Dan said:

The most dangerous time for a decaying government is when it realizes its mistakes, correctly observes the world, and begins reforms. The France of Louis XVI was more liberal and modern than that of Louis [XIV] — the Libya of [2000s] was more liberal and modern than that of the 1980s — the China of 1988 was more [liberal] and modern than the China of 1978.

Reform raises expectations and exposes to the people how weak the government was to begin with.

Alexis de Tocqueville noticed this pattern.  Overthrown regimes are generally less repressive than the ones preceding them.  De Tocqueville concluded that, though people “may suffer less,” their “sensibility is exacerbated.”

As in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, under an extremely repressive regime, the people are too focused on overcoming day-to-day suffering to focus on a grander scale.  Once that burden is reduced, then people can focus on the great work of establishing a government that respects human dignity.  While Gaddafi’s overthrowing may seem anomalous in that his regime was extremely repressive, his opening up to the world in the 2000s resulted in a regime that was, by relative comparison, less repressive than what it had been in previous decades.

To add to the list of states overthrown during reform, I would include Gorbachev’s USSR during glasnost and perestroika.  As this article from Foreign Policy put it, the conditions that permitted the people to question corruption and the speak out was what led to the collapse of the Soviet Union, not government prioritizing military spending over economic growth.

The death of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il and the accession of his son Kim Jong-Un has led to speculation on whether the successor will be as brutal as his father, or if he will be reform minded.  There is no reason to believe that the younger Kim will be a reformist, despite the fact that their only ally, China, has been goading the Kim regime to follow in Deng Xiaoping’s footsteps.

2012 is the 100th birthday of North Korea’s founder, Kim Il Sung.  Supposedly this year special accommodations will be made for the North Korean people for the occasion.

I want to be clear that I in no way endorse what the North Korean government is doing to its people and wish that the North Korean people can someday, soon, have the options to live lives as they choose.  However, given the history of reforming governments being overthrown by their people, one can see why the powers that be would be reluctant to open up North Korea to the world.

China put down the stirrings of discontent of 1989 by brute force (again, I’m not endorsing this action), and since then has been able to manage the tension between increasing living standards with an authoritarian government.  Of course, China is not out of the woods by far.  China is continuing to change, economically at breakneck pace, necessitating that the government respond in kind.

People living there now don’t know what China will look like in 20 years, much less 100 years.  It is my hope that they will be able to pull off the transition, much in the style of South Korea and Taiwan.  These East Asian Tigers had been authoritarian states with growing wealth, which successfully morphed into open and prosperous societies that don’t require continuous government response to keep stability.

Interesting idea, but I have to respectfully disagree that breaking up families and instilling children with the belief that they come from an inferior cultural and family background is the best way fix the education system. My own idea, though not fully developed, is that the government should provide parent training classes annually and actually pay parents to attend. We’d be helping people be better parents and help them with the costs of raising children. Obviously this would be an expensive program, but as you say, something needs to be done to help break the cycle for poverty!

My vision is something like a professional development/continuing education program where you’d take a few hours of classes each year. When you’re pregnant you would take a class on prenatal nutrition, when your child is 4 you’d take a class on activities you can do with your child to prepare them for kindergarten, etc. The focus would be on health, safety, and education. The classes would be open to everyone for free, but you wouldn’t get paid for them if you make over a certain income. I think everyone could benefit from the help in parenting, not just parents who are low income. Classes could be offered at multiple times. Child care could be provided during the classes, or some may even be appropriate for parents and children to attend together. Just some initial ideas . . .

Breaking the cycle of poverty probably requires attacks from many different sides where a variety of programs may have to be tried.  I think a professional development program doesn’t necessarily have to be government run, but can also be nonprofit, similar to how we have private universities and state-run universities.

I think the biggest problem in breaking the cycle of poverty is cultural. Poverty limits ones access to the greater world outside, and thus limits knowledge. Limited knowledge means not knowing things like basic nutrition, how to pay taxes, mandated car insurance, and the biggest one of all – OPTIONS on how to live life and knowing that there is more – things that further penalize the poor for “not being properly socialized” when their environment hasn’t provided this possibility.

