We Can And Should Speak Out, Collectively and Do The Right Thing: or What Social Networking Sites CAN Be Good For

Tonight, I did something I rarely do. I went to a suburban bar with a cover band playing. This trip was solely for the purpose of attending the birthday party of someone who I have met in person once in my life. This person is friends with my partner but, for all intents and purposes, doesn’t really know me from Adam. Nonetheless, I made the trek and paid the five dollar cover, because it seemed like the right thing to do.

When I arrived, I was surprised to be greeted by a room full of veritable strangers with warm smiles and hugs. It did not take long for people to ask me if I needed drink or to offer me a seat in a crowded room. I am not a particularly open or familiar person. In fact, I am painfully shy at times. However, that did not matter tonight. Because it is close to the holidays and we are American adults. This is what we do. We smile and extend kindness to those who we believe have extended kindness to our friends and comrades. I was accepted and made to feel like family by a group of strangers simply because I am kind to and care for one of their own. This is our culture. We care for those who care for those who we care about.

Why then, do we have so much trouble passing a bill which provides care to those who responded to the trauma and violence of September 11, 2001 by risking their own well being in order to ensure the well being of others?

As Americans, we often show caring and compassion for those who we perceive to have been wronged, either by other people or by the system itself. We are quick to respond to calls for charitable donations and we are proud of it. Yet we seem to have no problem allowing congress to not pass a law which will provide healthcare for those who responded to the September 11^th disaster by rushing into the chaos and attempting t help those who were most directly affected.

How is this even possible?

Much like every other American, I think I remember that day very clearly and I know I remember the aftermath of that day as clear as anything. I can clearly remember everyone I came in contact with clutching their newly purchase American flags and sentimental materials and waxing poetic about heroism and the nature of the American consciousness. I remember a lot of talk about coming together and supporting one another in an extremely trying time. I remember the endless platitudes and syllogisms about colors that don’t run and the strength of a nation. It seemed like everyone around me wanted to talk about how powerful we can be when we come together and support each other.

And, as sentimentally overwrought as some of these expressions may have been, they all had a grain of truth.

We can be powerful when we come together.

We can change the world, or at least our world, when we collectively decide to do the right thing.

But we didn’t.

Granted, we did care for a while. We extended hugs and generosity and understanding like I have never seen before or after. For at least a few weeks following the tragedy, we lived in the America which I had always imagined had existed long before I was born; The America where every citizen extended a warm hand to every other citizen and we care for each other like family. Then, the bubble burst. We became fearful of other Americans who were too similar to our middle eastern neighbors in dress and religious creed. We became entrenched in several wars and began to bicker, once again, about foreign policy and economic legislation. We forgot to be unified.

We forgot our unity and we forgot about those who volunteered to help in one of the most frightening events I have ever seen.

We focused instead on tax cuts, abortion, NAFTA and a host of other issues. We bickered and argued and campaigned and voted. Somewhere, in the sound and the fury of our everyday lives and the endless shout outs of frustration, admiration and support to soldiers and politicians alike, we forgot to check on the very people who had, not so long ago, rushed head on into the smoldering destruction just to make sure others were safe. While we were debating and campaigning and speaking out many of these men and women were becoming ill as a result of their bravery and we never noticed.

They are sick and some of them are dying. The right thing to do would be to pay for their healthcare. If they were enlisted soldiers, who were being ordered to help and paid for their service during the September 11h attacks, they would have at least their basic healthcare needs taken care of, and rightfully so. However, many of these people were neither ordered nor paid to attempt to aid others in such a frightening and chaotic time. Many of them are simply American citizens who felt that they could and should offer a helping hand during a crisis. They rushed in when most were fleeing.

As a result of this, many of them became ill and our government, the people who we voted into office, will not pass a bill which provides them with the care they need.

Last week, congress voted down a bill which would provide healthcare to those who were sickened as a direct result of their actions in support of other Americans on September 11, 2001. And very few people seem to care.

