I remember the feel of the springs in the pew through the thin weird burnt-orange-colored super-velvet upholstery.  In front of me were the hymnals full of songs I hated to hear sung and the Bibles full of texts I felt were constantly being tortured to make stupid points for stupid people.  I remember the way I used to slouch in the pew, allowing the corner of the book-holder to dig into my knee to keep me awake.  Sometimes I would take the pen from the pen-holder, gummy with months of leaked ink, and scribble subversive nonsense onto the back of the tithe envelopes, or draw rebellious little figures holding swords and shields or fire-breathing dragons.  Sometimes, I would draw maps of places that existed only in my mind, cobbling them together over Sabbath after Sabbath while cowering behind one of the massive slanted wooden pillars – escape maps to the countries in my mind.  Anytime I listened, I would feel frustration boil up in me when I heard Pastor Strunk drone on about some pointless legality or whistle one of his incredibly self-important songs.  I would see everyone sitting securely smug in the pew wearing their Sabbath-best and feeling proud of themselves for being part of the “remnant church.”

I do not begrudge my parents for raising me in the Seventh-Day Adventist faith, nor do I begrudge my father his faith.  In fact, it is quite to the contrary; I know that what I saw in the walls of that church on the side of Highway 46 in Templeton, California, set me on the path to become what I am today.  My parents always had the best of intentions, and had my father not been so persistent in promoting his faith among the family, I might have found it on my own and accepted it.  However, it is my nature (regrettably or otherwise) to refuse to the utmost anything which I feel has been thrust upon me.  The insistence that I accept that which I found to be wholly silly was one of the deciding factors that guided me to my present place of non-faith.

I clearly remember the day that Pastor Strunk made the altar-call.  I was sitting apart from my family as I imagine most early teens are wont to do.  For years I had been feeling the pressure to conform to a system that I didn't understand or believe in, and I didn't know what to do.  I remember sitting in my Sabbath school class and listening to various well-intentioned teachers lead us through the lessons and the prayers, I remember seeing my peers professing their beliefs and being so happy in the security these beliefs afforded them.  I remember trying so hard, with every cell in my body, to believe, but no matter what I did, it just seemed wrong to me.  I remember spending nights in painful tears, pleading for whatever faith there might be to be given to me, so that I could just believe.  There was never solace, just a cold and sickly discomfort that settled into my heart and bones.

All children have faith.  They do not have faith in Jesus or in God or in any other intangible force; they have faith only in their parents.  When a child is told of Santa or the Easter Bunny or Jesus, they believe.  They do not believe because it makes sense, but they believe because they see the person telling them as a reliable authority on reality.  However, as these children grow into adults, there comes a point where they realize that it would be impossible for a fat man to slide down a chimney with a bag of presents for every house on earth.  They understand intuitively, that there isn’t a magical woman who steals teeth and replaces them with shiny quarters.  For me, it was the realization that no matter how magical bible stories seemed, there was just something off about a man walking on water, something strange about a man who has unlimited strength until you cut his hair, and something just downright weird about a woman turning into salt just because.  The harder I thought about it, and the most I tried to rationalize, I felt myself losing my religion – one belief at a time.

That day though, I decided to take the next step.  For me, baptism was an all-or-nothing gamble for acceptance.  In the movies, they always showed American Jesus™ being baptized in the river Jordan by John the Baptist.  The scene is always the same; John lifts Jesus from the water as the heavens open and a solid ray of “god light” spotlights Jesus and the voice from heaven booms, “Behold, my beloved son, in whom I am well-pleased.”  Maybe Christ had felt doubt up until that moment, so I thought I would try for my own god-light moment.  I remember standing and walking stiffly to the front with some other people I now forget, and thus signaling my desire to be baptized.  My father was proud and delighted, and while I was happy to have made him happy, I felt like a fraud inside.

Several days later, Pastor Strunk arrived to interview me about the baptism.  The arrogant ass just pulled up and parked in the garage – I remember this clearly.  Even my mild-mannered mother was irritated by his presumption.  We sat at the corner of the kitchen table and discussed what baptism meant, while he looked at me seriously from beneath his plucked eyebrows and immaculately coiffed gray hair.  Bible passages were read, questions asked, and he went home leaving my mother to vent her irritation as he pulled out of the driveway.

