We have a big problem in the United States. People have been socialized into thinking that all cases of unemployment are indictments on the unemployed’s character. The result is reactions to unemployment and poverty ranging from dismissiveness to disdain to out and out abusive treatments. What’s more in the unemployed themselves, there is a sense of unworthiness and inadequacy and pervasive depression. All of which is a natural consequence to both being treated that way and buying into the myth that people are unemployed because they personally aren’t good enough and not due to societal and economic factors far beyond their control.

And the thing is, it’s an obvious falsehood. Yet people all across the country believe it. Indeed we’re going to hear a lot more of it as the Presidential election rolls around as the Republican party is going to make this their platform. The reason unemployment is high they will argue, is that people have become too weak and stupid and dependent and they just need to be pull themselves up by their boot straps and get used to hard work and then everything will be fine.

What’s incredible about these kinds of indictments is that they don’t take into account basic Mathematics. The simple fact is the jobs don’t exist. There’s 14 million unemployed people in the country and another 14 million without full time jobs. That’s just the people that we count. A lot of these people without full time jobs might as well be unemployed really. For example I have a friend who has two part time jobs but can’t get more than 8 hours of work a week, nowhere near enough to survive and no unemployment. That’s what a lot of companies are doing though, hiring lots of people at miniscule hours at pittance pay. They can do this because there are so many people out there desperate for work that they’ll take anything and have zero bargaining power. There are 6 unemployed job seekers for every single job opening, and they are competing not just with each other but also with everyone who hates their job and wants to switch or has a job but wants more hours or greater pay. Not to mention the millions of new people entering the work force every year and the competition from potential employees abroad.

Do you see the basic fallacy?

Even if you took everybody and made them all the hardest working people imaginable, turned them all into geniuses, made them all perfectly healthy, trained them up to be experts in every possible job, gave them the knowledge and credentials of people with multiple PhDs, made them all perfectly personable and skilled people persons, made them all get along with everyone, made them all impeccably dressed and well mannered, ensured they were all incredibly creative and innovative and capable and heck even beautiful.  Even if you did all of that to every single person in this country today…. guess how many unemployed we’d have tomorrow or a month or two from now?

14 million.

The jobs DON’T EXIST.

They won’t appear by magic. Improving humanity will only shuffle up who has the jobs. It won’t create new jobs. Certainly not in the short to moderate term anyway. Maybe in the long term some of those geniuses will create new businesses that hire people who otherwise would not have had jobs. Maybe. I have my skepticism about how many real new jobs that aren’t just replacements of old jobs these entrepreneurs create. Very often improvements in technology that create new jobs also cause people who were working old jobs with old technology to lose their jobs.

But even if it does work, it won’t happen overnight. We’re talking decades. And over the course of decades our employment situation is already on course to radically improve even if we do nothing at all, provided we don’t screw up and induce more recessions.

It’s totally irrational to assume we can just make people better and everything will be ok. And it’s equally irrational to assume that all or even a majority of people are unemployed because of personal failing in them.  Anyone who has ever interacted with our employment process on the hiring, firing, or seeking side has seen how very much imperfect the system is. So much of what causes people to hire one person and not another has to do with ineffable things and emotions like whim, instinct, a sense of camaraderie or similarity, emotional connections, desire to help out friends and family, desire for revenge. It isn’t a hard science. It’s quite frankly a lot of luck. Even getting your resume looked at for a good job is often a matter of someone chancing upon a needle in the haystack.

We need to start understanding that unemployment exists because of social problems not because of character. It’s system failure not individual failure. The simple fact is when you have a huge economic collapse leading to a prolonged depression a ton of perfectly capable ambitious well meaning intelligent high quality potential employees won’t be able to get jobs. And the longer they are out of work the harder it will be for them to get work.  And the more society will judge them and treat them like shit because of it which in turn reduces their self esteem and makes it even harder for them to find jobs. So the end up opting out of society altogether, giving up, contemplating suicide, or considering a life of crime. And is that any surprise? If society writes off people why should we not expect people to write off society? People’s lives are ruined by being unemployed. Their entire futures lost. They suffer emotional and psychological damage that can last a life time and a reduction in future earnings that puts them often permanently on track for less prospects for their children, worse health, and constant struggle no matter how hard they try to change their future. And we don’t seem to care at all. We just treat them like it’s all their fault, these genetically inferior refuse, and they’re just getting what’s coming to them. We act like we should just avoid associating with the icky unemployed or low salaried so we don’t get their cooties.

