The "WHY?"

The question I've begun to ask myself is, "why have I created this blog?":

I think that while a lot of incredible ideas are born without an understanding of where they are going or what they are for, there reaches a point where that particular idea risks fading into nothingness without the definition of purpose. Like everything else, however, there seems to be a strict balance between letting an idea blossom from that initial spark of creation and kindling that spark with the nourishment of thought and analysis. Too much of either seems to leave the fire unborn. The entire game of life just might be variations of the give and take of this particular balance.

I've only written one blog so far. A call to arms that came from an overwhelmingly intense reaction to what seemed like just an everyday nuisance. Something in the formula of the scenario, however, gave birth to this manifesto of sorts on how that microcosmic event was just a reflection of a larger picture. I was tired of feeling that burning desire for change, that need to "revolt!"- and just letting my rational mind calmly pat out another spark of creation itching for life.

That's what almost all of us do, afterall. We learn very quickly that our feelings are irrational in the broader scope of civilization and we experience that the more we pat out those beautiful flames, the easier we fit in and the more likely we are to get the things we want.

Now I'm no anarchist. Really. I don't damn the man or damn the system. And I don't think we should all preserve the childish fits that are our first means of communication. But like any good parent realizes that a child cries for a reason, I believe we need to realize that we continue to feel the urge to throw fits for equally as valid reasons. Our eyes see something that no one else sees and I believe rather than mature into complacency, we are better off teaching ourselves to interpret these fits, see why they're there and dismiss them if they don't serve us and translate them into something proactive if they do.

That's the purpose of this blog. To take these thoughts, these fits, these perspectives of life and what could make it better and translate them into a language that may or may not affect change within myself or another reader. The important thing for me, however, is that I am attempting to instigate a dialogue. I'm attempting to spread some desire to empower our basic instincts and our natural desire to speak out when we see something that affects us.

I aim to move, as it were, beyond indifference and into an idealistic world where we all harvest our greatest potential, instead of hiding behind silence and fear. That's why I'm writing.

A Call to Arms (via a morning at the airport)

I am at the airport and it is, absolutely and without a doubt, one of the most depressing expressions of our present culture and collective mindset. Mindset being the state of one's mind, direction of thoughts and habits, etc. Collective, of course, meaning all of us. The circumstances that surround me illustrate with such precision the desperation of a world dwindling into indifference that I, someone who arguably possesses a slightly above average amount of indifference, have been motivated beyond said indifference to bother myself with the daunting task of opening my laptop and moving my fingers. (you hopefully have picked up on the sarcasm)

Before I begin this sort of expression of my frustrations, I am going to preface this by saying that I fully intend to end on an optimistic note. I believe our world is in dire need of, among other things, hope. Up until about two years ago, I'm not sure you could convince me that I would ever believe in hope in such a basic regard, but needless to say, I have evolved beyond my old self (as I hope to continue to do) and I have consequently embraced that change. As a people, we have all proved more than capable of focusing on the negative things that inundate our world on a second-by-second basis. I have to believe that this only highlights that which I would rather see in low lights. So I will use this expression of my frustrations to incite and to hope for some sort of change. I'm not sure how far it will go, but I think we all need to at least try.

That being said…the airport.

My first question as I sit here waiting for my flight is, "does anyone care anymore?" I am outside the gate looking around and I see a bunch of people isolated in their seats, one space or more between people, of course. (let's face it, sitting next to someone and having any sort of interaction is a bit too much these days. After all, that person might talk to me and disrupt me from my intense wait for the plane to board and to fly me to where I need to go) Cell phones ring out in a symphonic chorus and solicit conversations apparently more real and important than the actual conversations occurring right beside us. The exceptions are, sad to say and I'm sorry for the generalization, the older people who sit talking over coffee, reading magazines or papers and smiling in their patience. Will the rest of us eventually get there with age or is this just telling us something about what once was that soon will be lost?

Now, this whole bit of writing started with me wanting to punch a wall because my flight was, to NO surprise, three hours late. Sad to say, this probably doesn't phase anyone reading this because, really, what flight is ever on time anymore? What service actually provides what it promises and who really gives a shit if it doesn’t? Am I right? And, like pretty much the majority of my generation, I heard the news, revolted internally, called my sister to throw a fit, and pretty much resorted to resentment. I wanted to do something, to say something, to scream out at the injustice and the complete indifference of the American Airlines employee who shared the news. But, there is no outlet for these frustrations. My mind went through the rigmarole. I've been down this road before, after all, at a time when I actually cared about things and believed we all had the power to affect our world. I've sent letters, called customer service representatives and received equal amounts of indifference or real apology for the state of business as usual.

