not long ago, i had someone ask me, "are you really into freeing tibet, or do you just like that shirt?"
which is like asking, "are you really against cancer, or do you just like wearing that bracelet?"
a question to which i usually respond, "actually, i'm pretty pro-cancer, i just have a thing for strapping uncomfortable bright pink rubber bands to my wrist."
now normally i don't strap those things to my wrist, but i know someone who is dying (though she won't admit it) of breast cancer, and solidarity is golden.
but back to tibet.
how could anyone be against a free tibet?
tibet has no natural resources to exploit. tibet has but one human resource: humans. but china isn't using them for anything... not at the moment, anyway.
tibet has one economic resource: tourism. but china isn't exploiting that one either, and by the time they change their mind and start letting people into tibet (if they ever do) it won't look much like the old world tibet that people actually want to visit.
tibet has never once taken an aggressive stance on international relations, or made any sort of threatening gestures to any other country or culture (fuck, man, the dalai lama chose to exile himself, rather than fight).
so why should china give a shit about tibet?
ironically, that very rhetorical question is why the rest of the world should give a shit about tibet.
because china has no clear reason for it's insane strangle hold on tibet, yet it won't loosen it's grip, not one iota.
the unfortunate thing is, between cheap chinese toys, and international federal loans, we will never lift one collective american finger to help tibet, until the himalayas topple down on top of them, and oprah asks us to donate money.
likewise, probably nobody is planning on helping zimbabwe out, until we find oil there (which begs the question, might tibet have a cache of rare earth? all those hybrid auto makers, windmill farms, and extended life laptop companies might pay a pretty penny when tibet is the last foreign source...). and probably nothing is going to progress, cuba-wise, unless a hurricane actually uproots havana and lands it directly on top of miami, and we most likely won't get serious about helping out with the mexican drug war until a wildfire burns the whole place down and salma hayek and her huge boobs start a relief fund.
now let's talk haiti.
george clooney's hopes for haiti are modest, but let's face it, they ain't coming true.
george clooney's hopes for haiti, are that haiti's recovery won't stagnate once the incident has passed from the collective conscious of the conscious collective.
as i said, it ain't gonna happen.
let's face it, this country loves to rally around things. hell, the whole western world does.
it's why we went from a stance of absolute uninvolvement in international relations, to the first ones into every potential possible future yes/no/maybe so war zone since dubbya dubbya two.
we discovered that having a bad guy is so much easier than having a good idea.
we've made uniting for the good of humanity synonymous with fighting a common enemy.
but when it does come to rallying around a good cause, we love us some telethons, some charity concerts, some "i gave to such and such relief effort and all i got was this stupid" t-shirts. we love things like "text to give", and telling our friends that we donated to help starving kids in war-torn where's it, and when we called in, alec baldwin answered the phone.
but if we actually cared about helping the world, it wouldn't be so necessary to garnish up our charity efforts like this.
you know how you (well maybe not you, and definitely not me, but "grown ups" mostly) keep folding chairs in the garage just in case you want to have people over and they need a place to sit?
well, it strikes me that if we really thought that at some point we might want to help out another country in need (or even ourselves. cough COUGH... katrina COUGH!), we would have wearhouses full of heavy duty tents (like the military uses to live in when they are down in it), and heavy blankets, and towels, and cots or at least light mattresses or hammocks, and how about syringes and bandages and splints, how about eye glasses and shoes and clothing, how about water tanks with filters, power generators, and flashlights, and kerosine lamps, batteries, shovels, picks, axes, hoses, tractors and backhoes.
just a huge airplane hangar size building with nothing but this stuff from floor to ceiling, and next door? another airplane hangar, with a big ass cargo plane that's got nothing better to do than wait there until haiti gets swallowed up by the bowels of hell. and at the front of this wearhouse, there's a desk, with a real comfy chair, and a phone, a phone that only rings when new orleans sinks into the sea, or when thailand gets washed away by a tsunami, and that phone rings real loud because in that comfy chair, at that desk, sits a guy, and he might not be the most spry guy around, but he doesn't need to be, he's just the foreman, and maybe he dozes off now and again, but that's ok, cause that phone rings real loud. and in the top drawer of that guy's desk, there's a check book. there's a check book so that when shit does hit the fan, we can just say, hey, kraft, coca-cola, yum! foods, monsanto, we're taking all this food, and sending it to haiti, and we'll be paying you cost for it. here's a check, and no, there is nothing you can do about it. now get your guys to load it onto that there big ass plane, and shut your face.
