course it has. And last month, it went down. The month before, I think it went up. We need to stop reporting these numbers and then providing commentary after it. Each time they do it, some pundit makes an argument that fits his world view of what he thinks should happen, rather than what is really happening. We’re in a recession right now. The market is going to be flying all over the place on a month to month basis. Stop trying to figure out long term strategies based off of short term notifications. It never works. Which brings me to my next one:

5. The Stock Market Fluxuates. Yes, it does. But one thing that needs to be constantly brought up, and it never is, is that the stock market really has very little connection to what’s really going on. It’s the Las Vegas for rich people. People buy based on speculation, and they think they have an idea of how the market is going to change in the short term. NONE OF THESE FIGURES has anything to do with what’s really going on. Companies are selling products, people are working for these companies and get paid whatever wage they normally get paid, and then some people buy some of these products. But because the stock market price of a company went up or down does not always reflect what’s going on in the real world of that particular company. Quite often, these fluxuations come because some executive did something stupid, like embezzled money, or had dinner with a celebrity. If the stock market goes south over the span of a week, it may not really mean anything to the real world as an implication. It may just mean a whole bunch of people panicked because they stopped living in the real world and see the market as the real world. Man, I hate the stock market.

6. Middle East Talks Aren’t Going Well. They never are. The two sides of that conflict are probably NEVER going to get along. Each new administration comes to the table convinced it’s going to make a difference but rarely ever does. That’s because the two sides hate each other. They have no incentive to be friendly to each other. Each side wants the other dead. That’s their international policy towards the other side. And it’s been that way for so long now that generations of their people grow up hating people they may never have met. If you want to fix the problems there, you have to do it generationally, and you have to do it by a completely different set of characteristics than our current process of diplomacy allows. Tit for tat and carrot diplomacy does not work on countries that live their entire lives to kill each other as their one foundational value. I could go at length on what would work, but NO ONE CARES OR LISTENS, so I’m going to stop caring, too.

7. Tablets Are the New In Thing. I’ve said this before, but it requires repeating. Tablets aren’t new. When the iPad was announced, suddenly a whole bunch of people who never wanted a tablet suddenly thought they needed one. We were like Eskimos being told we needed freezers and refrigerators by Don Draper and whatever fictional agency he might be working at. But shortly before this announcement, tablets were already out there trying to get us to buy them. And we didn’t. Why not? Because we didn’t need them, and they seemed kind of stupid to have. Well, now we all need them because Don Draper Steve Jobs told us we needed one. So now every other company under the sun is now releasing their tablet computer to compete with the Ipad. And I won’t be surprised if we start buying them this time around. We’re such sheep.

8. Myspace laid off half its staff. So what? Myspace has been irrelevant for years now. It used to be the “in” thing, and then Facebook came along and turned Myspace into an ugly sister of the hot cheerleader. Ever since Facebook, Myspace has been struggling to appear relevant. But its not. There’s nothing about Myspace that causes people to care. When it was told to sit at the kiddie table of technology, they tried to appear relevant again by pretending that it was the place to go for music. But Facebook was already there doing that, so Myspace continued to become even more irrelevant. At one point, I thought I might use it to hype my writing, but then realized that they were really only interested in doing so if I was already big time famous, which I wasn’t. So it wasn’t useful to me. And then I figured that if I was already big time famous, I probably wouldn’t need them. I’d just have a million facebook friends instead. Then, add to the mix that no one seems to be using Myspace anymore, and you realize why it’s probably going to be sold one of these days to someone like Murdoch who keeps buying up properties that are already irrelvant and trying to somehow make it seem like he bought a very relevant purchase.

9. Seth Rogen is Upset About the Hate Towards his Green Hornet Movie. So what? It’s a movie, not anything relevant. Make a really good movie that causes people to take notice, and maybe it won’t get the hate. Just saying. Then again, no one’s actually seen the movie, so perhaps the condemnations are a bit early.