So, like my fellow colleagues in generation Y, I felt so many feelings until "the way things are" hit me like a ton of bricks and brought my beautiful emotions into that same boiled up and collective indifference that the employee so kindly bestowed upon me. And so these feelings were shoved into a corner of my psyche, adding a knot to my back and probably stealing five years from the end of my life.

Then it hit me: write about it. A possible outlet after all. I've seen the movies where the all knowing English teacher guides her dispassionate students into new lives by forcing them to take pen to paper in humble composition notebooks. But I actually refused at first. Mind you, I had absolutely nothing to do for three hours. Literally nothing. But the impossibilities of it all swarmed over my head like a pack of vultures. "Nobody cares," I said. People read nothing more than what's on their friend's facebook profiles, the biggest video of two years ago online was Two Girls, One Cup and the highest ratings on Larry King Live were when Paris Hilton was released from prison. This is my audience, I think, and they don't give a fuck what I have to say because they, like me, don't care about anything. They, like me, don't believe they have any power whatsoever to leave a mark on the world or change the state of things.

I am currently traveling because I am on a cross-country research tour with the Transcendence Theatre Company. We are traveling the world to assess the problems of theatre and to use that information to form a theatre that changes the state of things and offers a new and more hopeful model for the future of a dying art. The fact that the theatre is and has been dying for as long as anyone can remember will forever break my heart. I think I am begging for the opportunity to see change. (I'm a naturally born generation Y skeptic, you know) I'm screaming from the inside, "prove me wrong, please!" And I am graciously feeding off the energy of our endlessly hopeful and unbelievably inspiring leader, Amy Miller.

Two days ago, I saw a production of Stretch, a relatively new play by Susan Bernfield at the People's Light and Theatre outside of Philadelphia, PA. The play is about Richard Nixon's late secretary Rosemary Woods whose slip of the foot accidentally erased part of the Watergate tapes. While the play explores the last days of her life in a nursing home, it combines dreams with realities that ultimately explore the generational differences between yesteryears and today.

In a monologue that was one of the most highlighted moments of the play, Bob, another man in the nursing home, talks about the differences in the current generations of people. Bob was a "social studies" teacher and prided himself on the art of teaching history with precision and dedication, and of sharing, without opinion, the moments that built our world.

Bob's son (a baby boomer), he explains, is politically active and focuses with die hard conviction on today. (baby boomer) "There hasn't been a protest in which my son wasn't involved". (or something like that) The obvious setup here is that he, Bob, teaches history, while his son, whatever his name, lives it. Now he goes further to explain that this "new generation" doesn't care about anything. They sit in the back of the class, eyes glossed, attention misdirected and they seem to not even know what is going on. Of course if they do know, they could care less about it, and if they feel anything, they have no faith in their own ability to express that or use it to incite change. "Why bother in an election," they ask, "when my vote means nothing…when I can't do anything….when I don't mean anything…that's just the way things are."

These are the crippling realities of our time.

The regional theatre movement, we have learned, was born, like so many other things, out of the civil rights era of the 1960's and 1970's. People, individuals, truly believed they could make a difference. They believed they could change the way things are, that their vote counted, that their voice mattered. Have you read about the protests during the Vietnam War? Do we realize that an entire culture of people was born (not just hippies) out of their collective belief that they could do and change anything??? And they did, that's the crazy thing. They affected politics, they built theatres, they paved the way for equity for all.

But we've ridden the wave of their work into our own time. And guess what? That wave can't carry us all and it is dissipating into a vast ocean of complacency. We are stagnating our souls in a world that continues full force on a new wave of technology. A wave that without our participation eliminates the need to even possess a soul. Isn't anyone else scared? Isn't anyone else watching, listening, feeling?

Now for the optimistic turn:

Here's the thing. Nothing has changed about people, their souls and their inherent feelings. They burn as bright as ever. But just like with me and my belief that writing this couldn't ever matter, we have suppressed them with our conviction that we lack any and all power. We don't matter on a larger scale and so we don't really care about much beyond who replied to our facebook post and whatever the hell tv show (reality or not) is on in the other room. How can we care about a game we don't even think we're playing?? How can we change a reality we don't even see is surrounding us?

