Our lack of understanding of ourselves as well as our fantasies of perfectibility are all rooted in this long-dispatched idea of entitlement, when, assuredly, there is nothing on this earth to rightly feel entitled about. In the United States of America, the constitution starts with a bill made of ten supposedly inalienable rights that have been alienated more than once and amended seventeen times since their pompous declaration. France has seven such rights, sweden only three and somehow, they tell us, these have been delivered by a god to its people. Surely, every religion has its commandments that eventually find their way into socio-political life but isn’t it strange that god would have handed down different amounts of rights to different people based on geography?

Can we even question the fact that there might be no such thing as a natural born right? Weren’t these privileges made up so that we could live together in supposed harmony? That is what Rousseau’s The Social Contract is telling us, yet another time, that there are things that are handed down (keyword) to lil’ ole us from a merciful deity who evidently picks chosen people based on a standard that only seems clear to him. My grandpa used to tell me: “You can only count on yourself, and even-so, not too much.” I always took that to mean not to believe those who would tell us what our rights may be, or what we should be entitled to, that we are the beginning and the end of our own life experience, the only ones responsible for who we are and what we do. Moreover, in most countries, these given rights are invariably about equalizing the human race, making sure that all have the same chances anywhere, everywhere, whether you are small, big, ugly, white, black, a girl, a boy, whatever the circumstances of your birth may be, so that “fairness” may prevail. But since when has life been fair in anyway to anyone, especially considering how biased our assessment of “fairness” has so far been? We are not dealt a similar deck of cards, are we? Never have been. That these rights that we invent and impose on ourselves and each other try to balance the inequalities of birth is surely commendable but not exactly enforceable. Let me simply submit, for your express approval, every single year’s MLK day editorials that invariably begin with a subtly different version of “great strides have been made but there is still so much to do to make Dr. King’s dream come true…”

Constant revision of our actions is the key. I have never met anybody who says, “I hope that I am worthy of democracy” or “I hope that I am worthy of the chances that come my way,” which is a shame. Perhaps we imagine those to be questions only available to former Cuban political prisoners lucky enough to escape and take advantage of what they never could back on the terrorized island but we should probably all wonder about these instead of taking them for granted. We, the allegedly free, do not work for our freedom, most of us have too much in our lives because we are used to plenitude, to never having to think about anything but entertainment. We make big problems out of circumstantial ones because we feel a guilt-ridden need to balance all the fun stuff with perceived tragedy in order to have a life we deem meaningful and in compliance with society’s religion’s ideals of morality. Does john one:eight not tell us that “if we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us?” Or so we think. When a tragic natural disaster happens, we do not know how to respond, so we wear ribbons, we put on telethons and the people in need rely upon the kindness of strangers who should have never been strangers in the first place. Certainly we are extremely lucky and fortunate to have been born in countries and societies that, even though appearances can sometimes be deceiving, favor freedom over tyranny but we must put a brake on perpetual self-congratulation and think about a world in which reaction, however plentiful and kind, may not be the best solution. We always say within the realm of our little agency that “better customer service is not just better apologies” and I feel that it is how we behave in the world. So surprised we are when catastrophe, whether man or nature-born, occurs, and so quick are we to favorably profit from our own inclination to show kindness by padding ourselves on our back fat…

This behavior tends to create, at large, a society of assisted people, who believe they are entitled to the principles of freedom, love and truth which so many have died to protect. What have you done? What have I done? Little, to be sure. We should not take any of those principles for granted but rather grow within them, a routine increasingly outmoded because we live in extraordinarily plentiful times. As cliché as this is, I am still amazed every time I troll the internet, by the plethora of choice that appears at the click of a button. My mind invariably flashes back to the supermarket scene in Oliver Stone’s Heaven and Earth, the third in his Vietnam trilogy, where the Vietnamese girl whom the soldier brings back to America is pushing her empty cart looking left and looking right, in slow motion, at the towers of products stacked up to the ceiling, as if this overstuffed store were a wonder of the world. Not that we should feel any shame about all that we have, we have earned our horn of plenty by spilling blood on the zigzagged roads to civilization in order to merit such wealth but the unintended consequence of such affluence came fast and hard: complacency.

hey, here’s an idea, let us, in the name of the dearly departed, fight for these supposed rights and earn them, shall we?

alright then, let’s get off our asses and have a productive week!

