Paredes En Sus Lados Son Puentes

“Humanity i love you because you
are perpetually putting the secret of
life in your pants and forgetting
it’s there and sitting down

on it
and because you are
forever making poems in the lap
of death Humanity

i hate you”
— E.E. Cummings

I, as much as the next monogamous-minded homo, want to get married someday.

But there’s something I have to say about the way we’re talking about same-sex marriage.

I’ve already got a problem with how we’re going on about it. State by state? Please. Get real. I don’t want to go through the same frantic and harrowing hour-by-hour news-checking that inevitably occurs, and while I love the high I and my friends get when a state like New York does something right, it hurts to know that we’re just fighting not to lose in Minnesota. But that’s not what this is about.

Keith Olbermann, whom I already do not care for, made a special comment about same-sex marriage RE: New York. I love the ideal of unanimous, country-wide suppose, despite its impossibility. What I don’t love is what he said about how same-sex marriage will somehow “increase the number of stable and loving homes” around the country.

Marriage isn’t about providing a stable, loving home. We can have that with or without being married — I don’t need the United States to tell me what I need to be happy. Indeed, many marriages are unhappy. Many marriages un/fortunately end in divorce. Attaining marriage equality isn’t about attaining happiness. We don’t need marriage to be happy. We need equality to be happy. This isn’t about creating happy homes. We have those already. It’s that insignificant piece of paper that this is all about. And while I’ve been tempted time and time again to argue that attaining marriage equality is saying, “Look! We’re just like you now! Look! We can be civilized too!”, I also know what I want. I want to live in a place where I can look somebody straight in the eye and know that who I love has nothing to do with how they see me in that moment. That I can level with them and say, “This is my husband.” That the ring on my finger doesn’t feel any less real, any heavier than theirs. That my home, no matter how happy it is or is not, feels like home.

Cheers,

Max

I never use tumblr anymore but oh my god this is necessary.

epic:

What’s funny is that he looks like you.

Or he could be your brother. Or the guy that held the door open for you yesterday. Or your neighbor, or your neighbors son. He could be the guy next to you at the bar nodding his head to a Lady Gaga song or walking two steps behind his friends as he texts somebody.

Now imagine the same situations without him. You might not miss much. There’s other people to see, sure, perhaps with more rememberable faces and more gregarious speaking voices. The thing about Bradley Manning is that - for all intents and purposes - you could change him out with anyone. Another guy opening the door. Another guy tapping his foot to “Bad Romance”. Another guy tagging along behind his friends as they go bar hopping.

But this guy with the unassuming face is a little different. He has been held in a Virginia military base for 208 days and faces up to 52 years in jail for leaking 260,000 classified documents pertaining to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan - although - specifically - he is being directly charged with leaking the “Collateral Damage” video showing video of the US military killing 11 civilians who did not return fire, including two Reuters journalists. It would be foolish of me to enter into the argument of whether releasing whistle blowing documents is considered treason - especially on something like Epic, a goddam Tumblr site. But while the Wikileaks saga unfolds and it becomes more and more clear how greatly the country has been lied to, people forget that Bradley Manning - only 23 - is the one who started the ball rolling, copying the files onto CDRW’s and labeling them, yes, “Lady Gaga”, amongst other things. He’s just a guy.

Is whistle blowing a crime? Where does the paranoia end and the news actually begin?

The comedians are bringing up some good points: Are we really into two wars? Can you tell me what the Iraqi uniform looks like? Isn’t the very definition of a war the fighting between two armies? And if Mark Zuckerberg sells your Facebook information such as what music you like and where you life to private companies while Julian Assange gives information as to what companies and governments are doing to fuck you over, does that really make Zuckerburg the ‘Man Of The Year’? Or does that mean that Zuckerberg is just more apt towards playing the capitalist game? In short: where’s our payout for sucking corporate dick all these years? I’m not saying we should all move to Portland and start Shins cover bands just yet, I’m just saying that none of this adds up. I invite you to disagree. I invite you to voice your opinion. I invite you to start talking and to start thinking about the situation that we are in involving two “wars”… because then we’ll at least be talking. As a whole. Silence gives consent, and the majority of the country seems eerily silent. Probably because there’s a sale on at Best Buy. Like it or not, the Wikileaks materials have been leaked and they’re available to read and they will show you exactly what’s going on. It’s what historians call a ‘primary source’.

