Never Walked In High Heels

My cable breaks down all the time. I’ve stopped buying magazines because, quite simply, they depress me and as you already know by the first of this year I made a conscious choice not to follow the news. These three things , combined with the fact that I don’t fit into the traditional mold of what a young woman ought to be, means that most days whenever I walk through the shopping center to get to work I feel like I am on the outside looking in at the world rather than the other way around. The funny thing is, people actually can’t stand those of us who are able to watch the world go by. They want everyone to be caught up in it and whisked away in some weird combination of lust and greed. The truth is, we live in a world which craves cultural homogeny. Everyone should want what we want.

This is the point in time when my political science creature would step up and make some sort of philosophical commentary about the state of the world. The truth is you could blame capitalism for this rat race fueled by advertising and big companies wanting to sell more, thereby making the rich richer. Or you could blame socialism, fueled by an unattainable ideal that everyone would not only be equal but also the same, have the same items, want the same things, and not lack any of the same necessities. Someone could probably find a way to blame every political philosophy in the world should they want to, but it doesn’t change the fact that every single one of us wants the world to operate our way. And every single one of us thinks deep down that our way of seeing the world is the best way to do so.

We are adept at filling the silences in our mind with the sound of things which we don’t have and the craving for those things that we want. Humanity, as a whole, excels in creating idols of ourselves and being prepared to seek whatever we desire at all possible costs. The cult of homogeny means that deep down we are unable to understand why we don’t have everything we want, but also why we want these items in the first place. Furthermore it means that we cannot begin to comprehend the idea that maybe not everyone wants items such as the strongest army in the world, more wealth, more land, or simply more food. But also it means that we can’t even begin to see why anyone would see the world any different than we see it. After all, when an individual sees himself as the center of the universe, there is only one way to look at each individual object in relation to him.

Looking at the world from the outside, being unable to run around in high heeled shoes, incapable of grabbing the latest mocha frappuccino in a Starbucks cup and refusing to have any contact with the popular hysteria brought on by the news means that I do have to see the world differently. There are moments where I catch myself standing in line at a checkout counter trying to decipher the headlines on a magazine cover and having no idea what the lingo is referring to. I have to say, I might not like it when I have no idea what’s going on around me, but I do enjoy it when I don’t feel obligated to sit with the entire pasteurized culture that I am surrounded by.

I am told by my friends that sometime soon, I will have to be sucked in to what they now call the “Two Percent Culture”. That is a place where only two percent of all real people actually honestly sit in. The rest of the people skim themselves off the top or try to be caught up in a whirlwind of frenzy. But based on cultural centrifuge which somehow acts as a great equalizer, so that they too can seem to belong. But the truth is I never think I will fit in there. Moreover, I don’t think that I want to.

My cousin is trying to help me walk through his sunken living room. I am tiny and still trying to get my legs under my hips. Most days that fight is a losing battle. He is a foot taller than me and attempts to wrap his arms around me so that I won’t fall. Of course this constriction is too much for my body to bear, and I end up on the floor. My aunt comes to the rescue.

“Don’t help her too much, there is such a thing as helping someone to such an extreme degree that you wind up smothering them and doing more harm than good. Just hold her hand if she needs help walking sweetie, that’s enough.”

Fast forward twenty years and I am watching the very same words come out of a friend’s mouth. She is on TV speaking about the adoption of orphans worldwide. Programs set up by the government are failing these children right and left (it doesn’t matter which government: state government, federal government; Russian; Chinese; they all seem to not be providing for children in desperate need of homes). Individual action needs to be taken, she says this over and over. If half the churches in America would have one family that would adopt one child, we could give a home to each child in America this year. I am shocked. Just one family in half the churches in America? That’s all it would take? Really? I stare blankly at my computer screen doing the math, wondering what would happen if some churches would find three or four families that would want to adopt and fully support them. The calculations in my head are rolling and then I immediately make the leap: What if we started a government program that would take in all the orphans? There are so few of them, surely someone in Washington could come up with…

And now we’re back to the original problem that programs, it turns out, just don’t work and that children don’t need anymore programs, they need individuals willing to step up to the plate and be a family.

When there is a problem of any kind, why is it that our instinct moves immediately towards a programmatic solution, instead of individuals taking initiative? I don’t believe that most people are lazy. After all, many problems we face are so inconvenient to everybody that perceived laziness is sheer naivety. It’s that the lazy solution turns into a much more complicated problem.

