because.

"We all know why Obama spoke the way he did on Monday. The forces
transforming the American economy are big and hard to control. If you think your
listeners aren’t sophisticated enough to grasp them, it’s much easier to blame
those perfidious foreigners for all economic woes. It’s much more heroic to
pretend that, by opposing Nafta, you can improve the lives of middle-class
voters. Furthermore, these trade deals have become symbolic bogies for union
activists. Instead of concerning themselves with the tidal waves washing
overhead, they’ve decided to insist on bended-knee submission in the holy war
against Colombia.
What I don’t understand is why the political consultants
prefer this kind of rhetoric. Aren’t there windows in the vans they use to drive
around the state? Don’t they see that most middle-class voters are service
workers in suburban office parks, not 1930s-style proletarians in the steel
mills?
American voters aren’t so stupid as to think their problems are
caused by foreigners and malevolent lobbyists. When Obama speaks down to his
audiences, it makes me so bitter I want to cling to my laptop and my college
degree."

[David Brooks, op-ed columnist on the NYT]

i've been thinking a lot lately on the way governments/rulers control their individual societies.

sure... that's not someone thinks about day to day, but well i sat on a plane for 14 hours with hardly anything to read, or anyone to provide interesting distractions.. so i thought about the two countries i've lived in and how different, but oddly similar they are to one another. sure on the surface, the united states and china look unmistakably different. americans are tall, athletic, and generally fair skinned with an assortement of lollipop colored hair. chinese people are small, oddly small, unathletic and spend their days under umbrellas to achieve the desired 'fair skinned-ness' that is not actually natural to them.

kidding. but in all honesty, it occured ot me at some point that in both countries there is actually very limited freedoms. the limitations within china are unabashed. you can't type in 'tibet' on the chinese google web page without being carted to a blank web page that says web page not found. you can't be openly verbal about anti-chinese sentiments without the very realistic possibility of going to jail.. and for an indefinite amount of time with no such thing as 'bail'. but in america, the limitations are there too, it's just a more subtle deceptive form of governmental control. i think we're beyond the idealistic point of thinking that what we see and hear on the 6 o'clock news is the bare faced facts of truth.. and although we are taught at an early age to question the information we receive, i'm banking on the fact that most people don't expect the actual 'digesting of information' process to happen.

just like that quote on the beginning of this blog. it's much easier to blame 'NAFTA' for the diminishing jobs within america, and the current economic strife that the middle class is feeling than to explain to them the several causes that all are interlinked together to cause this type of contagion within our economy.

i think the democrats should endeavor to explain that it's not NAFTA soley, but perhaps this 'capitalistic' way of life, that is causing it's own downfall. (marx anyone?? --- something i'll have to develope a more concise arguement for later).

but that's the thing. democrats will scream and yell about nafta, but i almost would guarantee that, should they get the opportunity to enter office, they wouldn't do anything about it, because they know as well as any person that trade is not causing the economic hardships to the extent they are claiming it to be. they just don't have the time, nor energy, nor patience, to go into a lengthy discussion about the innumerable causes in order to address the problem correctly. is that so different from china?

instead of addressing all the "tibet issues".. and explaining that perhaps development is just a tricky process, and oftentimes incredibly unequal... china just does what it does, and expects people ot undestand 'because' it's china.

i remember i used to argue with my parents, and i would often disagree with my dad. we always would reach an impasse, where i would ask 'why' and he would say 'because'.

well that answer was never good enough for me, and most assuredly not good enough for something on this scale. for government to be as effective as possible. it can't answer 'because'. democrats can't blame trade, because it's easier than explaining why capitalism can easily bring about it's own downfall if not regulated, and china can't say 'because we're china' to fend off questions of what is going on in tibet. solving answers, even if you don't know what the solution may be at this point, is best done when clarity and honesty is strived for. not empty worded 'becauses'.

be the person you've been waiting for.

i'm fucking inspired. so let me write.

today, as i sat inside, taking a break from the sights, smells, sounds, and exhausting heat of this particular city, i found my way to this website: http://www.vehicledesignsummit.org/website/

it's the website of a coalition of 3 MIT undergrads that have created this open forum for innovative thinkers, leaders, creators to work together to create a true 100% working plug in hybrid in three years. they say on their front page that 'we are the people we've been waiting for'.