In America you are brought up to believe that you can do anything, that you can be anything you want, and that above all your voice matters. Bradley Manning disagreed with the alleged wars that we are fighting and did something about it. Should he be tried for it? It’s not my place to say. But Afghanistan is our Vietnam War, infact, it’s gone on longer, and more people have died. The American men and women are brave, brave, amazing people but we are allowed to question the motives of the non fighting people who sent them into that very war. Its called Free Speech, and it’s what this country is founded upon.

Just remember Bradley Manning at the center of this. He could be your brother. Your son. The guy that holds open the door. But right now he’s a silenced voice, held in solitary condiment in a military jail on American soil for the better part of a year. I’m not saying you should agree with him. What I am saying is that you should talk.

We’ll return to boobs and jokes in a moment, because along with apple pie and baseball, America does boobs and jokes pretty damn well, too. It’s an amazing country. Your dreams really can come true here moreso than in most parts of the world. If you can make it in New York you ca make it anywhere is how the saying goes. But fuck it - if you cant stand up for something you believe in - what can you do?
N

(Source: epic)

Chapter 1:

I was fighting an alligator on a rocky, volcanic slope with several decrepit buildings surrounding us. I could jump impossible distances, but the alligator always seemed to catch up faster than I could jump; I would hurl stones at its face to try and crush it, but it would nearly reach me before I could muster up the strength to pick up any stone large enough.

Chapter 2:

Still able to jump impossible distances, I was jumping on a ropes/platform/rooftop obstacle course at Kalamazoo, though it looked nothing like the college. It was just before dawn, and though I was freezing cold, I was wearing nothing but sweatpants. There were several others up there as well, and I knew I needed to find a place to meditate before everybody else in the college woke up. I would grab onto hanging rope with padding on the ends and swing between wooden platforms and cold concrete rooftops, looking for some place to watch the sunrise alone.

Chapter 3:

I found myself wandering the empty halls of a huge government building in what I knew to be Madrid, Spain (though I have no idea what it actually looks like); nighttime had just settled in, though the city was still wide awake behind the walls. My footsteps echoed in the vaulting, curled ceiling, and as I made my way throughout, I came upon the open-back patio that overlooked the entire city, placed upon a misshapen bay. The water was a deep, dark purple and the cloudy sky a deep grey with a light purple dust, and the city was a bright, bright orange. On the left side of the bay were the skyscrapers, the broadcasting towers, and on the right were the shanties and industrial plants.

Chapter 3.5:

I found myself on a beach in Madrid; it was daytime, though I don’t remember much about this portion of the dream, sadly. I just know I was playing and running with something much larger than myself.

Chapter 4:

A close childhood friend was talking to me and a friend of hers about how we had to get off this ice floe before it started to collapse, and as I looked around, I could see the ice breaking already. We were three in a group of students, corralled by one or two hysteric adults. The aurora borealis above reflected green and yellow in the thinning shelf, and I began to sprint to the shore that I could see about 250 yards away. As I got closer and closer, though, the ice got thinner and thinner, and it broke underneath my feet and I was swept away into the sea.

Chapter 5:

I was swimming with whales. There were some thick and grey, others white and longer than I could see; I would wrap my arms around their tails and they would take me with them. They were on their way to do battle with a giant squid, which attacked out of nowhere. The whales would slap the squids silly, and the squids would wrap their tentacles around the whales and try to drown them. At one point, I was vaulted out of the water and flew around what I knew to be a research facility (it was a snowy, mountainous climate), and I found an old friend/acquaintance sitting on the top of one of the buildings. She was watching the whole fight, and though we had conversation, I don’t remember anything she said to me; all I remember is her dive-bombing into the water and exploding into the sides of one of the squids. When she died, a small, child-looking token appeared where she had sat; I took it and put it in my pocket, then went back down to help the whales. The last thing I remember is wrapping my arms around the tail of one of the long, white whales and its powerful stroked pushing us deep into the water.

Sooo, that’s a pretty ambitious and unabashedly vague title. I’mma do my best to keep up with it. Wish me luck.

