In episode five of Serial Experiments Lain, a girl and several other people are handed packets of tissues by a boy on the street. When she opens it and takes the first one out, there is a message written on it. I love stuff like that - anonymous communication between strangers.

We live a very crowded world with relatively few personal connections. It’s a paradox that’s referred to all the time: the more people surround us, the lonelier we feel. In the small towns that used to be common, you might know the face of everyone in a three-mile radius. But if you live in a city, you’re lucky to know the name of everyone on your hall in your apartment building. We walk around, surrounded by people we try not to look at. I’m just as guilty of it as anyone else. I don’t smile at strangers. But I should.

I think that’s why situations like the one referred to above really make me happy. They make it seem like someone in that vast sea of people is trying to make a connection. I love seeing signs that aren’t advertisements or gang signs, just people trying to make your day better. I was in Chinatown a few months ago and saw a piece of paper on a lampost that said “She loves you” at the top and “yeah, yeah, yeah” at the bottom. It was great.

One of the coolest things I’ve heard about in a while is Bren Bataclan’s Smile Boston Project. Bren does paintings like these and attaches notes like this one. Most excellent. Boston could use more smiles.

Meet Margaret Spelling, new director of the Education Department. Spelling has told PBS - which produces and airs much of America’s children’s programming - not to air an episode of Postcards from Buster in which Buster the bunny visits Vermont to learn about how to make maple syrup, and meets a child whose parents are a lesbian couple. “Many parents would not want their young children exposed to the lifestyles portrayed in the episode,” she said. And furthermore, “Congress’s and the department’s purpose in funding this programming certainly was not to introduce this kind of subject matter to children, particularly through the powerful and intimate medium of television.”

Read the full article at Democratic Underground.

Things like this make me so, so afraid.

I don’t want to raise children in a world that is afraid to show them gay couples on TV. I don’t want to have to tell them, over and over, that they have to be that much more tolerant and loving than the rest of the world. I want my children to look at same sex marriage the way I look at marriages between different ethnic groups. I don’t want them to grow up in a world full of hate, but I know they will. Society always needs a group to mock and make controversial legislation about.

This may seem like a strange thing for me to say, what with my general skepticism and lack of religious belief, but I don’t understand how people can not believe in aliens.

I’m not saying I believe in little green men who walk among us. I’m not saying I believe in any sort of government cover-up conspiracy, past UFO landing, or mind control/anal probing horror story. But I can’t believe that out of all the billions of planets out there, ours is the only one that’s managed to develop intelligent life.

True, the odds of another planet having intelligent life right now are a bit slimmer than the odds of other intelligent life ever exitisting, but think about it- our galaxy alone could contain 100 billion stars. Our sun is just one of those. If only 1% of the stars in our galaxy had a single planet, and if only 1% of those planets were capable of supporting intelligent life, and if only 1% of those capable of supporting intelligent life supported it right now, that would leave 99,999 other planets with sentient life. That’s quite a few.

Saying we are the only intelligent species out there seems a little too self-important. Yes, humans are unique and special and deserve any amount of back-patting, but we’re not that special. We’re not the only ones.

I think a lot of our problems are caused by our thinking we rule the universe. We don’t. We don’t even rule the planet- or, at least, we shouldn’t. We aren’t the only ones who matter.

Despite its blatant racism, ‘Nation’ still needs to be seen

The above is an article appearing in the Boston Globe today, about how some people don’t want the blatantly racist film The Birth of a Nation to be screened.

I’m constantly frustrated by people’s tendency to ignore ugly things. You can’t erase the fact that we used to treat people like scum. What good will it do to repress our history? We need to look it in the face and accept that it happened. It needs to be taught to our children. We need to learn as much as we can about it to insure that it will never happen again.

Some are afraid that showing this movie will result in hate crimes and more racism. But really, if we’ve done our job, everyone will see it as a warning: look at the depths to which humanity can fall. Look what we’re capable of.

Really, this is a censorship issue. There will always be people unwilling to look reality in the face, and I will never be one of them.

