le vingt-deux janvier

So I guess this is the slightly more political side of me, so to speak.

I don't really like getting involved in politics that much, but sometimes I do so subconsciously anyways when I have my own social or personal concerns (humans are selfish by nature).  This phase, whatever it is, is reminding me that politics can be very personal, but America, this great and all-mighty country, to me gives the impression that politics is not personal and that anything personal that you try to bring to a more public and political scale deems you as an outcast or radical or just ridiculous.  Because let's face it, America hasn't really progressed as much as it promised to in terms of giving sensible and logical situations to personal issues becoming public and political.  And if you disagree with me, then you're just an ignorant prick.

Basically, I'm taking these two very interesting classes this quarter - Environmental Science (ESCI) and Cultural Anthropology (ANTH.. not 'CULT' haha).  The goal of the ESCI class is to motivate students to be more aware of how they can contribute to developing a more sustainable society.  The goal of the ANTH class is to have students learn to see the world from many different perspectives and ultimately learn to understand every person they run into without prejudice (or acting on the prejudice because honestly, sometimes it's inevitable).

Today in my ANTH class, we watched this movie called DAM/AGE that discussed the policies and the personal impacts that the building of these dams does to indigenous people in India in order to benefit the urbanized societies (I never liked urban settings anyways).  This also reminded me of the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangze River in China.  The stories on the construction of these dams are essentially the same - big, scary, bureaucratic government wants to supply resources to the modernized and urbanized sections of their country.  Indigenous peoples and their villages have to be destroyed because of the flooding that the building of these dams will cause.  Protests from the villagers, environmentalists, ecologists, human rights activists, and various types of concerned people end up futile and the government wins anyways because the government doesn't care that they're taking away centuries of history and simple, natural prosperity from the natural people of the land.  So, villagers have to move out, end up in the slums, forced to work in horrible working conditions in the city, and are essentially kicked down to the lowest levels of society.

I'm not going to lie, though - living right in the Silicon Valley myself, the life of being a participant of a modernized society is great.  I don't have to worry about food or shelter and I get state-of-the-art education (supposedly).  It's great and all, if you have the 'modernized' $$resources$$ for it , and I doubt whether or not I still have any anymore, so I personally am starting to realize how ludicrous this all can be sometimes.  But every kind of society has its pros and cons.

I'm not saying that I'd rather go back to being a farmer or whatnot, but my cultural anthropology class does have a good point in that even though we accumulate more wealth as we modernize, the overall well-being of the human race has significantly decreased.  We are essentially killing ourselves slowly along with this Earth - and that's where all the ESCI stuff comes in.  Fortunately though, ESCI is more hopeful in that it seeks to find solutions that can balance modern human lifestyles with the natural world.

Going off on a sort-of-tangent here, I remember my mother telling me a lot about her childhood. She said that there was this crystal clear river that her siblings, her cousins, and herself would often play in near their homes. Fish were swimming in it, children were playing in it, and sometimes I think they even bathed themselves in it or something - it was just that clean.  A few quarters ago, I also remember my French teacher telling our class that when she was a child and lived in this rural valley of southern France, she and other children her age would run into the nearby forests and pick up some champignons (mushrooms) to bring home to have their parents cook for them to eat.  Or they'd pick some up whenever they had outings into the forest.  Sorry to sound cheesy here, but don't these moments of harmonious human-nature interactions seem so enchanting?

My mother took my sister and I to the site of the river she once played in as a child, and it's all been covered by tartar and concrete houses.  To be honest, the neighborhood looks really filthy.  I'm sure the forest that my French professor used to play in is still there, but I just wonder what any kid nowadays is doing with such easy access to technology and along with that, more excuses to stay indoors.

I guess I was always a very nature-oriented person anyways, which is why I may seem easily persuaded from the learning content of these classes.  And I want to refute this argument I saw on the internet once (not towards me, but might as well have been because they were complaining about something that I care about).  My speech professor last quarter said something around the lines of  'Pick three things you really care about and stick to those things because you can't possibly contribute to every single thing you want to change for the better."  Focus on three, hone in on three, etc... One of the things that concerns me is the extinction of giant pandas (because they are soo cute and vital to the mountainous regions of Asia, not because I am Asian).  Giant pandas are considered very endangered mostly because of modern development over their lands of bamboo (over their natural habits, basically).  China has been cutting down so many of their forests which contained pretty much all of the flora and fauna they needed to survive.  Some idiot on the internet said that pandas are her least favourite animals - I didn't mind that, everyone can agree to disagree - but the reason she said so was that because pandas don't know how to adapt to new environments.  As a result, because pandas are 'too stupid' to adapt to change and change to eating something other than bamboo, she thinks that they deserve to be endangered.  Really then?  Why don't you also include all the hundreds of others of species that have almost been knocked off the Earth because of humans?  I bet you hate all of them, too.  We have been the ones carelessly throwing these species off of the planet, yet someone even has the guts to say that an animal like the giant panda deserves to die because of our wrongdoings.

I am not an environmental hippie nor am I an actively political person.

But I am a Christian, and with all these modern-day issues in the world, I feel like Christians are mostly very passive and not ones who wish to join in conflict (I mean I'm pretty passive, too..)

I haven't heard of many Christian political activists.  I can only think of Martin Luther King Jr. at the moment, and all the other modern-day Christian political activists are all giving the actual loving-like-God and forgiving-like-God Christians a bad name - those activists include the Westboro Baptist Church as well as the Christians that keep pushing for inequality towards homosexuals.  I was talking to my friend the other day, and I said that a lot of Christians (including ourselves) really need to keep this verse (Matthew 7:3-5) in mind a lot more often: "Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye."

But what if, say, there was a Christian that really cared about the probable mistreatment of indigenous peoples if a dam were to be built over their ancestral lands?  Should that Christian go and protest to that government that is allowing those lands to be destroyed?  A lot of the time, Christians are expected to respect authority, no matter how wrong we think the authority may be.  But at the same time, if that Christian were to join in on the protest and could possibly convince the government to change their minds - they could  help all these native people keep their lands!  I know being a Christian isn't about do's and don'ts - it's about living out the love of God.  Yet when I ask myself, "What would Jesus do?' in situations like this, I really don't know what he would do.  I feel like just passively praying and hoping that God would do something won't do anything when people have the chance to act out for what they believe in.

It's kind of like that question of poverty, but not really.  People often ask, "If God is so great, then why are there so many poor people in the world?  Why doesn't he do anything?"  Well he created you, didn't he?  And he created so many people that have the same heart as Him to reach out and help so many poverty-stricken peoples all over the globe.  It's just that situations like the dam one are more confusing to me because then there's that factor of human authority.  Perhaps I'm taking something too literally here?  I don't know.

This is going to be a very interesting quarter.  Depressing, but interesting.