Sunday, May 04, 2008

Metaphors to Muse Upon: Smart Zombie

I’m a sucker for a scary story. That fascination is perhaps most notable in my penchant for the series of Of the Dead films produced by writer/director George Romero over the past 30 years. Both an artist and a social scientist, Romero has always intended the slowly-moving, cannibalistic, reanimated corpses of his films to provide social commentary in representing some identified marginalized “outsider” group of people whom the “living” (i.e. the wealthy, the privileged, the elite) would rather not engage, and further fear will come to “get them”, consume them, and take away their “life” and privilege if they get too close. Zombies look human, but are not treated as such by those still living, and the tendencies of the walking dead to hunger for the flesh of the living does not make them desirable company. As a result, the living exist in ever-shrinking and more sophisticated fortresses while roving hordes of ghoulish dead stare in from the outside, hungry for what they see and yet find themselves unable to attain.

For my part, I grew up very much in the world of the “living”. The son of two attorneys, one a Prosecutor, City Attorney and Judge, the other a clerk for two Federal Judges, I never considered that there might be another side to the world. And yet, through my own curiosity and ever-deepening forays into the world of the “dead” through short-term mission ventures in 18 countries, inner-city dwelling, and advocacy and community development work, i found myself one day awakening to the notion that whether bitten or bidden, I had become “dead” myself. In the last ten years, I have scrubbed toilets as a janitor and thrown papers for a local newspaper to augment my full-time job, only to engage the desperation of being financially “short” at the end of each month. My wife and I have served discarded, pregnant, teen-aged girls in Michiana as full time “house parents” for a local teen maternity home, and witnessed the ripple-effects of abandonment and social stigma on each of the young women’s lives. I have worked to engineer holistic systems of care with Granger Community Church to help men, women and children who are locked in the bonds of generational poverty to acquire faith, food, vocational training, medical help, high school equivalency and positive relationships within their community. I have walked for the past 6 years alongside Indian men and women planting churches in remote contexts where people sell their lives and their families to bonded slave owners for the cost of a few dollars, and, because of the oppressiveness of the reinforced caste-system, have little hope of changing their plight. I have done all these things and more with an ever-growing sense of powerlessness at my inability to help overturn the systems and structures that have prompted such bonds, and find that I am now unable to see the injustice and disparity between the “living” and the “dead” without myself beginning to feel… hungry.

Hungry for Awareness. Whether in government (local or national), corporations (domestic or multi-national) or community-based organizations and initiatives (churches, faith communities, NGO’s, etc), the oppressed people I engage every day are simply not aware of how best to navigate their own transformation to the land of the living. In addition, continual marginalization (overtly or covertly) by the “living” keeps the mob just out of view enough to prevent true efforts at bridge-building, advocacy, and grass-roots motivated change.

Hungry for Organization. In both the US or environments like India, I have been continually frustrated by the lack of concentrated or coordinated efforts between businesses, NGO’s, government and community organizations to help the “dead”. Few initiatives are backed by memoranda or contracts with specific and measurable metrics (what I call “relationships with teeth”), and program isolation and lack of coordination prevents sustainable change from happening. The result of both is that the “dead” stay dead, and all for what is, in many instances, a simple lack of adequate organization, contractual understanding, accountability and defined deliverables between organization types.

Hungry for Justice. Whether in bonded slave, sex trafficking or sweatshop environments in India or the red tape surrounding the working poor, ex-offender and welfare states of the “dead” that I have engaged in South Bend and Chicago, the simple reality is that most of the “dead” do not know what rights they have, or how to access them. In addition, the gap between legislation and enforcement is daunting at a government level (India, for instance, has anti-slavery legislation, but enforcement is lax if not totally nonexistent), and in the instance of corporations that are willing to be socially responsible, there is often too little concern or knowledge about the holistic concerns that govern the poor and marginalized to truly help them to be healthy or deliver to their potential.

And so I am setting out to gain the ability to combat those barriers which I have identified in my work to help the “dead” thus far. Specifically, the fact that the bulk of those barriers center around policy, systems and infrastructure supporting effective grass-roots initiatives lends me to my current path of pursuing some course to better enhance my effectiveness. I may now be one of the “dead” myself, but I walk forward not with the same mob mindlessness that is typical of those staggering corpses in Romero’s works. Rather, I remember “life”. I still remember what is possible, and have not yet succumbed to the numbness that layers of poverty and injustice can heap upon one until they forget their humanity altogether. I wish to add an element of focused intellect and skill to the horde… a “smarter zombie” of sorts, capable of rallying the mob and giving to it a direction and machination that will begin to build its return to the land of the “living” while simultaneously working with the “living” themselves to become aware of their privilege, and willingly and generously begin to open the gates of their walled privileges and embrace those standing and staring hungrily from the outside.