Less than one week ago, my inbox and news feeds were flooded by people who were changing their profile pictures to support a war on a concept.

This week, a very real and challengeable fact became public, and no one reacted.

This is shameful to me.

However, it doesn’t have to be.

We can change it.

If you are one of the many Americans who cared on September 11 and continues to care now about the men and women who bravely sacrificed their own sense of well being in order to insure that of others, then I urge you to look up your local senator and harass the living hell out of them. Send letters, make phone calls, put the word out on facebook, twitter and myspace. Scream from the rooftops. Hold a sit in. Throw rocks through the windows of politicians. Do whatever it takes to be heard. Support the 9/11 Responders act and demand that those who you have voted into office do the same. It is the only right thing to do.

Please America, restore my faith in you.

As Christmas and all of its attendant sentiments approaches, please do what you can to make sure that these people are not left without the care they deserve for any longer.

I double dog dare you to.

_Shannon

The Lone One: Or How One Small Thing Can Be A Powerfull Remider

Over Thanksgiving dinner my sister-in-law and I were discussing her two and a half year-old’s newfound fascination with his penis. “When he pees in the bathtub he becomes mesmerized, like he can’t believe it’s coming out of him.” Without a beat I quipped, “And he’ll feel the same exact way twelve or so years from now.” It took my sister-in-law some time to figure out what I was referring to. “Oh?...Oh! Gross!”

I didn’t intend to sexualize her little boy, and I suppose to a woman (and a mother, no less) it’s relatively unfamiliar territory, but the first time a boy ejaculates semen is, for lack of a better term, MESMERIZING! I’ll never forget my first time. I was busy rubbing up against something soft behind my double-bolted bedroom door when, after months of shooting throbbing blanks, BOOYA!, there it was! Only, it was hardly a stream of virility; it was more like a sad little droplet of diluted baby batter. But its implications were nevertheless gargantuan, and I knew this then. I was a man.

There’s henceforth an array of physical rights of passage that most men experience as they pubesce and age -- shaving, growing chest hair, sprouting an upper ass patch, etc. I remember the first time I noticed hair on my toes. Well, it wasn’t I who first pointed it out but a couple of my high school friends. I was lifeguarding on a sleepy beach in Southern New Jersey and I asked my friends -- both girls -- to stop by one particularly drowsy summer afternoon to keep me company. They grudgingly obliged, only after I promised to buy them a case of beer with my infallible fake ID. When they arrived at the beach and saw me perched atop one of those towering lifeguard stands, they almost lost it. My friend, KMH, ever the alpha, grumbled, “What, you’re just going to sit way up there and look down at us the entire time? No way. Get your ass down here.” “I can’t come down unless it’s work related.” “Work related? There’s no one in sight. Well we’re not going to stand around and talk to your feet all day.” That’s when my friend, ABK, surveyed the few, errant, wiry hairs springing out of my big toe. “Eew, sick, look at his toe hair. It’s like a Hitler ‘stache.”

Fast-forward to today.

After one of the worst nights of sleep I’ve had to endure in quite a while I woke up this morning to a new physical right of passage -- one that is not so much mesmerizing as paralyzing. Not so much virile as sterile. Not so much stimulating as utterly deflating.

Cruelly confident in and of itself, resolute, foreboding and unmistakable, there it was (shining in all its glory): the lone gray pube.

I couldn’t believe my bleary eyes. Maybe it was the way the sunlight gleamed on it as I rolled out of bed naked? (Note: I only wake up unclothed after sleepless nights in which I rip off all articles of clothing one-by-one in an insomnolent haze). But after close, closer, *extremely* close inspection, however, I was able to confirm that it was not a healthy and vibrant sheen of my natural hair color but indeed a gray, nay, a white, nay, a whiter-than-white pube. Fucker.

I immediately crawled back into bed to contemplate what this meant. There of course would be more of these. And soon, I’m sure. While wrinkles and gray hair (on one’s head!) may, on a good day, help to “distinguish” a gentleman, there’s nothing at all sexy about gray pubic hair. No one can pull it off. NO ONE. (Sidebar: Google ‘gray pubic hair’ and enjoy what comes up).