But it’s not really their fault. It never was. They didn’t ask to be unemployed and so many of their work their asses off trying to become not unemployed anymore. In reality, it’s all of our faults for not doing what we need to do to make an economic system that actually works and gives everyone the opportunities they need and deserve. Instead of solving that problem we’ve decides to be cruel and vicious to anyone suffering so as to blind ourselves to our own culpability. That’s how we roll.

I read this article about the changes being made to Facebook to make it more like Google+ and Diaspora and this line in it made me realize something that has been bothering me for months.

"To me, this confirms what I’ve been feeling for some time: the big social networking experiment many of us have been taking part in is now entering a new phase. It’s been fun making new friends online or at least pretending to, but now it’s time to return to reality and the people who really matter in our lives. One can hope, anyway."

For months now, apart from my few personal connections online that I cherish, I've felt completely isolated from the Internet at large. And it's a feeling that had been building for years prior to that. I still use it. It's still a tool I wouldn't do without. But there's much less joy in it for me personally. I feel more disjointed, more distant from people generally. The idea of meeting someone new online seems a long shot to a near impossibility in most of the communities in which I hang out. And I find myself more and more uncomfortable with what I do online. I find myself more guarded. I watch what I say. I watch who I say it to. I'm careful about where I go. I'm careful about who I connect with. And it's been getting WORSE not better. With each new cool tool that the tech world foists on us the more isolated I feel the experience of the internet becomes. Twitter seems awesome at first, until you realize all it is is a news stream and there's no meaningful interaction except between pre-existing peer groups. Facebook seems awesome at first until you realize you're bound by these "real life" connections online as much as you were in the real world. They are all like that. They are getting MORE like that.

And I HATE it.

I don't want to get to an internet where"making new friends online or at least pretending to" is a thing of the past. I LIKE making new friends online. Heck, I like PRETENDING to make new friends online. Seems to me that every real friendship starts as a "pretend" friendship in some way. I don't want an internet where you are afraid to interact with anyone for fear of the consequences to your "real life" experiences. I don't want an internet where every interaction is in a sense informed by things that are built into the system from the get go that you have no or only partial control over. What you look like. Who your friends are. Who your family members are. Your socio-economic status. Your age. Your gender. Your race. Your education level. Your credit rating. Your career. Your job. Even your name. Each of these feels like another set of chains around you restricting what you should say to who and when you should say it.  

To me the anonymity of the internet and the lack of obvious connections between people was not a bug that needed to be stamped out. I think it was the internet's greatest feature. I think blogging was great BECAUSE it was semi-anonymous. It was just you and the person's writing. Forums were great because you were interacting on an equal anonymous playing field. Yeah the result was sometimes rudeness and trolling. But to me that was a small price to pay for the chance to learn about someone in an environment that is casual and comfortable and devoid of all the baggage that comes with most IRL interactions. People felt free to share things about their lives with strangers they wouldn't otherwise have ever shared and because of that we were able to build real meaningful relationships from scratch and find acceptance and develop mutual understandings with like minded people we had little or no chance of ever finding or meeting or getting to know in the real world. That's the stuff from which real friendships are formed. The old internet made that easy. 

I am an extreme introvert. The more complex interactions get the more exhausting I find them and the more I withdraw to simplify my life. I think in the old days the internet was a place that just made perfect natural sense for introverts. It was a place we felt at home in. It was a place that made sense to us. And it was a place where we could relate with one another and grow and make lasting friendships.

This new social web is something different entirely. This is the internet created and designed for extroverts. It's an internet for people who thrive on their social connections IRL and WANT to map them over into their online lives in a 1-to-1 correspondence so that there are no lines between them. Then they can share and share and share with those people through ten million services, broadcast their likes, their activities, their LOCATION even. So the whole internet becomes like a big social party that everybody's invited to. And that's just great for advertisers, because once they know where the party's at it's trivial for them to hang an unobtrusive budweiser poster in the background or better yet, give away budweiser t-shirts so you can do the advertising for them. 

