Ripped from today's headlines!

So, those of you who follow the news know that one of the recurring fluff stories right now involves a Philadelphia day care and a local country club swimming pool. The short version is this:
Due to the closings of a number of city pools, the day care center contracted with said country club to use their pool once a week.
At the first visit, some of the members of the country club made derogatory remarks about the kids, many of which were racial in nature.
Shortly thereafter, the country club cancelled the contract and returned the full check to the day care center.

The slant that the day care center and liberal activists are taking is that this turnabout on the contract was racially motivated. After all, if a handful of the members of this club are bigoted, then obviously the entire organization must be.

The story according to the country club is that participation was unexpectedly high and they couldn't legally support having that many people using the pool. They cancelled similar contracts with other, predominantly white day care centers, too.

I don't really care at the moment which side is right. What I care about is that the obvious slant from the media is that the day care center is. The day care center is insisting that the entire board of the country club resign and that members who are identified as having made racist comments be expelled from the organization. What gives them this authority? Nothing, at least not until actual wrongdoing is proven. Until then, this is blackmail, plain and simple, and it's disgusting; and yet, it's not going to be seen as that in the press. It's going to be seen as a justified crusade against the ghosts of systemic racism.

I hate that, as soon as racism or homosexuality enters the picture, innocent until proven guilty flies out the window. Any time these issues arises, we start confusing correlation with causation; and not just in the lack of evidence, but often times (such as in this case) in the face of evidence to the contrary. I understand why we do it. We want to make sure that the system can't be abused to protect bigots. To borrow a phrase from the Green Lantern Corps, we want to ensure that no evil escapes our sight. I'm not sure that we go about it the right way, though, when we give our entire sympathy to the "defendant", particularly when they abuse their supposed weakness in this fashion.

More Religious/Catholic talk!

I really don't get why so many religious people are so violently opposed to anything dealing with postmodernism. We actively talk about faith as being transformative, and I can't think of anything more postmodern than that - belief impacting behavior and perception. The basic idea is that, if you really truly believe that Jesus of Nazareth was and is the eternal Son of God who came to live among us, then you're going to live your life differently. You're going to try to follow His example and His teachings more closely. You're going to have a new appreciation for the handiwork of creation in light of the revelation of God's love. The reality you live in will, in a real way, be altered from the reality you understood before believing.

Thinking about this finally helped me to understand the Catholic sacraments. The common definition of a sacrament is "An outward sign, initiated by Christ on Earth, to give us grace". The definition as I tend to remember (and prefer) it is "An outward sign of God's grace, initiated by Christ on Earth". The difference here is that the grace, in my definition, is pre-existing. It is something that the sacrament is a reminder of and not something conferred by participation in it.

Here's where I'm going with this. If I receive the Eucharist, and I firmly and truly believe that it is, metaphysically, the body and blood of Christ, who sacrificed himself that I may live more fully...then I'm going to respond to that presence. I am going to honor that sacrifice in my living. I am going to strive to be a better person. That's not to say that I couldn't do those things without having received the Eucharist, but participation in the sacrament, if I believe in it, heightens my sense of duty and my awareness of the abundant grace I have already been blessed with, grace I may not otherwise be aware of.

I've seen this in people. I had teachers throughout my Catholic education who tried to make it to Mass every morning, and you could tell when they hadn't. They were grumpier, they were less patient, they didn't teach as well. Daily Eucharist was a ritual by which they connected to God and their duty in the classroom as Christian educators, and without it, they were lost. For other people, myself included, Eucharist doesn't have nearly this big an impact...but that's because we don't believe in it, or at least not to the same extent.

Some people would look at what I'm saying and construe it as another way of saying "oh, religion is for the weak, the people who don't have the will to lead the lives they know they should without it". Maybe that's a valid interpretation. Maybe it's all a bunch of psychosematic crap we would be better off without. I disagree, though. I think that any way we have of pushing and encouraging ourselves to be better is of value; and I happen to believe very strongly that Jesus was right in His teachings of what it means to be better.

That is all.

WALL-E Revisited

I love WALL-E. It may be my favorite Pixar film. Whenever I say that, though, people give me kind of a look. "Seriously?" they say. Most people agree that the first half hour or so, up to the point where WALL-E and EVE are on the ship, is spectacular, but lots of people tend to get hung up on the "environmentalist agenda" of latter half of the film. To these people I say, please don't turn setting into subtext.

WALL-E is not a movie about condemnation. It's not a movie about our responsibility to the planet. It's a celebration of remembering what it is to be human. The humans in space don't want to re-cultivate the earth because of any sense that they've done wrong. They want to do it because there's something about growing things, about dancing, about falling in love that innately appeals to us as human beings. WALL-E and EVE, in their initial discovery and pursuit of these joys, serve as a catalyst for the human beings in their rediscovery of them.