the purpose of this wearhouse, and this plane, and this guy, and this check book is so that, when it all goes down, somebody calls that phone, and that old guy, he tells his weahousemen to load up the planes, we're going to port au prince. when it all goes down, haiti doesn't have to wait for george clooney to jump through the necessary hoops to create an entirely new charitable organization, then hire a graphic design team to make t-shirts and tote bags and a snappy website, then hire a PR firm to advertise it, then get all his celebrity friends to get together for a sing-along, then wait for people to send in money, then send the money to the red cross, then wait for the red cross to hash out a deal with REI to buy 10,000 tents at cost, then reassure REI that they will be able to write this off, then wait for REI to ship those flimsy 4 person camp tents to a country that was living in used camp tents even before the ground collapsed beneath them. meanwhile, the first shovel gets offloaded just about the time that a weeping mother is dragging her mangled child from the wreckage after 50 hours of clawing a tunnel with her bare hands. and while this has all happened relatively quickly considering how much bureaucratic red tape is involved and how slow international shipping actually is, and how bad celebrities are at promptly returning phone calls, by the time those shiny new tents hit the ground and anderson cooper is there to be all old-guy-sexy and coddle a small foreign child while he pretends to speak creole french and the child is just a little shy is all, by that time, we the people have practically already forgotten again that haiti existed at all, and those tents on the ground and anderson cooper's strong but gentle eyes seal the deal. yes, haiti has been saved, we can all throw out those tote bags now and wait for matt lauer to do a today show human interest piece on renewed interest in haitian culture in 10 years or so (there won't actually be renewed interest in haitian culture in 10 years, but nobody watching TV at that hour is registering anything, anyway. they'll mostly confuse haiti with jamaica, or south africa. anyway it was some place with a lot of black people who talked kinda funny).
meanwhile the people of haiti are standing on the shore while the relief workers shove off, and the cruise ships pull in right behind them. and they'll turn around and shuffle back to real life.
real life in an impoverished, corrupt, violent country, where everyday looks exactly like those horrible horrible scenes of devastation that we just assumed we unique to the aftermath of this most recent tragedy.
they'll return to a half baked "salvation" by western world, and they are no better off then when they started. in fact, we have most likely left them worse off.
we have left them with high hopes, fallen short. we have left them with a bunch of giveaway extreme makeover: home edition t-shirts, and some used water filters, and truckfulls of dirty syringes and bloody bandages that they have no way of discarding safely because they were just burning their trash in the streets anyway, even before their homes got destroyed.
we'll have left them with a hundred thousand plastic water bottles that they won't know what to do with, because relief workers need filtered glacial mineral spring water.
a hundred thousand plastic water bottles, and as many infected wounds, because dr sanjay gupta insists that the notion of infection spreading after a disaster like this is just an old wives tale.
a hundred thousand festering infected wounds because if you cut yourself and walked around in haiti 6 months ago, you would get a nasty infection, too.
a hundred thousand sick children, because once we see water flowing through those pipes, we will assume that they are all systems go, once more, even though the water to which we have restored flow is now, and has always been filthy and infested with diseases and chemicals.
a hundred thousand feverish babies, sweating through night terrors because surfAid won't send doctors to places that don't have a wicked shore break.
a hundred thousand people sleeping in tents made of sticks and old bed sheets, because habitat for humanity is one of the most pompous ass backward charities on the planet, and they will rebuild those houses in haiti, not concerning themselves with the fact that the needy people in haiti never had houses. and HFH will rebuild the houses of the well off, and they will leave. patting themselves on the back. congratulations team, job done! and those 30 or 40 people will move back into their nice new clean environmentally friendly homes from which they will continue to abuse the working class, and that very working class will be left out in the streets before they can even raise their hands, and clear the dust from their throats.
a hundred thousand poor starving undereducated homeless jobless sick people in haiti, maybe more.
because there were a hundred thousand poor starving undereducated homeless jobless sick people in haiti before the earthquake hit...
maybe more (well, not maybe).
but you wouldn't know that to ask anyone who's taken a caribbean cruise that stops in port au prince.
you might not know that to ask most people who live in the developed world.
as for the western world, what of all those poor, starving, undereducated, homeless, jobless, and sick people in the US?