Does this mean that parents from poor backgrounds can’t succeed? No, of course not. But the deck, statistically, is stacked against them. If that weren’t the case, we wouldn’t have a cycle of poverty.

Therefore, this is a proposal to help improve schools from the home front: providing parental role models. The lack of student achievement in schools is not entirely the fault of the teachers. It is also a cultural issue. Poor and/or broken families either are too worried about getting the next paycheck or simply don’t know how to raise their kids to value good education, achievement, and good citizenship. Their living environment surrounds them with negative influences where good grades is not a priority and is sometimes even looked down upon. While one may make the argument that poor people shouldn’t be having kids, let’s get real here. That’s NOT going to happen.

Furthermore, while the parents may be at fault, why should the child be the victim?

While this would by no means solve the entire problem of education, here is my humble suggestion:

Recruit nonprofits and religious charities to run boarding houses where children would live together until they finish high school. Parental visitation is allowed, of course, but the majority of the time the kids will be surrounded by positive mentors and role models who take on the roles of parenting that the kids’ birth parents are not able to provide.

Of course, getting kids there must be voluntary. Parents must believe that their kids will be better off living separately, or court-ordered if it is proven that the parents really shouldn’t be parents.

Rigorous background checks on the mentors would be absolutely paramount. The mentors would also have to ensure cohesion among the kids and prevent bullying and shenanigans that kids could get in serious trouble for (drug abuse, pregnancies, etc.). I’d also like to make sure that kids are completely supported and accepted in such a home. For instance, if a kid realized that s/he is gay, I would hope that the mentors give the kid their full support and NOT tell the kid that there’s something wrong with her/him. Rejection in the latter form on impressionable kids could be internalized and seriously mess up a kid.

Yes, a boarding house program will be expensive. It will require a lot of funding from donors and probably the United Way.  But breaking the cycle of poverty requires full-blown intervention. The reason why I would like nonprofits to fill this role is that having the government step in in such a role isn’t culturally palatable in the United States (and may also be an economic MORAL HAZARD in subsidizing bad parenting and throwaway children), but also because nonprofits have done this before.

Caritas, a Catholic charity, runs boarding houses for students in Mexico. These houses have adult supervisors who are this 24/7 support system and basically the kids’ parents during the week. The kids have the option of going home to see the parents on the weekends.

I think that keeping the parenting, schooling, and mentoring are all separate provides openness in the kids’ lives and also allows for the distribution of responsibilities among different adult role models. When I visited Puebla, Mexico a few years back, I lived in such a place for a week and was quite impressed by how things were run.

Of course, the nonprofit running such a house doesn’t have to be a church. It could be of any belief or not affiliated with any religion at all – as long as the values of the organization are in line with loving the children, accepting the children as they are, and encouraging the children to be curious about the world and excel in academics.

On a smaller scale, the NBC news program Rock Center ran this story on a nonprofit in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, called Targeting Our People’s Priorities With Service (TOPPS), run by Annette Dove: http://rockcenter.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/12/09/9332136-making-a-difference-helping-kids-be-kids-with-support-nourishment-and-love

While TOPPS does not house the kids, it provides a safe and nurturing place for kids to hang out after school and keeps them off the streets. More organizations like TOPPS could go a long way in improving the culture in our schools to help shape our students as high achievers.

I recommend nonprofits look into more ways to help kids achieve more and change American school systems from a cultural front. It’s impossible to ask schoolteachers to do everything, which is why I think it’s so important to have a mentor role for the kids if the parents cannot do so.

Zero, zero, zero, black rooster, left food for three cats.

No dead humans, thankfully. This area seemed to be mostly and safely evacuated.

We started work on the SRO that afternoon. The first floor seemed to be mostly offices. A cartoon sign that said “Mrs. K.’s office” gave the place a feel of a kindergarten in a house. The paperwork on the desk and the floor literally molded together. The desks rotten and soft, but easier to move out after being sledged into pieces by a sledgehammer. Dina found a pamphlet amongst the wreckage entitled, “Surviving the Storm: A Citizen’s Guide to Emergency Preparedness.”