But I was never comfortable at parties and I got no interest in the new digital ones. If the internet isn't a place to make real lasting connections with new people I don't know or to strengthen and make more meaningful connections between people that I do know, then I got no interest in this internet. If their internet isn't a place where I feel more comfortable interacting than I do in the real world then why should I bother with it? I'll still use it, but it'll be the way I use a textbook or music CD or a television. It's this dry dead thing I go to to absorb information. Read-Only. But it's not a place I want to hang out in and it's less and less a place I want to contribute to. I don't feel comfortable getting up in front of a crowd giving a speech in the physical world. Why would I feel comfortable broadcasting myself online?

This new social web we are building isn't social at all for me. It's less social. It's boring and uneventful. It's just a lot of background noise about nothing. I'd rather go in a corner and read a book. But maybe that just means that I'm just too anti-social for the social internet? That could be, but it wasn't always that way and I don't think it was me that changed. The internet did. And sadly I don't think it's going to change back any time soon.

Guess all I can do now is go and join Anonymous or something.

The Accent Challenge:

Your name and username.
Where you’re from.

Pronounce the following words: Aunt, Roof, Route, Theater, Iron, Salmon, Caramel, Fire, Water, New Orleans, Pecan, Both, Again, Probably, Alabama, Lawyer, Coupon, Mayonnaise, Pajamas, Caught, Naturally, Aluminium, GIF, Tumblr, Crackerjack, Doorknob, Envelope, GPOY.

What is it called when you throw toilet paper on a house?
What is a bubbly carbonated drink called?
What do you call gym shoes?
What do you call your grandparents?
What do you call the wheeled contraption in which you carry groceries at the supermarket?
What is the thing you change the TV channel with?
Choose a book and read a passage from it.
Do you think you have an accent?
Be a wizard or a vampire?
Do you know anyone on Tumblr Xanga in real life?
 
End audio post by saying any THREE words you want.

Sorry it took so long. I suck at doing things in a timely fashion.  Hope you enjoyed though.

Transcript:

OK, here we go, as promised.

There once was a WIZARD named NEPHYO. He was raised in a land called DELAWARE but now resides as you know in the lands of XANGA and TUMBLR which are as real as any other world. There he had many friends who like him travereled betwix these lands and others you might know. Realms with strange names like Delaware and Indiana and the magical kingdom of California of course. And together they kept the realms safe and all was tranquil and good.
 
Then one day, his AUNT code named the IRON SALMON raced across the ROOF tops in ALABAMA following the ROUTE to the CARAMEL THEATER. When she arrived she wielded FIRE and WATER against BOTH PECAN LAWYERS from NEW ORLEANS. CAUGHT in their PAJAMAS, PROBABLY terrified, they offered up COUPONs for MAYONNAISE, and ALUMINUM cans of SODA (not pop, not coke, and definitely NOT soda pop) as a peace offering. 

NATURALLY a GIF of this extraordinary event made its way on to that TUMBLR in the sky where Nephyo's NANA, GRANDADDY, and GRANDMA shook their heads in disgust when they saw. They wanted those coupons!!! So in retaliation, they sent forth Master CRACKERJACK armed with SHOPPING CARTS full of REMOTE CONTROLS, TENNIS SHOES... and toilet paper so he and his minions might TP every house in the planet whilst hanging ENVELOPES on peoples DOORKNOBS. What did these envelopes contain you wonder? Well if you happened to find one you'll find those GPOY (you know the ones) and you'd know then the devilish nature of this blackmail scheme.

Nephyo had to act to resolve this conflict before it escalated out of control! It was a good thing there was NO SUCH THING AS ACCENTS or his mission would have been that much more difficult. He grabbed his cat and began his spell:

<Passage from Tolkien>

And all was well AGAIN.

That's it.

I think differently.

A funny thing happened these past three years of the reign of "hope" and "change".  On the right there was a message told again and again and again with perfect consistency. Obama is as liberal as you can get. He's a radical, left wing, ideological madman. He's a communist. He's a socialist. He's a maoist. He's a fascist. Even though none of those things are the same, it hardly mattered. The message was clear. Obama is *not* one of us. He's one of THEM. He's an outsider. he's destroying this great nation with his anti-Reaganism and his big government commie liberalism.

That side of the debate was consistent.  There was no evidence for it but the argument never deviated no matter what happened. It wasn't based on FACT. It was based on feelings. The feelings of a people who were thrust out of power for failing miserably striking back at the new regime.

