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KippMuellerFirstPaper 8 - 18 Jun 2012 - Main.KippMueller
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John Brown 2012 | | | Then I head to law school, where I spend enough money to feed villages, print enough paper to kill forests and dedicate endless hours to transcendental nonsense instead of building things and reaching out to those in need. I look at something seemingly trivial, like my lunch meat. I realize I just made a donation to Monsanto, a company that injects artificial hormones into our food, treats both human workers and animals in extremely inhumane ways, bullies small farmers to crush competition and poisons our environment with toxic chemicals. | |
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< | Sometimes, in fact often, I don't realize it at all. And if I am thinking about it, I am too often consciously indifferent to it. Most of the time I think about it, recognize my indifference to it, and become saddened by it. Oftentimes, we talk about our "footprint". Our footprint goes well beyond a car we drive or a political donation we make. It's the day to day to day. | >
> | Sometimes, in fact often, I don't realize it at all. And if I am thinking about it, I am too often indifferent to it. Most of the time I think about it, recognize my indifference to it, and become saddened by my indifference.
Oftentimes, we talk about our "footprint". Our footprint goes well beyond a car we drive or a political donation we make. It's the day to day to day. | | | As for our "convictions": What about them? The guy walking down the street has a Che Guevara shirt. He got a great deal on it, because it was made in Vietnam. I'm not sure if he sees the irony, but I do. I talk about what I believe around school. To what end? | |
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< | There's my convictions, and then there's my life. And I don't know to reconcile the two, but I'd like to find a career where I can answer that question. Recently, I found myself wondering what John Brown would do. | >
> | There's my convictions, and then there's my life. I feel like the guy in the "Made in Vietnam" Che Guevara shirt. And I don't know to reconcile my convictions with my life, but I'd like to find a career where I can answer that question. Recently, I found myself wondering what John Brown would do. | | | Who Would John Brown Be Today? | | | Ultimately, I'm wondering whether John Brown could live in America today at all. | |
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< | He could subsist on food made locally and clothes sewn in America, but what about his tax payments which fund private militias in the Middle East which have slaughtered thousands of innocent civilians? What about the ground John walks on, stolen first during the genocide of Native Americans and second from the poor via eminent domain? | >
> | He could subsist on food made locally and clothes sewn in America, but what about his tax payments which fund private militias in the Middle East that have slaughtered thousands of innocent civilians? | | | He needs a computer to hash out his plans, but the titanium in the computer was purchased from warlords and malevolent mining corporations in Africa. He sits at a desk made of wood from the Amazon, cut by timber companies that are displacing thousands of villages in Latin America and causing the extinction of millions of species. |
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KippMuellerFirstPaper 7 - 29 Apr 2012 - Main.KippMueller
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John Brown 2012 | | | Or maybe I'm bullshitting. Maybe John Brown would sequester himself from all of this and fight the good fight. It could very well be that I'm simply rationalizing because I don't have the fortitude to give up my life, so I blame the world around me. Maybe John Brown wouldn't put on that shirt and those pants in the morning. Maybe he wouldn't pick up a coffee on the way to class. | |
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< | I'd like to think I would've been by his side in the 1850s, willing to give up my life. I want to live like I'm by his side in the world we inhabit today. I can't even answer the question as to whether I have the courage to live the life of John Brown, because I don't know what it would be in the first place. But I hope I'm always striving towards it. | >
> | I'd like to think I would've been by his side in the 1850s, willing to give up my life. I want to live like I'm by his side in the world we inhabit today. But I can't even answer the question as to whether I have the courage to live the life of John Brown because I don't know what that would imply in the first place. Whatever it does mean, I hope I'm always striving towards it. | | | I'm not talking about the actual man so much as what he represents, at least to me. To me, John Brown represents a person who stood for the right thing well beyond what was culturally acceptable or convenient. He stood for true moral convictions, absent any regard for the line we're not supposed to cross - the line where NGO meets radicalism. John Brown was well past the line where convictions became "uncivilized" or "radical". He was questioning the unquestioned. He was hanged for that. | | | "The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy." Martin Luther King Jr. | |
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< | Where will I stand? | | | \ No newline at end of file | |
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> | Where will I stand? And you? |
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KippMuellerFirstPaper 6 - 25 Apr 2012 - Main.KippMueller
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John Brown 2012 | | | To live a moral life in the first world, sometimes I think you just have to pick your battle. After all, if everyone did, the world would likely be cured of its corruptions. Perhaps if John Brown were alive today, he'd periodically purchase desks made of wood cut in the Amazon, but he'd fight for worker's rights in Peru. And the woman next to him wouldn't be fighting for worker's rights in Peru all the time, but she'd be fighting to stop the timber companies from cutting the wood in the Amazon. And maybe, between the two of them, they could come closer to embodying John Brown in the 1850s. | |
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< | Maybe the purity and absolutism with which John Brown fought for freedom isn't something a single person can replicate in today's infinitely complicated world, but rather an identity a community or even a nation could aspire to attain, together. | >
> | Maybe the purity and absolutism with which John Brown fought for freedom and lived his life (at least as I imagine it) isn't something a single person can replicate in today's infinitely complicated world, but rather an identity a community or even a nation could aspire to attain, together. | | | Or maybe I'm bullshitting. Maybe John Brown would sequester himself from all of this and fight the good fight. It could very well be that I'm simply rationalizing because I don't have the fortitude to give up my life, so I blame the world around me. Maybe John Brown wouldn't put on that shirt and those pants in the morning. Maybe he wouldn't pick up a coffee on the way to class. |
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