Also found in one of the offices was a fishtank with two fish still alive in it after four months of no one to look after them. Presumably, they had been living off the algae growing along the sides of the filthy tank. The two fish once had a third companion, but by the time we came into the house, (s)he had long gone belly-up. Lauren dubbed the bigger survivor “Katrina” and the smaller one “Rita” after the twisted sisters that came through the area. That led to another point — Rita caused some flooding too, but everyone blames Katrina for what happened. Rita just seems like the little sister who tried so hard to make a name for herself, but in the end, when people see hurricane damage in the Gulf Coast people just say, “Katrina did it.”

In other words, give proper credit where credit’s due, ’cause Rita did some damage, too.

Upstairs in both houses were untouched by the flood, which made sense since the floodwaters didn’t get *that* high. Nothing upstairs needed to be gutted. In the halfway house was a newspaper on the chair the day that the occupants left, dated Friday, August 26, 2005. Katrina hit three days later.

Whilst exploring the second floor of the pink house, I found three closed doors. Just before I opened them, an irrational fear struck me. What if there was a body behind the door, dead for months? What if it were the body of a child that didn’t know how to hail for help when the waters came? But the fears were unfounded. VoA definitely would not have had us work in a house that they hadn’t fully inspected, much less one where someone had died in.

Meanwhile, this house had not one, not two, but three refrigerators filled with rotting food. Two in the kitchen had floated and were lying horizontally on the floor. The third fridge was in the backroom, lodged in a corner that prevented it from moving. If we thought the first two fridges in the halfway house were bad, they were nothing compared to that fridge in the back room.

Steph and Maggie recruited me to help with the third fridge. The door was stuck open, and the awful stench of whatever had been evolving inside assaulted our senses into the kitchen. They needed to find a way to shut the door and keep it shut.

Since the power to the whole neighborhood had been shut down and since the back had no windows, they needed the light on my camera to see what the heck was in the way of the door.

I gathered up my courage and put it to the sticking-place, held my nose, and marched in with the light after Steph and Maggie. Hurriedly, they dashed to the fridge and tried to slam to door shut. It bounced open. Then we found a case of water on the floor, removed that, and then closed the door. It still bounced open. There was something inside the fridge that was keeping the door open and needed to be removed. Steph and Maggie, those brave souls, removed the offending chicken and finally the door could close. I’m not sure if was the same chicken or not, but Steph found a bag of chicken that had been devoured to the bone by maggots.

Also found in the house:
- a biohazard bag
- potatoes and onions that were sprouting
- kitchen cabinets that were sagging

The shower for that day was definitely needed, but obviously we didn’t really know what it meant to be dirty, even though all of us had past experiences where we’d sweat all over from cycling 100+ miles on 96 degree F days, and then proceed not to shower.

Dinner was at David’s Aunt and Uncle’s place, a swanky joint with some strangenesses. More about the strangeness later.

Next, Day 3 . . .

This post originally ran on January 16, 2006.  And I never made a “Day 3″ post.

Bike and Build was founded by Marc Bush, a Yale alum who had done a program called Habitat Bicycle Challenge, and since HBC was mostly a Yale program, he sought to bring it to other 18 – 24 year olds around the country by starting an independent organization.

As you may know, the largest, most well-known housing organization is Habitat for Humanity, an ecumenical Christian organization. Of course, they do not have monopoly over resolving the poverty housing situation, and other groups, such as Rebuilding Together, also benefited from the money that Bike and Build raised.

Tongue-in-cheek, some B&B’ers called the cross-country trip, “A Mission from God . . . and Marc Bush.”

After Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, Erin cooked up this plan for alumni to go down to New Orleans to go volunteer. I jumped to sign on immediately.

Tuesday morning was Day 2 of our New Orleans mission. We walked to the site where we were supposed to work. Going down Canal Street, Downtown business seemed as usual; however, there were still some telltale signs of the flood that had ravaged the city.

The plexiglass on the streetcar stops all along Canal Street still had black waterlines on them. Some stores were still unopened, with plywood boards covering the windows and doors. Amelia and I peered into an abandoned Foot Locker that hadn’t been entirely secured. Inside was shattered glass and what remained of the shoes that hadn’t been looted. We reached our working sites by continuing down Canal into MidCity. Here the water damage was noticeably higher. At Moler Beauty College, the waterline was above Madison’s eyeline. For reference, he’s about 6′ tall.