When you think of things from this perspective, it's no wonder that television has become the greatest of all escapes. It's no wonder people don't leave the house to connect to one another and to live a life in which we all, united by the fact that we are all humans on this same earth, live harmoniously and collectively to paint the brightest possible reality for ourselves. Instead, the lure of someone else's story is much more interesting than our own in the privacy of our isolated rooms. We need someone in a tv show to paint the emotions and experiences we are unable to express from day to day. It makes perfect sense that we are a society that reveres, above all else, fame and fortune. We are desperate in any way (you've seen the reality shows, I mean desperate in ANY way) to get our lives on the big screen, to be a star, to reach the point where we mistakenly believe people will care about us and our story. It's no wonder we seem to favor most the stories of the underdogs of the world who defeat all odds and change their own life or change the world.

But we have a serious disconnect. We don't see the relevancy to our own lives. We don't think these things relate to us or what actually occurs in the world. That's fiction, we believe, this miserable-ness is life.

There are many things that I think feed this mindset, but one thing is for sure, it is a collective mindset and it continues to define my generation….and I AM NOT ok with that. And I don't think that you should be either.

As I sat there furious about my flight I was crying out to the man at the desk: "Don't you see that this is not just about me arriving three hours late in LA. This is the system of our world. You don't care, your boss doesn't care, your company doesn't actually care and the person behind me figures they have no control or voice to complain so they don't care." Prior to this incident I even watched a woman budge six people in line. A wave of injustice briefly swept through the small crowd only to dissolve quickly into inaction. But I held on a little longer to my own feelings of injustice. "Please care, Mr. American Airlines employee!" I was calling out not just with words but with feelings that I hoped he would discover through the very thing that unites us all…compassion. I didn't really need my flight to arrive on time. I needed him to say, "I understand your position, this is terrible, and I am going to do my part by sympathizing with your position and passing it on to my superiors so that together we can stop this sort of thing from happening again."

But what actually happened was he probably felt the frustration of the forty people before me and saw the line of forty more people behind me bulging with an equally suppressed frustration and he was probably praying that none of them expressed their anger like me. Why? "Because I can't do anything" he was thinking. "My bosses don't think their voices matter and the collective mindset of our company is so backward that we think our business is flights and profit when it's really people and so they're just going to tell me that there is nothing anyone can do. The system is some great thing beyond us, they'll say, and none of us have control over that. The system was created by a god of systems and it lives beyond such volatile things as human emotion and compassion. The system would offer me a meal voucher if it could or perhaps even an apology, but really the system has a hard enough time keeping up what with eliminating meals on long flights, charging for luggage and paying for security, outrageous liability insurance and soaring prices in our increasingly untrusting and disconnected world."

The system is so real to us that we have lost the ability to talk to one another on a fundamentally human-to-human basis. We translate this into the language of the system and needless to say, the essence is lost.

We are, fundamentally bruised at the core. Not physically, not systematically, but humanly. We are bruised in our souls. We value NOT our strongest asset: our human emotion, our ability to feel compassion, love, hope. We value instead what we believe to be the greatest of truths: numbers, statistics, technology. These are what will tell us what is and what isn't. And in this world, there is no place for emotion because really you can't quantify such things and they are horrifically unreliable.

And so if there is no place for us and our emotions, of course we will slip away into indifference. Of course the millions of voices for change have burned their speech pads and thrown away their pens in place of iPods and personal computers. Of course the potential leaders and advocates for changing the status quo question the power of their voice and so slip away into the safer mass of irrelevant voices. Think how many people with the potential to change the world have stopped believing in a need for voices altogether.

This is a dire time, indeed. But I hold on to hope, nonetheless. I have to believe we are all still in there, capable of affecting our fate. I don't think I'm the only one who feels this way and I don't believe that it is a coincidence that our physical reality is mirroring this suppression.

For some reason, the word quotidian has hit me about five times a day for two consecutive days. When something like this happens, fate or coincidence, I like to take a little look at the relevance or possible symbolism it plays in my life at that moment. The word comes directly from the French and is defined as, "occurring daily." Now I have always thought this word was a beautiful word. Maybe it's just the French, but really it seems to invoke some sort of beautiful ritual, a celebration of life, of something that happens everyday and is part of the human experience. The word has evolved, however, and it's connotative use has come to also describe the ordinary, the mundane, the tedious. The symbolism in this case, I believe, is thick with irony.

Equally as ironic, I now sit here scrambling to get out the last few words, as my three hour late flight begins to board. It seems I took the time to do something more than just sit in a corner, hands tied by imaginary chains. It's a small difference, indeed, and it's product might not be measurable, but really isn't that how it all starts?