What Does It Mean to be a Citizen of the World?

I'm half Mexican, half Southern white guy.  I'm a historian of US and Latin American history.  I grew up listening to hip hop, a beautiful culture created by black Americans.  My favorite video game genre is Japanese role playing game.  My favorite author is a queer black man, James Baldwin; my favorite director is Japanese director and legend of world cinema, Akira Kurosawa.  Some of my other favorite movies come from outside the US, from countries like Mexico, Sweden, Ireland, Korea, and Thailand.  My political philosophy is shaped by thinkers from all over the world. So is my fighting style, as I've trained martial arts from around the world.

I say this not to sound all worldly and special.  In fact, what I think is kind of cool is that I'm not that unique at all here.  We're all connected to the rest of the world in tons of ways.  There's a good chance that you, the reader, probably have a bunch of different connections to the rest of the world, too.  Which brings to mind the phrase "a citizen of the world", an idea I've always liked, but never thought about in depth until recently.

So, what does it mea to be a citizen of the world?

Usually when I make a post about some sort of question about society I have a concrete answer.  That answer then functions as a sort of thesis for my post, almost as if I'm writing a paper.  But this'll be a bit different.  I'm just going to reflect without any set answer.  I guess, if I have any thesis, it's that being a citizen of the world shouldn't mean just consuming goods, customs, and ideas from other parts of the world, but involve some sort of reciprocity.  Being a citizen of the world implies being part of a global human community, after all.  But what that means and what that looks like will be different for each of us.

What is a "Citizen of the World"?

Speaking of my favorite director Akira Kurosawa, in his "Something Like an Autobiography" memoir of his, there is a quote I really like:

"No matter where I go in the world, although I can't speak any foreign language, I don't feel out of place. I think of the earth as my home. If everyone thought this way, people might notice just how foolish international friction is, and they would put an end to it." 

Another quote I like is from Thomas Paine, one of the most fascinating founding fathers of the US (and, in my own personal view, perhaps the only one truly worth celebrating- but that is a different blog post).  It's short, sweet, and to the point:

"The world is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion."

What stands out to me about these quotes is that they both provoke a call to action.  They're not just about appreciating other cultures, as neat and important as that is.  It's not only about what movies you watch, or what food you eat, or what languages you speak.  It's about how you relate to people around the world, how you're willing to connect to them, and why that matters.  For Kurosawa it matters to create a sense of global connectedness so we don't view each other with suspicion and hatred, while for Paine it matters that we do good to others, even if they're continents away.

A True Global Community

Above is a picture of Genki Sudo, a popular Japanese MMA star from the late '90s to mid '00s known for his flashy ring entrances.   Arguably his most famous moment, however, came neither during a walkout nor a fight.  It came right after.  After one of his victories in the early '00s, he help up a banner with all the world's flags saying "we are all one" in front of a cheering crowd with complete sincerity.  It's a sweet moment that is remembered fondly by many across the sport, even those whose entire worldview goes against what Sudo was saying.

MMA is a perfect microcosm of how much being a "global citizen" can matter, but often doesn't.  What I mean is: MMA is a sport that displays amazing martial art techniques from all over the world and celebrates "we are all one" signs.  Yet it also has a huge problem with racists and other far right hate figures, dating back to a forefather with ties to the Brazilian fascists in the 1930s.  So, what's the point of a "global" culture of it can create such close-minded, xenophobic views?  Is patting yourself on the back for being worldly worth anything if it can be twisted into something so rotten?  Is "global citizen" something even worth aspiring toward if you might end up with something that goes directly against those values?

I think it is worth it.  But we must approach it the right way.  Calling yourself a global citizen and creating a list of ways you're inspired by other cultures isn't enough.  What I said about myself at the beginning of this post isn't enough, because it's just me defining myself by how much I benefit from the rest of the world.  It's all about what I want, what I like.  By watching foreign films you like or training martial arts you find effective or befriending people from places you find interesting, you're only thinking of the world in terms of what it can offer you.  Which, to an extent, isn't bad!  There are many beautiful things, ideas, and people around the world.  Why not watch some Kurosawa films and read some James Baldwin books and strike up a conversation with someone from a different homeland than you?

