Photographs: A Higher Lie

Sure, photography is an art form. The use of black and white or sepia, and the right-upward angle at which you snap the tiger from below the mightily rumbling rock he sleeps on can most definitely convey a different kind of truth than seeing the beast directly from the side in black and orange.

But snapshots of people—due to our specie’s ceaseless obsession with others’ perceptions of us—almost never create a higher truth; it’s more like a higher lie.

It’s a family portrait of a husband, wife, and two kids, beaming their inhumanly white teeth at you, when in reality, no smiles are beamed; the parents spend long nights at a law firm and let the few moments they have at home pass by yelling at each other, and the kids have no idea what playing with a parent means. It’s the fact that in each of ten paintings of Mozart, he has different colored eyes.

Well, I’ve seen Facebook pictures of a girl I know, with eyes the same color as one of those Mozart portraits, as she beams next to the guy she loves—the guy who only wants to be friends—in a most girlfriend-like manner. She has eyes black with ashes, but shining with that one quavering glimmer of light that signifies her slim, impossible hope for him. The pictures are a half-lie, a half-truth.

But no matter. Let the black-ash-spewing volcano rage on; high school never bothered her anyway. Oh yes it did, that’s why she needs to prove herself desirable with a filter-flooded, fakely flamboyant Facebook photo.

A Humble Suggestion

            It is a melancholy object to those who walk through the halls of this great school, when they see the students trudging with heads down, heavy backpacks forcing them into the posture of Quasimodo, eyes glazed over like those of caged beasts yearning for their homes in Africa. In the present deplorable state of an economy that only demands service-sector jobs, it is not uncommon to see them on the backs, or at the heels of their teachers begging for less work, or turning thieves of answers in order to get the grades that will propel them into the Ivy Leagues.

            As to my own part, having turned my thoughts for many years upon this important subject, I propose, gentlemen, a humble suggestion.

            I have been assured by a very knowing member of the Chinese board of education that young Americans wholesomely enjoy being put through no less than twelve AP classes to get into their school of choice. Yes, they can’t get enough of retaking the SAT ten times in order to get that perfect score, or having to do three varsity sports, be an officer in no less than five clubs including Theatre and Robotics, and get twice the service hours required for NHS and the three other volunteering clubs they are a part of—all while getting a full eight hours every night. Oh and they definitely love that they must be Filipino-Mexican-Chippewa-Blackanese (okay, I stole that one from Rush Hour) Jews to have any chance of getting into U of M!

            Yes, let’s tell students that the only people we accept at our college are brilliant, energetic, out-of-the-box thinkers who will one day change the world. Because when everybody is unique, no one is.

            They are all just hopelessly stressed out cattle, ready to trek the long mile to an Ethiopian slaughterhouse.

            MUAHAHAHAHAHAH!!

*Side note: I find my piece even more startling than Swift’s, because it’s not even a satire; this is actually how it is!!!

No Restraint for Science Education

            Marie Skłodowska-Curie was the first woman to ever win a Nobel Prize in Science, the only human being ever to do so in two sciences, and an icon and true immortalizer of Polish culture. Curie’s research into radioactive isotopes centered primarily on locating them and using them to cure disease, so I’m fairly certain she never said, “Hey man, lemme slip some radium in your drink. This stuff freaking glows.”

So while I agree with Chet Raymo’s point that man should approach possibly dangerous scientific advances with “a measure of restraint,” I’m a bit irritated that he criticizes my home girl Marie. In contrast to Raymo, I believe that the answer to freakish glowing tobacco plants and the eventual advent of “Frankensteinian” glowing humans is not less science, but more.

Albert Einstein once said, “Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The import thing is not to stop questioning.” In a few clauses, he sums up the very nature of science: to question and test the validity of the theories, technologies, and processes that govern our world.

