Ranting – part 1: About others
PROLOGUE:
Everyone’s trying to convince me that this world is on the right track (albeit moving slowly), that people are inherently good and so, that good will prevail; that our “problems” are just bumps on the path to this perfect world that’s right around the corner, just waiting to happen. Sometimes I can’t believe that people actually expect me to go along with that when the only argument they can really summon is that it sounds so good and it makes us feel so warm and fuzy inside that it just HAS TO BE TRUE. Oh wait… did I say argument? Are we all voluntarily choosing to be deaf and blind?
I have often named an excessive realism as a reason for my skepticism, criticism and on ocassion rebellion. Maybe it’s about time I shed some light into these matters.
There is a crack in everything my friends. That’s how the light gets in.
Part 1: About others
At least 100 million people (to give you an idea that’s about 3 times the population of California and about 1.5% of the world’s population) are going to sleep on the street tonight with no home. Some estimates go as high as 500 million (consider that the US population is about 300 million). Estimates for street children are similar, somewhere between 100 and 150 million. And do we worry about them? No, we worry whether or not our home is properly feng shui. Or we throw them some change when our expensive leather shoes trip over their rags and move on proud of our epic kindness. I’m surprised we don’t expect to get paid back for our gesture.
Not impressive? Of course it wouldn’t be, we do what we can for them, right? We can’t be blamed. Well, here’s another thing to meditate on. About 800 million people are chronically hungry. And before you start telling me that we just can’t feed everyone, I should add that interestingly enough, more than one billion people are overweight (yes, that does mean that a lot MORE people constantly consume considerably more food than they need while there are people dieing of hunger). Let’s add that about two billion lack food security (that’s about 30% of the world’s population, so almost a third) and I think we have something to talk about. Did you enjoy your dinner last night? I sure did. I actually ate too much.
So why do I get to sit in my comfy chair, after a good and large dinner and write this post? Is it because I’m better than all those other people? Maybe, maybe I am. But I think it has nothing to do with better, I think it’s just because I was LUCKY. Lucky enough to have a roof over my head every night of my life, lucky enough to not worry about whether or not I will eat dinner tonight, lucky enough to have a family. I did not move a finger for any of these things, I just had them. Had I not had them I couldn’t have obtained them. And since I’m an agnostic, I don’t believe it’s anything more than randomness, pure luck. Just as well I could’ve been starving and freezing now. Or maybe already dead. What about you? Why do we get to “gather in moments like this when so much of the world is plunged in darkness and chaos”? Are we special? Are we better human beings? Are we superior? Or are we just plain lucky?
Okay, so apocalyptic talk, bla bla, are we about wondering if there’s a point to this? There’s no point, this is a philosophical point of view, not a political one like you’re probably used to. But if you really want a point, how about this: if the only thing setting the difference between me (or you) and THEM is where we were born, isn’t that pure discrimination? If people work endlessly to provide food for us, when they themselves starve, isn’t that slavery? And do we not ignore it, like the nobles of the land – that we now despise – have done for centuries? And do we not say that it is NECESSARY, as was said ever since the beginning of history? You speak to me of evolution, well speak, where is it? All I see is the same poison in a different cup. A more intricate one, more carefully worked, to better hide the burning, rancid scent of what it contains. But same poison unchanged, indicative of a rotten core hidden deep inside humanity. Oh granted our cup has evolved. So much that we can handle this poison every day of our life with our hands perfectly clean, without even a bare scent of its real content reaching our fine nostrils.
So let’s go over that question again: are we voluntarily choosing to ignore? Or is it involuntary? Or is there no choice at all? What do you think? Do you care at all? Should you?
You may notice I ask a lot of questions. It’s true, I do not offer answers, solutions, suggestions. I wouldn’t even if I had any, but I do not. Everybody thinks they have answers nowadays and everyone expects answers. This should stop. The real help someone can give you is ask the right question. So all I have to offer to you, are questions and that’s really all that matters. Try and find your own answers, otherwise all this is useless.
TO BE CONTINUED…
NOTES:
- I read an interview with L. Cohen in which he called Anthem his best song. It took me a while to understand why. If you do, then you will understand why I put it here, otherwise I can’t really explain it.
- The numbers I have are taken from Wikipedia and seemed well referenced. If you don’t trust them you are welcome to come up with your own from other sources, I would be glad to have them.
