Posts
Wal-Mart Employee Trampled to Death
Good to see everyone's in the Christmas spirit...
Friday, November 07, 2008
GOOD JOB, MAINSTREAM MEDIA!!
I was re-reading over one of my old, ranty posts about the RNC/DNC. One of the comments I made was regarding the mainstream media's failure to adequately explain the causes of the Russia's invasion of Georgia, back when that was going down. Now that the financial markets are a mess, I come back to criticize the mainstream media AGAIN for doing a piss-poor job of explaining what happened during the financial crisis, why it happened, what that means for you and me, what the bail-out is REALLY going to do, etc. I don't anyone has a good sense of it, myself included, and I don't think the entirety of that is due to people's laziness. People care about this; it's going to effect them in intense and long-lasting ways. When a country with an economy such as ours moves into a recession, the shit hits the fan. Up to this point, the information has been so scattered and useless as to render any proper understanding impossible without a significant amount of work.
Do you know what a Credit Default Swap is? Or a Collateralized Debt Obligation? No? Of course not, because no one took the time to do a good job explaining any of these high-tech financial instruments to you. Understanding how they went about creating this mess is important to understanding how we are (compared to how we should) go about cleaning up this mess. Especially regarding how we're going to now regulate the financial markets after something like this, without having any information, people fall back on their ideologies, with the "free-marketists" prefering less regulation, tending to blame government incentives for causing problems, vs. "government-interventionists" who believe the government should do more to regulate a problem such as this. However, ultimately, unless you're expert or work heavily in the financial sector, you're not really going to have enough information to come up with any ideas more specific than your ideology would lead you to believe.
I'm of the opinion that, at a minimum, everyone should be watching the news on a daily basis. The only problem with that is you really won't know a whole lot more than you would if you didn't, except you'd get an overview of the days events, divorced from any background or any sense of understanding what's actually happening and WHY. The only way for that idea to work is for the mainstream media to do its due dilligence, get the information we need, and give it to us in a form we can understand and use. If the mainstream media fails to properly explain such a momumental event, it's about time we demanded some change from them as well.
Part of the problem is that because of the way information has been given to us in the past, we've gotten to used to getting this "half-information" and believe we actually have an understanding of the issues because of it. However, every time I've gotten what I thought was an understanding of an event or issue from the mainstream media, further investigation always proved me wrong. If we believe we're getting enough information from the media, there is no impetus to change it.
It's a matter of recognizing the obvious limitations of the mainstream media and demanding better from them, as servers of the public good.
I was re-reading over one of my old, ranty posts about the RNC/DNC. One of the comments I made was regarding the mainstream media's failure to adequately explain the causes of the Russia's invasion of Georgia, back when that was going down. Now that the financial markets are a mess, I come back to criticize the mainstream media AGAIN for doing a piss-poor job of explaining what happened during the financial crisis, why it happened, what that means for you and me, what the bail-out is REALLY going to do, etc. I don't anyone has a good sense of it, myself included, and I don't think the entirety of that is due to people's laziness. People care about this; it's going to effect them in intense and long-lasting ways. When a country with an economy such as ours moves into a recession, the shit hits the fan. Up to this point, the information has been so scattered and useless as to render any proper understanding impossible without a significant amount of work.
Do you know what a Credit Default Swap is? Or a Collateralized Debt Obligation? No? Of course not, because no one took the time to do a good job explaining any of these high-tech financial instruments to you. Understanding how they went about creating this mess is important to understanding how we are (compared to how we should) go about cleaning up this mess. Especially regarding how we're going to now regulate the financial markets after something like this, without having any information, people fall back on their ideologies, with the "free-marketists" prefering less regulation, tending to blame government incentives for causing problems, vs. "government-interventionists" who believe the government should do more to regulate a problem such as this. However, ultimately, unless you're expert or work heavily in the financial sector, you're not really going to have enough information to come up with any ideas more specific than your ideology would lead you to believe.
I'm of the opinion that, at a minimum, everyone should be watching the news on a daily basis. The only problem with that is you really won't know a whole lot more than you would if you didn't, except you'd get an overview of the days events, divorced from any background or any sense of understanding what's actually happening and WHY. The only way for that idea to work is for the mainstream media to do its due dilligence, get the information we need, and give it to us in a form we can understand and use. If the mainstream media fails to properly explain such a momumental event, it's about time we demanded some change from them as well.
Part of the problem is that because of the way information has been given to us in the past, we've gotten to used to getting this "half-information" and believe we actually have an understanding of the issues because of it. However, every time I've gotten what I thought was an understanding of an event or issue from the mainstream media, further investigation always proved me wrong. If we believe we're getting enough information from the media, there is no impetus to change it.
It's a matter of recognizing the obvious limitations of the mainstream media and demanding better from them, as servers of the public good.
Thursday, November 06, 2008
SO MANY QUESTIONS
So few answers
I attend a meditation class on Mondays and Wednesday nights (shout-out to the Interdependance Project - IDP for short - check 'em here: http://theidproject.com/). It's two hours long; for the first hour, we meditate, then we break, and during the second half, we have a discussion, usually centered around some particular concept of Buddhism and how to integrate that concept into your own life (I'm not a Buddhist, although I certainly buy into a lot of their beliefs, but the group is Buddhist). However, before we break, the teacher (Ethan Nichtern, the MAN, BTW) asks if there is any questions regarding meditation practice, and invariably, questions come up regarding a particular experience someone had while meditating, or what they're supposed to be "doing" during meditation. For some reason, I'm always surprised at these questions. Meditation never really seemed that complicated.