A few days ago I watched a video from PETA called Meet Your Meat. Though it was a bit sensationalist and I would have trusted it more had it not been made by PETA, it reminded me of the biggest reason that I don’t eat meat.

Ever since I read Ishmael (plug plug plug- read it!), I’ve been very aware of the way humanity interacts with the rest of the natural world. The most important idea I got out of that book is that the Earth does not belong to us. It belongs to itself. We are animals like any other animals- the only difference is that we’ve evolved to the point where we are intelligent enough to dominate other species. People tend to look at the world as Us vs. Them- Us being humanity and Them being trees, bugs, monkeys, oceans, volcanoes, diamond mines, protazoa, lice, chickens, and everything else that comprises our world. We belive that we are the masters of our world, and that it is our privilege/right/responsibility to beat it into submission and reform it the way we choose. The earth is not our kingdom. It generously sustains us, and in return we must cooperate with it instead of trying to subjugate it and the others that live on it.

I’ll get to the point before this gets too long. I think that all life has to be respected- not just human life. When we put animals like cows and chickens into tiny cages for their entire lives before shipping them off to slaughterhouses, are we respecting them? No, we are thinking of them as nothing more than a commodity. That’s what I have a problem with. Every other animal on earth has just as much a right to exist as we do. We are not the only ones that matter. It’s terrible to see entire species deprived of real life just so that you can eat a steak without trouble.

Thus, I am not against the act of eating other animals. I am against the way in which we do it. If I lived in a situation where free animals were hunted because people needed their meat, bones, and hide in order to survive, I would probably eat the meat. Animals prey on each other, it’s a law of nature. What I cannot stand is the the way we deprive other conscious organisms of of their lives, not only by killing them, but by making the short lives they do have miserable.

Last, I would like to express my irritation at those who love their pets and cry at the thought of people being mean to little doggies, but turn a blind eye to the suffering of animals in factory farms. If you can’t stand the thought of a cute little puppy in that situation, how is it any better when it’s a calf?

Edit 2/23/05: Since I wrote this, I realized that I would only feel comfortable eating meat if I didn’t have a choice. I believe that if I can live without killing another conscious thing, I should. But I respect your right to do otherwise.

Kurt Vonnegut has some interesting ideas that I mostly agree with.

One point on which I disagree: He says that there is “not a chance in hell of America’s becoming humane and reasonable.” This is one of many issues on which I don’t have a definite stand, but I can’t believe that we have no chance at all. I believe in the basic decency of humanity. Surely someday people will wake up and realize that they’re wrong.

I can hope, can’t I?

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/jesus/

It makes me very, very nervous that our president believes that he has given his life to Jesus. Almost as nervous as this us/them, good/evil, with-us-or-against-us attitude towards 9-11/Iraq/terrorism.

If you’re old enough to vote this fall, VOTE!

“One day I spent a weekend with Billy Graham.”

-George W. Bush

I’d like to know who’s commenting in (and reading) the blog, so if you comment, can you leave a name of some sort? It doesn’t have to be your name, you don’t have to leave contact info, I just like to associate comments with some sort of person. Anonymous comments drive me crazy because I spend all my time trying to guess who they’re from.

Apparently the Yahoo search engine loves Forbidden Fruit. I’m getting tons of hits from it. Well, tons for me. I don’t get a lot.

I caught a few minutes of 60 Minutes the other night, and there was a piece about one of the original Yahoo guys- I forget his name. Anyway, he’s giga-rich,* owns a basketball team, lives in a mansion, etc. They were talking about how he was just a regular guy, didn’t like really fancy things, etc., etc. As an example, they showed the office of the business he currently owns- a depressing warehouse jammed full of rows and rows of half-height cubicles. 60 Minutes gave the impression that this was an example of his ability to do without the finer things in life and not waste his money on frivolous things. It was ridiculous. He lives in this huge empty mansion and owns a basketball team, while his employees are stuck in terrible working conditions. There is nothing remotely admirable about wasting money on yourself while subjecting your underlings to days of work in a horrible place.