So I considered where this sadistic and arrogant pube now left me. No doubt I’m a changed man. Sure, it’s only one pluckable little hair, but the implications of it are huge, and not nearly as exciting as when I first discovered I could procreate. But then I realized -- I could still procreate if I wanted. In fact, I could still do everything I did before, some of it even better than when I was a young man. And, in a way, this gray pube proves it, not to anybody else perhaps but definitely to me. My lone gray pube is actually my body’s way of telling myself that after all these years I’ve earned it, whatever ‘it’ happens to be. And, come to think of it, I have. I have earned it. And I deserve it, too. Thank you. Thank you, lone gray pube, for reminding me of this. You did good, really good. I genuinely appreciate it. Now, goodbye.

**FLUSH**

-Duardo

Juke Box Throwdown: Jane's Addiction- Ted Just Admit It

"Ted, Just Admit It..."

Camera got them images
Camera got them all
Nothing's shocking...
Showed me everybody
Naked and disfigured
Nothing's shocking...
And then he came
Now sister's
Not a virgin anymore
Her sex is violent...

The T.V.'s got them images
T.V.'s got them all
It's not shocking!
Every half an hour
Someone's captured and
The cop moves them along...
It's just like the show before
The news is
Just another show
With sex and violence...

Sex is violent...
Sex is violent...
Sex is violent...
Sex is violent...
Sex is violent...
Sex is violent...
Sex is violent!

I am the killer of people
You look like a meatball
I'll throw away your toothpick
And ask for your giveness

Because of this thing!
Because of this thing!
Because of this thing!

That's in me
Is it not in you?
Is it not your problem?
A baby to a mother...

You talk too much
To your scapegoat
That's what I say
He tells you everyone is stupid
That's what he thinks!

Snapshots
Make a girl look cheap
Like a tongue extended
A baby's to a mother

Sex is violent!
Sex is violent!
Sex is violent!
Sex is violent!

I wanted to focus on this particular song, because Jane’s Addiction has long been one of those bands who I can slip into as easily as a well worn pair of oversized coveralls. I loved them with the intensity that only a 14 year old kid can love a band for a good portion of high school, and then, as is often the case, I sort of forgot about them. However, there have been a few random occasions throughout my adult life where they have come back out of nowhere to remind me of how much I love them. One such occasion was just a few weeks ago when The Dead Guy and I were hanging out and listening to Nothing’s Shocking and Ted Just Admit It popped up. At that moment, I could not help but think about how this particular song, with its themes of sex, violence and media, seems even more relevant today than it was in 1988, when it was released, and again in 1993, when it was included in the Natural Born Killers soundtrack. I then began to babble about it, which is exactly when the idea for Jukebox Throwdown was formed.

That said, I suppose a good place to start with this song would be examining why the lyrics were and are so relevant. Well, obviously, Perry Farrell was reacting to an onslaught of shocking and highly sexualized content in the news media, especially on T.V. I don’t remember the eighties well, but I do remember the very late eighties and early nineties as a time when television news seemed to focus almost entirely on violence and sex. I have no idea if my perception of this time is accurate, or if it was simply a case of me becoming more aware. I suspect it was a combination of the two.

To that end, the title of the song has always made me think of nightly news anchor Ted Koppel. Now, I know that there are references throughout the song to Ted Bundy, whose trial and interviews were being conducted around the time that this song was written, but I think it is entirely possible that the title and resulting lyrics are a double entendre of sorts: asking the listener to consider the fact that most media had become violent and that most of our primal urges are violent by definition. Flash forward to now, and it is easy to dismiss the amount of violence we see in our every day television viewing, even if it is just the nightly news, as a symptom of living in more violent or unstable times, but I think this is a misnomer, and that this song is asking us to examine exactly that.