What are you "doing" during meditation? Nothing, really. It's really just the 5 or 10 minutes of the day you have to check in with yourself and say "So how am I?" It's probably the only 5-10 minutes you aren't doing anything but sitting and breathing. Granted, there are many different ways to "go about" meditating, so to speak, including several different types of contemplative meditation. However, during mindful meditation, the point is that there is no point.
This kind of ties into the problem I have when I try to explain to people why I meditate (or at least why I did; to be perfectly honest, I've lapsed on practice as of late). Personally, I know I feel a tangible change in the way my mind works after having sat down and meditated for 10 minutes. I just can't communicate these benefits to anyone who hasn't done it and feels that concentrating is a waste of time.
It's interesting to watch as Buddhism and other Easten traditions start to make their way over here into the West. Especially given our culture here, with our emphasis on "work work work, make money, buy things, work more to make more money to buy more things," seeing a contemplative practice such as meditation or yoga make its way into the mainstream is really a great thing for this country and this culture. Here in the West, though, I don't think people quite get it; I don't even think I quite get it either.
That's why I noticed these questions being asked. I've had some interesting experiences during meditation, and I know I feel better after having done it. However, as Westerners, and perhaps more importantly, as Americans, we bring this essentially Protestant work ethic to meditation practice with us. Yes, it is all called meditation PRACTICE, but no, you aren't doing it to get "better" at it, per se. This is where I see the disconnect and the questions: what is the point or purpose of meditation?
The question itself, though, assumes that to do something, it has to serve a purpose, and that's what I identify as a Western cultural value that causes us to resist opening up to meditation. If you look around at a lot of the Western institutions, companies, etc., that "sell" meditation to the public, a lot of them advertise particular benefits: it will increase clarity, make you calmer, reduce stress, and all other sorts of benefits. None of those, however, are really the point of meditation, though, and because people are sold these as the benefits or uses of meditation, they lose the intuitive understanding of the whole "point is no point" ethos of meditation and, to an extant, Buddhism in general.
Now, I'm not an expert on Buddhism, its presence in the West, meditation, or even American culture. Based on my impression of these things, this is how I put them together and currently see meditation/Buddhism's presence in the West. My understanding of Buddhism is rather limited, unfortunately. Is all of this accurate?
So few answers
I attend a meditation class on Mondays and Wednesday nights (shout-out to the Interdependance Project - IDP for short - check 'em here: http://theidproject.com/). It's two hours long; for the first hour, we meditate, then we break, and during the second half, we have a discussion, usually centered around some particular concept of Buddhism and how to integrate that concept into your own life (I'm not a Buddhist, although I certainly buy into a lot of their beliefs, but the group is Buddhist). However, before we break, the teacher (Ethan Nichtern, the MAN, BTW) asks if there is any questions regarding meditation practice, and invariably, questions come up regarding a particular experience someone had while meditating, or what they're supposed to be "doing" during meditation. For some reason, I'm always surprised at these questions. Meditation never really seemed that complicated.
What are you "doing" during meditation? Nothing, really. It's really just the 5 or 10 minutes of the day you have to check in with yourself and say "So how am I?" It's probably the only 5-10 minutes you aren't doing anything but sitting and breathing. Granted, there are many different ways to "go about" meditating, so to speak, including several different types of contemplative meditation. However, during mindful meditation, the point is that there is no point.
This kind of ties into the problem I have when I try to explain to people why I meditate (or at least why I did; to be perfectly honest, I've lapsed on practice as of late). Personally, I know I feel a tangible change in the way my mind works after having sat down and meditated for 10 minutes. I just can't communicate these benefits to anyone who hasn't done it and feels that concentrating is a waste of time.
It's interesting to watch as Buddhism and other Easten traditions start to make their way over here into the West. Especially given our culture here, with our emphasis on "work work work, make money, buy things, work more to make more money to buy more things," seeing a contemplative practice such as meditation or yoga make its way into the mainstream is really a great thing for this country and this culture. Here in the West, though, I don't think people quite get it; I don't even think I quite get it either.
That's why I noticed these questions being asked. I've had some interesting experiences during meditation, and I know I feel better after having done it. However, as Westerners, and perhaps more importantly, as Americans, we bring this essentially Protestant work ethic to meditation practice with us. Yes, it is all called meditation PRACTICE, but no, you aren't doing it to get "better" at it, per se. This is where I see the disconnect and the questions: what is the point or purpose of meditation?
The question itself, though, assumes that to do something, it has to serve a purpose, and that's what I identify as a Western cultural value that causes us to resist opening up to meditation. If you look around at a lot of the Western institutions, companies, etc., that "sell" meditation to the public, a lot of them advertise particular benefits: it will increase clarity, make you calmer, reduce stress, and all other sorts of benefits. None of those, however, are really the point of meditation, though, and because people are sold these as the benefits or uses of meditation, they lose the intuitive understanding of the whole "point is no point" ethos of meditation and, to an extant, Buddhism in general.
Now, I'm not an expert on Buddhism, its presence in the West, meditation, or even American culture. Based on my impression of these things, this is how I put them together and currently see meditation/Buddhism's presence in the West. My understanding of Buddhism is rather limited, unfortunately. Is all of this accurate?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)