But what about what we give back?  Genki Sudo is now a politician in Japan, a member of their House of Councillors (roughly the equivalent of our Senate).  His three main policy concerns are food safety, global environmental protection, and a foreign policy involved in peace.  Another self proclaimed citizen of the world, socialist politician and labor leader Eugene Debs, said "I have no country to fight for; my country is the earth, and I am a citizen of the world."  Aside from fighting for all the things you'd expect a socialist to fight for, like worker rights and economic democracy, he was also arrested for speaking out against World War 1 (the one where there were no clear bad guys, unlike World War 2).  He did so because he was willing to risk his freedom to oppose sending young men to die in vast numbers in a brutal, senseless war against the young men of Germany, Turkey, and elsewhere.

Closing Thoughts

So what does it mean to be a citizen of the world?  I don't know.  I'll probably never have an exact definition in my head.

What I do know, though, is that it can't just be a matter of what we like about other cultures.  It can't just be about us picking and choosing what we like, as if the world owes us everything while we owe it and the people in it nothing.  If it's to mean anything worthwhile at all, it should mean taking part in a way where there is both give and take.  I can watch Kurosawa movies and train Brazilian jiu-jitsu, but I also have to care about people from these places too.

Thanks for reading!

Heroes and Rebels in the Age of Loneliness

Before I get into this post, I wanna start by apologizing for the break I've taken with this blog.  While it'd be easy to pretend I was too busy, frankly I just wasn't struck by any subject that compelled me to write over the past few months.  I began the year with a number of ideas, but they all became posts within the first half of the year and I simply haven't found anything to write about since.

Or at least I hadn't.

Recently I rewatched Samurai Rebellion, a 1967 samurai movie directed by the anti-authoritarian Japanese director Masaki Kobayashi.  Of course, SPOILERS AHEAD.  The film follows Isaburo Sasahara (Toshiro Mifune) as his family, the servants of a powerful feudal lord, have a concubine forced onto Isaburo's eldest son by that feudal lord after she attacked him.  Isaburo, trapped in an unhealthy marriage for the past twenty years, initially opposes the decision.  He'd rather find someone who makes his son happy.  They are eventually forced to give into the lord's wishes, however.  Then the unexpected happens: the concubine ends up being a wonderful woman.  She attacked the lord not because she was malicious or unstable, but because he was a gross creep.  Isaburo's son and the woman fall in love.

Two years into their marriage, the lord's eldest heir dies.  This makes the son that the woman gave the lord the new heir.  The lord demands her return in order to save face, as he can't have the mother of his heir living with another man.  Long story short, the couple refuses, and Isaburo- the most skilled swordsman in the land- stands with his son's and daughter-in-law's decision.  The third act has the three of them (but really just Isaburo, the young couple are killed rather quickly) fight nobly until the end.  When Isaburo defeats his greatest rival (and friend) in a badass duel, he is ambushed by a large squadron of riflemen and samurai.  He is eventually killed, but not before slowly, ruthlessly taking them out like a demon from the underworld as they shoot and stab at him.

Yeah, I'm definitely not gonna fuck with this guy.

There's a lot that can be said about this movie.  For instance, the fact that a concubine is revealed to be a strong, kind, honorable character, something you wouldn't expect to find in basically any movie from the 1960s.  It's also a joy to watch Mifune's acting range, as he begins the film as meek and subdued, but ends it with the forceful personality he was associated with during much of his acting career.  The movie is beautifully shot, as well as shot in a way that backs up its themes- for instance, the beginning of the movie has mostly sharp edges and neat patterns in the background, while by the end things are much more chaotic.

What I really wanna focus on, though, is the hero meeting a tragic end while standing up against an unjust society.  It's the same thing that happens in his most popular samurai film, Harakiri, which stars Tatsuya Nakadai as another badass grizzled samurai who dies fighting against the cruel feudalism of the time.  In yet another film- his sweeping, semi-autobiographical Human Condition trilogy, which I wrote about a couple years ago- also stars Tatsuya Nakadai, this time as a pacifist-socialist stuck in World War 2 Japan who tries to stand up to Imperial Japan in whatever way he can.  All of of these films, then, feature a rebel who gives their life in a futile, but noble, act of resistance against an unjust system.

