TANGENT-

I hope your work has not taken it's toll on your youth.

ANOTHER TANGENT-

I had a very awkward conversation with a young Hispanic Psychology student at Berkeley recently.

She said that she is obsessed over whether or not her children will be "revolutionaries". She said that she wants them to be revolutionaries but she also wants them to be free to have their own way of life.

This seemed immediately very uninspiring to me. Firstly if someone tries to make their kid into something the kid usually tries very hard to be anything but. Secondly I have no idea what she means by have their own way of life. Ways of life are always patchwork quilts made of political, religious, and business affiliations.

After some chatting I told her that my mother was Austrian and Mexican and she was taken aback.

I asked her what she wanted to do with her career and she said she wanted to do whatever is best for the Mexican American community. We basically got into this discussion of "grassroots" versus "ivory tower" means of social change. I made it clear that as a Berkeley graduate she may be one of the few educated Mexicans in future history, and that she may be one of the only people to reach a Judicial seat, principal at a non-profit or PHD on a specialized topic. On the other hand she might work to change over 25,000 Mexican lives over the course of the same 30 year career. I tried to explain how state legislators late in their careers often make it down in to the local level later in life and tend to dominate the city level.

She was kind of hurt by my comments and responded that immigration rights is all about enforcement not so much law. I said yeah I get it and enforcement is about public opinion so you better maximize your influence on public opinion by any means you got.

Then she went on about selling out to markets and advertising. I responded that markets are not about money. Markets are about emotion and that she is asking for people to have compassion. People respond to things emotionally within just the first few seconds. Neurophysiology teaches us that the Amygdala makes an assessment of whether or not something seen in the eyes is good or bad before the person is even conscious of what it is that they are seeing.

I says:

"I said hi to all of your friends and you are the only one who smiled and spoke with me. At that moment you were not thinking about the color blue and the number three."

She said "why is it that I was smiling."

"I don't know and it does not matter. We could do a study, or deduce the root cause. It still would not matter. We would not have any of that if it were not for the initial positive response. We would not even be talking right now."

She basically walked away.

At this moment I destroyed her pride and happily so.

Pride is contradictory to progress. It closes communication to put static ideas into precedence over dynamic living things.

She had some story in mind about who she is and who her friends are and who I am and she could not for a moment think that she just had some kind of base response to a living situation.

We could now get into a discussion of what it means to be categorically Mexican or categorically "for social change" or we could just be categorically "human".

yet another tangent--

British Petroleum just brought all of the six supermajor oil companies under one leadership group.

The media is centrally controlled due to FCC laws put in place by Colin Powell's son.

Obama supports continued big military budgets. Over 30% of the Army budget is going to Dick Cheney's companies. Over 50% of the Airforce Budget is going to private contractors.

There are only six major commodities distributors.

The markets are controlled through the extension of credit not the fluctuation of interest rates.

In sum you could put less than ten men in a room who control Food, Money, Energy, Military and the flow of information.

And yet they tell us there is no such things as an international sovereignty.