We would be working on three houses, each run by Volunteers of America. Two houses were across Gayoso Street from each other, The white one was a halfway house (for recovering drug addicts) and the pink one was an SRO (single-occupancy residency for poor people and families). The third house was on Dupree, and we still had a few days before we tackled that one.

Cathy and Jim, the bigwigs of VoA in Greater New Orleans did an opening speech where they expressed their thanks for our help. As could be expected, Madison pulled out the camera and got the whole thing on tape.

We started on the halfway house first. First rule of working at a disaster site is to be properly covered and protected. I had some (very limited) training in working at disaster sites which came into good use, though the working procedure is easy to pick up. Be double-gloved, have goggles, and a facemask.

To use an oft-used phrase, I was totally unprepared for the damage inside the house — after all, it was only standing water that had crept inside. Of course, the water had been a toxic mix of gasoline, soaked rotting garbage, and overflowing sewage that, in St. Bernard Parish, had killed two DMORT dogs who had lapped up the water.

The dampness itself caused mold to grow all along the walls, sometimes even onto the ceiling. The carpet was ruined. All the bureaus had gone green, furry, and soft with mold, and the rotten wood was like putty in our hands. A simple push could cause a shelf to collapse. Chairs, somehow, were still stable enough to stand on to reach the higher places. Mattresses had gone orange from the rusting springs. Among other finds made while clearing out the house included a dirty magazine (pages stuck together, presumably from the flood and not some other fluid), what looked like a bag of crack, and some syringes. Apparently, the house was true to its word about being “halfway” — some people were still in the process and still sneaking in some cheats when they had left.

As for the kitchen, the water had so permeated the place that the two refrigerators had come off the ground and started floating. I could tell because of the waterlines on the appliances. Even though they floated, the fridges were full-sized and not featherweights. The tough part was getting them out of the house.

The first fridge was lying face down, and in order to get it on the dolly, it needed to be put back upright. The prospect of doing so seemed a bit unnerving because, since the fridge had floated face-down, it seemed logical that the toxic soup had seeped into the fridge through the doors. We would be in for a surprise if the doors flew open. Jim and Dave and a whole bunch of people (I can’t remember all of them at the moment) positioned themselves to lift the fridge upright. At the slightest lift we could see refrigerator sludge starting to ooze out of the doors, and I feared the unholiness that would be unleashed from within.

As soon as Fridge Team #1 got the fridge to stand upright, the bottom fridge door burst open and out poured a slew of food that had been liquifying and rotting for four months, plus the toxic city waters of gasoline, rotting garbage, and human sewage that can only be best described as refrigerator sludge. Out, out it gushed until it covered a good three-foot radius around the fridge on the linoleum floor.

To say that the smell emanating from them was also absolutely rancid would be an understatement. As I type, remembering the whole scene, the putrid smell comes back to my mind. I know I can’t properly evoke the repulsiveness of the smell, and the only illustration that I can provide to you is such: After Fridge Team #1 dollied out I found a pile of white on the floor that was maybe half a foot high and a foot wide. At first I thought it was a pile of rice that had spilled out from the fridge with the rest of the sludge.

Upon closer inspection I realized that it was actually a pile of drowned maggots.

The second fridge had floated face up, and the waterline showed that the city’s toxic brew most likely did not get inside the doors. Perhaps the insde of this fridge wouldn’t be as bad as the first one. Dina and I decided to investigate and she opened the bottom door.

The smell was just as bad.

So bad, that despite the face mask, Dina nearly gagged and had to rush outside for fresh air. I promptly slammed the door shut and joined her.

To prevent the doors from bursting open again while moving the fridge, Steph (or was it someone else?) borrowed duct tape from the neighbors to seal the doors shut.

We spent the rest of the morning throwing out moldy furniture, moldy clothes, rotten food in the shelves, tearing out carpet — by noon we had thrown out so much in front of the house that the pile of waste, if that is the appropriate term, was 5′ tall, 8′ thick, and 20′ wide.

We were drained by noontime and while we were eager to explore the second house (an SRO), we couldn’t work until Cathy brought the lunch.