Living here in the U.K, I am often struck by how many individuals consider money as a form of charity. Is that it? Is it simply that we feel we are doing something by throwing money at a problem? Government money, our money? But do we really think a simple check can solve all of our problems? In this way of course, writing a check or forming a large program which we support financially but take little direct action in sometimes doesn’t do a whole lot but line the pockets of bureaucrats.

It’s easy to talk about improving the world in comfortable leather armchairs when we have our noses behind thick books and talking about items such as programs in theory. But money, although it has a great deal of power, is also hugely impotent. If you literally were to just throw money at a problem nothing would happen except that there would be a pile of money on top of the problem. A problem with a large amount of financial pools never gets to the core of an issue, changing the hearts and minds of people. It always takes individuals doing something directly, whether it comes from using money appropriately or taking some sort of physical response in order to find a solution. And what are the chances that members of a government who meet behind closed doors and drive Mercedes actually know how to solve a problem when they have never faced it themselves? Not very likely. The fact is my aunt was right. Mothering a problem is not the same as solving it; it just suffocates those who have fallen underneath and are already suffering to begin with.

“Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government.” –James Madison

The 188 pulls up to my stop and lowers its ramp. The nervousness in my stomach disappears for the time being and I am momentarily at ease. In my experience there is about a fifteen percent failure rate of bus ramps not opening up. Now I just have to worry about the bus ramp opening up when I want to get off.

“It sure was nice of them to put those ramps on buses so you can use them wasn’t it,” a little old Irish lady says to me. Nice? No, actually, it isn’t nice. It is the law. When people with disabilities chained themselves to buses as a form of protest, it took years for the lawmakers to take action. It wasn’t until five years ago that all buses were required to have ramp access before leaving the depot. And even with that rule in effect, I still can’t get on a bus a large percent of the time. Call the accessible transit situation in London frustrating, hellish, difficult, or even unfair if you’d like. But you cannot call it “nice.”

I’m always a bit bewildered by people on either side of the Atlantic who insist that disability legislation is something nice for lawmakers to come up with. I’m with Madison on this one, it is not the role of the government to be charitable or nice. Establishing justice and securing the blessings of liberty and well as promoting the fact that all men are created equal is not merely something “nice” to do. One is baffled why the subject of disability rights is seen as an as issues hand-outs rather than justice.

President Eisenhower ordered the 101st Airborne Division of the United States Army to Little Rock High School to escort nine African American children into having the same education as their white peers. We do not look back on that event and say that Eisenhower was being “nice.” We do not give women the right to vote because it is a matter of social grace. Nor should we promote equal access to public transportation because it can act as a form of alms. Perhaps it is a statement about our society’s views of individuals with physical limitations that we choose to see such issues of inaccessibility as a form of inconvenience rather than social injustice.

The bus stops in Russell Square when myself and the woman alight. I again feel a sense of relief once I reach the pavement and turn to get to my appointment, smiling at the woman out of trained politeness. Looking behind me I see her walking away slowly, dependent on her wooden cane. I can’t help but wonder, as her body becomes increasingly uncooperative with age, if notices that her world is shrinking as well. Perhaps she doesn’t even realize that growing older and loosing stamina shouldn’t result in a smaller world.

Recently, my friends in the UK have been inundating me with horror stories about health care workers taking anything but a patient’s best interest in mind. Yes, I realize that malpractice occurs in America too, and no, this isn’t another health care reform article. My conversations relating the experiences of my mainly able-bodied friends began to make me think about how we, as a society, treat not simply ”the disabled,” but simply the sick, the injured, and the aged as well. Its something even the “experts” can’t seem to get right.

If the mark of how advanced a civilization is how much we have evolved away from barbarism, then surely one definitive measurement of this progress is how we treat the most vulnerable in our society. This, of course includes not only the smallest and the most impoverished but also those whose bodies have turned against them due to either time or condition. And yet, even in our modern age, this level of civility is a standard that has yet to be reached in all but the most exceptional of cases.

