Odds and Ends

Since I’ve been unemployed, now for a little over a week, I’ve been trying to write some pieces, essays on the state of affairs of our economy and how high tech jobs are moving overseas to places like India. But my writing seems just awful anymore. I look at it while writing and think it’s pretty damned good, but truthfully it’s all mostly trite bullshit. I don’t know what’s going on, not really. I read some pieces online and in trade journals about India and overseas outsourcing and I got nervous and wondered if I’ll ever be able to find work again. So I thought I might try my hand at writing. Maybe get into some big magazine somewhere. I wouldn’t mind writing like David Sedaris. He’s damned good. Maybe I should stick with introspection and fiction. Deep thoughts, struggling to make a name for myself. All the while living poorly, my wife and I, scraping for scraps. She working overtime, me writing on fragments of paper with stubs of pencils, sharpening the points with my finger nails, pulling away bits of the pencil wood, staining my already stained and greasy fingers with pencil lead, my beard getting longer and greyer, the hovel (a small apartment) cold in winter, hot as hell in summer, cheap plumbing, rusty water, a fridge that barely works and is rarely filled. Oh the life of the struggling artist. My god, what I would shrink to, how I would appear. Madness lurking around the corner, under my desk, in my beard… ha ha… laughing at me this madness, threatening to take over, to come to the surface of my frail mind, and then split me, fracture my personality into little shards, bits and pieces. Christ what a mess.

11:29 PM

I believe that no social problem can be solved. I believe that there are partial solutions to a given social problem, but not ever a single, universal solution.

The problem of bigotry. Unless we can send out some kind of mind ray that turns everyone into a joy-filled, non-hateful, loving and caring person, there will exist intolerance. But is tolerance always the correct thing? Should we have to “tolerate” something? Does not toleration imply some pressure we’re forced to not give in to? And if so, what pressure is this? Is it entirely learned? I can certainly say that my mother holds prejudices about lesbians and gay men and I’m pretty sure about black people, although she seems to admit that she likes the black people in the Virgin Islands, a place where my father often goes on business. She says that aren’t the same as blacks in the United States. Now, having grown up with this you’d think that I would also hold prejudices. But I neither tolerate blacks nor am I prejudiced. For one, there is nothing to tolerate. They are human beings. I am a human being. I have nothing against them and in fact there is no them, there is only we, us, all. I hold no prejudice either. I don’t know why, but it could be that, unlike my mother, I grew up in a community consisting almost completely of white people. Whenever a new student would enter my school, whether Indian, Black, Chinese (essentially, not Caucasian/White) I would be always intrigued and curious. Even today I am still drawn to people who hail from places not anywhere near where I live. I’ve made friends with Russians, Indians, Greeks, Chinese, Koreans, Japanese (I think), and have made acquaintances with two fellows from Mexico (when I worked at SmartOps). Oh, and also I made acquaintances with a fellow named Kaare at SmartOps, who is from Norway.

It’s very odd, but in all of the jobs I’ve had as a software developer, I think that I’ve only worked with one black person and she was fresh out of college. She was a junior programmer, with some attitude, who didn’t like me too much, even though I recommended her highly after my interview with her (I somehow intimidated her during the interview, but not intentionally). And as I suspected she turned out to be a good employee and very smart. I am surprised, however, to not have seen more black people in technical positions, well at least in a software engineering capacity. I don’t know why.

But to get back to some original point I was attempting to make, unless everyone thinks as I do and possesses those qualities I mention above, we’ll never really have a society free from bigotry and prejudice. And of course there are partial solutions. But these won’t work for everyone. There are people who just hate and there is little anyone can do about it. Hate for hate’s sake. And I don’t mean serial killers or shit like that, but people who hate, period. Like those people who seem completely delusional who think that anyone except a born and bred “white man” from the U.S.A., is worthless and only good when dead. What’s funny is that they seem to all forget that their own heritage doesn’t stem from these lands originally. But from somewhere deep in the heart of what one might call Africa. Stupid men who don’t rationalize but rather use sheer hateful emotion and incredibly twisted interpretations of the bible cannot ever know peace in themselves or out in the world. It must be a horrible existence.