In the meantime, Caterpillars came. The bulldozers, that is. Blocks of the city had been contracted out to companies who would get rid of the material that people had to gut from their houses because of flooding damage. The workers are paid by how much stuff they move, so each individual company can’t clear blocks to which they are not contracted, or else they’d be depriving someone else of a paycheck.

Seeing the clash of Caterpillars was a sight to behold. Dare I say it, that it was rather entertaining? Had it been the removal of just regular trash it would have been something as rah-rah as a monster truck rally. But to think that what they were hauling were people’s memories . . .. Perhaps the fact that these were halfway houses and not really permanent residences dulled the horror. Furthermore, in order to work in a disaster area, one has to have pretty thick skin. If we broke down every time, nothing would get done.

I just remember this one photo that had been on the wall, presumably of the halfway resident and his friend. On the back was scrawled a message of encouragement to end his drug abuse. I can’t think of the exact words at the moment, and I know that if I paraphrased it, the message would lose its impact. But that was just one of many things that made me realize, it was real people who were impacted by this disaster.

***********

If you’re still reading this, first, thank you. You’ve probably figured out by now that this is a long journal entry and that you’ve probably tired of reading. I do, however, have my reasons for my long-windedness.

1) The first day sets the tone and color for how I describe this area of New Orleans in order to contrast it to other areas of the same city and to other cities. If I don’t paint a detailed picture (such as with the maggot pile), I don’t think that I would do justice to the horror of what happened to this beautiful city.

2) I’m a poor talker (I’m OK at speaking, however) and much more articulate when it comes to writing, so I tend to write more to make up for how often I don’t talk.

The rest of Day 2, coming soon…

This post originally ran on January 15, 2006.

Monday – Jan 2, 2006

Thankfully I had packed the night before. I had to catch an early flight into Nashville, TN so I could meet up with Amelia, and the two of us would be road trippin’ into New Orleans. Amelia had told me that her parents weren’t too excited about the idea of having their daughter drive a car into a city still in upheaval, but thankfully the plan went through since I had already bought my plane tickets. I wouldn’t want to be stranded in Nashville.

Upon arrival in Nashville I saw the trilingual signs in the airport. They were in English, Spanish, and Chinese. Chinese? I had no idea that the middle of Tennessee would be so attentive to a culture as far away as China and I was moved. I mean, really — would you have expected that?

Amelia picked me up and we drove southward. I suppose that since the only exposure of Tennessee I’ve had has been limited to the Nashville airport and the highway to Birmingham, AL that I saw through the car windows, I didn’t really have a legit claim that “I was in Tennessee.”

Outside of Huntsville, Alabama is a replica of a Saturn rocket, the type that NASA used to get people to the Moon. As we were both tourists, we were pretty much obligated to stop there and try to get the whole rocket into the picture frame of the camera. We then decided to stop in Birmingham for lunch. We totally didn’t expect the whole city to be shut down. Understandably, it was the Monday after New Years and people wanted their day off; however, we would have assumed that at least *something* would be open in Birmingham. We were wrong.

Tuscaloosa is the home of the University of Alabama. Which, of course, means that there’s got to be a lot of businesses nearby eager to get the money of college students. So finally we got a bite to eat. Anyway, about U. Alabama. It’s a really beautiful campus. I mean, the departmental buildings are actually in large buildings and not some weird and inadequately adapted colonial house. Also while we were in Tuscaloosa, we received an emergency call from Dina. She had not been able to get a flight to New Orleans and was on standby for a flight to Mobile. She wanted to know if we could swing by Mobile and pick her up. And so of course we obliged and headed south for Mobile.

The emptiness of the open country can be creepy at times. Somewhere south of Eutaw, Alabama is a ranch where we saw not a single soul, but it was made up as if for Halloween. Of course, it’s now January and why Halloween decorations would still be up are beyond me. We drove off the main road into what seemed to be the front yard of the ranch. The house itself was still a ways off and we couldn’t see it from where we were. Facing the presumed ranch house, to the left of the driveway was a 20-foot tall Tin-Man from the Wizard of Oz. To our right was a giant bunny made of hay bales. As cute as they were, there was something not quite right about this place. Amelia wanted her picture taken underneath the Tin-Man (which was creaking in the wind) and I had this irrational fear that the axe the Tin-Man was holding would come loose and get her. Really. And then the hay bales that made the bunny were brown and rotting. It seemed that these ornaments (or whatever they were) had been around for months, if not years. Further adding to the sense of unease was that when we drove out, we saw near the mailbox what seemed to be a crafted demon-head sitting on top of a imitation human skeleton. Getting back on the highway, we passed even more of this seemingly abandoned estate where a strawwoman had been set up with an accompanying cloth text-bubble that read, “Call 911!”

