Ways of seeing

I saw a cone-hat lady make her garbage scavenging route after midnight.  I blurted out ” wow, that late. Must be tiring.”

When my friend suddenly added ” she doesn’t depend on others to make her living”.

Now, that’s an alternate way of seeing the same thing.

Our judgment is often clouded by our prejudice.

Prejudice is built up over the years, millions of stimuli have conditioned us to a certain “safe” way to respond.

We carry on with “stuff” in our heads to assure ourselves that things will always stay the same, and that we have control over our surrounding (dominion over the seas).

This white-man burden, with steam-ship industrialization, helped expand empires in the mighty seas and to distant shores (colonial period).

Now, it runs out of steam (no punt intended).

We now have a multi-polar world, with blocks and alliances, and fewer common denominators to work with (Kyoto, Kosovo and Davos).

Emerging countries keep their options open: they can’t forego OPEC, but can’t pretend to be in the league with BRICs or PIGS.

Welcome to 2012, the year without Whitney and Monkey’s lead singer.

Things used to be a lot simpler: Chevy in the drive way, chicken in the pot and cherry on top.

Now, it’s “where is the beef?, and “where are the jobs?”.

We bail out banks and blocks of countries.

Young people are netizen more than citizen.

At least, there, online, their fingers can take control.

Reality is just one-way: command, coding, outcome.

We are moving away from the communitarian model, to online collaborating model (sans borders).

All of a sudden, localization is hot (the same way Contextualization used to be).

When we zoom out,  we see patterns.  When we zoom in, we see details.

Depends on where we stand, how much of the “garbage”  we are carrying in our heads, and the zoom lenses we have at our disposal,

we see things differently.  Garbage in, garbage out. First in, first out. Wow, that’s tough!. No, wow, that’s liberating and independent.

Who is right and who is wrong.  Same set of facts and circumstances. Midnight in the garden of Eden, or of garbage disposal.  What’s happiness? We don’t seek it in the sense that it is a moving target. Rather, it’s a longing to return to the place where we were expelled from.