10. Two of my novels are now on Kindle and the Nook. Innocent Until Proven Guilty, my first novel, is available on the Kindle.  Thompson’s Bounty, which is a science fiction, time-travel novel I wrote involving pirates, is available on the Barnes and Noble Nook, and it is available on the Kindle as well. I would not be very upset if you chose to read my novels. Really.

11. The people of Haiti still seem to be suffering, even though most of the world has left this area because it’s not a photo op any more. Just saying. Some people gave up on it because they don’t like how the Haitians are continuing to follow corrupt leaders who continue to cheat them out of international aid. Some people gave up on it because they only have the capacity to handle concern for a certain amount of time (usually the time between football season and American Idol finalist run-offs). And then some people just don’t care.

That’s all I have for today. My stuffed animal Brucoe thinks people should do more to care about other people, but he’s just a stuffed animal, and what does he know?

The Plight of the Hopeless Cause

Politics, Uncategorized,

Recently, there’s been a lot of talk about Haiti. CNN has been reporting a lot about it recently, including a bunch of reports of its reporters showing up there and “discovering” that things are still very bad. Not that long ago, when Haiti was all the talk, I mentioned that once Americans got over the initial shock of the disaster, we’d go back to not caring about that island nation again. And sure enough, that’s where we are.

But it is kind of important to understand why that might be. The CNNs of the world want us to think the problem is inherent in us, as if we’re responsible for the horrible conditions there. But fortunately, that’s not really the case. While we are often guilty of not caring about a certain geographical location (East Timor, Somalia, South Central LA, or wherever), this time it’s not really something to put squarely on the shoulders of those of the USA. What no one wants to face is the possibility that the problem might be a lot closer to home…their home, not ours.

Haiti is one of those places, like Liberia, where a lot of people outside of the area really care, but once we start caring, the people themselves don’t seem to care about their own plight, often neglecting all attempts to help them, either by destroying their own farmland for short term gains, or by continuing to support destructive leaders who tend to keep them locked in their plight of despair.

Americans care about people who are suffering, but there’s only so much we’re going to do before we start to think that the problem is yours, not ours. I’m sorry to say that but after awhile, we start to treat a wayward country as a family member who just can’t seem to get his crap together, who keeps knocking off liquor stores, even though we keep getting him a job at the Quickie Mart. Lots of money was raised for Haiti, but immediately after this process started, we started to see the old ways of corruption falling right back into place, so that the aid wasn’t getting to the people who needed it, but was going into the coffers of people who tend to make things worse. I’m sorry, but we’re not willing to keep giving money to destructive dictators who hold out their hands, “promising” to fix things even though they never do. Or corrupt leaders who don’t seem to understand that eventually they have to stop taking EVERYTHING and trying to do something to help their own people.

Haiti has been a cesspool ever since they cast off the reins of slavery while the rest of the world was still embracing the evil that was going on back then. It would be nice to think things might have gotten better, but they haven’t. Unfortunately, the rest of the world started to notice them again because there was an environmental disaster that cast them into the light again. Unfortunately, they didn’t do anything better AFTER it happened, so it makes it really hard for people to want to do anything when the people themselves aren’t interested in helping themselves.

It’s a lot like Somalia where the west showed up to help feed the people and then found the pirate, criminal element that was there waiting for us. If we show up with all intentions of helping and then find that the people there are more interested in playing local games and hoping to profit off of the outsiders, we’re out of there, and we’re not coming back to help. You notice how few Americans are interested in helping Somalia today? Well, that’s what happens.

It’s why North Korea is quickly pushing itself into a no help situation. The west isn’t interested in helping when the people are stupid or acting stupid. And that’s what’s happening in Haiti. Sorry, but we’re not interested in helping if the people themselves are going to act stupid. Yeah, a lot of people are suffering, but we’re not the world’s police, no matter how much George W. Bush tried to make that happen.

I’ll be honest. I hate what’s going on in Haiti. But at the same time, there’s only so much energy you can expend before you start to realize that no amount of energy is going to make things change.