But on the Left and the center of the country things were much more muddled. The yearning to push back against the utterly FALSE narrative of the Right, the way we always do, was at war with the undeniable fact that the same president who wasn't a radical Leftist also wasn't doing anything remotely resembling what we WANTED him to do, or what he promised he would do.

This conflict was hard to cope with. I saw tons of different reactions to it.  Some decided to go the route of Blind Faith. They said to themselves, "I believe in Obama and while I don't quite understand why he's doing the things he's doing I trust him to know more than I do and that he means well in the end."  Others went the route of ever increasing rage at the Republicans. They said "Obama isn't doing the things we want him to do but it's because of those DAMNED Republicans! Standing in the way of everything, always blocking, always plotting to undermine and destroy his Presidency! I will place all my rage and anger at them! If it weren't for them, he'd surely be the great President I always imagined him to be!"

Others went a different route that was less forgiving of the President, but it was still an attitude based on excuses.  Some imagined that the President was just not a fighter. Others that he wasn't good at negotiating. Others that he wasn't brave or that he didn't have the strength of his convictions. Some said he picked poor advisers or stupid advisers or advisers who were secret moles working for the Republicans. Some said he was too inexperienced. Some even suggested he was not very intelligent. Some said he was too stubborn. Some said he was too much of a professor. Others that he wasn't enough of a professor. Others that he wasn't a good politician. And that he was too easily pushed around by Republicans. Some said he didn't use the bully pulpit enough. Some said he didn't gather the people to his cause. Some said he needed to make his CASE more. Some said we expected too much.

Still others didn't know what to think or say. They just expressed their extreme sadness and sense of DISAPPOINTMENT with Obama. Almost treating him like he was a wayward kid who is goofing off in school.

But the President isn't our child or our parent to be disappointed with or proud of. He's the President. He's the most powerful political figure in the country. And he got there through hard work and dedication when nobody would have expected it would have even been possible for someone so young, so inexperienced, and so.. well... black. It's hard to imagine that someone who can do THAT, who can get the people behind him all over the country is stupid or bad at politics or a poor negotiator or any of the other excuses people came up with to explain his actions.

Now, finally I think in the blogosphere at least and I think amongst many other liberal communities amongst those who have been paying close attention, consensus is building and the reality is seeping through to people.

In the latest negotiation over the debt ceiling the blinders were lifted. When people saw that it was President Obama who put social security and medicare at risk for fundamental changes and painful cuts even when the Republicans hadn't even bothered to do that, it was like a light bulb going off in people's heads all over the world.

People were no longer able to deny it. Ahh now we see. Obama actually IS as brilliant, as capable, as intelligent, as politically savvy as we thought he was. He's actually quite GOOD at his job. He's quite effective and strong and goes all out to fight for what HE believes in. What he thinks is right for the country. He's negotiating the best possible hand given his circumstances to achieve the ends he seeks.

The problem is.... those ends aren't OUR ends.

Not the ends of Liberals.

Not the ends of Progressives.

Not the ends of Unions.

Not the ends of working people.

Not the ends of people suffering under the hardships of this economy.

No. The truth is, President Obama isn't in any way an ideological foil for Bush-era Republicans that dragged our country through Hell for eight years. In fact, quite the opposite. He AGREES with them on many, many things. He might not be a Conservative. He comes at it from a different perspective. But that perspective is still totally contrary to the way most people on the Left, most people who call themselves Democrats or Liberals or Progressives or POPULISTS come at the problems the nation faces. 

And so there's only one conclusion you can really draw. It's not just that Obama is not a Radical Liberal. It's that he doesn't even BELIEVE in Liberalism. Not at all. He doesn't want a balance between the best ideas of Liberals and the best ideas of Conservatives. He doesn't think Liberals HAVE any good ideas. He thinks the old school systems like habeas corpus and single payer and social security and Glass Steagall are just that... old. Quaint. Dumb. They don't fit his view of what society needs in the modern era. Believing in them makes you a rigid ideologue in Obama's book. 

I'm sure there are a lot of people who consider themselves on the Left that agree with Obama about all of this. Particularly a lot of young people who seem to be being taught this new ideology from the political leadership of the Democratic party. They call themselves "liberals" or "progressives" too sometimes. But their brand of liberalism doesn't match up with the historical brands of Left wing politics from FDR to Johnson to Martin Luther King. It's something NEW. It's something different. And it's something I find myself as utterly philosophically opposed to as I am to ideological Conservatism. And most of the Left wing blogosphere seems to be realizing now that they are just as opposed to it.