When the day of the baptism arrived, we all went to church as a family.  I was sent to the special room to prepare for my spiritual rebirth.  I was given the characteristic black robe that Seventh-Day Adventists wear to symbolize their culpability when it comes to the matters of sin.  As I pulled the robe over my head, I recall feeling the weights in the hem knock against my legs and feeling oddly disillusioned.  I didn't know the robes needed weights, and it seemed oddly corporeal for what was to be a spiritual experience.  As I walked down the steps of the baptismal font to where Pastor Strunk was waiting, I was handed the cloth that was to cover my nose and mouth as I was dunked.  With mechanical precision, I moved one step closer to baptism.

The baptismal itself disappointed me in some way.  I don't know what I was expecting.  It was a baptismal font in a modern building, so the fact it was just a big-ass bathtub probably should not have been surprising.  I had never really seen it before, as it was usually covered with extremely colorful flower arrangements, but today I could see deep into the clear water all the way down to the drain with its utilitarian black plug.  Behind me waited the rest of the candidates, standing patiently in their black weighted robes with their handkerchiefs, all waiting expectantly for the moment when the light of god would burst forth from the heavens.

I remember stepping down the steps into the big bathtub to where Pastor Strunk was waiting as an instrument of the divine.  He led me into position, said the blessing over me, put the napkin over my mouth, and tipped me backwards into the water.  That is when it happened...

...I got very, very wet.  There, for that moment as I hung underwater, I waited for the feeling.  I waited for the moment that I would be transformed.  In the womb-like embrace of the lukewarm water, I waited for the moment where God the Father™ would reach down his hand from heaven and wrest me from the bosom of the water, thrusting me into the world like a newborn infant “Born-Again.”

When I finally broke the surface and the napkin was removed, I held my breath for a moment, waiting for the great cosmic reveal.  Waiting for the moment I would join the ranks of the “saved.” I waited for the moment I would know.  I waited for the moment that the powers of the Almighty would stand behind my long-failed faith and bolster it, showing me the truth behind the veil. I waited for the hand of god on my shoulder, telling the world that in this single action I had redeemed my soul from eternal damnation and exchanged the lake of fire for a golden crown.  However…

There was no light...

There was no sound...

There was no rush of emotion...

There was no magic...

...no joy...

...no faith...

...only me in a wet weighted polyester robe with a wet napkin in my hand and a hole in my heart.  It was a tragic moment for me, realizing that in all of this, it is up to me to accept that hole, and nobody else will ever be able to fill it for me.

The thing is this, and I have learned this after everything I have seen.  People talk about the “god-shaped hole” like it is something that needs to be filled.  I have to protest this concept, this hole is what makes us human.  It is this hole, this recognition of our own mortality, powerlessness, and ultimate meaninglessness that sets us apart from animals.  This void what makes you ache for the rest of life around you, makes you capable of feeling love and feeling hurt, makes you capable of rational thought.  It is this hole that keeps you from ever being complete, but enables you to be beautiful in your incompleteness.

It wasn't long after that day that I was able to find the strength in myself to call is the way I saw it and quit attending church.  It has been over a decade since I sat through a sermon (I believe I have gone to several random Catholic masses with my mother and grandmother, but I see that as an entirely different category).  Most of the people I grew up with in the church have found their own ways, many of them still within the church.

Each weekend, they meet and clutch their Bibles and look at world events to determine when the inevitable Second Coming of Christ will happen, calling the “sinner” to atone for their sins.  Each night, if they think too hard, they feel the weight of reality pressing down upon them.  Instead of facing their doubts and reevaluating, they call it a “crisis of faith” and pray harder, wringing their hands in anguish as their mind attempts to rationalize the irrational input confronting it.  Each weekend they come together to confess their shortcomings and to be justified by the projected faith of others around them.

While they do this, I laugh.  I am not laughing at them; I could not care less what they do.  Rather, I am laughing at the whole silly beautiful mess that life and our existence on this planet.  No matter what happens in the end, we are here, we have lived, we have loved, and if this is all there is, I am ok with that idea.

Note: I am starting to get e-mails from friends, family, and even a few strangers, all telling me they miss my writing and posting.  I figured I should probably put something up before people start showing up and looking for my body or something.  To those who have written, I am sorry I have not responded, I have been INCREDIBLY busy here lately.  This entry is cobbled together out of a bunch of half-starts, so sorry if it seems disjointed.