Tonight, instead of doing the homework that was assigned to me (sorry Brook), I’ve been watching TED talks, which (if you don’t know them) are an ongoing series of incredibly interesting and relevant speeches, forums, and think-tanks that not only highlight the wealth of knowledge that we as human beings have, but highlight it in such a way that is both physically and intellectually accessible to far more people than ever before. Complex topics such as economic trends, climate change, communication, and urban planning (to name a few) are explained in meaningful and often very hopeful ways — always naturally imperfect (how could you ever fully explain the effects of the recession abroad in eighteen minutes?) but also always creative and outside what I’ve always known to be “the box”. But since embarking on this journey to the Borderlands, I’ve been presented with some (in my mind) quite radical ideas regarding capitalism and its pivotal role in why I have a life that people want. Consequently, I’ve begun to consider expanding my idea of “the box” dramatically.

Obviously, I’m making a lot of assumptions in that post and using a lot of buzzwords without really defining what I mean. Here’s the long-and-short of how I understand some things to mean: Capitalism, in a sense, is the global economic system in place, born out of Feudalism, that replaces the precolonial Lord-and-Serf dynamic with a Producer-and-Consumer dynamic, wherein the consumer operates as an autonomous being, though at the same time needs the producer to provide necessary, desired, and/or trivial goods and services not directly available or apparent to the consumer. “The box” is the dominant Western paradigm in which nearly every one of us in Europe and westward operates, that being an invisible, given list of assumptions about how the world conducts itself based upon observed person-to-person as well as person-to-nonperson interactions. Previously, because of my privilege as an uppermiddleclass white male, I hadn’t even considered factoring capitalism into my idea of “the box” simply because a) I knew very little of its implications and b) it was too big for me to comprehend; insert couldn’t-see-the-forest-through-the-trees metaphor here. I don’t profess to truly understand any of it now, but I have a better grasp of it, at least.

Prior to this program, my ideas of approaching systemic change has always been to work within the system to change the system. It is a form of innocent subversion with the intent to create a new, slightly-altered system from the previous one, with minichanges that are easily accepted and incorporated into the invisible new paradigm. In this way, the change is concrete, nonvolatile, and programmed into future paradigms as well. But for many of my classmates and program facilitators, that has not been nor has never been enough. Capitalism, this system in which I’ve been operating to change, must fall in order for true change to occur, because until it does, this Producer-Consumer dynamic will always favor those producers that can sell to the consumer for the biggest profit. Historically, this has translated itself into producers produce cheap goods through a chain of exploitation to sell to comparatively wealthy consumers at dozensfold its production cost.

In this increasingly globalized world, too, the way we think about the Producer-Consumer must globalize as well to account for shifting production. It can no longer be Me, the consumer, going into American Apparel, the producer, and buying a shirt that was “Made in America, no sweatshops included”. It must also factor in that American Apparel, as a consumer, bought the raw materials, those being dye, cotton, and whatever else they put into their shirts from various other producers, who in turn probably bought the seeds and the land on which they grow the cotton upon from several other companies. Even just writing that sentence, I could feel my mind bending backwards to try and track the branches of the Producer-Consumer tree as they disappeared into the canopy of the market. It was dizzying.

In the words of a Mexican farmhand that I met at a ranch in Aribabi, Sonora, “Es mas facil comprar que producir”; “It’s much easier to buy than produce.” And it’s true. It’s a TON easier for me to go to a store and buy a soccer ball than cure and stitch a goat’s stomach. I haven’t really tried doing that yet as Jessie so wisely said I should, I suppose, but driving to Target tonight and buying a soccer ball was pretty damn easy. (Maybe that should be our project on the next Epic Road Trip O’ Doom… we could probably find a small screaming child who doesn’t need his/her stomach. :D) And so, with this cycle of Producer-Consumer economics hiding its modes of efficiency in a great, big, globalized market, it is very easy as well to forget just where all of our consumed goods come from, both on an individual as well as a corporate level. The argument that I’ve heard this entire semester has grown into an anarcho-anticapitalist vision of decentralized, localized, and (in my opinion) isolationist communities that function on a purely self-sufficient basis. This vision is rooted in the belief that capitalism is going to destroy the world as we know it in such a way that it will take, essentially, human extinction and millions of years to repair it.

Ain’t that just a ray of fucking sunshine?