This breach of advancement becomes even more despicable when one considers that a breakdown of the human body, in one form or another, is inevitable in all of us. By ignoring or disgracing those whom this breakdown has already occurred in,

what exactly are we trying to accomplish? Perhaps it is that we are afraid to acknowledge that human frailty is everyone’s fate, and the feebleness, the pain, which we see in the eyes of the man lying in front of us from his bed will someday be our own. When we are all faced with our own vulnerabilities, it is within our prideful nature to behave in the worst way possible, particularly when it is embodied not within ourselves but someone else. And so, we go on creating a world which will surly be unprepared for even our weakest days.

For decades, we have made health and caring for those in need of physical help an issue of politics rather than an issue of humanity. Even if we did have universal healthcare throughout the solar system, it does little to care for people in imperfect health outside of an institution. In this way, would the world outside of hospitals and urgent care center be fairer, or would it simply be cheaper to institutionalize the frail who inconvenience us to be dogmatically watched after? If we mean to fix all our health related issues with improving our respect for the frailty of the human condition, both the politicians and the doctors have fooled us into we our much more evolved simply by keeping our weaknesses out of sight.

Of course the words ‘integration’ and ‘rehabilitation’ are words that we hear those dressed up as reformers on the news shows spout out as well, but there are little visible effects of an attempt to improve the quality of life for individuals who don’t have the most cooperative body. Even the most compassionate health care which costs nothing cannot alter the fact that even today, even in the richest and arguably the most advanced and compassionate nations in the world, some schools still refuse to open their doors to disabled children and architects choose to put steps rather than ramps outside of new buildings because the former “looks more traditional.” This says nothing about the countless small issues of discrimination and even hatefulness that occur at the checkout lines or railway platforms.

If we consider ourselves an advanced society we are grossly mistaken. If we think any sort of government act will force us into being more progressive or charitable, we are lying to each other. Those are the changes to a culture which cannot take place by asking doctors to see more people or even handing complicated issues over to experts so we can keep our hands clean. We do a terrible job taking care of people who we find inconvenient in life specifically because we have built a world where their life is inconvenient. But all to often, by the time we realize how inconvenient the human condition actually is, is the time we’ve succumbed to it ourselves.

Last night I became engrossed in a debate with a fellow American about whether or not it was appropriate for us to bow when meeting the Queen of England… should we ever do so. Her argument was that it is British custom bow and “when in Rome…” The problem is, there is a difference between following cultural custom because you are a guest and completing an act of submission, which is what the bow symbolized originally.

I’m not going to talk about the point of the American Revolution and the preamble of the Constitution ensuring that Americans bow to no one. Such an argument is quickly, even if irrationally, dismissed in a postmodern world. But I do want to challenge the argument that people give: Americans should bow to the Queen as a sign of respect?.

Respect for what exactly?

If it’s respect for the culture, this is a shaky argument to say the least. I’ve never walked down Tottenham Court Road and seen one man bow to another. Unlike the Japanese, Brits are not normally the bowing type these days contrary to what you may read in fairy tales. That’s why businessmen bow when they are over in the Tokyo office. This is not a bow I have a problem with.

So then, why do British people bow to the Queen? Simply put, because she is their queen. They do not bow to their prime minister or any other member of their government. They bow to no other foreign regent but their own; British people don’t bow to the king of Saudi Arabia because he is not their sovereign. And likewise, Queen Elizabeth is not ours.

You will now no doubt say, “you should respect a world leader.” I will never disagree with this. But since when does showing respect to people mean bowing to them simply because they wear a crown on their heads. For that matter, what makes her a world leader? She was born into a regal position, this is very true, and so were many world leaders. One might even very well argue the same about a wealthy man born into his privileged position. But by being a leader it is inherent the one leads. According to most of my friends here in the UK, the only leadership activity she undertakes is putting on the crown.

I bow to no one except to God. The American Constitution and my own faith are far too engrained in me to even consider doing otherwise. Some might call it fanaticism, others can call it arrogance. But I personally think no one should be obliged to bow down to another person, ever. If we are all made of the same stuff, if we are all equal as people and as cultures, why should a title be acknowledged at all, let alone with an act which historically signifies acquiescence. You are still fearfully and wonderfully made, even in a place as sophisticated as Rome.

I’ve been told there was recently a horrific earthquake in Haiti. My pastor tells me the president’s approval ratings are at fifty percent. Evidently there’s been a change over in congress. Supposedly Google and China are at odds. Oh and Johnny Depp is dead (I read that one on Twitter… it wound up being a hoax).