The idea of a lone rebel against society is, of course, nothing new.  Especially here in the United States, where the myth of the rugged individual is perhaps our most beloved cultural figure.  We see our founding as led by rugged settlers setting up their own homes amid the perils of the New World; we imagine the westward expansion of our country as being led by lone cowboys doling out frontier justice; we picture the average American after WW2 working a tough factory job of some sort while mentally preparing to fight Soviet-style communism.

 "Support freedom and oppose forced communist conformity!

Do so by adhering to a heterosexual, Christian, segregated suburban family model or else!"

Now, many people reading this are probably (correctly) thinking to themselves how the unstated part of these myths is the ugly underbelly of Native American displacement, the enslavement of African/African descent people, and a whole slew of other ugly truths.  This is all true and important, but there's even more to it.  In addition to the ignored atrocities, none of these images are based on how things actually happened in the first place, even aside from the atrocities.

Colonization, the expansion of the US frontier, and the Cold War all involved an intimate link between the private and public spheres, which included strong communal bonds.  It takes individuals and communities, private and public forces, to make shit happen, whether said shit is good or bad.  The Atlantic slave trade, for example, required a combination of the government, the military, the church, private industries, and private citizens to each play their part.  All of this was done in an effort to use stolen/forced labor for grueling work that enriched all of the European players, which included both governments and private enterprises.

I could write a book about all of this (and sort of am), but what I really wanna get at in this post is why this matters.

We're in an age of profound loneliness, alienation, disillusionment, and cynicism.  People feel disconnected from each other and from their ability to have any sort of effect on the world.  It certainly doesn't help that much of the advice we get to deal with these feelings is often predicated on the idea that these issues are problems of the individual, problems to be solved simply by yoga or a gratitude journal (which, to be clear, are awesome things, but not a solution to such deeply entrenched societal ailments by themselves).

"Okay class, our next pose is called Rethinking How We Relate To Each Other As People"

Margaret Thatcher once said that "there is no such thing as society", that we are instead just a bunch of individuals and families whose main obligations are to ourselves.  Now, it's obvious this is untrue on a practical level.  We all affect each other's lives in too many ways to count- if every firefighter, or teacher, or garbage collector, or retail worker, or steelworker disappeared tomorrow, society would be devastated.  We're too interconnected to truly be strictly individual units.  But it's also just not true of how we relate to each other on a psychological level.  Humans need social interaction.  Humans need to feel we belong.  Hell, we even need to feel physical touch.

What worries me is that we've internalized Thatcher's hyper-individualistic way of thinking to the point where many of us have no way to diagnose and solve the previously mentioned issues of isolation and disempowerment.  Our cultural imagination doesn't allow us to see beyond individualistic understandings of our problems, and our "solutions" stem from that individualistic understanding.  It's as if we were all suffering from chronic migraines, but the only medicine our society had available was cold medicine.

To see what I mean, scroll through your social media platform of choice.  How many times do you see quotes like "don't walk the path of others, walk your own path" or "get yours, don't worry about others", or something along those lines?  Or how about when you see people who you know are lonely post memes that say something like "geniuses are often hated/misunderstood" or "only you are responsible for what happens to you."  How many times do you see Self Care(TM) posts about doing something entirely centered around themselves held up as a healthy act of bravery?

"Excuse me, Lois, but buying kryptonite and ambushing Superman was an act of self care!"

Now, those can be solid pieces of advice in certain situations.  I'm not saying any of this is bad.  Rather, compare how many quotes about walking your own path you see to how many times you see people talking about how we should look to the wisdom of other people who can help us find our path.  Compare how many lonely people share "wise words" that further entrench them in their loneliness, instead of a post about the importance of healthy connections.  Compare how many people's self care posts are about them  buying something for themselves or binging Netflix instead of walking through a park and making a new friend.

Again, this isn't to say you shouldn't do any of those individualistic things, or feel bad about doing them.  Many are defense mechanisms that can help someone get through a rough day, or a rough period in their life.  Rather, the point is that our culture is so focused on individualism that our imagination is stunted.  As the old saying goes, when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.  Our way of "fixing" our feelings of isolation is to entrench further into ourselves, to share platitudes about how great it is to be different, to buy ourselves ice cream while binging The Office.  All of those things are valid and sometimes necessary ways to alleviate our pain, but they won't cure our problems. 

