The Pursuit of Happiness

Recently there has been a flurry of activity in regards to gay marriage. New Hampshire and Maine passed legislation legalizing it, leaving New York and as the only states that still have nothing on the books to defend this right. New York is struggling to get it passed, and even Democrats are wary of supporting a bill unless it is likely to pass. We're still not certain if it does or not.
In Russia, a lesbian couple applied for a marriage liscence, and though they were denied within an hour (it usually takes ten business days for a couple to recieve a ruling), it was declared illegal for them to be denied the opportunity to apply. After being denied, they went to Canada, where marriages are performed regardless of nationality. They're hoping that since Russia doesn't have any laws directly stating that out-of-the-country marriage is invalid, their Canadian license will be recognized.
Last but not least, as Rachele has already mentioned, there's the problem of Miss California, who stated her opinion that marriage is for heterosexual couples only. While this comment was preceeded by the statement that she's proud to live in a country where everyone shares equal freedom, the most vocal people in support of gay marriage are tearing into her. That's bad news, something we can't ignore even when good things are happening. Attacking a girl who was stating a personal opinion could bring the movement to a grinding halt.
We're getting somewhere. Massachusetts, Iowa, Vermont, Maine, Conneticut, and New Hampshire have legalized gay marriage, three of them quite recently. That's more than ten percent now. We have to be careful not to take things too personally and be grateful we're moving forward. Things can change, especially in the twenty-first century.

Trippy fish out of its habitat

This week, off the coast of Britain, a fisherman caught a fish called sarpa salpa. Though it is easily identifiable by those who know about it, the fisherman had no idea what it was. That's because it's native to the coast of Africa, and this particular fish was far out of its normal range. It could have simply been caught up in another shoal of fish, but it's also possible that it is one of many that are expanding north as water heats up due to climate change. The sarpa salpa in particular is a risk to uninformed Brits, because eating certain parts of it (the head in particular) causes svere halluncinations. People have been hospitalized with auditory hallucinations and dramatic nightmares as a result of eating unhealthy parts of the sarpa salpa.
As for the fisherman who caught this specimen, he says if he'd known what it was, he'd have taken it to a club and sold it.

"Hyperlocal" News Sites

In this current economic crisis, many people have stopped buying newspapers. The news industry is in decline, suffering cuts just as severe as any other market's. Many people, short on cash, are turning to the internet for their information because it's usually free. Now, a trend in this on-line media has surfaced: the obsession with local news. These "hyperlocal" news sites are concerned with only a limited area, disregarding even national news that affects the local, like swine flu, in favor of a block-by-block investigation of one town or county. Most of these news sites are manned by volunteers, and so the information is questionable. Trained journalists are changing that, though, starting their own hyperlocal news sites, then recruiting and training area volunteers on the proper way to investigate, find facts, and present controversial topics without bias. These local newsmen then go into the community and report on topics that would never be noticed by a larger paper. One newspaper volunteer was able to uncover a case of police brutality in their small town which had gone uninvestigated by any other source.
While the news industry is struggling, the operators of these hyperlocal papers are more optimistic. They believe that the culture of media is changing, and they are adapting well and coming up with new ideas about how to fund newspapers and decide what to present (one paper allows its readers to choose which stories they want to pay for, thus tayloring the paper to the local demand). The world may be ending like all the large papers say, these locals believe, but there's more to it than that, and there will always be a news source to report on it all.

Young Iranian Voters Know Their candidates.

Iran is a democracy on the surface. In truth, it is controlled by an Islamic regime. The people elect the president and his parliment, but candidates are selected and approved by the Ayatollah. Also, the people are often uninformed voters due to the lack of information about the presidential and parlimentary candidates which is presented to them by the government. But many young Iranians have found a way around this information gap: facebook. The revolution in Iran took place before most Iranians who know how to operate facebook were born, and they are more likely to encounter a wide range of views through their exposure to the internet. Many democratic nations are hoping that these well-informed voters will realise that their vote doesn't count as much as it could, and will mount some kind of rebellion against the theocratic state. Maybe it'll work. If any change does come to Iran, that should be the way it happens.