I certainly don’t mean to be patronizing, and I apologize if I’ve come off that way to anyone. I actually agree in that capitalism in its current incarnation is an inherently racist, classist, and nationalist system that feeds off the poor to feed the rich. My beef with this worldview is that it leaves very little room for creativity, nor does it provide current or relevant answers to the problems facing the world today, right now. The patterns of development have played out in such a manner that we have as a species began congregating in densely populated areas (cities) for the sole purpose of keeping the system (capitalism) alive and well, lest our entire world crumble immediately. A logical and natural reaction to this can be simply to reject these developments and advocate for complete eradication of our current way of life. This is a noble and an entirely, for the moment and in my opinion, irrelevant goal. The fact of the matter is, these cities and these ways of living unquestioningly exist in a very, very large and involved scale, and as someone who has always thought about working within the system to change it, that is my natural route for approaching these incredibly important problems.

Creativity becomes a vital part of this discussion right about here: when the anticapitalist butts up against the internal reformist and the two, though fundamentally working toward the same end (that being a system that actually works), come about it in completely different ways. This is an age-old theme, revisited in film and literature over and over again. When I come up to a problem such as this, I wonder “Well, now that this city is here, how can I make it less destructive than it already is?” One of the TED talks I watched tonight was by Natalie Jeremijenko, who spoke about how she was using natural ecological processes such as a tadpole evolving into a frog and the restorative nature of plants to both raise awareness on a person-to-person scale, but also change very actively the ways that person-to-nonperson interactions began to shift within a space. For instance, she led efforts to rip away the concrete in front of various fire hydrants, where no cars are allowed to park anyway, and instead install gardens where oil and harmful chemical residue can collect and be filtered out by the plants’ natural processes instead of simply draining into the gutters, which eventually lead to watersheds and such places. In this way, she was able to minimize specific chemical effects on the environment within and outside of the city in measurable and effective ways.

This method, however, is designed to help sustain the system just a little while longer, and that (to play anticapitalist’s advocate) is still failing to address the root problems of the environmental degradation of the space around the city. And that is true; it doesn’t. However, my response to that is that eventually, capitalism will fail. It will fail dramatically and with massive, massive global fissures and ripples. Maybe this is me just being stuck in my box, but maybe there’s also not just one big box. Maybe it’s a community of smaller boxes, all packaged up inside and next to each other, and everyone is inside some boxes and outside of others, and we’re all communicating in between the boxes using really fancy words and pretty gestures but not really getting anywhere, while all the boxes are sitting in a truck with no driver but no road either and a brick to the gas pedal with a flat tire for good measure and unpredictability.

My point, when all that is said and done, is that pushing our own boundaries is going to be imperative in the years and decades ahead; almost as imperative as pushing other people’s as well. We live in a world of hyperconnectivity and impossible amounts of ideas at our fingertips; one of the TED Talks I watched spoke directly about the ways that modern dance has evolved dramatically because internet videos were available in Japan from troupes in Detroit which evolved from a certain style in California. Don’t be afraid to look for ideas, and don’t be afraid when you find them; whether or not they work within the system doesn’t really matter. Create something that has a measurable impact, whether it be an urban garden or a unicycle trick nobody’s ever seen before. All of these things, though apparently inconsequential when compared to the truck carrying boxes and going nowhere but everywhere, will shift ideas and directly challenge others that you and your peers may have, and that will always be important for when capitalism eventually does fail and we have to find somewhere else to start. We will have a group of people willing to rise up and present ideas instead of simply accepting what is there.

And maybe I’m writing things waaaaay outside of my own comprehension levels at 1:45am. I think that’s pretty clearly evidenced by those last few paragraphs there. Still haven’t done my homework yet, either. Cool.

Cheers,

Max

I and my compadres have been wrestling with a concept for a while now: given a topic so polarizing as, say, border issues, how does one discuss such a thing with another who disagrees so emphatically with you that civil conversation is unlikely at best? And is that even a situation worth navigating? Needless to say, it’s an incredibly relevant question given the somewhat terrifying (for me) advent of the Tea Party, though on a somewhat less dramatic scale, the simple partisan divides with fierce, breathless defense of a party’s dogma provide excellent fodder for this. Simply put, how do you talk to someone who disagrees with you based on their deeply entrenched beliefs about how the world works?

