hex_m_hell

As my daughter takes pictures of the mosaics in Park Güell, studying them and saying how beautiful they are, I wonder if this place will be something that influences her. At 6, she loves to draw and do basic paper crafts. Her mother went to art school, I went a different route but I loved art as a kid. I was originally studying English before I decided to switch to computer science. She has roots in a few worlds that intertwine beautifully. So much potential, if we can keep up with it. If...

I think of the career aptitude test I took in highschool when they told me I should be a sniper, I think of the military recruiters constantly in the halls handing out pamphlets, of the impossibly of imagining going to college. Then I think of the joy I find in math... A joy that I didn't discover until years after I left school. I wonder at the years I've worked in my ducttape job in the security industry, an industry that is a monument to the wastefulness of capitalism, an industry that rightfully shouldn't exist.

What would the world be like if Kalashnikov lived in a time when he could have worked on farm equipment? Could he have revolutionized agriculture instead of combat? There is a world in which Nazis never existed, and farmers swear by the indestructible Kalashnikov tractor. It's impossible to calculate the loss of technology and culture that war and authoritarianism continues to impose on us all.

The Stephen Jay Gould quote is evergreen: “I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops”.

Looking out over Barcelona, at Sagrada Familia from Park Güell, there are so many beautiful things humans have created with only the smallest portion of the population free to create them. Meanwhile, the majority of our abilities are wasted to make sure that pool of people stays small... And even those few privileged people spend most of their time and effort figuring out how to stay on top. It's as though the myth that humans only use 1% of our brains were true, but at the global, not individual, level.

How much more could we have if we stopped wasting so much on maintaining involuntary hierarchy? How many generations of children will we betray to keep it?

I love the joy she finds in her art, her pictures. I hope she learns to find the joy of math that I only found so much later. I hope her love of nature lets her make beautiful things for humans. I hope she inherits a world that's free because it's cruel to leave it to her to fight for it.

I spent years alone, hour after hour, a latchkey kid from second grade. Reagan took my mother away. I was just another of so many at that time, families squeezed dry and ground raw to feed the unsatiable hunger of Mammon. It's no wonder my generation basically invented school shootings. But the hunger has only grown... When will we let our children grow?

I am beyond tired, and I feel as though I have yet to even begin.