Other than that I have no idea what’s going on in the world. I haven’t turned on the news, listened to my favorite talk radio station, or opened a paper since New Year’s Eve. This was the resolution I made for myself. And so, what I know of the world I get in snippets: the boldface overly dramatic Evening Standard sign, conversations with friends, a headline I happen to see from the paper the man opposite me on the tube is holding or a dubious Twitter feed. There are no images of mass graves coming into my home while I’m eating dinner. I haven’t seen a lying politician for months. And my blood pressure has probably dropped.

This year long experiment has already changed my worldview in so many ways. I can no longer assume myself to be the most jaded one at a cocktail party as every piece of news hits me fresh. I listen to other people and their opinions more, because I cannot offer my own. And once I hear of an incident, it is the principles rather than the particulars which I am left to think about.

But my favorite effect of not watching the news is I see the things in front of me much more clearly. With the extra time I now have, I’ve made an effort to spend it with the people who surround me in daily life. The truth is, everyone’s life is so dramatic that each person could be their own news show. If broadcasts are supposed to inform us about the events that shape our world, why do we not respond with the same amount of passion when our friend finds out that her husband is having an affair as we do when we hear about a politician doing the same to his wife. How can I honestly say I feel pain for people who lost their homes in a natural disaster, when I don’t even bother to understand why a man outside Waterloo Station has lost his?

I’m not even saying ‘love thy neighbor as thyself’ and everything will be fine. The truth is I don’t like the idea of being nice for niceness sake, it becomes another excuse for legalism. I think western society’s obsession with the news can be another form of this devotion to the standards of society. We appear to care about the world around us while not actually looking at the issues close to home. It’s like driving in the desert; everyone is looking at the mountains, which are miles away, wondering how the people there can live in such harsh conditions. We almost marvel at the drama of it. What we miss are the folks who we drive past that desperately need a cup of water. Perhaps we are even on our way to help the folks on the mountainside ourselves. But while this is admirable, we aren’t anywhere close to our destination. The fact is, when can’t even get where we think help needs to be without looking around and seeing first where we are.

I sat across from the occupational therapist, going through his checklist and asking the standard questions. It was my last visit to the therapy center I had attended for 16 years. She was going through what she called the “release documents” which was to say that I was leaving the center, never to be a client again. “How have you improved in your independence since coming to this institution? Are you now able to live a fully independent life?” It was a ridiculous question on several levels. First of all I was approximately 9 months old when I first started going to therapy at the clinic. I would hope I had improved from a baby who could not sit up by herself in the past 16 years. But to further complicate the situation the therapist was asking for a definite answer to a rather nebulous question.

Do I live a fully independent life?

What the heck does that mean, “fully independent?” There are plenty of able-bodied people who aren’t at all “fully independent.” There’s the girl who is in a co-dependent relationship with her boyfriend and can’t leave him at any price. There’s the man who lacks self-confidence and therefore relies on his wife to make the decisions that he cannot take initiative for. Co-dependency is everywhere. What about the woman who can’t shovel her driveway when it’s full of snow, or calls her daughter every time the DVD player starts flashing 12:00?

In our society today, we’re not just dependent on people. Stuff ties us down and paralyzes us in an extreme way that most of us don’t recognize. SO often I hear, “I can’t go anywhere without my pillow,” or, “I don’t want to be away from wi-fi for longer than 3 hours. I need to know what’s going on.” The comforts of the home which we insist on are in their own way a confirmation of our dependency on things outside of ourselves. They tie us down, make it difficult to move at a moment’s notice, and close options and opportunities that might occur yet ask us to travel away from our home with all the comfortable stuff.

A good friend of mine is a philosophy professor up in Leeds and she asked me one day why I seemed to have this obsession with independence. According to her, none of us are independent. We can’t survive on our own. We need to go the grocery store and buy flour made by some farmer we’ve never even laid eyes on. I guess it depends on how you define independence more than anything. The word “depend” actually comes from an old Latin and French root meaning “to hang.” Properly defined by the dictionary, depend on or depend upon means “to be controlled or determined by.” Maybe it’s just the way I was brought up, but I can’t help but see the connection between being controlled and hanging oneself at the end of a rope. If the French root of the word is indeed “to hang” it quickly explains my fear of dependency. You are tying yourself to something that will inevitably not allow you to go as far as you want and much like a dog on a leash, eventually the choke collar will nip into your neck.