A perfect example of this presented itself several weeks ago when we went on our first travel seminar through Sonora, Mexico. We seven students were sitting on the rooftop patio of a very swank (and altogether culturally amalgamated) hotel, sipping Tecates, and talking about how we all fit into this program. The night was dark and quiet and we were enjoying ourselves immensely. And then, there was Rosie.

The daughter of a Canadian mine-owner, born in Butte, Montana but raised in Vancouver, British Columbia, Rosie found herself in the quaint little town of Banamichi by way of her mining engineering job. She lives in the same hotel where we stayed that night, occupying a large apartment next to the rooftop patio and commuting eight miles daily to the gold/silver mine her father owns just outside the town. Hearing our voices, she came out of her apartment and transplanted herself and a friend of hers into our conversation by offering us what she called “real booze”: a bottle of Smirnoff vodka. We all politely declined, so she subsequently began swigging out of the bottle, straight up.

We discovered very quickly that she was (simply put) an incredibly ignorant, racist, misogynistic, affluent bitch. Among other things.

As she began asking us about why we were there in Banamichi and who we were, she would add brief but incredibly telling sound bytes in the vein of, “Well, we all follow our parents eventually, right?” In the end, while the conversation didn’t get anywhere productive, it was an incredibly fascinating psychological analysis of this very privileged person, who had indeed followed her parents into the mine and literally had no frame of reference outside of her own little bubble.

I had the unfortunate opportunity to have an extended one-on-one conversation with her once everyone else had either tried to distance themselves from her or she simply stopped paying attention to them. While I don’t remember everything we talked about in detail, I did write down several quotes and ideas after the fact, which I am more than glad to share.

- “There are 2 homeless people that I’ve seen in Hermosillo” (the capital of Sonora)

- “That would be like you reaching across the table and grabbing my boobs. You just wouldn’t do that!” (After I explained how the US basically took over Mexico’s economy.)

- Doesn’t think that her daddy going into a remote community in Guatemala and installing a “tiny little treatment plant” to improve soil quality is a bad thing. (It’s a very, very bad thing.)

- Mexico’s economic situation is “all Mexico’s fault”. (lols)

Among other things. At the end of this conversation (which was about an hour altogether, I was impressed I made it so long) I simply got up and left after she laughed when I told her I was gay. As I thought about what exactly happened, I realized that neither of our opinions had changed, nor probably will change any time soon. And then I realized that this has been a very noticeable trend in many debates and arguments that I’ve had in my life. In the end, very seldom do we find that our opinions have changed significantly, if at all — unless we enter into a situation with a belief in the incompleteness of our knowledge and a desire to learn more, we’ll simply revert to defending ourselves and our beliefs.

So then, if neither Rosie nor I gained much of anything from the conversation (besides a mutual dislike of each other and some very interesting stories to tell), then what was the point? Was it merely to test my skills in defending my points in a rapid-fire, largely illogical discussion? Neither of us was willing to learn more because of our rigid belief systems; both of us felt as if we had the monopoly on information, which clearly, neither of us has. Our beliefs have been defined by where we’ve been and through what lenses we’ve experienced these places and events, and those cannot change. What can ultimately change is how willing we are to accept that our knowledge is not infallible and complete. But how does that factor in the fact that Rosie was, very simply, an idiot (in my opinion)? Obviously, this post has demonized her quite a bit (possibly unfairly… but probably not), but there was simple nonsense behind many of her points.

Here’s what I’m mainly struggling with: I don’t want to live in an echo chamber of ideas where I’m surrounded by people who agree with me; I think that that only reinforces these monopolies of ideas. But, at the same time, I don’t want to live in a place where I’m surrounded by Rosies. That just sounds terrifying and impossible. So then, where is the middleground? How does one navigate through these ideas with a mind open enough to receive new information and reevaluate, while steering clear of the Rosies, if one even wants to? I don’t really have the answers, and if you’d like to chime in, I would absolutely love to hear what you have to say. This is one of those “I wanna know more!” situations.

Cheers,

Max

aydenmace:

MY PARENTS ARE THREATENING TO SUE ME FOR INVASION OF PRIVACY IF I DO NOT TAKE THE VIDEO OFF!! SO IM LEAVING IT UP FOR THE REST OF TODAY!! PLEASE WATCH IT BEFORE I HAVE TO DELETE IT!!