Words flash before my eyes, burned into my memory.  Pictures built upon the pages from the minds of men who have long since turned to dust.  I have always read books, but in the past year I have upped the consumption of literature to an almost frightful level.  My entire library and more I had in the States has been rebuilt in PDF format upon the spinning magnetic disc of my hard drive.  Instead of turning pages, I let the PDF reader scroll the words of the book past my dancing eyes.  I have learned to consume the pages and soak up information like a sponge.  I love feeling the strain in the back of my mind as I see how much information I can truly get to fit.  I have, by observing people, determined that unless you are actively trying to learn, your mind is in an active state of decay.  Use it or lose it – I am using my mind now more than I ever have my entire life.

I have been reading a lot of letters lately; I find them to be an invaluable glimpse into the world of the past.  These letters have been written home by travelers: soldiers, adventurers, students, writers, wanderers and seekers of every stripe. Some are filled with longing for their lost home, for their loved ones, for their friends and family.  Sometimes they are sad, sometimes funny, but there is always a constant theme of separation - of difference.  A constant sense of metamorphoses imbues the words of these forlorn wanderers.

They write from the desire to be remembered and understood.  It is the pervasive desire for others to see the world through the writer’s eyes, to share the feel of the foreign wind in their hair and the strange soil beneath their feet.  They seek to explain why and how they have come to find themselves in their strange and different surroundings.  This is my wish: I want others to understand the perspective from which I write, and feelings that abide with me on my current vantage point on the far side of the planet from my homeland.

I think back through time, to the centuries in the past when my forefathers stepped with booted feet upon the gangplank of their rough Dutch trader to head to the new world.  Fleeing the religious persecutions of their homeland, they established a new home in what would become New York.  From that day forward, they worked their way inch by inch across the country, weaving themselves into American history as they went.  They fought at Bunker Hill, on both sides of the Civil War, and made their marks upon the history of a nation.

As I consider this, I feel the weight of legacy bearing down heavily on my shoulders.  I am so far from the wheat fields where my forebears turned the soil and weathered the harsh Northern winters, so far from Mirror Lake and the men in serious hats, so far from the comforting smell of steel shavings and grease of the airplanes I played around in my youth, so far from the small pond and the fiberglass boat I was not to touch the edges of, so far from the oddly homey warehouse filled with nuts and bolts, so far from the dark soil of my mother’s garden, or the smooth concrete of my father’s garage; and I miss these things.  I am so far from my own history, I sometimes wonder what my own descendents will think when they look at the meticulous genealogical records I have been building and wonder what exactly motivated that distant ancestor, Jason, to climb aboard a primitive petroleum-burning airplane and fly halfway around the world.  If I end up staying here permanently, what will be said of me by my own descendents after one of them has moved to some fantastic new location?  Will they look at their genealogical records with no true understanding of who I am and ask themselves why I would leave the old American Empire to move to SE Asia?  400 years is about what separates me from my forebears – what will my bloodline look like in another 400?

In the States, I felt surrounded.  I felt caged in on all sides by the growing feeling of malaise that seemed to be infecting the body politic.  As I walked the streets, I passed the people with their heads hung low, their faces tense knots of frustration and stress.  Things seemed to be reaching a fever-pitch of malfunction before I left, and if anything I am hearing from within the borders of the States is to be believed, it is just getting worse and worse.  I love my family and friends, but I think I will probably not be returning anytime soon.  Politics seem to be getting more and more divisive, with both sides of the aisle determined to sell the nation down the road to their corporate backers.  Here I stand, in Asia, looking at the distant nation, and wonder if this is what Thucydides felt while in exile on distant shores watching the might of Athens crumble.  A friend of mine just returned from a full tour of the United States and said only, “Dude…stay here, there is nothing there anymore.”

As much as I recognize this, there is so much that I miss.  Last night, I dreamed of the desert.  I could smell the crushed desert sage and the dust on the wind.  The ponderous weight of years of memories and the oddly familiar scent of the kitchen of the Crystal Palace: something of a mixture of dust, propane, bacon grease, and Coors.  After I woke up, I stood on the balcony and felt the hot Bangkok breeze as it etched my face.  I imagined the mountains around me, the hot breeze redolent with the smell of desert blowing in my face, and the silence that allowed your “ears to uncurl.”  Later, I pulled up Google Earth and looked at a contoured projection of the scenery.  To see it again, from “ground level” I was taken back.  I traced out hikes I have taken, vantage points I love, and just looked at everything – god, I miss the desert.