If we look at where the word comes from and the violent as well as suspenseful image of being controlled, we begin to wonder if independence means not being at the end of a leash. Maybe it’s about knowing that you have options to change your life and live how you would like it to be rather than living a life completely self sufficient? I can’t make my own breakfast or tie my own shoes. If you define independent in this way, my occupational therapist was a failure in her goal of helping me work towards independent living. But if it’s about having options and being able to control your life, seeking help if one method fails you and having the confidence that you will survive one way or the other, then I am independent. I have succeeded in being the driver of my life, being able to take it where I want to go, and ensure that I can meet my goals and dreams. Oddly enough I don’t feel independent during the hours I spend alone, even if I’m able to complete any task I want to. I feel the most independent when my front door revolves with people offering suggestions, borrowing a cup of flour, insisting that we live in a community where we value each other, help each other, and encourage each other to go as far as we possibly can.

There’s a homeless man outside of Waterloo Station. There’s always a homeless man outside of Waterloo Station, and I didn’t think today would be any exception. The biting cold whips around the coats and scarves of myself and my companion. She is older, considers herself a hippie and only wears natural fibers that are organically grown. Her hair turns silver a little more each day adding to the image of wisdom and magic she already exudes. By the time she was my age she was already taking place in college protests demanding peace and equal treatment around the world. I respect her for her passionate views on humanity and her liberal amounts of love.

The homeless guy spots us and smiles, reaching out his Costa cup that has been torn in half and begins asking us for money. My friend holds on to my arm tighter and urges us to keep walking even though I hesitate and slow down to look him in the eye. I smile, shake my head and walk on. “Keep walking. We have a government that can take care of him better than we can. We’re not experts in his condition and problems.”

I’m confused by her statement. Why do we assume, all over the world, that the government will take care of people in need? That the government can make all of the problems disappear? That someday there will be no poverty and no homeless if only we had the right set of social institutions and collective practices? We all have some idea that if just our party, our guy, our religion, our class, our race got into office somehow, that everything would better. And we lie to ourselves about this every election year.

Most people think that my political views don’t include things like charity or giving the little guy a chance. They assume that I’m highly liberal or highly conservative, fitting into one of the extreme poles of the situation. More often than not people say that I don’t care or I’m selfish because I don’t fit with their ideologies about what human rights are or what charity is. That’s simply not true. I believe that human rights are better described as human responsibilities and we as individuals have responsibilities to everyone else, to make sure they can and will achieve the highest standards they can possibly reach. This does mean taking action at an individual level rather than waiting for someone in Washington D.C. or Parliament to agree with us and letting them take it from there. I’m afraid that it is our nature to assume that just because a government has a program somewhere, everything is ok and it is reaching the people that it needs to. I see this all the time in America. People assuming that just because there is a law against disability discrimination that it never happens, this simply isn’t the case. Governments cannot pinpoint specific problems the way we can as individuals, and so saying it should be everyone’s responsibility is essentially saying it never will be anyone’s responsibility. Like everything else, responsibility and the enforcement of justice gets diffused so that nobody feels that they can toe the line alone.

I know I probably pass by too many people in need on the street, not just the ones crouching in the shadowed doorways trying to keep warm, but the ones who need help in my own neighborhood, who have a home and food on the table, but are desperate for so many other things. I assume when I see them living their lives independently and unobstructed by a set of stairs, I assume everything is ok and everything is provided for simply because they have two hands and two legs that work. And to some extent I need to do this in order to get anything done in my life and in order to fight for justice and expand the borderlands of creativity (my two objectives while I’m on this planet). I can’t spend every single night taking people to churches and shelters ensuring that they get help, when I need help myself so much of the time, but I also know that things put in my path, regardless of if they’re directed towards me or just in the obscure corners of my field of vision, they are there, in whatever form it may be, whether it be a physical obstacle or the fellow human in need, to be aware of and to face. And while I might not be able to do anything for him in that moment, knowing he exists, knowing that the situation, the condition of life exists, means that someday, when I am in a position to do so, I may be able to advocate for him, having never seen him again. In this way, it is my duty to acknowledge the injustices, if anything, to stay grounded in reality.