When we see or hear of an act of violence, from a slightly less than equal sexual encounter to a brutally horrific murder, we are at once repulsed and titillated. Our hearts speed up. We get very agitated. Our endocrine system kicks in and we are flooded with hormones. These reactions are similar to what occurs when we are sexually aroused. This arousal is, of course, uncomfortable for us. No one wants to admit that they feel anything akin to enjoyment when they are confronted with the most heinous of acts, but we do. We know, on a visceral level, that we would not act out of this primal reaction, but just that slight tingling of excitement causes us to watch these items more intensely. We are as captivated by the horrors of truly diseased men as we are by images of sex acts.

As we move along through the lyrics, there are many references to images of naked and disfigured women being made to look cheap. Again, a parallel is drawn between the literal image of a murder victim and the highly polished and artificial images which are presented in pornography. Our society gasps in audible disgust at the idea of seeing an image of a woman who has been cut or altered in an act of violence such as murder or rape, yet images of women whose physical appearances have been altered by a surgeon are widely accepted and even sought after, both now and then. I think that, by using the sexual imagery in the song along with the violent imagery, Farrell was reminding us that we are drawing an invisible and ever moving line between how much violence and disfigurement is acceptable and how much is not and then using that line to both justify our own actions and to sell the actions of those we despise.

In other words, by fetishizing violence in the news ad using it to sell ad space and keep viewers engaged while lashing out against sexual imagery in the main stream, we have created a bizarre vacuum. We spend hours viewing acts which are vile, heinous and frightening via the news and no one questions it. However, we still fight to keep images of sexual acts and expressions under cover. Perhaps, we, like Ted, need to admit that this sort of shaming of something natural and beautiful along with the exploitation of something so vile may be causing some of the problems we are facing.

-Shannon

After the Tipper Gore PMRC debacle, many bands felt it necessary to mock, stand up to, and expose what they thought was a true purveyor of the perversion of sex and violence, the news. It also informed us that these drives in the human psyche had a very thin line of distinction. Ted Bundy had been on the run since he escaped in the late 70's, and violence and murder was always enticing to the audience, as we would learn over and over again, with Jeffery Dahmer, John Wayne Gayce and O.J Simpson. The American public had their eyes glued to the screen to find out all of the horrors that had been perpetrated, and in particularly graphic detail during the trails.

We've learned very little since then about the correlation of sex and violence in the neurology of the human brain. But one could make the claim that the simple act of penetration, even in the case of sex is, in and of itself violent. Not all human beings enjoy the more extreme practices of S&M, but you could also make the case that acts like pulling hair, and even the dominant act of mounting evoke a Sadomasochistic element. What we have learned is that when it comes to entertainment sex (commercials) and violence (sports and movies) always sell. As Farrell sings “The news is just another show with sex and violence...”

Perry Farrell takes the time to really blur the line that separates these two acts. If you look at the lyrics one way he may be describing the photos of the victims that Ted Bundy captured during his rampage, or under another light of awareness it could be describing the circus of news camera before, during and after Bundy's trail, “Every half an hour someone's captured and the cop moves them along...It's just like the show before.” Farrell seems to be pointing out that the people think the news helps raise awareness about the heinous acts, when that is not the case. The news covers these stories for one reason, because people like them. The news is not here to rid the world of evil, if anything its mission is to create a culture of fear in order to desensitize people into accepting the fact that these atrocities will probably never go away.

- The Dead Guy

Activism in the Internet Age: How Cartoon Pictures and Purse Positions Are Bullshit Forms of Masturbation and Self Aggrandizement.

It started back in October, when countless facebook friends started posting updates that read “I like it on the floor” or “I like it in the kitchen” in order to, apparently or not so apparently, raise awareness of breast cancer. It reached a fever pitch this afternoon, when I began receiving feedback from a slightly drunken status update last night about how changing one’s profile picture to a photo of a childhood cartoon was not going to help any abused children in any way. It started as an annoyance and a mere cause for eye rolling. Now, it has reached a fever pitch of anger.

