Month: May 2021

Recently I was talking with someone about a interesting question someone had proposed them. The question was, “Say you built a ship, and it was the first of its kind. We’ll say its a pirate ship. Now say every year you take one plank of wood off the pirate ship and replace it with a new plank of wood. With the plank that you took off the ship, you begin to build a new ship. Say 1000 years passes and you’ve successfully removed all the planks and built complete other ship out of the planks of wood you removed from the pirate ship. Which ship is the original?”

The idea of an original event starting something, just seems absurd. The more I learn, the more I realize that history tends to repeat itself quite a bit. I was just thinking about this because today I was discussing the current stock market with someone today. We were talking about how much wood costs right now, an absurd amount. The housing market is in a bubble, its just like everything that I learned back in our first unit about turning points and stock market crash are flashing back to me.

Though this analogy might fit more comfortably with terrorism. Acts of terrorism have tended (I am not a professional, so this is all coming from the research I did) to be built on top of one another. Each act has to outdo the previous to maintain the amount of attention needed for people to respond to their cause. Mr. Hughes brought up a point about the mass shootings (defined by the Gun Violence Archive as: 4 or more people shot or killed not including the shooter LINK) in the US. The news tends to pick up larger events, and so larger shootings tend to end up on the news, but not all of them. From January 1st to May 28th this year there have been 225 mass shootings in the United States alone. As of April 30th 206 people died from mass shootings in the States. Now the pandemic has heightened shootings, as 2020 and 2021 have been really bad. Even now as I google “mass shootings in the United States” articles pop up published 17 hours ago, about shootings that happened today. Theres a fine line between not wanting to hear any more bad news, like choosing to ignore or avoid information like this, but theres also the side that news broadcasters are choosing not to display this 24/7. There has been (on average) more then 1 shooting a day in 2021, so why haven’t we heard about them all? Many news broadcasting companies have only chosen to mention the largest shootings, and  to recognize them. The United States Government will fly its flag at half mast when a large shooting has been committed to memorialize those lost. But it doesn’t fly its flag at half mast every day, or for every shooting. These things that I’ve found are interesting, because at the end of the day the recognition of a shooting only comes when its larger then average, and when the average is increasing at a steady pace, it just looks like exponential growth.

So I guess bringing it back to “what is original”, my conclusion is that if something was original you would never be able to find it because it would become buried under the exponential amount of people doing the same thing. For the ship analogy it means that the original ship must be the one that wasn’t made last.

 

***Quick sand. Hint, hint

As I’ve been working through these past 2 units in PLP, Turning Points, and School of Rock, I’ve noticed something. Human beings have extremely low attentions spans. This is a fact for so much more than just these past 2 units though, it’s a common factor that each individual displays every day. I can connect this factor even further to my recent kayak guide training.

I was in charge of teaching a few lessons, and to prepare I had practiced my lessons with another guide. This other guide taught me a lot, and gave me a lot to think about, but one thing he couldn’t stress enough was that people have incredibly low attention spans. I really let this one sit with me. He went on to tell me about how you basically shape every lesson around the fact that peoples attention spans are so low so everything has to be short, sweet, and engaging. Obviously I know that my own personal attention span is low, but it was interesting to learn about general peoples attention spans.

Ok, I took myself off course there but I felt that it was important to include that this is a common occurrence. I had also come up with another example. I’m guessing everyone has seen a missing animal poster, (look right).

These posters are a good metaphor for how well people can retain interest in something. I know personally when I see a missing animal poster I’ll take a photo, and make sure I keep my eye out. As time goes by though I don’t actively look anymore. I thought this was an insensitive problem of mine, so the second I notice myself doing this I tend to look harder. Which ends up just faltering out. I used this analogy because as we are faced with an issue, or another persons problem for too long (I am not sure how long, I would absolutely love to do research about this!!!) we loose interest, not because we become uninterested per say, but rather we’ve seen it, and now we are done. Naomi Klein talked a lot about this in her book “On Fire” as well as “The Shock Doctrine,” where she argues that for an event to change the publics perspective, it needs to shock them, and I mean really shock them.

Now taking this analogy to political movements we can apply this to the Climate Crisis firstly. The Climate Justice movement started in the 1980’s. So we have had 40 years, an entire generation of time to figure something out, and yet we are worse off then we were in the 1980’s. Why? Because like quick sand and missing dog posters, the more you promote it, the less people want to see it. And we know that it is almost impossible to make people want to see something when they don’t want to. (Now I am talking mostly about people who live in countries that reside in the Global North). The more people force climate activism, the less and less attention seem to have.