Food Shortages

How important is food? We take it for granted, but many a government has been brought down by people rioting for want of bread. Now, some scientists fear that the combined forces of population growth and global warming will decrease the already insufficient food supply and wreak havoc on poor nations.
Population growth stresses the water supply. In order to provide more water, deeper wells must be produced. This uses energy, and since fossil fuels are the cheapest and most readily aviable, sources of energy, these are most likely the ones which will be uses. This will spur clilmate change. Climate change will lead to droughts and floods, and these will lead to the loss of topsoil because of wiind and water. Also, the heat will kill many crops which are grown. Population growth is linked to loss of topsoil and rising temperatures along with being a food problem in itself, making it the leading cause of food shortages. But loss of topsoil is also caused by clearcutting and other man-made disruptions of the environment, and the countries which use the highest levels of fossil fuels also tend to be the countries with the lowest population growth rates.
If poor countries suffer from food shortages, chaos will soon follow. And poor nations, especially the wildly unstable ones, are more likely to spread diseases (like AIDS), and the sale of drugs and weapons tends to increase. Also, unstable nations are more likely to accept extremist govenments and leaders, leading to extreme conflicts.
There are several basic, if not simple solutions to this problem. Planting trees would reduce the loss of topsoil and the amount of CO2 in the air (and growing fruit or nut trees would help directly, at least to some extent). Creating cheap, sustainable energy will help slow climate change. Increased water management, including conservation and recycling, would ease the strain on the water supply. And healthcare, at least on a basic level, combined with a reasonable sex education and family planning program, would ease the burden on large and poor populations.

Migrant Worker's Song

As the world's population moves from the country to the city, many people worry that rural culture will be lost. However, there is a culture in China which is forming around this transition. Migrant workers who come into Chinese cities often leave homes that have been kept by their families for generations. They leave a more natural land and work they know well to find opportunity. To commemorate their loss, they write songs. This sort of tradition is seen all over the world. Now, Chinese migrant workers have begun to record it. They've created a new strain of folk song, and it appeals to Chinese city-dwellers, particularly youth (perhaps because of the feeling of wandering and alienation that is the feature of many of the songs). Even audiences outside of China are taking notice, and while they can't understand the lyrics, they can hear the emotion. We know these people and what they feel, and their culture is being preserved by the progress which has caused them to lose their way of life.

Lost in space

The space program fascinates people. Rocket science is almost incomprehensible. The shuttles are a sublime depiction of the power of controlled physics. But sometimes I wonder what it has contributed to us, and so do a lot of others. I asked someone what the space program had given us, and they replied, "Velcro." There was tremendous resentment when the space program began, because the taxes of the poor were being spent on programs that didn't really benefit them, while very little was being done to improve their standard of living (see "Whitey on the Moon," for example).
When you dig into it a bit, the space program has some benefits. Solar panels were developed by NASA. Also, the lens used for the Hubble telescope was converted into an imaging technology for breast biopsy that can examine a tumor so closely it can determine whether it is malignant or not without surgery. Also, there are a tremendous amount of jobs generated by the space programs and the companies that produce the supplies it uses. I don't think NASA will solve world hunger (although they might come up with something through their plant research), but there are benefits, no matter how little-known they are.

California's on fire again.

I didn't even hear about it this time. There's a website with five hundred photos of these most recent wildfires, but no one's talking about it around here. Are we just used to it by now? I wonder if Californians talk about it. How often can something happen before you just get used to it?
Yesterday we got out of school early because of the threat of tornados. Tornados didn't even cross my mind as I realized I could go back to my room on the (unsafe in a tornado) third floor and work on all the projects I have due before the semester ends. Some people grumbled that they hoped the housing staff wouldn't lock us in the theatre again, but that was the biggest concern we had. Tornados are old hat. Even when a tornado hit a high school near where I lived and killed some students, the next time a storm rolled around, no one really cared. There are exceptions (a friend of mine covers the furniture in plastic so it won't get ruined if something happens to the roof, then demands that enveryone gather their precious belongings and huddle in the basement), but for the most part, severe weather isn't that interesting. Natural death threats are a pain, not a worry. Even airport security, an unnatural phenomenon, is annoying.
Death does not disturb us. Is that instinct, or are we simply used to it?