This problem of hyper-individualism relates not just to how we think of our relation to other people, but also to how we understand our relation to society, politics, and historical change.  Using the Civil Rights movement as an example for that last part, many people think of the Civil Rights movement as a time when Martin Luther King Jr, Rosa Parks, John Lewis, and a few other prominent activists rose up against racism and inspired a generation to change the country.

In fact, the civil rights movement really started in force after WW2, after black people sacrificed for the war effort only to come back home to a country still entrenched in white supremacy.  Aside from the blatant moral contrast between Americans "fighting fascism to defend freedom" while having segregation at home, WW2 also brought many black Americans together that created social networks that could be used for organizing.  It not only highlighted moral reasons to push for anti-racism, but helped created actual conditions to help organize around the cause, because politics is not a spectator sport.  It was then a mixture of veteran, labor, church, and other community groups that helped push for an end to institutional racism in this country.

Black Soldiers: "So, we're gonna get GI Bill benefits, right?"

The United States: "uhh, new number who dis"

MLK and other prominent figures absolutely deserve credit for their monumentally important contributions, but they were continuing a legacy of community organizing and activism that'd been going strong since 1945.  On top of that, many of these efforts built on top of a legacy of organizing from the first third of the 1900s (the NAACP was founded in 1909, for example), tracing the work leading to the civil rights movement back even further than 1945.  Some civil rights leaders even considered the Civil Rights movement to be a sort of sequel to Reconstruction, which was the effort to help challenge white supremacy in the South from 1865-1877 after the Civil War.

In other words, it wasn't just the actions of a few outstanding people.  It was the continued efforts of countless people through decades upon decades, even arguably generations upon generations, who put in constant work with each other as part of a large, long-going movement toward a better tomorrow.  That's not to say outstanding individuals can't make a huge impact.  But part of their very impacts came from their ability to inspire and mobilize scores of people into organized, sustained action, which would've been impossible without the tireless, thankless work of thousands of organizers who will never get a book or documentary dedicated in their honor. 

That sounds sad, but the truth is that, while I'm sure many organizers from the Civil Rights movement (or labor, feminist, anti-war, etc movements) would've loved a book deal, their main goal was coming together to create a better world for themselves and others.  They did so as part of large networks of people working together toward a common goal, because that's how things have truly changed historically.  People working together, despite their flaws and differences and clashes, over long periods of time.

So how did we get here from Samurai Rebellion?

Masaki Kobayashi, the director of Samurai Rebellion, was no stranger to rebellion himself.  During World War 2, he was drafted into the Imperial Japanese Army.  A leftwing pacifist, he refused to be promoted above the rank of private despite his aptitude as a soldier.  He did so as an act of defiance against Japan's aggressive militarism.  He was forced to fight against his will, and eventually ended up in an Okinawan POW camp.  This had a profound effect on his movies.  Though he made movies set both in the distant past and in the (then) present, every movie contained a criticism of the status quo.  As he put it: "in any era, I am critical of authoritarian power."

Tatsuya Nakadai's character in the Human Condition trilogy, which is loosely based on Kobayashi himself.

I'm not sure if the failure of each of Kobayashi's heroes comes from Kobayashi purposefully urging people not to take up an individualistic approach of opposition to exploitative power structures, or if their failures represent the deep cynicism of a man whose own individual rebellions against the status quo failed to stop Japan from getting swept up in militaristic authoritarianism.  Either way, these movies contain a lesson.  The lesson that no one can change the world single-handedly, even if they're as badass as Toshiro Mifune or Tatsuya Nakadai.

A dozen average men can lift more than the world's strongest man.

If this sounds discouraging, it's only because we're so programmed to think in individual terms.  We're all powerful.  It's just that part of exercising that power involves working with others.  Talk to people.  Open up to people.  Form bonds with people.  Build with people.  Create a new world with people.  I know it's scary.  Personally, I'm right on the line between extrovert and introvert.  Some days I feel more introverted, and it's hard to even talk to a cashier at a grocery store.  But beautiful things can happen if you can push past that.

