Build This City...

Here are some lyrics that I "wrote" for the song Pedrosa, off of Build This City Now Burn It Down's release from last summer:

"The collection plate takes your money, exploiting your small comforting “sins”, sacrificing nothing at all in return.
Immense demands made from the altar steps by men who don’t know the meaning of sacrifice.
The weakness of faith.
What is there to experience but vacancy?
Are there still those that claim a loving and merciful God?
You would rather die and destroy everything, alone without any memories at all.
But we have to go on living.
The world is not the universe."


I borrowed a few lines from the book "The Power And The Glory."


Build This City should be starting up again some time next week with at least one member change, and we are contemplating a name change. Keep a look out for new releases and show dates.

Click the title to go to the band's myspace page.

Atheism Video

This is part one of three. I might put up the other two parts later, but I have not watched them yet.

To be frank here, I disagree Kirk. I really do.

If God is your reason or excuse to do good things in the world, then by all means, believe in God. But do not try and tell anyone else that they are wrong. I do not feel the need to believe in something "bigger than my self," so why try and make me?

Is it really so hard to believe that the universe was never created and it will never end? Why does it even matter if there is a "creator" at all?

I honestly do not see the point in killing someone else because of your/their faith. I also do not see the point in following yet another set of rules. If you step out of line, you're going to hell.

Why not live our lives for what they are, not for a creator. If I were God, I would be pissed off at my "children". Certainly there are a lot of christians doing good in the world. But it seems to me there are a lot more wasting their lives waiting for heaven and trying to please an absent entity by attempting to force others to believe. Don't you think God, if s/he exists, wants us to look out for eachother and have fun?

Pray if it gives you strength. Believe if you feel the need to. But do not try and make me believe in God with bullshit reasons about a banana fits in my hand or a car has a maker therefore I must as well.

My personal view is everything that glorifies 'God' and the afterworld slanders humanity and the real world.

Bokito Agrees

Bokito is a gorilla that escaped from his cage at the zoo in Amsterdam today. I think he was tired of being locked up on account of his species.

Click the title to check out the CNN article about it.

Life Slowly Starts to Choke the Poetry Out of Us

The Washington Post, in a social experiment, convinced world famous violinist, Joshua Bell, to play in a subway station in Washington D.C. He is used to selling out massive arenas and plays with a $3.5 million Stradivarius violin.

Yet out of the 1,097 that walked past while he played some of the most difficult and beautiful pieces ever written, only seven people stopped briefly to listen.

There is an article about it in the Washington Post for May 4, 2007.

What does this tell us about our culture? We are self-centered and caught up in our own world. Getting to work on time is more important than art and life.

Now don’t get me wrong, I am not looking down on the people that did not stop. I think our culture has trained us to ignore anything that might slow down production, and to view a street performer as a slacker. Frankly, I don’t know if I would have stopped had I something “important” to do. I think that is why the article interests me so much. Who knows what great things I have missed in my life by simply not paying attention.

Right now I am counting down the days until my graduation, waiting to get out of here. But in doing so, I may be ignoring or disregarding beautiful and important people and things in my life.

My favorite part of the article says:

“The poet Billy Collins once laughingly observed that all babies are born with a knowledge of poetry, because the lub-dub of the mother’s heart is in iambic meter. Then, Collins said, life slowly starts to choke the poetry out of us. It may be true with music too.”

I hope this never happens to me.

Free Trade vs. Fair Trade

This is a pretty good video about free vs. fair trade.

An article in the New Yorker called “Exporting I.P.” illustrates what the American government is doing to the rest of the world in terms of its free trade policy. Here is a quick excerpt:

“Free trade is supposed to be a win-win situation. You sell me your televisions, I sell you my software, and we both prosper. In practice, free-trade agreements are messier than that. Since all industries crave foreign markets to expand into but fear foreign competitors encroaching on their home turf, they lobby their governments to tilt the rules in their favor. Usually, this involves manipulating tariffs and quotas.”

It goes on to explain how America bullies other countries into changing their copyright laws in order to support American pharmaceutical companies.

It is well written article, check it out. I don’t have the link though, sorry.