Taking a step back... What is at the heart of this philosophical disagreement we have? What makes this divide between these two factions of the Democratic party exist? I have a lot of thoughts on this but by and large I think that at its core there is a difference of opinion about what the biggest problems our nation faces. What I think Obama believes, and I think you can see it in a lot of his rhetoric and actions, is that the biggest problem in our society is the inability of Government to form concensus. He thinks the problem is that the Left and the Right can't get along. He's think the poisonous battle between radical extreme Republican Conservatives and radical extreme Democratic Liberals is destroying the nation. And he sees himself as a Lincoln type figure who is trying to forge a compromise between the two sides before there is another civil war. And he'll do almost anything to achieve that unity. Even if it means a lot of people have to suffer in the mean time.

That's not how I see it. I don't think the biggest problem is Democrat vs Republican, Conservative vs Liberal. I think by far and away the BIGGEST problem is POWERFUL vs WEAK. It's the RICH vs the POOR. It's the people so high up on the totem poll of society that they can't even see us poor pitiful people underneath and don't understand how their games effect us. 

Now why do I think that?

Because it wasn't conservatives or liberals who created the financial crises and the housing crash. It was BOTH.

Because it wasn't republicans or democrats who voted for war in Iraq. It was BOTH.

Because it wasn't members of the right or the left who misled the nation on weapons of mass destruction. It was BOTH.

I can go on and on and on with this. Warrantless wiretapping. Targeted assassinations. Indefinite detention. Afghanistan. Libya. Destruction of Labor laws. Limitations on abortion rights. Draconian requirements for citizenship for illegal immigrants. The war on drugs.

In fact it was in all cases the same elites and powerful figures in both parties who come to agreement again and again to make decisions that are destructive to the middle class and the poor and seem to always keep the CEOs of major companies pouring in the record profits while income disparity continued to rise.

I think we made a mistake. Every one of us who were on the Left who voted for Obama thinking he would bring "hope" and "change" like he said over and over again made a terrible terrible mistake.  The mistake wasn't voting for Obama. That was still the right decision. He was and is still the lesser of the two evils.

The mistake was not listening to the advice of Noam Chomsky who wrote before the election that if we lived in swing states (which I did), we should vote for Obama but "without illusions". Whatever you think of Chomsky's politics, I think that's generically good advice. You have to be clear minded and realistic about the person you are voting for. You shouldn't buy the marketing hype. You shouldn't accept that someone is going to do the things he says he's going to do just because he said it.  You should never have any illusions.

We have an impoverished left wing movement right now. We are, many of us in this movement far too young and idealistic and trusting. We voted for Obama and no matter how hard we tried to keep our hearts out of the vote and make it all about our heads many of us... most of us even I'd say had so very very many illusions. We bought the hype. Some of us a little bit. Others of us a LOT. You can see it in all the excuses and all the exceptions and all the many many many ways people tried to justify or explain or even just understand decision after decision Obama made that didn't fit in even the slightest bit with our hopes and dreams. We had illusions. 

Just as the Conservatives were CONSISTENT in their message that Obama was in fact NOT one of US, the liberals of the Left has been consistent in their overwhelming desire to portray the opposite message. We would do anything, say anything to make sure Obama WAS in fact one of US.  But he wasn't.  He never was. He's a Third Way Centrist Democrat. And that's something different.

Listen carefully to this and listen carefully to me.

In every story, in every philosophy, in every work of literature, in every line of poetry, in every piece of art, in every religious text I think there is this singular underlying argument.  The question is simple. The answer is impossible.

Is there hope for us?

We see it all the time. Whether it be in the text of Ayn Rand or the words of Karl Marx. From the story of a sin carrying apple all the way up to the tale of a bespectacled wizard. It repeats again and again. Hegel, Kant, Jefferson, Einstein, Twain, Vonnegut. A Brave New World. Animal Farm, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Native Son.  Everybody weighs in. Everybody has an opinion. And they tend to fall into two camps.

One camp believes that we are bad. If there is any hope then it is a shadow of a shadow of a hope. There are some good people. Heroes. But most people are weak. Most people are cowards.  Most people are sheep. Most people have forgotten what it means to care.