please, tell me if i’m wrong about this… as soon as there were cave dwellers, there were cave drawings. and as soon as there were cave drawings, there were storytellers. and as soon as there were storytellers, there were myth-makers. and the myths they made spoke of the unknown, of gods looking at us, judging us and deciding we could not be left alone. that is when the myth-makers discovered their power, when they understood that they could influence, guide and have authority over others as they told those amazing stories, especially if they involved aspects supernatural, aspects that could not be satisfyingly explained for they had no documented context and, most importantly, could not be proven wrong by empirical study. the greeks believed their dreams to have been transmitted during the night by the gods telling them what to do. the romans had the demiurge, a very, very tall man, who could actually reach into the heavens, talk to the gods and relay their messages back down to mere mortals. we have pat robertson, granted a diminished source of wisdom but still, all-in-all, a myth-maker in his own right. all of them, not merely content with transmission but requiring obedience without investigation. what once was wonder was turned into indispensable certainty in one or another’s story and the exclusion of the others’, to the detriment of peace. that was the beginning of faith.

could the motivation for such an unreasonable approach be the simple, base, human need for control? i think so. control over ourselves, over our own fears, certainly. but then, still, our lives are just too damn hard, aren’t they? it was too hard then and it is too hard now not to have a safety net. and religion, as it eventually became known, is quick to provide one, which it does elegantly because it is so rich with stories, so rich with characters, so rich with lessons, with morality, with not-so-white lies. religion tries to do what art had done before it, to rationalize what keats romantically called “negative capability,” the wish to find a way for us to live with the unexplainable. art does so much, with so much more humility as it attempts, with mere interpretation of the world, to show us that which cannot be shown, daring us to look beyond form. art shows us, by nature, that there are parts of this world we cannot see, but it does so without vanity because it dares not name that which it cannot know, it dares not draw its face. the very opposite of the religious approach, on the whole.

that is why i will go ahead and keep drawing, playing, choosing colors and camera angles in order to fill the void left by the original confusion and wish you an equally artful week!

every year, around the end of the gregorian-reformed calendar, we inevitably feel the need to look back, if only between passing the proseco and noticing how quickly little suzie has developed, at all the deeds, good and otherwise, of the last three-hundred and sixty-five days just wasted spent on this earth. and yes, you have to admit, as i do every year, that things are not exactly going our way… as a matter of fact, if we were to excel-sheet the past twelve months, we would probably find the i’m an idiot column bloated to morbidly obese proportions and the i’m doing great, not so much. sure, we finished hopeful for next year but ultimately, and predictably, unsatisfied. “never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow” lazily quipped mark twain and to you, myself and i, let me say: let’s get off our asses!

indeed, digging in the minutiae of our lives and considering the library of moments we have ignored, whether for comfort or denial, compels us to stop being the whiny victims of circumstances we had a hand in creating. we must stop blaming each other, society or whatever else that is supposed to have created our little problems. and i say little, conscious of the fact that some of us are quite literally in dire straights, unable to make mortgage payments, to find a job and facing eviction or loneliness. in such moments, is hope enough? no. work is the only salvation. i believe in the power of that deceptively simple marxist notion that work is what will eventually liberate us from the prisons of our minds, individually and collectively. and by work here, i certainly do not necessarily mean a j.o.b. but any manner of thoughtfully selected pursuit, valued and acted upon, that which literally renders the mind un-stable and finally kicks it off the shelf it was comfortably resting on, putting it at risk of usefulness. god-forbid. Work, dully capitalized, is, in most cases, the natural consequence of consideration for what else are we to do, after having looked at ourselves up and down naked in the full length mirror, than, you know, order another omelette.

work, first and foremost, signifies production of some kind, whether it be manufactured or philosophical. work is the result of applied force so as to displace its point of origin to something either greater or other. that point of origin? you. me. them. ultimately, us. the process of working towards the goal is the goal, warns the over-used cliché but why do we never listen to clichés? if the words have been repeated so much as to lose their meaning than let us find new ones because truth usually stands the test of time… (fuck!) what i’m trying to say, while simultaneously looking at my thesaurus, is that the cruise is the port, the expedition the camp, the race the finish line… okay, i think we get it, work’s value is the benefit gained from its own toil. which is why the countless productivity methods lining the aisles of your bookstores and bookmarks are worthless, because they just want to get work done! whereas i think the better idea is to listen to your instinct, consider and act, not necessarily to finish.

unfortunately, we have collectively decided to look down on this process and call it an ugly name: “procrastination.” to my mind, there is no more noble approach to life than to let it linger, float, decide for itself what it must be and then, just as it drifts back to earth, work to support it with all we have so that it may drift again. procrastination is an understandably dirty word when associated with overstuffed inboxes, unfinished novels and unfulfilled parental obligations but only has meaning when completion has been made to be what matters most. for me, it is not worth working a lifetime towards completion when a thousand incomplete but satiating experiences can be had in the same amount of time. completion is evaluated by others, satisfaction by oneself.
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