In one of my favorite books, the hero tells his love interest, “nobody gets anywhere by denying reality.” I think of this often, the second I try to avoid uncomfortable conversation or pretend that everything is fine. I’m in the car with my mother and we are discussing this book. The conversation soon turns to the difference between lying to oneself rather than lying to others. Two different categories of sins, in my opinion. The latter we all know is wrong. But the former?  How does one begin to lie to oneself, if he knows reality to begin with?

But we do exactly that. We all hate certain aspects of our lives, our relationships, much preferring to push those into a corner and soothe ourselves, rather than face what are seemingly minor problems full on. I never really understood what lying to yourself meant, until last semester when I was faced with conditions in my home that I really didn’t want to see. However, in my small two-bedroom flat, there was very few options to get away from person problems. What insisting on not lying to yourself actually means is that you have to see what is directly in front of you.

In acting, we call it living in the moment, which sounds easy, but is extremely difficult if not next to impossible to accomplish, both onstage and in reality. It’s better to understand what it means in life by first understanding what it means in acting. Briefly, it means that while an actor is onstage, he cannot be thinking about how he delivered the last line or how he will deliver the next. He can’t be thinking about what he left inside his dressing room or the technical difficulties that arise in the next scene. He has to be listening, in only the matter of the moment. He has no idea what will come next, no idea how the play will end, and at this point in time it doesn’t matter. He only needs to accomplish what has to be done now.

This is not to say that the actor denies planning ahead. Indeed every option that is offered to him by other characters, he must consider the possible outcomes of. But it does mean that nothing exists beyond what is on the stage.

In life, problems resemble a cancer. The more you ignore them or fear them, the bigger they grow. Oddly enough, if you obsess over a problem, the same thing happens. It’s a sort of ontological joke. That is, if you don’t imagine a successful outcome to begin with, if you don’t envision your cancer actually getting smaller, chances are greatly lessened that you will ever make a full recovery. So you must first get diagnosed and then take action accordingly. But denying that there is a problem and denying that there is a solution is ultimately practicing a form of escapism in your own life.

Emily, in the play “Our Town,” says it best when she questions whether anyone ever appreciates a single moment that they live in. According to the stage manager no one but poets and saints are able to even begin to do that. What’s in front of us on a daily basis is without a doubt highly overwhelming. Even looking at a chair and thinking about all the actions and reactions that are going on within the world of that chair on the subatomic level is enough to make your head spin. But, to then try to plot and plan what may or may not happen a month, year, or even a week down the road is biting off more than anyone can chew. All that we have control of is here, now, and barely that. No amount of lying in order to make oneself feel better, safer, and more at ease, will change what actually may and will happen.

Having a disability helps master this task to some degree. You have good days, and you have bad days. Days when you literally can climb a mountain, and days when you fall out of bed. On the good days, you know that there are bad days coming, you’re not suddenly going to be healed and have that be that, but you also know that you have to enjoy a good day when it comes. Going outside for a walk that lasts a little longer. And on the bad days, it means that you can’t go any further before you figure out how to, quite literally, unlock the door in front of you when your hand is shaking from spasms. And then, after you unlock the front door, you figure out what the next step is. And then the next. And then the next…

I’ve always been a big-picture thinker. I don’t care about what’s going on down the street, but rather what’s going on in the rest of the world. Once I actually ended a relationship with someone who tried to make me only see the small and local problem. He would say, “You can’t change the world, you can only change yourself.” That wasn’t my style at all. So I’ve surprised myself this New Year by making a resolution to watch the news less. Actually the resolution is to not watch the news at all, but given the ubiquity of it, I don’t think avoiding the news altogether is entirely possible.

In today’s world, keeping up with current events seems to be a sort of status symbol. If you don’t watch the news you’re considered by many to be non-educated. At every school I’ve applied for they repeatedly begged their prospective students to stay up to date with what is going on in the world. And in truth I am a news-aholic. Politics is the only full-contact sport that my family shares. I was raised listening not to music but talk radio approximately eight hours a day and have been known to get little done while listening intently to news broadcasts. I surprised myself with this resolution when I set it.