Mother's Day: Caring and Capitalism

Isn’t it typical that corporations can take something worthwhile, commercialize it, and in the process turn it to shit? Click the title for the link to the CNN article about mother’s day, and how its been bastardized and sold to us. Any way for them to make a buck, and it isn’t just mother’s day. They sell us our entire lives.

They stole mother’s day. They commercialized punk rock. They sold rebellion. They even bottled our water and sold it to us. What is next?

Straight Edge and Rebellion

Rebellion in general has always held my interest. Not that bullshit stick-it-to-the-man hogwash, but rebellion with a purpose. Resistance movements. Freedom fighters. Guerillas. Manifestos. Counterculture. All of those wonderful things.

Straight edge.

Think about it for a second. Hardcore and punk are obvious forms of rebellion in and of themselves. So what does that make straight edge? Aside from the one and only true path to self-liberation, it serves as an intelligent counter-rebellion to the mindless opposition of society’s accepted moral codes. So is straight edge then supporting the majority if it is rebelling against the rebellion?

The answer of course is no. A youth engaging in activities that he/she believes to be counterculture is indeed supporting the same social structure that he/she intends to disrupt. For instance, many of today’s young punks buy merchandise or compact discs distributed by major corporations. Those that claim they only purchase directly from independent bands and labels believe that they are one step above their mallrat counterparts. But they are wrong. They indeed support the two corporations largest of all: the alcohol and tobacco industries. Each of these two industries is a leading killer among the working-class citizens that these punks claim to represent. Where is the logic in that?

Abstinence is the answer, and that is why straight edge is gaining so much ground. Aside from all the health reasons, straight edge is a form of pure intelligent rebellion.

The argument could be made that jumping on the straight edge bandwagon is not rebelling, but nothing is original anymore and the same argument could be made for any situation.

The possibility of straight edge becoming affiliated with any established political party or religious organization is nonexistent, if not downright absurd. Straight edge seems to say, “sure, we’ve got values that the public deem appropriate, but we say ‘fuck you’ anyways”. Society can write off punks as a whole because of the way they present themselves, but it cannot write off straight edge. It cannot reject something that reflects many of its own moral principles. And yet we still reject society.

Chimp Rights

This is an interesting article that Lindsey brought to my attention. Click the title of the blog "chimp rights" to go to the article.

I definatly agree that chimps should have some basic rights and that they deserve more legal rights "than bricks or apples or potatoes," as stated in the article.

Thanks Lindsey, for the article.

Cannibalism

According to the Economic Policy Institute, as of 2001, a “living wage,” or the minimum hourly wage to be able to sustain a family of one adult and two children, is $30,000 a year, or $14 an hour. 60% of Americans earn less than $14 an hour, or the living wage. The vast majority of those earn about half that, at $7 an hour for many entry-level positions. This means that the majority of Americans are struggling to pay rent, health insurance, car insurance, credit interest, groceries, etc. With the relatively recent welfare reform bill signed in 1996 by Clinton, thousands of people are suffering, namely single mothers living far beneath the “living wage”. The poverty line, which is at about half that of the “living wage,” is grossly outdated and is not a substantial measure of poverty. Americans feel relatively confident in the fact that the percent of Americans living under the poverty line hovers somewhere around 13% (a number that I find disgustingly high), but do not realize that many Americans live above the poverty line and yet still cannot afford rent. According to a 1997 report of the National Coalition of the Homeless, “nearly one-fifth of all homeless people (in twenty-nine cities across the nation) are employed in full or part-time jobs” (1).

To me, what this all boils down to, is that capitalism works in a way in which many are left out. Capitalism is the problem. According to the principles of capitalism, businesses operate according to the law of supply and demand, and exist only to raise their bottom line. They do not care for their workers, as there is always a fresh supply of those in poverty willing to fill in when a corporation decides to discard a former employee. What does this create? People working twelve-hour shifts, seven days a week, to feed their children and make rent. What is the point of a life wasted as a wage slave? It seems to me that capitalism has forced us all to sell our lives away for $7 an hour with the pathetic hope of moving up the corporate ladder, as if that will somehow change something and suddenly fill our lives with meaning.

I believe that we can operate our society in a way in which everyone can enjoy life while contributing positively to society. I call this direct action. I call this anarchism.



(1). Direct quote from Barbara Ehrenreich in Nickel And Dimed.