The things I miss the most are my friends and family.  I miss my mother and her fresh bread and pesto, my father and his analytical way of thinking, my sister and her spirited enthusiasm, my brother and his snark (and beard), my grandparents with their insight and wisdom (even if some of them inexplicably believe Glenn Beck is something more than a waste of carbon and water), even my dog Mr Bill.  I also miss my friends, especially Delilah and Pandora.  I miss the early morning fog creeping through the grape vines.  I miss the smell of fresh cut grass.  I even miss In-N-Out (if I come back to visit, that will be the 1st stop out of the airport).

Here, in the recovered swampland that is most of Bangkok, I have been welcomed.  I have formed fast friendships with the most improbable and distant parts of society.  I have gone from being just another farang passing through Thailand to being the white guy who speaks a bit of Thai and defies stereotypes.  A friend of me said the other day, “you are not farang man, you are Thai man.”  I know I am not, but I am doing my best to fit in as well as a giant blond guy can.

“Life is time, they teach you growing up.  The seconds ticking killed us all, a million years before the fall.  We ride the waves and don’t ask where they go.  We swim like lions through the crest and bathe ourselves in zebra flesh.” – Primitive Radio Gods

This post isn't so much biographical or really about me in any way, shape, or form.  However, I do feel the need to share information I have stumbled across in my online meanderings in response to the rather tremendous interest one of my earlier posts generated.  You can find the original post, Painting By Rossini, here.

I have received dozens and dozens of emails and comments regarding this post, from people all over the world.  Everybody seems to have a similar painting, the signature is always the same, everybody seems to have purchased the paintings over the last fifty years or so (frequently at garage sales) and nobody seems to know anything.

In my initial research, I stumbled across Nicolas Rossini.  Very very little can be found about him, except that he was a polish painter who spent time in Italy (his father's homeland) painting.  During WWII he helped Jewish orphans escape Poland, and it was for this that he was executed by the Third Reich at the Kraków-P?aszów concentration camp in Poland...a particularly nasty camp, and the one featured in Schindler's List.

Apparently, though I cannot find any corroborating evidence, paintings by this Rossini are fairly well known in Italy, but he is known mostly for his heroics, not his paintings themselves.

When I initially began searching for info on this about a year ago, I found a painting by this Rossini and the signature matched mine fairly well.  I cannot, unfortunately, find that same picture again.  It had the same heavy hand and inconsistent style mine does, but I cannot prove it conclusively.  I have found a book that apparently has a chapter on him, but being here in Bangkok now, I have no way to get it shipped to me without paying the veritable arm and leg shipping.  As I left the painting in California hanging in my mother's “antique room” above the manual typewriter collection when I left, so this is basically a curiosity to me.  If someone wants to let me know what the book says though, I would be delighted!

Polish Painter Introduction on Amazon.com

If anyone has any further information, I would very much appreciate an email or comment posted below.  Thanks!

On a side note, looking around I discovered that there is a Facebook page set up for Rossini here.  All of the links in this page, basically taken from the Wikipedia stub, link to their own pages.  I am going to guess this is being automatically generated by Facebook, because it is now possible to “Like” the  P?aszów concentration camp...which thankfully nobody has done.

“It is not power that corrupts, but fear,” writes Aung San Suu Kyi, Nobel Prize winner from Burma. This mirrors something I have been thinking of writing for some time, and have gone back and forth as to whether or not it is a good idea. It may very well be inadvisable socially, but I feel the need to say something, and so I shall. This was initially intended to be a daily book update on Freedom from Fear by Aung San Suu Kyi, but it spiraled out of control and became stratospherically disconnected from the initial point I was making – or rather the point itself moved from being a simple observation about a piece of literature and its relevance to education to a wholesale indictment of western apathy.

As I write this, I sit on the balcony outside my apartment in Saphan Khwai in the Bangkok. I have been here for some time now, and in this period of time I have begun to realize that while living on the Central Coast I was blinded in so many ways. I could not only not see the forest for the trees, but I was having a hard time seeing any one tree because I had my nose wedged so firmly into a knothole. I had felt a sense of dissatisfaction for years, but had never really known what needed to change. Since my youth I had ranged over every political theory imaginable – from the Marxism of my early teens (I once snuck a copy of The Communist Manifesto into the Templeton Hills SDA Church and read it inside a hymnal) to the cold objectivist philosophy of Ayn Rand, to the anarchism of Bakunin and Proudhon – but nothing seemed to fit (and just in case anyone is wondering, there is still nothing that fits). Over the past months though, I have spoken to many Americans (incidentally, for the sake of simplicity, “Americans” represents people who are citizens of the United States) both in the States and abroad as tourists, and I have been stunned by the thought processes and stories being shared with me. The more I look at the current geopolitical situation, and the more I look at the history that has led up to this point, the more I realize that the United States is a nation completely driven by its own intentionally manufactured fear.