We are what we are.  Maybe there are sentient beings out there who aren't built like us.  Maybe there's some type of creature a thousand light years away with our level of self-awareness who is fine going everything alone.  For human beings, though, we need each other.  Both in a practical way and literal, evolutionary psychology way.  Do what you can when you can, and don't feel bad if there are times where you just can't.  Reaching out to others is for you, because you deserve to feel wanted, to feel needed, to feel a part of something.  And hopefully that something also helps make the world a tiny bit better.

Good luck.  Thanks for reading.

The Millennial Generation: Entitlement and Cynicism?

I was born in January of 1990, one month after the Cold War was officially declared over by George Bush Sr and Mikhail Gorbachev at a summit held in Malta.  I am, basically, right in the middle of what US society collectively refers to as the "millennial" generation.  As with defining most generations, there's no solid agreement as to when the exact dates are, but the general consensus is that the millennial generation began somewhere in the early or mid-80s and ended in the early 00's.

As millennials, we occupy a unique time in history.  We were around before computers and cellphones were commonplace, coming of age just as they started to take off; we grew up in a world where there was only one global hegemonic power, the United States, unlike most of the rest of human history that had multiple world powers vying for control; we experienced both Anchorman and Mean Girls.

And, just like figuring out the exact period of time that encompasses a certain generation, trying to figure out how to collectively define our generation has generated a lot of different ideas as to how we can do so.  Some of the proposed ideas come from our shared experiences: the internet, globalization, 9/11, the Great Recession.  Others come from traits that we supposedly have: entitlement, idealism, cynicism, sarcasm.

My persistent efforts to get social scientists to collectively refer to us as

"Generation Pokemon Stadium" have, alas, yielded no results so far.

Amidst all the thoughtful analyses about our generation, however, is also a metric shit ton of content by people that were somehow paid to write articles that basically amount to "get off my lawn and stop it with your dag-gum hippity hop music, you hooligans!"  There is no shortage of articles talking about how terrible we are as a generation, saying that we don't have any work ethic and our economic woes are the result of that (rather than, say, that whole Great Recession thing).

It'd be easy to just respond "nuh uh!" and call these people unkind names.  Or even point out that, hey, if you're the generation that raised us, you're actually insulting your own parenting skills each time you talk about how spoiled we are.  But, as usual, a more nuanced and thoughtful response is probably the more productive route.  Why are so many older people so likely to believe we are spoiled and entitled?  And might there, perhaps, be a kernel of truth to that notion?

First off, it's important to get something out of the way: we're inheriting a global economy that is pretty fucked.  There's a reason we're so cynical, and there's not really much room for debate here.  Income inequality is the worst it's been since right before the Great Depression, and on a world wide scale, the 85 richest people in the world have more wealth than the poorest half of the world's population.  Unemployment in the United States is still severe, even for people with a degree, and it will remain so because there are a lot of jobs that are simply never coming back.  It's not just one cause, either, but a number of them: shipping jobs overseas, automating jobs so that people no longer have to do them, less public sector jobs due to lower tax revenues to fund them, and many other reasons, there are a lot of jobs that are now gone forever.

And yet jobs like "millennium falcon pilot" haven't even popped up in their place

And there's something kind of cool about some of those.  Some blue collar jobs are very dangerous, for instance, and making them more efficient or even automated is great.  What isn't great, though, is that all of these factors together get rid of so many jobs and create such an overcrowded job market that many people simply give up, which has also made a lot of unemployment statistics look less severe than they actually are.

Put into the context of recent history, wages have stagnated over the last few decades for the middle class and actually declined for low income people.  Minimum wage, adjusted for inflation, certainly isn't what it used to be.  Meanwhile, healthcare costs, college tuition costs, and other vital living expenses have increased exponentially even when wages haven't.

Basically, we're inheriting a job market and economy in a condition much worse than our parents did.  There's even a pretty great (yet infuriating) meme about this whole shindig.

To any older adults reading this: yes, this is actually a completely foreign concept to us.

So when you read an article about us "choosing" to put off buying houses, or have children, or get married, know that it's not actually a "choice" on our end.  Yes, as a generation, a lot of us question the values of previous generations, and there are plenty of us who actually would choose to put off these things as individuals.  But it's not rebelliousness or laziness or anything like that which explains this incident on the larger level- it's our economic condition.