Perhaps if America mandated a more rigorous and real-world-based science curriculum for K-12 students, taught them about science’s failures as well as its triumphs, and didn’t save all the good teachers for only the students motivated enough to take APs, we would create a society more inclined “to question.” In Finland—ranked second in the world for science scores—teachers are among the most respected in their fields, and students spend a lot of time out of doors, exploring the natural world—which I’m sure Raymo would approve of. If we took a leaf from Finland’s book, we would no longer have a generation of mindless consumers, but a generation of avid thinkers—a generation of Marie Curies—who question the products and scientific advances being shoved down their throats, and try to aid mankind and respect the natural world.

Quench their thirst with knowledge, and they will be wise enough to know what must be restrained, and what simply cannot be held from the world.

Puzzle Paragraph!

            In Brent Staples’s essay “Black Men and Public Space,” he criticizes America’s seemingly incorrigible infatuation with stereotypes and suggests that blacks have been tossed from the frying pan of slavery and de jure segregation into the fire of unjust stereotyping and informal racial profiling. The confounded fates would have it that all black men—even those pursuing a PhD in psychology at the University of Chicago— taking a midnight stroll would cause hearts to beat faster and car doors to lock! Staples explains that African-American males reporting on a murder case oft get mistaken for the murderers themselves. And it is not just his article that depicts a society riddled with stereotypes—no, in Jeannette Walls’s memoir The Glass Castle, the stereotype of blacks beating up on whites is so engrained that classmate Dinitia Hewitt must viciously bully Jeannette in school, but has pleasant excursions to the pool with her on Saturdays. So how do we get rid of stereotypes so powerful that they persist when they are obviously not always true and actually force the stereotype-ees conform to them? While others—like Staples, whose essay offers no solution to the problem—might say that the stereotypes will persist ceaselessly, no matter how impressive a black man’s education, I say they are wrong. Yes, stereotypes are difficult to eradicate; however, no one ever said that they were impossible. Perhaps if the government spent less money on their own salaries and tax breaks and welfare that would never motivate anyone to work, and instead spent it on improving the quality of education for all and not making student loans so crippling, blacks could truly advance themselves from the ghetto and be free from the bondage of stereotypes. Staples does not realize that men like him are the solution. Hardworking blacks with education and acclaim are truly paving the way for their race to be recognized as accomplished equals, not a nation of thugs. What about the fourteen black American astronauts who have shown throughout history that not even the sky, but outer space, is the limit for their race? What about Jimi Hendrix who skyrocketed to fame in an era when rock was dominated by whites? Maybe one day, when blacks truly have the education and motivation necessary to succeed, Staples can whistle the riff from “Purple Haze” instead of a theme from The Four Seasons, and no one will cower in terror.

The Contemplation of a Squirrel

Thanks to this ceaseless polar vortex, it’s been months—more like years—since I’ve experienced the vibrations of the “vigor…rolling in from the fields” on a balmy “mid-September” morning, forever since I’ve heard anything like a moth’s enthused fluttering against a windowpane and had a deep existential crisis thinking about it.

            So, to still reuse Virginia Woolf’s idea of discovering the great truths of humanity in watching a simple animal, I’m going to discuss a picture we took on our family trip to the Grand Canyon a few summers ago.

            Of all the photos we snapped depicting the canyon’s majestic beauty and godly might, my favorite included a tiny squirrel—one of the kind that scuttle around hikers’ feet with energy from the very wellspring of life itself when they think the manna of trail mix crumbs will rain down upon them—sitting on the edge of the canyon. However, he was not skittering crazily along the path like his cousins, but meditating with his eyes closed, as still and stoic as the Buddha.

            There was this huge expanse of foreverness in front of him—orange canyon fading into cool purple and soft grey undertones, which melted into the endless clouds from which I know universes are born—and the squirrel was just calmly poised there on the precipice, not caring whether he fell into the abyss.

As I sit here gazing at the image and listening to Paul McCartney sing, “I’m a blue bird, I’m a blue bird…” backed by liberating Major 7 chords, I realize that the thing about the squirrel was that he was free. And truth be told, freedom scares me. Sometimes, when I have this massive panorama of canyon before me, and I’m free to hike where I please, I don’t know which trail to run down.

But perhaps, like the squirrel, I can free myself from this fear of freedom. I can meditate, give myself to the canyon, give myself to God, stand on the edge, and be content with whichever trail I may fall upon.