Now, I know that there are many people (specifically certain family members) who are rolling their eyes and moving the mouse cursor to the X in the corner of the screen. However, before you click that X, hear me out. While there are things written here you will not like, you will not find any dogma or anything contrary to the spirit of what the United States has the potential to be. You will find no abrogation of the core principals holding life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the highest esteem. Nothing I am going to say should be inflammatory, nor is it anything that anyone who actually looked around wouldn't see on their own were they to be honest with themselves. If this still frightens you, then by all means, close the window - this is not a message you are yet able to hear or understand. If you want, bookmark it, and one day when you become tired of the continual dissolution of your basic human rights, you may think back on it, bring it up – and maybe it will stick then.

So, if you are not ready for it, go ahead and close it, I will wait.

Now, for the rest of you. Look at the world around you. Look at the men and women milling about in the street with their heads hanging low. Watch the blank-eyed masses push their overflowing shopping carts through Wal-Mart as they load them up with cheap pre-made goods and TV dinners. Go to the library where I spent so many days as a child and look for the youth in the aisles. Go sit in the back of a classroom where the students are taught not out of a desire to impart useful information, but just to pass a test. Go stand in the center of a dance floor at a club amid the sweating and convulsing masses as they try to drink, dance, and dope their way to peace.

I have wandered those streets, mind reeling and head heavy. I have bought CD racks and new bedspread sets because it seemed like a good idea. I have gone to the library and seen the kind old woman arranging books on the shelves in a nearly empty building. I have wandered, somnambulistic, through the rituals of western society and felt completely empty while doing it. I once saw some graffiti that said, “Go to work, send your kids to school, follow fashion, act normal, walk on the pavement, watch TV, save for your old age, obey the law. Repeat after me: I am free.” While I contest parts of this, I feel that it is accurate in its basic assessment of society. As a society, we now willfully place our intents in the hands of those who will do the thinking for us.

To me, it feels like something has changed in what was once the land of the free and the home of the brave. While I am sure this process began long before I was able to observe it, the citizens of the United States have fallen asleep and seem to be trapped in some sort of nightmare from which they are unable to awaken. Enslaved by consumerism and toxic rhetoric, they muddle forward like oil-tainted crabs on a trash-strewn breakwater collecting glimmering pieces of tin-foil, quick to skitter back to their holes at the first sign of threat or danger from something as innocuous as their own shadow.

The human fear of outside threats has always been, and always will be, the driving force behind Nationalism. We believe that because we are born on one side of a border or another, we are somehow separated and different. Any debate that occurs along nationalistic lines has elements of this fear embedded in it. It is always a fear of the “others” and what they might do. The immigration debate in the States is fueled by fear that the “others” will take American jobs or that the “others” will change the ways things are done – muddying up American “culture.” Just about everywhere, this commonly takes the form of ethnophobic anti-anythingotherthanwhatevercountryyouareinism. Whether your target is the French, Mexicans, Chinese, Haitians, Homosexuals, Baptists, Atheists, Republicans, Democrats, Muslims, Union Members, or Indians, there is always a ready-made but entirely false stereotype to go with your talking point. Mexicans are lazy, Indians stink, the French are wusses, the Chinese can't be trusted, Haitians are stupid, Gays are evil, Baptists are bible-thumping morons, Atheists just want to think of themselves as god, Republicans are heartless, Democrats want your money, etc. We, as a separate societies build these walls between one another because they allow us to cling to our own kind and create an internal sense of cooperation. These tactics have been used for millenia to dehumanize opponents and create inner-stability. This inner-stability is created at the cost of cooperation in the broader sense, a cost that we can no longer afford to pay.

These external fears are bad enough, but even more insidious are the internal fears that drive our economies forward – the fears that sneak into our dreams and flow over and around us. Commercialism is driven forward primarily by these fears of being inadequate. Fears of being unloved. Fears of falling behind. Fears of not being respected, of not fitting into your assigned spot in society. The entire concept of advertising has morphed from “We have the best yogurt” to “If you don't eat our yogurt, you will be fat and nobody will ever want you.” A simple half-hours worth of watching network TV will make this abundantly clear. From clothing to jewelry to cars to houses to food to medication – woven throughout all of it is rhetoric designed to make you feel inadequate and inspire you to consume. I do not fault people for not seeing this – they live with blinders on and have never been given the opportunity to see – never been allowed to glimpse the true light of day outside their narrow ideological confines. Once they have seen though, it is impossible for them to return to their previous ignorance. Once you know that someone is just trying to play to your fears, you can never make yourself play along again.