i thank my mom for this idea. the analysis is all mine, though.
we take those cruise ships that have the massive testicles to actually use a country like haiti as their playground, and cancel all trips for a couple of years.
then we load them up with all our unemployed skilled laborers, and send them down to haiti, and for a couple of years they have a room on the ship, and they head landward each morning and work at rebuilding the entire country. they live, free, on the boat, their expenses paid for, and when it's all said and done, each one gets a check for services rendered. sort of like a GI bill, only they didn't have to kill anybody to get it.
in fact, they got it for saving lives.
at this point you might be asking what cellular biology has anything to do with this.
it's about community and cause.
in cellular biology, we can see everything we need to see, in order to live a good life. in order to recapture that thing that we keep going to war to find again. that certain special something that, for example, the US felt post WWII.
that thing that feels like a life lived, friends loved, diems carpe'ed, dances danced, songs sung, experiences had, opportunities seized, regrets? we had a few, but then again, too few to mention.
that elemental thing that feels like life maybe does have some greater meaning, even if that greater meaning is simply to live a good life.
whatever that might mean.
consider the human body.
it is made up of a massive amount of genetic material.
and each bit of genetic material in the human body carries the exact same genetic code.
each bit is exactly the same.
so how does a cell know that it should look and behave like an eye?
or a heart?
or a lung?
or a brain?
each strand of DNA has certain genes turned on or off, or turned down or turned up, and that gives it a purpose.
just to make this easy let's say, a hundred thousand little strands of DNA in the human body.
and this group here, they have been trained to be eyeballs, and that group there, they have been trained to be a heart.
now certainly there are cells that are told, "you are an anti-body, you handle hostile agents" but they are simply a line of defense. they don't jump out of your body and attack viruses and allergens in the world around you. they are passive until needed, and then they simply contain and dispose of the threat, and when the time comes, they shut down operations, and let the body die... and eventually the body must die, otherwise it can't give back to the natural equilibrium, and future bodies cannot find life.
but no matter what a cell is "trained" to do, one cell alone is nothing more than a cell that looks exactly like any other cell, full of DNA that looks exactly like all the other DNA.
together, the eye cells make an eye, and the heart cells make a heart.
what's even more amazing is that you can't just have a bunch of cells that think, "i am lungs" and expect them to start breathing when you clump them together like a meatball.
you need cells to act like capillaries, and cells to absorb oxygen, and cells that behave like muscular tissue, and cells that filter out toxins, and you need all those cells to know where and how to perform those roles, and you need them all to accept each other, or the whole system fails.
like a rejected transplant, or a cancer (which for the record, i am against).
now, sociobiology (which is a whole different -ology) will tell you that a cell, left alone, will do nothing but reproduce and/or die. consequently, the human life has no greater task than to reproduce and/or die, and everything else we do is simply a factor of one or the other.
it may or may not be that bleak, but one thing is easy to grasp, here: if all we are made of is genetic material, then aren't we just a big clumped up meatball of genetic material?
genetic material doesn't talk, it doesn't pontificate, it doesn't love, it doesn't prefer its steak medium well, or care which team wins the super bowl, or laugh at the stupid commercials that run during the TV time outs.
so what makes the whole so different from the sum of it's parts?
you could say that at the base level, the parts are first given knowledge.
this is how you become brain matter.
then it is given purpose.
you are part of the brain, this is your function in the brain.
then it's given companionship.
these are your fellow brain cells.
then it finds acceptance and cooperation. if it fails to do this, it dies, or it poisons the system.
the brain only works if you work together.
but this is where it gets hazy.
fortunately, this is the part we don't really need clarification on.
because somewhere between all these identical cells coming together to form eyes, to form a brain, to form a heart. somewhere between reproduction, mass assembly, and death, this meat ball of a hundred thousand little strands of identical DNA starts to see, starts to think, starts to live.
so if we are all slave to the laws of cellular biology, then doesn't it hold true that if a hundred thousand (or even 6.5 billion) identical little human beings (and we are) started working together, we might stop poisoning the system? if we all lived with knowledge, and purpose, and companionship, and acceptance, and cooperation, doesn't it hold true that somewhere along the line, without us even knowing what happened, we will begin to breathe free, to think, to live...
to live a good life?
and when that happens, we won't even need to know what a good life is, because when you're living a good life, you don't have time to worry about that kind of shit.