But, surely, with our Sony Gamestations and Nintendo Playcubes, we're still spoiled, right?  We grew up pampered, even if we inherited a tough economy.  Surely we can find a way to both blame millennials while admitting that they don't have the same labor benefits or opportunities our parents did?

Actually, in a way, yes.  Because prices for consumer electronics, such as computers, have plummeted over the last few decades.  Likewise, 51% of US households own gaming consoles, with the average number per household being not one system, but two.  So all of us as a society, especially us younger folks, do enjoy easier access to electronic entertainment and media.

But here's the thing that often gets missed in these conversations about all the material benefits we enjoy: it connects to our economic situation, because these low prices are the result of lower labor costs.  We enjoy cheaper products, but at the expense of meager wages.  So a 20-something (or someone of any age, really, since the average age of someone who works for minimum wage is 35) working a part time job while also on food stamps or a healthcare assistance program like Medi-Cal isn't a moocher if they happen to own an iPone.  Rather, our current societal reality is that a cellphone is actually way, way easier to afford than medical care and many other costs of living (also, while we still think of cellphones as a luxury good, they have actually become more of a necessity now that everyone [including potential employers] assume you have one).

Feel free to keep posting those shitty, judgmental memes instead of thinking critically, though.

And I think our different economic realities help explain why a lot of older adults think millennials are so spoiled.  Because I don't think most adults who say we have it easy are Disney movie villains who secretly know the truth and are saying we have it easy as some sort of conspiracy to undermine us.

When I was a preteen, a cellphone was something only a few people had.  And now, about a decade and a half later, they're a necessity, along with computers.  That's a weird concept for me to grasp, and I'm someone who came of age during that shift.  For someone who was middle aged (or even elderly) when this shift started, people who grew up in an era without widespread cellphone and computer use, and only a fraction of the entertainment media we have available to us today?  The idea that we have it rough when we have so many conveniences available to us must be hard to swallow.  And they're not completely wrong, either; all of these things are pretty fucking sweet.

And beyond that, the challenges we face are a lot less romantic on paper than those faced by previous generations.  A large chunk of the 20th Century was defined by the Cold War, when almost every country in the world- even the neutral ones- genuinely feared they could get wiped off the map.  There was an immediate, tangible threat.  Before that, it was the Great Depression, where people were starving in ridiculous numbers, and the World Wars, where millions upon millions of people died.

Today, the United States is the world's biggest superpower, and other emerging superpowers like China and India are far too economically intertwined with us for there to be a war any time soon.  There are a lot of problems that stem from this situation (again, especially economic), but all out warfare or famine that threatens humanity as a whole isn't one of them.  And, while my generation was around for the worst attack on US soil that we have ever suffered, none of us actually think that we are in any danger of being invaded and destroyed as a country because of how ridiculously high our military budget is.

Which is outrageous, considering all we needed to end the Cold War was a boxing match

Instead of a big war*, today our biggest problem is trying to navigate a post-employment economy.  It's a big deal, but it doesn't have the same ring to it, especially when as a culture we are taught to look up to the hyper-wealthy elite who have exacerbated these conditions we face.  We have reached a point where, as a species, we aren't really struggling for survival against the elements or each other anymore.  We still suffer from both of those, but we probably won't be wiped out by them.  We're past the point of worrying about warfare or famine sealing humanity's collective fate.

So here we are as millennials, individually struggling for economic survival in a post-physical survival world.  We have a lot available to us that previous generations didn't, but we also face difficulties that our parents didn't.  The conditions we live in and the problems lying ahead of us are unique to our generation, and a lot of older people don't understand that.  So they look down on us- not because there is something inherently wrong with Baby Boomers in particular, but because human beings in general are terrible at putting themselves in other peoples' shoes.

Hopefully, we don't repeat these same mistake and start talking shit about the generation after us.

*It should be noted that while the so-called War on Terror in the Middle East hasn't been a huge war for us in terms of lost lives and perceived threat while compared to other wars, (1)we have still lost soldiers and (2)people in the Middle East have lost many, many lives, including thousands upon thousands of innocent civilian lives, because of the pointless and costly violence we initiated