Category: Editorials

As a Catholic, I am forever cursed with guilt, but I like to think that with age Catholicism’s grasp on my soul gets a little less tighter and perhaps free-will even enters the picture at some later date. I am somewhat caught in a weird loop when it comes to religious matters. It is not that I don’t believe in God, it is that I don’t really think it matters. As part of Generation X, I tend to be pretty cynical in nature and just like everyone else I went through my whole depression stage (remember when everything in your closet was black?), but now I’m older and my biggest fight isn’t with God, The Catholic Church, parents, or even my own kids, it is actually with myself. It is always been about me! In a sense that is what religion is, it is me!

However, I am not perfect, and the religion of me, is not that I am God, it is my connection to the world. What I feel, who I think I am, what I want to be. In this it is not that I have been searching for God at all, it is that I wanted to run away from myself. Most religion tries to fill a void and give you some direction and possibly some really strange believes, (like worshiping a guy who had his disciples drink his blood and eat his flesh does not sound strange enough?), but for me personally the perfect religion for finding yourself is really Buddhism. It is the only religion that allows you to live your life in moderation, to have discipline, to know yourself. Now, I am not saying you should be a Zen Buddhist tomorrow, and I for one find it incredibly hard to give up eating beef, however Buddha really made some great points about the human condition. I wont go over any of them, cause you need to experience them for yourself in your own time. The only thing I will point out is that not all Buddhism is Zen, and in actuality Zen is a pretty strict version of Buddhism, so I personally would not start there.

I seem to remember Jack Kerouac saying something about how he was a Catholic Buddhist, and for the most part that is exactly what happens. You can not totally change your religious upbringing, but you can get to know yourself better and Buddhism is one way to do it.

It’s been a while since I sat down and wrote an editorial, part of it is my inherent lack of time to do anything lately, but mostly it is my incessant view that I must write something meaningful, and not just dribble on and on about nothing. This made me think more about something which I see every day, namely people’s searching for the next thing to talk about. It seems to me that media is driven to provide us with an abundance of topics for our idle chatter. However in the age of always-on Internet, it is getting harder and harder to come up with anything, cause the Internet is faster than any one else, and so people are always trying to find ways to beat each other on the next big topic. This is the main reason why websites like Digg and services like StumbleUpon are so popular with bloggers and everyone else for that matter. But I can’t help thinking that after a couple of days of digging and stumbling, for news, does it not just become pointless?

Something similar to a critique made of Apple’s iMovie software. If iMovie really is so easy, where are all the new movies that people are making? The fact is that many people do not invest much time in being creative. It is easier to sit back and criticize. Without a doubt the most popular medium for people of all ages are movies, we rent them, we go to the theater to experience them, we even watch them on television. Yet as our insatiable appetite for movies grows, we also complain about them. About their predictable plots and their outlandish conclusions. There seems to be no appreciation for how difficult a feat it is to make even the most mundane of films. We in a sense gorge ourselves on other people’s genuine work and then insult it for not being genuine enough in our eyes. This leads us to an over developed sense of self and perhaps secretly if we ever did try to be creative we would not blame ourselves for not having any creative powers, but our tools. It isn’t that I can’t draw or have vision, it is that Photoshop is too hard, or my camera sucks, I need a better one. We tend to believe that artists need to suffer for their art, yet after viewing their art we scoff at their efforts. So what is it? Did they not suffer enough? Our answer is usually that so and so work copies off another greater more genuine work. There’s that word genuine, again. We tend to believe that genuine works are some how better than just good imitations. Perhaps this is something akin to our post-modern era, but lets face it everyone copied everyone else. Without Eric Clapton, we could not have Van Halen. And we would never have had Clapton without the guitarists that preceded him.

I guess why we even search for things of a genuine nature, has more to do with us than the artists behind the work. We might feel more genuine ourselves if we are the first to point out something unique and authentic in world that seems to be moving on to the next big thing before we even have time to appreciate what we found yesterday. Life may seem boring and not very unique, but it is mostly because we are speeding our way through it, instead of appreciating what we have in the moment.

Over the last few years I have come to dread one piece of technology more than any other. The phone in my house is just plain evil. It interrupts my dinner, my evening entertainment, and even on days when I sleep in, the phone still rings and rings. Eight times out of ten, it ends up being a telemarketer wanting to sell me something or have me upgrade my debt ratio on my Visa. In my online time, I run into more and more spam and after a while, I have now become immune to most advertisements, except of course those tempting junk food commercials that they pass constantly on television. I don’t want a hamburger with extra cheese, but for some reason I have the urge to buy one. Anyway, the one idea that I ran across had to do with email authentication. It is based on the receiver giving permission to receive emails from you first before you can really send anything to that email address. What a great idea for the phone system. Why should I have to pay for CallerID, when 80% of the time I don’t really want those phone calls anyway?

The perfect phone system would require you to either approve the phone number or user id of the person calling you in order for your phone to accept the phone call. This would work out well because I could allow parents to call me based on their phone number, and friends who want to call me can just let me know what their user ID would be. Everyone has some sort of online ID nowadays, many people even use their online ID in person. Lastly if I wanted to I could still accept the call regardless of the phone number or ID. Government agencies would be exempt, so their calls would still come through. As for credit card companies, when you activate their card, it would add that credit card’s ID to your phone, so that the credit card company could still call you in case they needed to for non-telemarketing purposes.

This would effectively kill all telemarketing and would change the industry overnight. The business community would of course object and never let this happen, but think about it, the phone is outdated and like it or not, as everyone begins to embrace IP phone service and other communication mediums, it is just a matter of time. Someone will invent an authentication system and private networks will spring up and it may become popular for people to only communicate on private networks that have authentication. A system is only as popular as its users. If people abondon the phone system in favor of their own private telephone system, they can define their own authentication and not even have to pay extra for it.