It is the time to call “bullshit” on facebook awareness campaigns.

I know it may seem a little cynical to state this, but awareness campaigns in general, and facebook awareness campaigns specifically, are utterly useless ways to waste time and energy. This should not be surprising to anyone, as facebook itself is just that; a time waster. Now, don’t get me wrong, I see no problem with wasting time. I don’t even see a problem with people changing their photos because they wish they were She-Ra or Rainbow Brite. However, my problem comes from the fact that these campaigns are so often held up as examples of activism when they are not at all effective and really have no purpose beyond making the person who participates feel as though they’ve done something to affect a positive change.

Awareness campaigns in general tend be pretty bad at doing anything other than make people smug, You see, in order to believe that an awareness campaign will really change anything, you have to truly believe that the issue for which you are attempting to raise awareness is one which no one is aware of already. For example, let’s take the aforementioned child abuse campaign. How many people out there are really and truly unaware that child abuse exists? Assuming there are such people in existence at all, how likely would it be that they would be capable of using a computer or understanding the complexities of an in joke? Even if they could, they’d have to search long and hard to figure out what this one is all about, as most users are just changing their profile pics without a word of explanation. Starting a campaign which is predicated upon the assumption that people are unaware of something which has become a facebook meme is pretty silly if you think about it. The same goes with awareness campaigns which utilize real world tactics such as buying and displaying ribbons or wearing a specific color. All they do is let people know that the wearer or picture changer has spent some time and/or money on something which will allow them to tell the world that they care about something that everyone else cares about, only they care enough to buy something or google a cartoon image.

It is this positioning of participants in such campaigns as do gooders or world changers that pisses me off more than anything.

The fact is that changing anything, be it the rates at which we find cancer cures and causes, the amount of children who are abused, or the amount of AIDS patients who receive good care takes sacrifice and effort. This is why most people prefer to participate in a facebook campaign or purchase a pink ribbon or buy a red shirt from the GAP. These actions are easy, painless, and still allow people to feel like they’ve done something good.

Only, they haven’t.

In some cases, they may have even caused more harm than good. For instance, any cancer awareness campaign which uses plastic trinkets to send a message is using a material which introduces known carcinogens into the environment. How, exactly, is that helpful in curing cancer? Buying clothing form the Gap supports an economic system which exploits and damages countries, such as Africa, where the need for AIDS intervention is greatest. This is improving lives how? Finally, sitting in front of your computer and searching for cartoon photos keeps you detached and removed from the hundreds of ways you can make a difference in the life of a child in need or in the life of a cancer or AIDS sufferer. It not only helps nothing, but it allows you to feel as though you have accomplished something when, in fact you’ve not done anything more than make yourself feel warm and fuzzy.

Now, here’s where it gets tricky for me. I have no problem with people wasting time and making themselves feel good. In fact, as a blogger, it’s in my best interest that people do waste time on the internet. However, it is not ok to dress this time wasting up as change. I truly believe that most people do not intentionally do this. I think that most people want to help affect change. However, I think that most people are truly unaware of how much effort it actually takes to do so, and do not like anything that involves a large amount of personal sacrifice. The fact is that, sadly, that is exactly what affecting change may take.

One person is not likely to rid the world of all its ills and suffering. However, one person can choose one or two areas in which to direct their energy and time and begin to make a small change. One of the argumentative responses I received to my status regarding the child abuse campaign stated that while changing photos would not end all child abuse everywhere, neither would my suggested actions of intervention, volunteerism, real education and actual advocacy. It’s true. Doing any or all of those things will not end violence against children. However, unlike the facebook campaign, it can help to free one or more children from the horrors of abuse, or prevent them from facing it in the first place. Isn’t that the kind of change we can quantify? Isn’t that exactly what we want to do?

So, let’s do it.

Let’s walk away from the silliness of facebook campaigns and find a cause we believe in and actually do something for it.

_Shannon (who will smack a bitch who smacks a kid in front of her)