HERE IS THE LINK

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3jYESZpHIo

The fight goes on.

I understand that what I am about to write is hardly related to the US/Mexico border as is my normal blog post, but I feel that were I not to write this, I would continue to experience an emotional pressure so great that I would not know how to deal with it. I apologize if this lapses into sentimentality and impassioned frustration.

Dear President Barack Obama,

First, I wish to convey the respect that I hold both for you and for the position of office that you hold. Like many before you have done in varying capacities, you have learned the hardship of guiding an incredibly influential and equally arrogant country and its people though a myriad of crises. I do not wish to belittle you or the job that has made the hair of many heads significantly grayer. What I wish to do is voice my disappointment, born of frustration, as is my right, my privilege, and what I now believe is my duty as an American citizen. Just as I believe it is my duty to write this, I believe it is your duty if not to read these words, then to understand what they represent: A crying out. A demand for dignity. A lonely plea. A brave, and desperate song.

On this day, Monday, October 11th, 2010, many lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and straight people will celebrate National Coming Out Day, an occasion designed to encourage all members of the Queer community and its allies to announce their sexual and gender identity in a spectacle of solidarity and support. It is a day filled with courageous love, tenacious hesitation, and downright fear for some. In the wake of the sudden, timely media coverage of the tragic suicides of several gay youth around the nation, the day will also be lined with a sorrow I have not so acutely felt in a long time — not because this is some shocking new phenomenon created by recent events, but because it is only now coming to light as a problem, and that only minimal efforts have been made to reverse the root causes of these deaths. In today’s day and age, the minimum is no longer effective, responsible, or acceptable, and I am imploring you to do something about it.

There are many failures at work here, and not all blame can or should be placed upon your shoulders. Scapegoating is not only ineffective in inspiring change, but also damaging to our cause as a whole. What I aim to do is only ask for more than words. The Employment Non-Discrimination Act, the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, and gay marriage are all important and will happen in due time. I have no doubts about that. However, the longer that they are not in play and can stand as symbols of the silence that LGBT people must adhere to in their lives, the longer the status quo is maintained that we are innately different. This is incredibly damaging for those of us who may not have the luxury of being so comfortable in our own skin, in our own homes — and, of course, for Seth Stambaugh, fired from the Beaverton School District in Oregon, and Lt. Dan Choi, discharged from the military. These are examples of countless others both publicly shamed and privately suffering throughout their respective realities, and your promises of passage and repeal, however hopeful, have done little more than bring them to the table for increasingly uncivil discussion.

The fact that children at public schools especially, from elementary through college, are being called irreparably disparaging names and physically, emotionally, and mentally devalued as humans by their peers is unacceptable. The truly atrocious thing, however, is the acceptance — and, in some cases, perpetuation — of this behavior by those administrating and facilitating the schools which these students attend. These are people who hold the influence and command the respect necessary to begin shifting these trends away from such destructive language and atmospheres. I was lucky enough to have attended a private, Catholic high school that did not tolerate homophobic slurs and indeed fostered a healthy, vibrant environment that helped me thrive as a gay teen in an incredibly frightening, unsure time. Most homophobic attitudes directed toward LGBT persons are expressed in the schools, and I know that were these youth to have existed in a school like mine, they most likely would not have put themselves in a casket. That is the real tragedy.

I ask you, as the charismatic leader of this country, as the man who ascended to great heights on the great spine of hope to please address this issue directly with as much understanding and love as you are capable. It can no longer be put aside, and it should not be. These teachers and staff members, who could have been tremendous resources for these kids and who are paid by the United States government, must not fail at protecting their students’ lives any longer. Every time a closeted lesbian hears the words “faggot” and “dyke” is a failure. Every day that a transgendered person lives in the wrong skin is a failure. These are not new phenomena, and that is the biggest failure of all. More importantly, this is not your failure alone. This is the failure of every one of us, and as we stand on the bones of those whom we have failed, our heads bowed in reverent grief, we must remember that this is not an unpreventable circumstance. Every one of us has the right, the privilege, and the duty to continue preserving the dignity of the human beings around us in ways never impossible. So long as the dignity of humanity can be preserved here, in this place, then will such actions reverberate throughout history and resonate with all those listening today as right and true and good.

Sincerely,

Max Aaron Bryant Wedding