The other believes just the opposite. That there is good all around us. That we are capable of so much. That most people when given a chance and the right circumstances will do the right thing. There is a lot of hope. If those bad apples amongst us don't ruin it for the rest of us.

I've always leaned closer to the second camp.

At times though it is hard.  When you see people horde wealth while people starve, when you see people callously ignore the future of the planet for the pleasures of the moment, when you see us lock away in cages millions of people out of fear, when you see the man you helped elect continue a system of imperialism imposed by the predecessor he replaced whom you despised. It's hard then to still believe in people. It's hard not to think that there's something broken in us and it may never be fixed.

"There are no heroes left in man"

Let me tell you a story.

There was  a man named Mohamed Bouazizi who was a street vendor in Tunisia. He wanted to earn money so that he and his sister could go to college and get an education. He was harrassed by the police for years. Spat on. Beaten. Humiliated in public. His wares were taken away because he lacked the money to pay them the bribes he was expected to pay. 

One day he couldn't take it any more. He ran to the Governor's office. He demanded his wars back. The governor would not see him. 

Bouazizi would not be denied.

On December 17, 2010, at 11:30 AM,  standing in the middle of the street at  the height of traffic Mohamed Bouazizi spoke these simple words: "how do you expect me to make a living?"  and then he lit a match and set the world on fire.

When he died 5000 people attended his funeral. And they chanted these words "Farewell, Mohammed, we will avenge you. We weep for you today. We will make those who caused your death weep."

Protests built in Tunisia after Bouazizi set himself on fire. The police tried to crackdown on them. It only made the protests stronger. Images of the crackdown went out across Facebook and Youtube creating even more support. Strikes happened throughout the country including lawyers and other elites. The country ground to a halt. Some of the protests threatened to become violent. And finally President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali fled the country and resigned 28 days after Bouazizi's martyrdom.

It could have led to nothing. Another meaningless blip on the screen. Nobody cared much about a tiny country like Tunisia. People figured Ben Ali's stupidity brought it upon himself. Nobody was frightened.  I remember reading an article on my twitter stream it was titled "What if a revolution happened in Tunisia and nobody noticed?"

Somebody noticed.

Meanwhile a couple countries over Egypt was having its own problems. A rash of police brutality and torture there was making its citizenry already uncomfortable. A man named Khaled Mohamed Saeed was brutally beaten and killed by the police. There were numerous witnesses and yet the police denied it and tried to cover up the killing. It looked like they would get away with it and it was just the same old same old. Nothing would change. An Egyptian man named Wael Ghonim who was living in America and working for the Google at time would not let it go. He secretly made a Facebook group titled "We are all Khaled Said". The group eventually grew to have hundreds of thousands of followers.

A protest was planned by many of the groups who had long protested the conditions of Egypt. It would take place in January 25th, their National Police Day.

Egypt had had protests before. Like here in the United States there are often protests of the conditions. Sometimes they happen for a day or a weekend. Then people go home. They get back to work and go about their normal lives. Maybe it is enough to cause tiny adjustments. Maybe it helps people network with like minded individuals. Rarely does it turn into anything bigger. Rarely does it mean anything more. I doubt anyone who planned this protest knew it would turn out to be something quite different.

On January 17th copying the Bouazizi incident and Egyptian man set himself on fire in front of the Egyptian parliament. 5 Others attempted to set themselves on fire. Then this happened:

 "I will not set myself on fire! If the security forces want to see me on fire let them come and do it!"

Twenty-six year old Asmaa Mahfouz asked people to come with her to Tahir square on January 25th. And oh boy did they come. They came in hordes. They came in the masses. And they didn't just come, they stayed. And the protest grew bigger and bigger. Hundreds of thousands. A million. More. They stood and they protested in Tahir square, stood against the tanks and the militia and the security forces all determined to stop them. The regime shut down the internet in fear. It changed nothing. The protests grew huger in city after city throughout Egypt.  And now the whole world was watching.