Recently watching the news makes me feel in less control of the world. Actually more specifically it makes me feel a combination of despondence and high blood pressure. Every network shapes the opinions of others by superfluous things. I trust that reporter because of how he looks people in the eye, or I don’t trust that one because of what he said last week regarding a completely separate issue. And this is how the journalism industry works, trying to win people over in an intense form of competition, via shaping the news however they can.

Turns out, I argue with friends about politics more than I do to take any action about the subject. “People should…” I begin my argument. Never acting in the way I recommend myself. For that matter, few of us do. So we just talk about the problem rather than actually doing something about it, assuming that the politicians or someone else will fix it for us. And then we can talk about them.

But, the problem goes deeper than that. Not only do I question whether watching the news can lead to some sort of inactivity, I’ve begun to wonder if we even watch the same news. One channel says one thing and the other says the complete opposite. This is truly the strength of the broadcast industry, using journalism to create a crisis, not only in their own reports, but also in the fact that they directly contradict each other, throwing the public into a situation where we have nothing but superfluous things to figure out who to trust. If everything was fine in the world, or stable, journalists would have little to do.

I am a big picture thinker. But the biggest thing I can do at this point in time to affect the world is to act boldly where I am placed. It’s not Washington DC, and it’s not even the Parliament in London. It’s on her little quiet street on the Thames that overlooks Canary Wharf but yet is surrounded by neighbors who have their own needs and problems and crises to attend to. From them, this year, I attend to learn as much as I can and be as active among them as much as I can, because there is something to be said for the idea that we are all made for such a time and a place as this. We are all made to bring forth change for such a time and a place as this.

He was the type of person who says Homer is his favorite author although he has no idea what that means. A good looking man, at least in photographs, he was able to spout popular opinion so eloquently that we all thought he was a perfectly lovely man if not a little bland. When he introduced himself, he did it with all the right moves, so you thought he really wanted to get to know you, be on your level, respect you, and talk about important things—things, which few people are willing to speak about.

Then you would ask him about his opinions, a detailed question out of curiosity, and he couldn’t back them up. “Everybody just knows it’s a fact.” Talking about deep issues, his eyes would eventually glaze over, and he would dismiss himself quickly with a pale face and little to no idea of what was just said.

Lots of people buy into popular option—believing what they hear on the news and read in a magazine. I’m learning that people are spouting out the same statistics, the same quotes, and even the same opinions—all just hand me downs heard from one person and said to another until they become the stuff of legend. This is nothing new of course but I feel like people have begun to just glaze over, to not pay attention to new ideas. They would rather stay just as they are than have their opinions refined. I find walking around London, hearing the same quotes over and over, repeated almost like automatons scarier than any zombie that might visit my door on Halloween.

Often people will refuse to engage in conversation, simply repeating these lines and catch phrases even when they have no relation to the subject being spoken about. This particular individual was extremely good at dropping into a conversation without the pretext of the last five minutes. Working with him was like working with one of those dolls with the string in its back that you would pull and it would say random things. His eyes looked alive, but often what he said bared no relation to what was being discussed, and everyone would stop, look at him for a minute and then go on realizing that no conversation piece from him was helpful as of yet.

Time and Newsweek simply are not enough to form an opinion. They’re the crux of pop media that one has to read in order to be called “well-educated.” If you follow books suggested by certain individuals, memorize statistics on any cable news station, you are entitled to call yourself well-educated and well-informed. But the very concept of being well-educated suggests that not everyone is. How can this title be yours if you are just reading the same things that everyone else reads?

Getting into political discussions today is about as creepy as watching the Stepford Wives at a grocery store. You come up with an obstacle and they simply don’t know what to do. If you say that one of Maya Angelou’s books wasn’t good, no one asks you to defend it; they’ll just shut you down. Going through life not thinking and with the brain shut off is becoming a more and more common occurrence, almost to the point where you expect popular opinions to band together and start doing the Thriller dance down the street as you run into your house to take cover.

Don’t shut off your mind—the very organ that makes life worth living. People need to learn that it’s okay not to have an opinion. If you don’t have time or the interest to go further than headline news, that’s okay, perhaps your resources are better used elsewhere. So many walk about the planet unconnected and yet can quote every statistic on last nights news, seeking anything that will numb their minds and put their conscience at ease, even if it means refusing to dig deeper into an issue and really find out the truth. The most moving sight in the world is the sight of man fully alive, questioning boldly, and holding fast to the truth.