The whole ranch seemed like it could have been the setting for a slasher movie, and I was quite glad that Amelia and I weren’t foolhardy enough to drive further along the driveway and try to find the ranch house. Doing so would lead to an outcome like the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Or so I’ve been told.

Stormy weather over Charlotte, NC delayed Dina’s flight for about an hour, so while Amelia went to Starbucks, I napped in the backseat of the car — a much needed rest considering that I didn’t sleep much because of packing the night before. We did manage to rescue Dina from her long hours at the airport and continued our drive to new Orleans.

Mississippi was another state that I can’t claim to have really been in since we only drove through it. I had heard about the terrible damage that Katrina inflicted on Waveland and Gulfport, but I was not able to see that for myself since it was dark and I-10 stayed far from the shore.

When we arrived in Louisiana, it was already too dark to be able to see what damage Katrina (and Rita) had done, but from what we could the damage seemed considerable. The first exit ramp into St. Bernard Parish had been completely blocked off and was starting to go wild with bayou vegetation. The whole usually westbound section of I-10 had been shut down and westbound traffic was diverted into the other channel, turning I-10 into a 2-laned street. This was true for the duration of the trip over Lake Pontchatrain, which leads me to believe that part of the I-10 bridge sustained some pretty bad damage.

Into the city of New Orleans itself. Well, none of the three of us (Amelia, Dina, or I) had a detailed enough map of New Orleans, so basically I was on the phone with David until he could direct us to the street on which he was living. Unfortunately, New Orleans is also full of one-way streets that make things far more complicated than they ever should be. But we got in, safe and sound.

Erin was there, eagerly awaiting our arrival. And the apartment that we were staying at was actually David’s sister’s. She’s a med student at Tulane and we could use her place because she was still being a refugee. Among other people I got to meet were Megan, from the SUS ’05 trip; Jon from the NUS ’03 and CUS ’04 trips, also the maker of the “Bodies in Motion” video; Kayley – I don’t remember which trip she was on; another Megan, a friend of Erin’s; and Madison, also a filmmaker who documented SUS ’05.

Next, day two . . .

This post originally ran on January 12, 2006.

Touring (or perhaps, more accurately, trespassing) into modern day ruins has become a popular pastime, even among  people I know, and the photography of such places has become an art form of its own.

A few days ago I came across this article in the blogosphere, and it definitely struck a chord.  http://rustwire.com/2011/12/27/things-are-broke-can-ruin-porn-help/

I shared it with my friend R. who wrote this response.  I think he put it more eloquently than I would have ever thought to:

Thanks for sharing this article.

While it is a blow to the American way of life, with its principle of ever-expansion, this was inevitable. It is the way of the world in general, for countries, as well as their cities, to rise and to fall. Change is the only constant that can be counted upon.

Cities & countries live and die by the people who live there. Ruins such as those featured in the article are modern-day places which require little/no excavation, and tell of a place’s past.

Despite having 21st century technology, we are not immune to having places that are broken & abandoned due to money issues, social issues, or political issues. People will always be people, whether in the now or in the ancient times. “There is nothing new under the sun.”

To dig into my personal beliefs for a moment, I believe that this brokenness is a picture of man’s sin nature, and that the currently-prosperous parts of cities are a picture of the best that man can do without God’s offering of salvation. The thing is, even these prosperous parts of the city can and likely will one day fall into ruin. Through salvation in Jesus, I believe that God will bring us into heaven, where sin has not tainted things, and because of that, things will remain new, as God has said, “Behold, I make all things new.” (That statement itself is in the present-progressive form, meaning that it is continually happening in the present.) This may not be what everyone sees when they look at ruins, but it is one thing I see.