I think that what get's people hung up is the extreme way the humans are portrayed in the film. Maybe I get it because it's a rhetorical strategy that I like so much, but that's just a variation on captatio benevolentiae. It's a straw man built with a wink and a nod, a caricature actively recognized as such so that we can feel better about ourselves and our more legitimate situation. After all, if these poor oafs can get back to basics, what's to stop us?

Sure, responding to those fundamentally human callings towards creativity and relationship may require us to reject consumer culture, to an extent at least, but they don't make any insistence about that point, so what's the a problem? Beats me.

Dynamic Link Submission

Web 2.0 and the Rise of Passive Relationships

While the Web may have started its life as a collection of largely isolated repositories of knowledge, it has evolved into something entirely more human as the Web 2.0 revolution has taken off. Whereas once the masses were largely relegated to being mere consumers of online content, we are now invited to contribute, categorize, critique, share, and support it. The response to this democratizing power has been overwhelming. More and more, we are witnessing the vast subculture of the Web permeate popular culture. More and more, we are trusting the expertise of the many when seeking knowledge or entertainment. More and more, we are becoming comfortable living transparently as we broadcast our lives and our thoughts to the world.

It's well known that identity is a complicated issue in the online world. Long before the introduction of the World Wide Web, way back when Usenet was shiny and new, science fiction authors and scholars alike were already probing into the implications anonymity could have on our perception of others online. In his seminal 1985 novel Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card included a major subplot in which mere children manipulate the entire geopolitical dialogue by contributing to what is essentially a global bulletin board system. The only things they needed to earn legitimacy in this impersonal, asynchronous environment were their own brilliance and the assumed names of Locke and Demosthenes. As it so often does, what began as conjecture has become commonplace in reality. For reasons both noble and vile, many people take advantage of the potential for anonymity online in order to create identities for themselves that wouldn’t be possible in the real world. Over the years, as the Internet has grown in significance and as people increasingly turn towards it for communication, we have not only adapted to this conundrum, but we have learned from it. Interactions with our peers online can teach us much about the nature of our neighbor. They can help us realize that wisdom is wisdom regardless of its source. They can help us accept that bad behavior isn’t necessarily perpetrated by bad people.

An issue that I haven't seen being discussed nearly so thoroughly is the impact of the Internet on our relationships. At its core, the Internet is a platform for the development of new communication technologies; and while, historically, advances in telecommunications have aimed to make it easier for us to reach out to specific individuals or groups at increasing distances, the ever growing suite of Web 2.0 technologies is different in nature. When we engage in the culture of Web 2.0, whether it's through blogging, social networking, participating in an online community, or whatever else, our communication is no longer targeted. We no longer control with whom we are communicating or who is viewing our communications. Instead of being members of an intentional dialog, we become part of some sort of incomprehensible, existential play. The basic structure of this production involves millions of individuals acting as both audience and cast. We jump between hundreds of thousands of stages, concurrently participating in numerous smaller dramas; observing as many more as we are willing or able to; and directing one another's attention to particularly riveting performances along the way.

The voluntary, asynchronous, and broadcast natures of social interaction on the Web allow for us to develop attachments radically different from those that regular, personal encounters nurture. Of chief interest to me is the increasing prevalence of what I have begun to refer to as passive relationships. By this, I mean relationships that are sustained without direct contact between the parties involved. These sorts of relationships have a number of interesting characteristics. They are low maintenance, they are directional, and they have limited impact on our daily lives. These are the sorts of relationships that we used to develop with celebrities or even fictional characters, but as ordinary people continue to increase their online presence, it is becoming more and more common for our ordinary relationships to become passive.

As I see it, this is cause for concern, as passive relationships like these encourage us to substitute information in place of intimacy. Moreover, from this information, we can't help but make judgments and assumptions. We take the information available to us and then continue to fill in the blanks of the other person's character on our own without the clarifying context that personal experience brings. The result is that, ironically enough, this overload of personal information has the potential to obscure our understanding of our neighbors' identities more than anonymity ever could. The real danger in online interaction no longer lies in failing to properly recognize Locke and Demosthenes for who they are. Instead, it lies in determining which of our classmates are worth getting to know by a simple “about me” section on Facebook. It lies in keeping track of our friends by following their Twitter feeds or Flickr accounts instead of keeping in touch with them through email and phone calls and going out for coffee. It lies in inundating ourselves with weak ties to the point that we are no longer able to strengthen any of them. It lies in re-imagining our neighbor in our image and faltering in our ability to grow in love for them.

I have no doubt that we will learn important lessons from this dilemma just as we learned from dealing with the complexities of anonymity, but we need to begin talking about it first. Web 2.0 services have proven time and time again that they have great power. From reconnecting childhood friends to helping creative individuals get the chance they so richly deserve to make a career from their talents; from exposing corruption to galvanizing the grass roots, the seemingly personal nature of these systems makes them valuable beyond measure. Yet, if we fail to recognize and begin serious discussion of the dangers and shortcomings inherent to these technologies, then this value is worthless. Let's get the conversation started.

-Jonathan Walz