i realize that i have all the attributes of an activist. or in less romantic terms.. a crazy zealot (and perhaps that's a bit redundant usage of words, but stresses my point). i've been crazy about many things. my sophomore year of college, inspired by the movie 'the constant gardener' i was on a war path of what was happening in africa. i ranted to everyone i met, i rallied at the capital, i participated in a peaceful demonstrative march. needless to say, my ardent anger at the many human rights abuses in the world has lately been replaced by a keen fascination for economics and the way things have been playing out in our financial institutions. and now. i cannot help but see my own thoughts easily align with those of environmentalist around the world.

perhaps i am too easily swayed by passionate speech and eloquent words. okay. not perhaps. i am. but even more so, i think i so easily identify with each of the 'causes' that are enlightened in front of me. i return to this idea that has been bouncing around in my head for the past few months. this idea that is at the foundation of a new school of thought 'behavioral economics'. the idea that people matter. the incentives that drive people, that motivate people, and the ideals that resonate with people matter. you can't count us as one big random aggregate, life unfortunately doesn't work that way.

why does the idea that 'as long as savings increases, the national gdp should increase, and therefore the country can pull itself out of poverty' doesn't work? as so often espoused by early development economists? it's because the people that make up these countries aren't the same. the poor citizens of indonesia cannot be clumped into the same camp as the poor of east africa. try telling an indonisian and a sudanese man that they are the same, and i will bet they would think you're crazy. that's why development programs MUST be modeled individually from country to country. culture to culture.. people to people.

why with all this talk about global warming, does the majority of people honestly not give a shit. it's because they can't rationalize with themselves the true cost of the future weighed with the immediate benefits of the present. take for example this article i read today about this environmentalist in indonesia. the conservation biologist quoted in this article says that it's very hard for these people to rationalize saving the environment for the sake of human kind with the more immediate and realistic fact that they will get paid tons of money to participate in illegal deforestation.. and should they get jailed or fined or retributed in anyway, there are tons more eager beavers to take their places.

and i won't get into why we got ourselves into this credit crisis in the first place.. i think i've talked about that one enough.

but the truth is. to get people. we have to understand ourselves.. the truly selfishness of our innate human nature. whether or not you are christian, and believe in the innate sin from birth, i've come to see that we have a lot of ugliness in us. and more and more i've come to believe that it takes a lot of self determination to rise from our careless ways. character is easy to have, but much harder to act out. in this same sense, believing in something, is much easier to attest, and much much harder to live out. so let's start. one by one. living out things that make our world better, make our society better, and truly make ourselves better.

so let me go first, lest i become more of a hypocrite.

-i will stop using so much toilet paper, paper towels, napkins, and not print out things excessively without forsight.. (this is something the fashion industry should pay great attention to... or any industry that wastes unbelievably amounts of paper a day printing worthless shit.. so to speak)
-i will limit myself to eating all the 'free bread' they offer me at restaurants and i will only eat till i'm full and know that if i'm not excessively wasteful. perhaps that can feed someone else in some strange but realistic connection.
-i will endeavor to walk more. and drive less. and taxi less.
and most importantly i will endeavor.. somehow to be the person that i've been waiting for

waste not, want not

it is a sweltering day in nanning, china (33c aka.. 92 f) and instead of braving the heat, i've decided to take a break from the chinese madness, and just read for the afternoon in my hotel room. unfortunately i've plowed my way through my only book already, and have eaten about 3 mangos too many, and am suffering from the most uncomfortable stomach ache.. but thank God for the internet.

i just read the most interesting article on the nytimes. a certain commentator was highlighting the impending world food crisis. where as americans for the most part (not i for certain) spend less than 20% of their income on food, citizens of the world in parts of indonesia, thailand, africa.. etc. spend over 75% of income on food, and thus with rising food prices all over the world, they are unable to afford to eat. he quoted robert zoellick, president of the world bank, in which he said "for countries where food comprises from half to three-quarters of consumption, there is no margin for survival." this is true, and genuinely points to a most diresome situation...

