All day long I am required to read about topics that Middle and Upper Class American Whites have tried to ignore since our country was birthed. The creation and institutionalization of successive labor and social control apparatuses aimed at establishing White Supremacy in the U.S. and abroad; the horrifying abuses, often violent, sometimes sexual in nature, and gross inequalities that were and are encouraged by such systems; and opportunity after abandoned opportunity presented for governments, municipal, state, or federal, American or otherwise, to address or stifle such systems only for officials to avert their gaze or even join in the corruption. I don’t claim to know every abuse, but those I am familiar with are difficult to reconcile with a lifestyle that can allow a young man to pursue higher education while sometimes travelling thousands of miles playing music to strangers in bars, basements, and shacks.

That being said, for every one person, place, or thing that scares or saddens me another inspires, provokes, or brings me solace. There seems to be an embryonic (or even more evolved than that) worldwide movement pushing for Democracy, Egalitarianism, and basic Civil Liberties whether they call themselves the Arab Spring, the Green Revolution, or Occupy Earth. Many of my friends, mostly in the Northeastern U.S., become bitter and spiteful when they hear contemporaries denounce or make fun of such protests asking questions of their peers like, “How can someone my age say something like that?” What you need to realize is that there are 7 billion people breathing, eating, sleeping, fucking, and dying on this planet right now; several hundred million of them in the U.S. alone. You can’t present a vision of open-mindedness and equality with one hand, and use the other to stifle the criticism of a person who thinks differently than you.

How do I feel about the world today? I feel that political, social, and economic problems are rife. There is someone making thousands of dollars every second on one edge of the Earth while another is purchased as a sex-slave on the other edge. Someone is instantly communicating with a friend thousands of miles away using smart-phone technology while someone else is hunting or gathering in a manner little different than people had thousands of years ago. While one person slumps lethargic after an enormous meal, another goes to bed for the 5th night in a row without food. When 7 billion people are given the means to communicate or interact with each other, it implies that they will also have to deal with one another which will inevitably lead to confrontation. As far as I am concerned, the best we can do is make that interaction less hostile, stifle any attempts to gain off the abject misery of someone else, and maybe even learn from one another.