Even then, the outcome was not certain. It could have all gone to shit in an instant. January 29th was the pivotal moment. The order came down from on high to use lethal force and live ammunition to disperse the crowd. The tanks were there. It could have been a massacre. It would have ended the protest. And fear would have driven away any likelihood of further. It could have happened then that the spark lit by Mohamed Bouazizi and fanned by Wael Ghonim, Asmaa Mahfouz and others might have been snuffed out. It was a remarkable moment in the history of Egypt and the history of the world. The story goes that young military officers were torn between their duty to their people and their duty to follow the orders of their superior and to enforce the laws. Some called their parents on their cell phones asking them what should they do? What was right? Their parents, themselves long time retired officers gave them a remarkable answer. In Egypt there is a tradition that the military is never to be used against the Egyptian people. It exists to serve them. So they told their children not to follow orders. Not to participate. Young soldiers came down from their tanks and joined the ranks of the protesters. And the military was forced to choose between rescinding the order, defying their government or having a veritable insurrection on their hands, seeing the start of a brutal and bloody civil war.

"Never say there's no hope! Hope disappears only when you say there's no hope."

Egypt turned a small flame into a firestorm. The people of Egypt demanded change. And they GOT change.  On February 11, Hosni Musbarak President and dictator of Egypt who had ruled their nation for 30 years was forced to step down even after even the day before swearing he wouldn't. On May 24th, Mubarak who had once been at the heart of international power, untouchable, unassailable, was ordered to stand trial for premeditated murder.

The whole world was inspired by the events in Egypt. Protests broke out all over the place in the aftermath. Libya, Bahrain, Syria,Yemen, Algeria, Iraq, Jordan, Morocco, Oman, Gaza, The West Bank, on the borders of Israel, Kuwait, Lebanon, Mauritania, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Western Sahara, Côte d'Ivoire, Italy, Greece, China, Chile, London and Madison, Wisconsin. Some were small. Some were big. Some might have happened regardless of the events in the Middle East. But so many of the people taking place saw Egypt and Tunisia as an inspiration.

To see what's happening here you have to look at it in the greater context of recent history. In the decades that just passed throughout the world we've seen a total lack of accountability for people with power and money. We saw an economic crash that devastated the world economy. We saw illegal wars break out and a mysterious secret network of prisons run throughout the world where torture was a matter of course. We saw power consolidated and wealth remaining concentrated in just a few hands. And even when wrong doing was exposed. Even when administrations were changed. Nobody faced any sort of consequences. Bankers weren't jailed for cheating people out of their homes. Investors weren't punished for gambling with the money people needed to buy food. Oil Companies saw little consequence for letting oil pour unchecked into the Even Osama bin Laden remained uncaught for his violent killing of innocents. People were getting used to it. It was starting to get to be the norm. People just expected the major forces to play games with us as their pawns. It seemed like this was just the way things were going to be.

Then Egypt changed the trajectory of society. If this President who was at the center of the games of power for thirty years could be laid low by the people he pretended to serve, maybe anybody could be. Maybe nobody was safe. Maybe change was POSSIBLE. Maybe people could awaken.Maybe there was hope.

We don't know what the ultimate consequences of these changes will be. Maybe it'll all die down. Already we see many protests throughout the middle east brutally taken down by regimes determined to retain their power at all costs.

But we already saw some signs of good. After Egypt, protests in Libya sparked a civil war. But when their leader Muammar Gaddafi spoke madness and threatened to bring great violence to all those who opposed him and it looked like a massacre was about to happen in Bengazhi as Gaddafi's troops closed in. But then a remarkable thing happened. If the tales are true, many in Gaddafi's government resigned in protest, and cried warning to the world of what might happen. They asked for help. And all around the world, all over the internet, people demanded that their government not allow a slaughter to continue. Even not trusting their government to do the right thing or for the right reasons. Even after the horrible illegal war in Iraq and even after the long endless conflicts in Afghanistan and drone attacks in Pakistan. People still decided that even giving authority to go to war to the untrustworthy powers of the world would be better than allowing the rebels to be slaughtered. And so the government reacted. A resolution was passed in the United Nations security council at the behest of the Arab League to authorize the use of force to save the civilians of Libya. Five nations abstained. No one said no. And a massacre was averted.

"You underestimate the character of man."

We ask the question again and again. Are we good? Are we Just? It's as if we're asking... are we worth it?

When I see these events *I* find myself convinced more and more. We are. We're capable of such greatness and glory as to shake the heavens off its hinges. We split the atom. We built the internet. We created democracy. We created Justice. We created freedom. And we did not die doing it.

And yet I can hear the other side still always there always arguing always denying. I heard a person comment on Egypt.. he said that Tahir was nothing but a big party and that those fools had no idea what they were getting into and were unready for the real hard work of building a nation.  A party? Over 800 people DIED in that party. And every one of them was at risk day after day.

