Category: Social Studies

“Life on the edge;” “the cutting edge;” we’ve all heard of the “edge,” and it seems like an attractive place, but the change that this edge-ness represents isn’t just the novelty our bored heads crave. There is a lot at stake when you travel to the edge and back, or work on the bleeding edge. Get too close, and we cut our selves, or … fly off the cliff.

As individuals we seem to seek barriers to break, and triumphs to win. We want to struggle with the unknown, or the seemingly unknown, to conquer some primordial fear. Somehow our quests prove to ourselves that we are more than our impulses and instincts, but alas that drive to face down fear is just that, isn’t it? An impulse.

I’ve always found it odd that the things people fear are the simply overcome things in life; spiders, snakes, heights, enclosures, to name a few. With even a somewhat evolved mind, none of those things pose any threat to our individual safety or or collective well being, yet the phobias mingle on  in generation after generation of people.

Our instincts control us in so many ways, and we are always in a battle with our own minds to feel evolved and carry on reasoned thinking. At any moment we can fall victim to ourselves and become someone else, and maybe someone less, for a moment or for a hundred moments. When it happens, its hard to know what we’ll do next. That scares us.  Maybe we race through a changing street light, or yell at a waitress, or often much worse. We all have that in us, and those moments pepper our lives from the moment we enter the world to the moment we leave it.

We are a hoard of individuals with multiple personalities, and we are all on the edge. No one knows when one of us will be cut or will fall off the other side, so it keeps us on that edge. There’s excitement in it, like a game of Russian roulette, but our collective minds grow weary of the stress. Life on the edge robs us of any sense of solid ground.

The games we play mascaraed as an evolved existence when we live out there… on the edge.

Where do we go when we’ve only learned to walk in a straight line, often pushed to do so by the mob around us, and in our path lies a mortal challenge?

This post represents a new start for this chronicle. It is also a long time coming that I reflect on the economic turmoil we are experiencing. If you read artedetimo v.1, you know that I have lamented the problems that have founded the economic mess for a while, but since all the stuff has hit the fan, I’ve been trying to figure out what to say about it. It has been one thing to see the gathering storm, but it is another to see where we’re going to come out.

One thing for sure is that the old captains; the economists, investors, bankers and businessmen, that had no vision and have no vision of where we could be going, need to be removed from power. A strong point I have tried to articulate in the past has been that in the last 20 to 30 years we have increasingly traded long term value for short term gain. That’s not necessarily a bad thing at all times, but when that gain is used to let s drive around big cars, buy house we can’t afford, and push for high dividends to pad our retirement funds, it has lead to where we are. This mess has been a long time coming.

Its odd now when I flip through the news shows I hear a lot of talk about all sorts of 20-30 year trends; maybe a little too late in my head. Its nice to hear now, but problem was that we should have been picking up on these trends 5-10 years ago when anyone who was looking could see them coming. That’s not how things work is it.

The country needs vision. Obama is trying to provide that vision, but he’s butting up against a whole class of people who won’t be able to let go of the way things are. It’s only when our financial society is pushed aside that we will see a new way forward. I can’t blame anyone though; you live much of the last 2 or 3 decades like you are running the show, you start to think that’s how things are. Society in the US since WWII has been more of a creative man’s cave, despite the man in the gray suit and the middle manager society’s logistical dominance. The problem solvers and innovators have always been the source of our greatness no matter how many layers of corruption, or bureaucracy or finacialism covered them up.

Go back to Lee IA coca. Was he a suit? The auto industry has been in this situation before, but last time there was a visionary left in teh industry to pull it out… I don’t see one today do you?

Steve Jobs? Apple despite its tiny share of the computing world has been the point of the spear head since its foundation. You ask the business world about them and they laugh, but if you think of computer history, its criss-crossed by the style-is-equal-to-practicality visions of Apple. Is this going down that pc v. Apple road? I don’t think so. My point is only that the PC’s type is good for business makers, the Apple type is good for making businesses.

I think this idea of imagining what society, culture and our relationship to nature COULD be, is at the core of why I write this blog. So many of the public figures out there leading our institutions have so little imagination its frightening. I’m not sure if it has been beaten out of them by life or what, but it is something that plagues us in all parts of life. We, both our leaders an us, get caught up in the limitations of the way things are, and can’t see past the trees.

Alas, this post is only a teaser, or a re-starting point. It is where I put my writing on a path that is line with what my work and passions are about.

I hope to weave this thread of the social forest here. I will be presenting my art work along the way, which follows that theme. I’ll post the work of others who use their imagination to get us somewhere beyond the dead end we live in. Above all, I hope to spark the imagination in all its forms within my readers; you.