I like ruins, because it reminds me of our human-ness. It lets me know that we are neither immune nor exempt from change, and that whether or not we wish for it, change is inevitable. I also like ruins because it shows that “stuff” can never be as important as people. Stuff will break, get lost, stolen, or the like, and it can be replaced. People, on the other hand, are susceptible to the same, but cannot be replaced.

In the end, people are the only thing that really matters.

No matter what you believe, the impermanence of our own lives and even of the work of our hands that outlive us really do make us think, “Is this it?  It can’t possibly be that way.”

The fortunes of cities around have risen and fallen – Rome went from caput mundi during the empire to a broken-down, overgrown town in Michelangelo’s day, and back to a modern bustling metropolis since Mussolini, although its global position has since been overshadowed by the likes of London, New York, and Tokyo.

But this narrative is unfamiliar with Americans, who have only seen expansion and growth.  America has also been different in that instead of sticking to cities, people have moved into the suburbs thinking that it will insulated them from the decay of the cities.  However, I don’t think that’s the answer.  I mean, certainly, if you feel a calling to go somewhere new, by all means, do so.  But if we have problems in our own backyard, we need to face them, not run away.  Continuing to do so like we have in the last half-century has only made us a nation of broke nomads.

“Revolutions are not won by enlisting the masses. Revolution is a science only a few are competent to practice. It depends on correct organization and, above all, on communications. Then, at the proper moment in history, they strike. Correctly organized and properly timed it is a bloodless coup. Done clumsily or prematurely and the result is civil war, mob violence, purges, terror.” – Robert A. Heinlein, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress (1966)

In some ways I do believe in this, but when we get to discussing Libya I can tell you that the issue is not so clear cut.  There is a famous misquote of Malcolm X where he states that no revolution has ever been bloodless.  But if you listen to the entirety of his 1964 speech “The Ballot or the Bullet,” you’ll hear that he continues to say that history has evolved to the point where revolution CAN be bloodless: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vO9UF3q6Fhg

America today is at a time or in a day or at an hour where she is the first country on this earth that can actually have a bloodless revolution. . . . And the only way without bloodshed that this can be brought about is that the black man has to be given full use of the ballot in every one of the 50 states. – Malcolm X

And so the unrest from the Civil Rights Movement was channeled into policy instead of full revolution. Fast-forward 25 years later to Eastern Europe and you see the Revolutions of 1989 unfold.  A bloodless coups after bloodless coups brought down an authoritarian regimes in Eastern Europe and ushered in new governments and a new age of democracy.

The only reported death during Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution, that of one Martin Smid, was later found out to have been made up.  Ceaușescu’s Romania was the only country to undergo violent revolution, but even that was an astoundingly rapid and accomplished in just the week before Christmas of that year.

Of course, things could have ended up differently.  Why the fall of the Soviet Bloc was largely so peaceful had a lot to do with Gorbachev’s unwillingness to use military force.  Had the tanks been called in, the revolutions could have ended the way Prague Spring in 1968 or Beijing Spring in 1989 did.

The Arab Spring of 2011 has toppled three authoritarian governments as of October 2011.  True, blood has been shed in these revolutions.  However, in Tunisia and Egypt, these revolutions were brought about by peaceful protesters, not by armies.  Libya is a different story.  Eight months of civil war finally ended the brutal rule of Muammar al-Qaddafi.  However, eight months is a long struggle considering that the Romanian Revolution lasted only 9 days.

Considering the Heinlein quote, then, are prolonged, bloody revolutions necessarily premature, bringing untold misery to the people, whose efforts are only stolen by another dictator in the end?

There is a saying, “justice delayed is justice denied.”  If one says that the revolution is premature, then we are condemning people to continue to live under tyranny. Aren’t the people of Libya better off now that they’re not living under Gaddafi’s brutal rule?  Isn’t it far better for them that they overthrew him now (as violent as the civil war was) than to have to endure until the dictator died of natural causes?  No one deserves to live in oppression, so who are we to tell rebel armies, “it’s not your turn” ?

