Starfishin'

I'm still in meaning-of-life mode, wondering a lot about what things I can do to make the world a better place, and whether it's even worth it to try when so many other people are just going to go in the other direction and cancel out my good deeds.

A friend who read my last little post said my concern with the preservation of the immediate area around me -- and my lack of concern for the doomed, consume-themselves-to-death idiots in the areas outside my niche -- reminded her of what she calls the starfish analogy.

In the analogy, someone is walking on the beach and sees a starfish. Worried that's it's going to die, our hero casts the starfish into the ocean, and feels good to have done something positive. But then he looks up and sees millions of starfish strewn across the beach -- and realizes he'll never be able to single-handedly solve the starfish problem.

I like the starfish analogy. To take it even further, I think we live in the kind of nation where the majority of people think dead starfish look neat in the sand. Some people will ignore a dying starfish, and some will even find ways of getting starfish out of the ocean and onto the land, just for the cool visual.

But here's the thing about the starfish analogy: it's one of those things where the glass is either one-hundredth full or ninety-nine-hundredths empty. Maybe 99 starfish are going to bake on the beach for every one we save, but the ones we save are going to be very glad that we saved them.

So yes, we do go through life surrounded by idiots and bastards. And they do make the world an often-crappy place. But if we can thwart their stupidity and assholishness one time in a hundred, we should feel good about that much. And then go for two times in a hundred.

Next: The difference between helping starfish because it helps starfish, and helping starfish because we think it's cool. I'm talking to you, hippies.

America the Bad

People talk a lot about "what's happened to this country." But the fact is, nothing's happened. This country sucks, and has sucked for a long time. Let's review. Until 1865, this country had slavery. All that talk of "All men were created equal" is negated by the hypocrisy of slavery. After slavery, we had Jim Crow laws that preserved much of the inequality that existed under slavery. Around the same time we had people from other countries like Ireland and Poland coming here for industrial jobs and ending up getting ground into sausage. (You remember The Jungle, right?) And women, who are smarter than men, weren't allowed to vote until -- what, 1920?

Sure, we had a brief, admirable period during World War II when we bested some of the many countries that, at the time, sucked even more than ours. But even then, when we were at our best, we had our sucky side: we had our own concentration camps stacked with "Japs" instead of Jews. Today they're packed with Muslims. We suck, folks. We sucked then and we suck now.

"What's happened in this country"? For 28 of the last 36 years we've chosen Republican presidents who appealed to our fear and greed instead of Democrats who, however timidly, asked us to sacrifice a tiny bit for others. When Carter wisely suggested that we keep our heating bills down by wearing sweaters, we didn't even consider it. We booted him and kept wasting fossil fuels. What the fuck is wrong with us?

I think the answer is, we're human. (At least you are. As a wolf, I'm of a species even more ravenously consumption-obsessed than yours.) America's free enterprise system has allowed our desire for self-preservation to run unchecked for centuries, and to evolve into a lust for self-enrichment. It's no longer enough that we have "safe" cars. Now we need vehicles that are more tanks than cars which ensure not only that we'll survive a crash, but that anyone we crash into won't.

So what do we do? I'm developed a guiding theory for how to predict the behavior of the majority of my fellow Americans. I call this theory "pessimism." I genuinely believe the average American won't stop consuming until his consumption leaves him no choice but to conserve.

So why do I still live here? First, there aren't any caves in Barcelona. Believe me, I've checked, And secondly, because I don't have to be an average American.

The only thing I'm optimistic about is the ability of myself and like-minded people (and maybe wolves) to eke out little ecosystems for ourselves that don't suck. Places like Berkeley and West Hollywood and New York City and Boston. And yes, even 20 percent of Utah voted against the president. The nice thing about places like Texas and Kentucky and Alabama is that the people who aren't idiots tend to find each other quickly.

So yes, I'll keep arguing about why one side in our political system is a little better than another. But I don't really think that will be the source of good things in my little world. I think the real improvements in the world around me -- and I'm talking about the immediate world around me, because I think most of the country is fucked -- will come from things like reading to kids in my neighborhood or being a mentor or walking instead of driving to the store or helping to clean up a beach.

And no, I don't think it's surprising that people who live in nice ecosystems (the coasts) do more to protect their surroundings than people who live in shitholes. The people in the crappy places have nothing to lose.