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Some things just happen. Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, the ocean's tidal rhythms. The earth orbits the sun and spins on its axis, and we experience day and night. Other things don’t just happen, like war, poverty, and the criminal justice system. People in power start wars, communities fail to provide resources to people without resources, and societies deprive some people of their personal liberty to offer the illusion of safety to others. Lately I’ve been hearing this kind of human-created circumstance discussed in the news as if these things just… happen. Like fixtures in the landscape we need to work around instead of the result of all our collective participation in societal and global social and economic systems. On one hand I can understand that perspective for things that have existed for generations. The telephone, for example, was invented long before I was born, so to me telephonic communication definitely feels like an immovable fixture of modern life. And if it isn’t causing any problems for me then I might not bother to consider where and when it came from. Which is why it’s so critical to make sure everyone's voice shapes our institutions and governance policies. We need to hear from every kind of someone that something we’re doing continues to serve all of us so we don’t just keep doing what we’ve always done because that’s how we’ve always done it and nobody in charge noticed it was a problem for somebody else. On the other hand is what confounds me about the framing of our present moment: these things are causing problems. Obvious problems. Well known and highly documented problems. Smart, qualified, and credible people are talking about the problems with the war on Ukraine and the siege on Gaza. Smart, qualified, and credible people are talking about the detrimental impacts of poverty and the criminal justice system. Smart, qualified, and credible people are talking about our dangerous reliance on fossil fuels and the resulting impending climate catastrophes in our near future. But the folks who can do something about it don’t seem to be listening. And now we’re talking amongst ourselves as if nothing is being done because there isn’t anything that can be done. And that’s dangerous. It means we’re not holding the people who run our systems accountable for how things are running. The US presidential election is still 9 months away. Someone could conceive, grow, and birth an entire human before we all cast our vote. But we already know which two candidates of which two parties we will need to choose between on this year's ballot, even though most of the primaries haven’t taken place yet and nobody seems to want what we’re apparently going to get. So we should do something about it. It’s hard to know what to do, but just because it’s hard doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. The US government isn’t a democracy machine; it’s a government machine. If you feed it democratic policies and practices, then you get democracy. If you feed it fascist policies and practices, then you get fascism. The fates are not handing us a Biden vs Trump election, we are creating that future inevitability by not doing something else. I see the same resignation in much of the discussion about AI. AI isn’t a force unto itself. It didn’t arrive from another galaxy fully formed and ready to take over the fun parts of our lives while we work dead-end jobs that barely cover our rent. We created it. Humans made (and are making) AI. It’s not just an alien invader as Yuval Noah Harari described it; it’s a version of ourselves we ran through a machine. The call is coming from inside the house because AI is only the result of exactly what we put into it: us. We are here in this moment with these challenges because this is the reality we have collectively crafted. Fortunately, that means we can make it into anything we want as long as we make it into something on purpose. Last year’s tax season was brutal for me. But everything that made it a bummer didn’t just happen; the bummer is what happened because I didn’t do something else. So this tax season I’m doing a few things differently. I could have resigned to a repeat of last year, but I don’t want that. So this year I’m crafting a completely different experience. I want us all to do that in every way we can because we need to craft a brighter future in order for it to happen. Information and Inspiration
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AuthorJaydra is a human in-process, working to make the world a better place. Sharing thoughts, feelings, and observations about the human experience. Archives
March 2024
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