These internal and external fears have always been part of American political rhetoric. From our earliest years in government, Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton would trade insults and accuse one another of being too close with foreign powers, of being flip with the constitution, and whatever other insults were handy. So, while I cannot say that American political discourse has fallen to new depths, it has become more about promoting the growth of weapons-grade fear of all things external and internal. A political group will choose an enemy and label them as something people know nothing about. They will then begin to demonize this label and create doubt surrounding the issue. It doesn't matter if it's true, people don't know what it means and most of them won't look, so pundits are free to label away to their hearts content. This has been done recently to politicians on both sides of the narrow American spectrum by their opponents. If you want to make it even more fun, you can invent statistics to support your fear. Draw them on a chalkboard, toss up some magnets and a swastika and you have a display that at least a third of the population buys it on the grounds of “Well, he seems legit,” or “but hes so sincere, he even cried on TV.”

Last night I was standing on the BTS headed out to meet up with a friend of mine and this serene but gruff looking man got onto the train and stood next to me. He had the scraggly outdoorsman/fisherman look to him, weathered skin, red beard, and sharp eyes. He was wearing a Glock hat (which is oddly a dead giveaway that hes American, nobody else wears gun hats) and so I decided to strike up a conversation with him. His name was Red, and he was from Pennsylvania, and hes in the surplus business, and has lived in Bangkok for a year. In the 10 minutes we were on the same train, we quickly traded “what the hell are you doing here” stories. We discussed the phenomenon of people we have known our entire lives going from being calm and rational people capable of discussing anything to people who cower inside their own minds and spout hateful rhetoric. He said something that I agree with very strongly; he said, “Its impossible to really understand the world when you stay inside the United States today. You are raised being told that all these things are important, or that you need to be afraid of a whole list of other things, but in the end you are just a pawn – the only way to be free is to leave.”

I mention all of this because having stepped back to a distance that affords me a view of the forest, I believe that we can no longer afford these divisive behavior patterns. Globally, we are facing many more challenges than we have collectively throughout all of human history. As citizens of this world, we must stand united for the purpose of building a better planet, not just enriching our corner. I know this is a pipe dream, but what would to happen if everyone just stopped fighting? What would happen if we dropped our border fences and quit looking at everyone outside as “other” and started thinking of them as “human” instead. I know that so many people will never be able to do this. I know that there are people who will hide in the hills waiting for the “terrorists” to creep over the ridge to enact Sharia Law because without that hatred and fear, their world-view falls apart. In so many cases we have stopped defining ourselves by the powerful and amazing things we want to accomplish, and started to negatively define ourselves by our fears.

The argument that we must fear these things because they want to destroy us inevitably arises. I can think of one case in particular in which a man is positive that Islam's sole purpose is to drive all non-Muslims from the face of the planet. Positive that Islam is determined to perpetrate genocidal acts on those of non-Muslim faiths, his only solution is a counter-genocide – the elimination or conversion of every Muslim on the face of the planet as a pre-emptive act of self-defense. Speaking from my own experience with the Muslims that I have known throughout my life – they are every bit as disgusted with violence perpetrated against anyone as the rest of the world is. The irrational and violent fringes exist on the outside of every philosophy, but overall they are just like everyone else – just other humans trying to live their life in the best way they know how to and bearing no ill-will towards anyone. I refuse to harbor hatred in my heart towards any group as a whole – I would rather catch a bullet with my forehead while having my hand outstretched in peace than live a long cowering life hiding in the shadows.

Yes, there is evil in this world, but as a good friend of mine so aptly put it, “I believe that if I were to stand on a mountain where I could see all of the good and evil laid out before me, there would be more good than evil.” I think if we can all remember this and begin to work together, we can actually accomplish something. We must collectively face our fears, challenging them and tearing them down. As Frank Herbert wrote in Dune, “I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear it the little death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over and through me. And when it has gone I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing, only I will remain.” (Bene Gesserit “Litany Against Fear”) Wake up, stop being afraid, and live your life.