the commentator right on the money for the most part in divvying out blame, is outrageous when he blames the rich countries for exacerbating the problem with food shortages by giving tax breaks on companies that use biofuels (like corn). he even goes as far to end the article by saying that rich countrie's energy policies have helped create the problem, and therefore they need to exercise more efforts in giving aid to countries without food.

i am a bit perturbed.. no highly perturbed by this conclusion of his for a few reasons. first of all, it is a miracle that the us is giving a tax break for people who try to use alternative energy methods. sure biofuels may not be the most efficient form of alternative energy, but thank God we are trying to encourage people to seek out these methods, and hopefully find even more effective ones. even though a solution to one problem (global warming) may exacerbate the cause of another problem (global food crisis), it doesn't mean that we should condemn the people who are seeking out the solution to begin with.

secondly.. i feel a much more criminal culprit to the global food crisis, is the excess of the rich countries.. and not of only rich countries, but countries like china as well. (i am able to critique china, as i am here right now and able to witness their excess.)

as much as i love free bread, maybe one thing people can critique is the fact that all american restaurants give out abundant amounts of free bread. how about telling them to stop giving out all that damn bread. it would be a hedge way into solving two problems, lack of food and american obesity. he also talks about the rising middle class in china and india that demand more and more meat, which puts a huge strain on grain that act as the source of energy and feed for these animals. this is something i think that should be legitimately looked into, since the middle classes of these growing economies are often just as wasteful as those of the rich.

honestly, one of the things i've witnessed in china, that has never ceased to surprise me, is the tradition of being excessive at meal time.. especially when families gather together, or even friends. just the other day, me and my mom, and cousin went to the fish market and we purchased 2 lbs of fresh sea shrimp, 4 huge lobsters, and 2 fish to eat.. for lunch!! on top of that we ordered a bunch of dishes.. honestly. should anyone eat that much? yes it's a reunion of family aka.. a cause for excess celebration.. but when this is something that many people do on a normal basis.. it's not so special. in fact it can be a little bit disgusting. i'm not saying my cousin does this (he's a poor new graduate so this is something he can't afford) but i'm speaking of the millions of people in the world who do this.

okay. i'm a victim of excess too. perhaps i don't need to eat so much pizza after i am drunk. i'm really not taht hungry to begin with. and i'm sure a starving child in africa could use that bread and cheese more than i can... so i acknowledge my hypocritical ways.. but perhaps. this is a lesson for all of us. heedless waste in the end will only harm us. throwing away boxes of good cereal taht was never eatin because you ate out instead, or tossing random pieces of litter on the street, or driving somewhere that you can easily walk to in 5 minutes.. all these little things are straining our world resources, and if we are at all, we should endeavor to do a little something about our worrisome habits.

i choose.

i forgot how annoying it is to fly to china. it may have something to do with the long connections you have to wait for, or perhaps the 14 hour flight you have to withstand.. which by the end of, your ass hurts like it's never hurt before. but to me, the most annoying thing may be the fact that on that transcontinental flight you are enduring, you cannot, as a regular member of coach decide who you are sitting with. perhaps that is just a dangerous aspect of flying period, but 3 hours is much more endurable compared to 14 hours.

to my horror, on my way to china, i happened to find myself sitting between two rows of teenage kids. no, teenage children, on their way to china. i tried to bite my tongue and not say anything, because after all, their excitement for venturing overseas must be high. and understandable. but i couldn't. after 7 hours of enduring their prodding into the back of my seat, and their high pitched squeals, i desperately sought out the flight attendant to ask if perhaps i could seek out another seat on the plane and sit there.

this led me to the front half of coach seating, where for the remaining 7 hours i would just enviously admire the people sitting in first class, whom were in plain sight for my viewing pleasure. first class is very nice for a few reasons. delicious foods, better beverage service... but the foremost reason is that first class is extremely self selecting. since first class is so much more expensive than coach, the people who sit there are either super rich, or on business, and any case can be classified as super rich with their unlimited corporate charge cards.

this is an interesting idea to stop and ponder for a minute. the self selecting nature we have as humans. we like to be around people that are like us. perhaps that's how the caste system evolved in china, and how racisms in it's nature evolves everywhere. maybe that's another thought to develop more later on..

for now. i'm going to. go. and enjoy the fact that i'm not sitting on a plane.