I heard another person argue that Egypt was all well and good but we Americans are too lazy and too busy eating our hamburgers and playing our playstations to ever stand up for ourselves in the same way. So many people chimed in in agreement. So many people thought the same. It could happen in Egypt but not here. Never here.

I wonder at this sentiment. Can't happen here? It DID happen here. What do they think the American revolution WAS? What do they think the civil war was for? Why do they think there WAS a civil rights movement? It happens all the time here. It never stopped happening here. People come together. People fight for what they believe in. People change the world.

It happens everywhere. Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, the Gaza Peace Flotilla, Tianamen Square. Do people really think the Jesus was a fluke, that Moses was a once in a lifetime thing?  Good happens everywhere and all the time and not by accident.

The other day I saw a congressmen take to twitter to ask if two people who love each other should be allowed to get married in the State of New York. And people came out of the woodworks to tell him YES. Yes they should. It is in things like this that I see hope everywhere. I think we're worth it.

"They are weaker than you think."

In Tahir, during the revolution, amidst all that talk of freedom and justice and of fairness and righteousness. A female reporter from the West was sexually assaulted. People who said they wanted peace did that to her. People who said they were there to fight for freedom did that.  What kind of monsters were they? The normal kind I'm afraid. The human kind. She was saved finally by a group of women from the crowd came to her defense and about 20 Egyptian soliders broke it up.

In spite of it all, the other side isn't wrong.  Those cynics with whom I so greatly disagree are not wrong. We are terrible. We do horrible things to one another again and again and again. You don't get a Tahir unless you have a brutal Mubarak with security forces beating civilians. With every battle to overthrow a dictator you get a monstrosity like Abu Gharaib prison.  Every time the world comes together to end the horrors of the Holocaust... doesn't that just show that there WAS a holocaust that needed to be ended? And how did it get so bad? For how many years did people turn a blind eye and hope for someone else to solve those problems? We wouldn't have needed a civil war and a civil rights movement if there hadn't been cruelty after cruelty, injustice after injustice done to people for no other reason than that they had the wrong colored skin. How many people are starving right now. How many future generations are being doomed by our inaction today?

When people say that we are weak and we are flawed and we lack the courage of our convictions, that we are selfish and we are greedy and we are so very often too afraid to stand up for ourselves, they aren't wrong.

"Do not say this is how it has to be."

When you paint the question in such stark terms of A versus B, of good versus evil, there can be no answer. If you ask are we mostly evil or are we mostly good, as much as I would love to believe simply and without reservation that we are mostly good, anyone who approaches the question honestly and fairly cannot come to such a simple solution. No. There is only one answer to that question. And that is, it's neither. We're not just A OR B, one way or another. What we are is COMPLICATED.

Humanity is complicated.

We collections of a multitude of cells and a plethora of moments are complex. Every single instance is a chance for us to do good or to do ill, to help or to harm. Every single moment we make mistakes. Every single moment we learn. Every second of every day is a chance for us to go beyond ourselves, to be able to empathize... to catch a glimpse behind the eyes of another human being and see that unending complexity laid out before us and to try, just a little, to understand it. And with that understanding grows friendship, love, generosity, heroism, and justice.  We have that capacity within us to see into the windows of experiences that which we can never truly understand and know that they are beautifully complex and wonderfully extraordinarily different. 

It's in our complexity that I see hope.

There are 7 BILLION of us now on this planet. To me that means 7 billion chances every second of every day to do good. 7 billion chances to say words that inspire, to give a helping hand, to be a hero, to save a life, to learn from a mistake, to become just that little bit stronger. 7 billion chances every second to be able to make someone smile. I'll take those odds any day.

"Even now there is hope for man."

Whatever happens to us there are countless countless instances of good in this world. They wont be erased by the end result. All the horrors we unleash will not undue the single moments of kindness we take a chance to give one another as a gift unsolicited asking nothing in return. The one doesn't erase the other. There is no grand calculus. The good is real. And it matters. And we KNOW it matters. That's why there's hope.

We only need to see it and be inspired by it to do good and to be better. We only need to try and understand each other and to see the complexity in us and to forgive one another when we do wrong. If we can do that then there's no end to the good that can come about. There's no reason why we can't create a world of endless hope.

I think that's very possible.

What do you think?