I\u2019ve watched a couple of documentaries lately and I want to reflect on them for a bit.<\/p>\n
The first was Masters of Doubt, which was about the PR folks who work for corporations (such as big tobacco) to generally obstruct progress when it comes to the public\u2019s understanding of adverse health effects, climate change, and so on. It\u2019s an exploration of the tactics and strategies they use to slow things down, muddy things up.<\/p>\n
The second was Thirteen, which walks us through the history of black America \u2013 from slavery to segregation and Jim Crow all the way to the troubling Amerian pandemic of mass incarceration. You really get a sense of the suffering that black people have endured ever since being brought to America as slaves, how they were beaten and abused and attacked and arrested and jailed and criminalized, and how the State, maybe even without overt racist intentions, has encouraged and enabled that over the decades. A mythology of black criminality. And how the fear of black men has been almost engineered and inculcated in people systematically. It\u2019s quite mindblowing that a people can undergo so much suffering \u2013 and I find myself wondering now about colonialism in India, and in Singapore, and what the effects of those were on people, and what it means to live in the shadow of that. I say shadow because I think these things can be incredibly subtle, and it can require a tremendous amount of finesse to discern.<\/p>\n
And yeah, I\u2019ve seen first hand how some people are quick and eager to declare themselves as victims \u2013 and it\u2019s messy, it\u2019s problematic, I don\u2019t want to be prescriptive about it. I think each person needs to confront their own circumstances, their own personal demons, survey the landscape themselves, read up their own history, and figure out for themselves who they want to be. We don\u2019t start equal, and we don\u2019t end equal, and the schools we go to tell us a sanitized story (and don\u2019t get me started on schools themselves, lmao) about our histories.<\/p>\n
So it\u2019s really up to us to educate ourselves. The second part of this is\u2026 after watching a documentary and hoping to look for some enlightened discussions about it, I get on reddit and I see people who miss the point, who talk about black-on-black crime, who complain that they can\u2019t bear the documentary because there\u2019s a \u2018hippie white guy\u2019 who says that it\u2019s \u2018all white people\u2019s fault\u2019. Why do people have to oversimplify things like that?<\/p>\n
But that\u2019s one of the points I wanted to bring up. While watching the part about the mythos of the black man as a rapist, I found myself thinking about what Amy Schumer wrote about Odell Beckham Jr, and how privileged she was to be able to be so careless about something like that. (And yet, of course, women have their own share of struggles too, their own history of being subjugated, treated like property\u2026 so yeah, it\u2019s complicated.)<\/p>\n
I fee like there\u2019s some fundamental, underlying thing that i\u2019m trying to make sense of here about what it means to be a human living on this planet in the post 2010s. [1] But what exactly? I guess it\u2019s something along the lines of \u2013 we are products of our history, and yet we\u2019re a very myopic people. We don\u2019t look very far into the past unless we\u2019re forced to out of necessity, or because we happen to be curious about it. And I suppose we\u2019re maladapted in that sense \u2013 our ancestors didn\u2019t really have to care about history, they simply had to survive in the present moment. We still need to survive in the present moment, but that\u2019s somehow simultaneously easier and more difficult. It\u2019s easier to stay alive, but it\u2019s harder not to feel terrible the whole time you\u2019re alive \u2013 despite the creature comforts, sanitation, healthcare, etc. Or maybe I\u2019m just naive and ignorant and we really do live in the best time ever to be alive.<\/p>\n
But I doubt it\u2019s so straightforward. My gut tells me that there are definitely things that we have \u201clost\u201d \u2013 not in a linear sense; I don\u2019t want to fall into the trap of thinking that past civilizations were necessarily better. In fact it may be that there are flaws and weaknesses intrinsic to modern civilization itself \u2013 loneliness, boredom, a lack of sense of community, communion and so on. Watching Human Planet, I found myself thinking that there seemed to be a joy in the hunt for food that we don\u2019t quite get when we\u2019re pulling things off of shelves in the supermarket. Yet surely they\u2019d trade places with us? [2]<\/p>\n
Recently I saw some of my old statuses thanks to Facebook\u2019s On This Day feature, and I was amused by the sort of thing I used to think about. \u201cIs an idea a thing?\u201d or \u201cWhat is an idea?\u201d \u2013 a part of me thinks that I no longer have time for such \u2018frivolous\u2019 or \u2018idealistic\u2019 thoughts, and that I have to be more concerned with pragmatic, day-to-day concerns now. A part of me mourns that tradeoff. But is it really a tradeoff? Maybe that was a necessary process for me to go through, and I\u2019ve gone through it now, gotten what I needed to get out of it, and I\u2019ve now moved on to a new thing. It\u2019s still fun to talk to young people about these things, to ask them questions and help them along, and to watch them learn and grow. But I don\u2019t personally need to spend a lot of time on that because I\u2019m done with that, at least as far as I can tell. It\u2019s on to the next thing for me. Which is good. Which is what makes life interesting and worth living.<\/p>\n
–<\/p>\n
[1] Interesting that it feels like I can\u2019t just say post-2000s \u2013 there seems to be a difference between the first and second decades of the 3rd millenium. It seems probable that there will continue to be more differences between each coming decade.<\/p>\n
[2] Look at me, second-guessing myself with every sentence. But that\u2019s fine, that\u2019s just how I process things. It\u2019s a sign that I\u2019m thinking about something a little new and a little unfamiliar. I\u2019ll be able to tidy up my thinking later on once I\u2019ve gotten through with it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I\u2019ve watched a couple of documentaries lately and I want to reflect on them for a bit. The first was Masters of Doubt, which was about the PR folks who work for corporations (such as big tobacco) to generally obstruct progress when it comes to the public\u2019s understanding of adverse… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[345,364],"class_list":["post-10276","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-word-vomit","tag-learn","tag-media"],"yoast_head":"\n