Through all of this, achieving any skill for myself is of little value if I do not further disseminate the benefits of that skill to those others in the mob, and facilitate the continual increasing, investing and slowly building of their momentum. In the end, I suppose, that my hope is that mob itself can become “smart”. And once we are “smart”, we will no longer be easily dismissed by the shrinking numbers of “living” in the world. Further, our flesh will no longer rot, our stagger no longer be plagued with mindlessness, our hunger no longer focused on violently consuming that which we see around us because we will have access to the same tangible and intangible benefits shared by the “living”. Our rage will subside as we are treated not as a faceless and undesirable mob ever encroaching from the outside, but rather as respected equals in the land of the “living”, with a full and equitable place in the world around us.


Friday, February 15, 2008

My New Kindle...

Okay, so admittedly, i'm a closet Geek (among other things... closet Goth, closet Ninja -- kind of reminds me of Hellboy and Professor Bruttenholm's admission of "being a Catholic... among other things"), and have a penchant for new gadgets when they surface whether or not they have much direct bearing on my life. However, I just bought a new Kindle from Amazon, and am totally psyched about it! Want to know what it is?

1) Kindle "digitizes" all books and puts them in a nifty e-format that allows you to keep all your books in one little device. This is particularly handy for me as i seem to be continually lugging 15 - 20 pounds of books around with me everywhere i go, and so now won't have to. Plus, i can store around 250 books on my little device, so if, on our next trip to India, i get tired of reading one book, i can choose from 249 others if i want to and never have to add any more weight than the 6 oz or so that the device weighs itself.

2) Kindle links directly to Amazon.com and provides you instant access to their on-line bookstore. If you wanted to download...say... Bill Strickland's newest book called "Make the Impossible Possible" (i just did! Can't wait to read it!), you just click "go to Kindle Store", type in the title, and in less than 1 minute, the book is yours on your Kindle. It also uses Sprint's network, so there's no need to find a "wi-fi hotspot". If Sprint has cell phone coverage, you have access. And no, you don't even have to pay for a "monthly charge" or anything. It's just free for you if you own a Kindle.

3) Books are cheaper for Kindle! Usually, anything you download for Kindle is about 1/3 or more off the price of a "regular book". Plus, Bestsellers and New Releases all sell for $9.99. In addition, i've found several books that are literally $.99 or less than $3.00. I downloaded Inazo Nitobe's classic "Bushido, The Soul of Japan" for $.99.

4) Amazon backs it! Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com basically said that his goal is to have anything ever printed, and everything printed from this point forward digitally available for Kindle in the next 18-24 months. This is actually the biggest reason i bought a Kindle instead of a Sony eReader or an Illiad. Both of the latter are actually better designed products than the Kindle, i think, but neither are backed by Amazon.com's powerhouse for delivery of product.

5) Kindle has cool other "accessories". Don't know what a word or term is? No problem, it's hot-linked to Wikipedia and you can find out. You can also add your own highlights, notes and bookmarks just like in a "real book". The display is also not backlit, so it even LOOKS like the pages of a regular book and won't burn your eyes over long-term reads.

6) Paper is evil and must therefore be destroyed! No seriously. I HATE paper. It's messy, wasteful and now, unnecessary! Every time you buy a Kindle book, you save a tree... or close to it. No more paper books means it's better for the environment. And leaves a lot more space on your bookshelf for other knick-knacks.

7) Everything you buy is backed up on Amazon's server. If you ever lose or break your Kindle... no problem. Your entire library just loads right to your new one!

Like all products, it does have some quirky inconveniences, like you can't really share, "own" or lend a copy of your books to anyone else. You also can't export your notes or highlights to a digital document (to my knowledge) for easy incorporation or usage, and finally, you are, to some degree, eventually still dependent upon that scourge of all cool technology, "battery life" (though Kindle's battery lasts several days before needing a charge). It's also expensive. At $400 each, i became very grateful for my professional expense money or i would have had to still be sticking to dead trees. Also, Amazon is so back-loaded with orders for Kindles that if you order one today, it may take as long as a month for you to get it. sigh.

But all things considered, i really like mine!

You can check out some of the other specs and features for Kindle from Amazon here.