Conversely, is living under oppressed tyranny better than being killed in revolution or purged in a reign of terror?  Who can make this value judgment?  And haven’t some protracted and bloody revolutions actually been successful?  Look at the United States of America.  It had a bloodly revolution and look at how it is today.

But there is a cautionary tale in all of this:  the Chinese Revolution of 1911.  It was intended to bring democracy to the Chinese people, but instead military factions jockeyed for power, leading to a second revolution (1913) and the splintering of the country into warring factions (1916 – 1928) and a prolonged civil war (1927 – 1949) that was only interrupted by Japanese invasion (1931 – 1945).

After the Japanese were defeated, the country once again plunged into civil war and a third revolution (1946 – 1949), the aftermath of which was purges (Anti-Rightist Campaign), mob violence (Cultural Revolution), and terror (White Terror, Cultural Revolution) on both the winning and losing sides.  To boot, the winning side went on to suffer the largest famine in modern history (Great Leap Forward, 38 million dead).  From 1917 to 1987 it is estimated that 92.1 MILLION people died in the chaos following the 1911 Revolution, NOT including the roughly 20 million deaths from The War Against Japan/World War II.

By the time the dust settled normalcy was restored in Taiwan it was 1987, 76 years later.  Mainland China, while now relatively stable and prosperous, is STILL not under the democratic government envisioned by the revolutionaries of 1911.  And it’s been 100 years.

After all this, was the 1911 Revolution worth all the misery, purges, violence, and terror it led to, WITHOUT even achieving the goals of WHY the revolution was brought forth in the first place, a full century later?*

Should we have waited for a more fitting moment in history for the revolution to be carried out bloodlessly, as in the Velvet Revolution, without the ensuing tumultuous century of misery?  Even better, couldn’t all of this have been done through gradual reform, rendering revolution irrelevant?

Then, what about Libya? Will it be like America, or will it be like China? It is too soon to tell, but I hope Libya end up being more like America.

Libya’s National Transitional Council has clearly outlined the steps and timeline it will take to make Libya a fully-functioning democracy.  The recent elections in Tunisia gives hope that the democratic process will prove contagious, and that it will actually take root in Libya as well.

On Libya’s future I am hopeful. I sincerely wish them the best.

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* Arguably, the goals of the 1911 Revolution have been achieved in Taiwan, but that is poor consolation considering Taiwan’s population and area are dwarfed by the population and area of the Mainland, where the revolution occurred and was intended to take root.

As stated in the Dao De Jing,

Tao produces one
One produces two
Two produce three
Three produce myriad things

I will now talk about gradients and shades of grey.  The previous post talked about how every dark and be further subdivided into light and dark, and that the so-called “darkest dark” will still possess light.  The converse is true, for the “lightest light” will still contain some darkness.

To presume that existence occurs along gradient (so called shades of grey) presumes that there is no light in the darkest dark and no darkness in the lightest light.  Therefore, I would say that thinking of the “darkest dark” and “lightest light” as ends of a gradient is at best an oversimplification and at worst wrong.

I hereby propose a different way of understanding the universe: the color wheel.

In the absorption spectrum, black is actually composed of all the colors of the rainbow combined.  Similarly, in the emission spectrum, white is composed of all of the colors of the rainbow combined.  From this illustration, we can see that even “shades of grey” is a gross oversimplification.  From black and white we get not only grey but every color in existence.

So let’s go back to the quote and break it down:

Tao produces one -> (Taiji, i.e. the undifferentiated everything)
One produces two -> (black and white)
Two produce three -> (black, white, and grey)
Three produce myriad things -> (black, white, grey, and every color imaginable)

We must understand that the universe in all its complexity isn’t even about binaries or gradients.  Instead, everything is its own color.  No color is by any means “better” than the other.  After all, what would be a spectrum that is entirely red?  It’s no longer a spectrum.  All the colors are all inseparable parts of the same spectrum.

Similarly, all parts of the universe have their differences and cannot be neatly categorized into binaries or even gradients.  There is no one aspect that is “better” than the other – they all have their place and purpose.  The only people who would dare say that they know better than the universe are ignorant and possibly possess hubris of an enormous scale. Remember – pride comes before the fall.

To close: everything in the universe is different and does not fit into neat categories.  At the same time, everything in the universe is still part of a greater whole