Customer service
Clearly the regular posting is off to a slow start, but I swear I am trying, haha 
So here’s a short note about customer service (and I guess it’s also about LEGAL MP3 downloads). Some time ago, I had an angry rant about iTunes, after which I decided to not get stuff from them anymore, instead try things like Amazon. Now, given that the price difference between the regular disc and the MP3 album is often small and that I play discs in my car, I usually go for the disc instead of the MP3 (and rip it myself to play it on my computer and throw the CD in the car collection). But, I did make an exception twice.
First time I bought an MP3 album from Amazon, all was good. I liked the great quality, it was DRM free, so thumbs up for Amazon, thumbs down for iTunes. The second time I bought from Amazon, which was about a week back, things didn’t go so well. The download went good, but then the tracks were skipping (I’m guessing the original CD they were ripped from was dirty or scratched). So in other words, another small but terribly annoying problem, just as I had previously with iTunes. Now here’s the difference. When my iTunes album was messed up, I tried to contact them about it and I never heard back. This small failure in customer service ensured that I will never buy a track from iTunes again. On the other hand, Amazon responded fantastically fast (I think in less than two hours every time I wrote to them), were very polite and offered me a whole bunch of solutions. Now, the solutions themselves looked as if an automatic answering system spit them out because they were all solutions for download problems instead of messed up tracks, but with a service as big as Amazon, some preset answers don’t surprise me much, you have to keep things going, I can understand that – even if it doesn’t make me very happy. Eventually, unable to get things figured out, I requested a refund and again, very quickly, I received a confirmation that I will get refunded AND I was invited to try and get the MP3 album again in a few days, after they try and get a corrected version up (finally an acknowledgment of the real problem).
Now sure, I am still upset that the whole thing didn’t work right and now I have to get the disc instead and wait for it to be mailed and all, but their responsive customer service made me happy. Yes, I will think twice before buying an MP3 album again, but I might nonetheless. And I will definitely still consider Amazon my number one choice for Internet purchases as long as they keep up the good work like this. Everybody makes mistakes and that’s normal. It’s how you react to those mistakes that sets the difference, especially when it comes to mistakes towards your customers.
A little note here: the OVERALL quality of legal MP3 sales has got to go up, otherwise you will never convince people to stop doing it illegaly. If you download an album illegaly and it’s messed up, you don’t lose a cent, but when you start paying for it, you have some expectations and if those are not met, ethics alone will not keep people on the right track. Actually, they probably will increase the popularity of illegal solutions if anything.
Just in case anyone’s curios, this is the album I am trying to get. I highly recommend it: Bach:Concertos
Getting serious?
I never think of myself as a blogger. I don’t write often, I rarely write about things that interest more than a select few and I don’t do it in a very original manner. But I enjoy this and changes in my life have all been reflected in this blog as it bounced between being a photo, tech and purely personal blog. Further more, one of the pieces of unsolicited advice that I often give people is: “no matter what you do, put passion in it and thrive to at least do the best you can”. So what does that mean?
First of all, I will attempt to add some structure and dedication here and actually post regularly and put a little bit more work in what I write. I would like to stress the word attempt since I got no idea whether or not this will actually work out as I want it. But this blog deserves a bit more work. At the end of last summer I decided to split my public online publishing activity into three components: this blog was going to remain the main component, but it was going to suffer some modifications to remove the very personal things out of it, give it a more presentable view and this has been mostly succesful, I should say. The second was to create a private forum for myself and very close friends that I had difficulty keeping in touch with and that was done shortly and has been going very well also. The third component which was also the least important has actually been a failed attempt and I will not spend more time here on it, I will just say that the need for it was easily covered between the previous two, as I realized some time later. So as it is, this remains the single public publishing online spot I work with and I feel it merits some more work and I will try to get on that.
Second, althought I am still debating exactly what the best manner to go about this is, I will look into adding more categories and variety to the blog. I do a lot more things every day than criticize others, look back at good memories and listen to music. There is a lot I can share with the world (whether “the world” actually wants to read it or not is a different story) and I think I should at least try. More on that soon.
Third, I started out on the wrong foot since this post is one day late according to my own personal schedule, but even more of a reason to catch up! Stay tuned, I hope you’ll be getting more updates on your RSS feeds from me very soon!