c'est la vie?

sometime i have so many thoughts in my head i feel like i must be going crazy. does that ever happen to you? probably not right? indeed i must be going crazy. i feel as if my inability to blog has nothing to do with writers block, but instead with the fact that none of my thoughts are able to organize itself within this head of mine, and are all trying to bust out at the exact same time. a sort of mental traffic jam i would imagine.

anyways.

i watched 'the kite runner' yesterday. i would definitely agree that the movie doesn't even compare to the book, but if you don't think you will read the book, you should definitely make time and watch the movie.

at one point, the father in the story asks his son, amir, what he thinks the worst sin in the world is. son doesn't know, and father says that he thinks it's theft, and that in reality every sin is a mere form of theft. for example, he says that when you take the life of a man, you steal from him his right to live, you steal from the wife, the right to a husband, and from the child, the right to a father.. etc. whether or not i agree with his interpretation of the sins that plague mankind, i do think that the unfairness of life sometimes steals so much from you.

what is it that thomas jefferson once wrote? 'unalienable rights of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness'??

it's not that i'm some democratic jockey thinking that we should export our way of government to the rest of the world, but it's that i agree that we all deserve this. even the children of afghanistan (where the book is set), whom largely in reality have their childhoods stolen from them by the men who are raging this war. i'm thinking they don't think that they have rights to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.. or the children in africa, that millions of them are growing up each year without parents because they are dying off in droves due to aids.. or even the children here, children of broken homes and neglecting parents, whom are stuck in cycles of poverty because they have no idea how to even access the 'unalienable rights to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness' that our government has so promised them..

do i sound like mother theresa? probably not as eloquent.

i never got over the unfairness of life. some people look at this and say 'c'est la vie'. that's life. and they amble along and do what they do. and i do admit i almost envy their sense of smallness in comparison with the world. i do feel small too, but at the same time this leads me to get so angry sometimes. many times. did i mention that i can be extremely temperamental?

people joke that i'm a communist. i'm not. :) but i admit that i am not a true capitalist either. capitalism forgets about people and merely drives itself on this ambiguous idea of profit and productivity. true it's probably the only economic/political social structure that has proven itself to be sustainable, and definitely the only one that will work in this current 21 century. capitalism (in it's current state) leaves people behind. it looks at the innate unfairness of life, and says 'c'est la vie' and may the best man win.

people look at china these days and think 'wow what a miracle nation' in the span of 20 years we've taken GDP and increased it exponentially. if i was a true academic, i would know by how many times, but i'm not. however, i have visited before, and within the 10 years between my two visits, i've seen the infiltration of luxury stores into hongkong and beijing, stores like prada, gucci, cartier, that wouldn't be there unless they knew they had a market they could tap into.

however, it's so apparent that this influx of wealth has not reached everyone. no. definitely not. and tons of people are getting left behind. wealth should increase the living standards of all the people in a nation, yet it has sorely missed a large part of china's people. i read this article in the nytimes a while back that says in fact, health care in china has gotten progressively worse for many chinese. where as under the tighter controls of the communist regime, everyone had universal health care (as rudimentary as it may be), it is nearly impossible to see a doctor these days for a common cold, and if you do, you're not getting to see a good doctor that may actually take care of you. they tell this story of a man that had some horrible illness and was dying. his relatives brought him to the village doctor and he said it was curable but they had to pay for health care. the relatives, as poor as they all were, pooled together their money and bought him 4 days stay at the local hospital. after that they had to take him home and watch him die. i'm NOT a fan of socialist health care program.. every one knows that. but this story almost makes me a champion for it's cause.

it's not like things are so much better in america either. millions of poor people can't get health care. they can't even see a doctor for something like the common cold. how are they suppose to pursuit 'life, liberty and happiness' if they can't even be guaranteed basic health.

God i sound like a Hilary supporter.

i guess my problem is. i know the problems. i rant about the problems. i get angry that nothings being done. and i expect someone else to fix it. perhaps i would try to fix it myself, except for the fact that i don't know how. but hopefully one day i will. i will never be okay with unfairness, but maybe one day i can actually do something about it..

until then, i will keep blundering off long long blogs about how things should be.. and really could be.