Nuclear Ethics

My girlfriend came to me fuming one day about a debate she'd had in her history class. The topic of discussion had been whether or not it was ethical to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Almost everyone in her class said that absolutely it was. "This was war," they told her, "It would never end if you were soft." Their thought was that American soldiers would have died in droves if we hadn't forced the Japanese into submission with the bombs. Her thought was that those soldiers joined the military knowing that they might die, while the Japanese civilians simply had the unfortunate distinction of being Japanese.
After September eleventh, I heard a few people say that we should just nuke the whole Middle East and be done with it. That always made me angry, but as a sixth grader unused to having opinions of my own, I couldn't articulate why. Now I think it's because I'm a civilian. My government it at war, some of my friends are in the military, but I don't have anything to do with it. In the fraction of a second before I was vaporized, I'd be rather offended that another country was taking out their anger on me when I haven't personally done anything to them.
I read somewhere that fighting people simply have no imagination; they can't stop and imagine what their fist is going to do to someone's face, and therefore they can't put themselves in that person's place and figure they probably wouldn't like that too much. Perhaps ethics is simply an excess of imagination. We don't do bad things to others because we imagine it wouldn't be fun if they did it to us. We need creative people to be in charge of nuclear weapons. Maybe then they wouldn't be used.

Hydroponics

In the 1980's, a man who made antivenom for snakes in Australia was telling Douglas Adams (as related in Last Chance to See), that the future was in hydroponics. Almost thirty years later, he might just be correct. But very few people seem to know it. Hydroponics is a way of growing plants in little or no soil. Systems can be very complicated and mechanized or as simple as a well-monitored tomato plant in a mason jar. There have been recent developements in the mechanized area, where farming units are available. These machines can grow several acres of plants in a single unit, because the plants are given a perfectly-balanced portion of light, darkness, and water by being rotated in a circular hydroponic planter. The plants are also slightly larger and grow somewhat faster. How does this sound as a solution to world hunger or the demand for ethanol?

Swine Flu

Cough cough.
No matter what, someone's going to say something about swine flu. Coughing isn't even one of the symptoms, but they'll say it anyway. And have you heard the joke about Obama? I heard about swine flu while I was lying on the back seat of my grandmother's car, just about ready to die of fever, so of course my first thought was that I had it. I was dramatizing the thing before the radio report was half finished.
"What's the big deal with all this?" I asked one of the other dorm girls. "It sounds just like regular flu to me."
"Nothing really. It's just different. And some people have died."
But people die of the regular flu all the time. Granted, there are news reports during flu season, but the president doesn't worry himself about it.
"Haven't people died from swine flu?"
"In Mexico, yeah," I answered another girl the next day, "but not here."
That was a Friday. I'd already had my SAT postponed because there was an outbreak of swine flu at the highschool that was hosting the test. I still don't quite believe it. An epidemic in teh high school my mother graduated from.
On Monday, the girl I'd talked to on Friday told me that a baby had died of swine flu. "You were saying nobody was going to die here, and now someone has. It's like karma."
"I didn't want the baby to die!" I wailed. She tried to assure me that wasn't what she meant, but it was too late. The whole thing just wasn't funny anymore.
I still make jokes about swine flu. But I can't shake the fact that we're laughing about something that kills people. It probably won't kill me, but does that matter? I can't decide. If people didn't laugh about it, they'd just freak out. But is making jokes disrespectful to the dead?

A friend of mine told me yesterday that he has his own religion: himself. He says that he is his number one priority, and he surrounds himself with people who feel the same about themselves. He doesn't expect anyone to love him so much that he overpowers their own needs.
In a culture that seems to be obsessed with self (youtube, myspace, itunes), the people who want change advocate selflessness. Many claim that the youth of today are too ego-centric, that they're arrogant and don't care about anyone. And yet doctors like Gerald L. Klerman are seeing an upward trend in young people with depression and low self-esteem. The symptoms are "less psychotic" but more common. Perhaps youtube isn't catering to an already inflated ego, but simply providing a shaky foundation for what little self-confidence that young people have. Perhaps consumer culture doesn't run on the greased gears of people assuming their entitlement but on the backs of those who are so stooped over from shame that they consume blindly because they are lost in a haze of self-hatred. Like Jack, when told he looked harmless, sped to the mall and bought everything in sight, are we simply trying to make up for the self-esteem and true substance that we lack?
My friend is a self-acknowledged narcissist. He also doesn't have much, and he doesn't seem driven by the consumer machine. He shows no sign of depression; he's one of the happiest people I know. He's just one example, but he's a positive one. Perhaps we should all convert to his religion.