This can be applied too many political movements, though I will preface my next paragraph by saying that I believe that there is much more going on then peoples lack of interest when it comes to the Black Live Matter movement and the Civil Rights movement. I do believe though that this plays a role in peoples lack of change.

 

The Civil Rights movement (officially) started in the 1950’s. A really long time ago. Think 2 generations, and 13 different presidents. And yet black people are still being treated as less. Take Hurricane Katerina as an example. After the hurricane hit New Orleans, a predominantly black city, in 2005, it took the national guard 5 days to get there and help the people. When people tried to escape the city by crossing a bridge to another town they were forced back into New Orleans by people with guns on the other side of the bridge, sending them back into a figurative hell.

The conclusion is that the longer you protest something, and the longer you fight for your rights it seems, the less people will pay attention. Going back to what I said earlier about kayaking, it looks like more than just my lesson plans have to be “short, sweet and engaging.”

Additional connection: Free Palestine Movement (more reading here), and how it started in 2003.

The event that started the Cuban missile crisis was the Cuban revolution. The US got involved when JFK proposed that Cubans fight, and the revolution themselves after the US had already gotten involved. 

JFK decided to make an army of Cuban people who were against the revolution. So he sent this army of American/Cuban people to take down the the Cuban revolution. This was thought of as a very strong idea, JFK believed this was the solution. The battle is called The Bay of Pigs, and when it failed miserably it humiliated the US government.

You’d think that people (the US government to be specific) would have learned from this experience, that they wouldn’t make army’s of people to fight their own people in a proxy war. Well your wrong if you thought they wouldn’t do it again. If theres one thing I learned it’s that the states loves a good proxy war.

This same idea of proxy warfare, and making people fight your wars, was used at the end of the Vietnam war.

Before Nixon was elected he campaigned saying he knew how to end the Vietnam war. He didn’t. He used this same idea. He called his idea Vietnamization. To make the people in Vietnam fight for themselves. This looked like getting all the American troops (the support in Siagon) and people out of Saigon before the fall, and leaving the few non-communist people to fight the war the US had waged. What this did was deprive the Vietnam people who were in favour of Saigon of safety and leave them to die. 

Now you might think that maybe after this has happened twice the US might take a hint. Leaving/leading other people to fight your war is not the way to go. But yet, you’re wrong again.

This same concept is being used for the removal of US troops from Afghanistan by July 4th this year. Biden said that Afghan troops have been trained to hold up the country to avoid collapse. Obviously we don’t know how this will end, maybe Biden really has developed a sound foundation, but with the way things have gone in the past, I have doubts. I would love to believe that things will be sound in Afghanistan once the troops leave, but history tends to repeat itself. I guess only time will tell. 

So we have been doing quite a bit of research lately about turning points, and I have found quite a few interesting connections between topics. One that I would like to start off with is the association of a crisis to a turning point. I understand this is a broad idea but I would like to walk you through my thinking.

I first came across this idea when we were looking into the assassination of JFK. I had been playing with the idea of a turning point requiring a crisis for a bit, it had popped into my head when we talked about The New Deal and The Great Depression, and I had also had the same thought when we discussed The Cuban Missile Crisis. When we started to talk about the JFK assassination I quickly started to draw connections to the crisis of it all, how America’s sweetheart, their young, beautiful president was killed. How he was visiting Dallas with his wife, who had just birthed a still born child, and was still grieving. How he was so close to making it to lunch when he was shot. The crisis of his assassination rings clear from every history book, and article you read on this event. Though the idea of it being a turning point is very much based on the crisis.

Like I mentioned earlier I felt this same way about the other turning points such as the cuban missile crisis. This turning point came after the crisis that almost demolished the US and Russia. This crisis came about when Russia started to move nuclear weapons to Cuba during the Cuban revolution. The US was getting panicked. The enemy having nuclear weapons is one thing, but them having them so close to your country pointed right at you is something else entirely. The US was loosing control quickly, and one wrong move could have led to a completely different present day. This was a turning point because the world got so close to total elimination, but turned back. This traumatic experience led to the US and Russia installing a telephone line directly to each other to communicate more efficiently, and before things were to escalate too far.

 

Lastly, the New Deal was a perfect example of the turning point arising after a crisis. The New Deal was a product of the Great Depression. It was created to ease the American economy back into safety, and though some argue it did not help and that actually WW11 healed the American economy, it was a major help. The New Deal, and I’m siding with Ms. Willemse, pulled the American economy back together, and deals since then have been based off of the New Deal (such as the Green New Deal but thats for another day). But the New Deal and the turning point of it came as a product of a crisis.

I’m excited to see if this idea holds up for the entire unit of “Turning Points” and if it doesn’t I’d be happy to figure out more on that side as well!

Thanks for reading!