Generations

Generations: The History of Amerca's Future, 1584-2069

Two Tiers

Hurricane Katrina survivors_Aug. 05
(nationalgeographic.com)


My White Privilege by Naomi Klein
NOW Magazine - Dec. 06
(Excerpt)

I get sent to a ritzy hospital with no patients while poor New Orleans is left to die

I was in New Orleans during the flood with Avi Lewis, my husband, and my friend Andrew Stern. We were driving in a rental car, and we kept getting lost because all the streets were flooded. Andy started thinking he was in a video game, a post-apocalyptic environment, weaving the car around the debris. Then we realized it was five minutes to 6, and 6 o'clock was curfew.

We got into a collision. We spun out and drove right through the stoplight, which wasn't working because there was no electricity. We went through a wrought iron gate and landed in an independent coffee store, kitty-corner to a Starbucks. And someone said, "Did you want to hit the Starbucks?"

The other car was a cop car, and that's how we found out we were in the South. Andy was arrested, Avi was face down on the ground, being warned what happens when you hit a cop in the state of Louisiana.

I was strapped to a gurney in an ambulance, trying to convince the driver to please not take me to a hospital, because I'd been watching the news and seeing these images of what hospitals were like during the flood.

Charity Hospital had no electricity, and incredibly courageous health care workers were trying to keep their patients alive, watching helicopters airlift everybody but them. It's the only hospital that provides emergency services to the poor in New Orleans - or provided. They haven't reopened Charity Hospital, along with many public schools.

I'd seen the awful images and actually gone to one of these clinics where it was like Dante's Inferno, with elderly people falling out of wheelchairs and no one helping them. I was terrified about where they were going to take me.

So I was negotiating with the ambulance driver. I had a concussion and kept slipping in and out of consciousness. "Just drop me off at a corner - you know, I'll walk. No problem."

The next thing I knew, I was at, from what I could tell, a spa. Called the Ochsner Hospital, it's apparently quite a famous private hospital. That's where they decided to take us because we're white. I was in a private room in three minutes flat.

I was cared for by three nurses, a senior doctor and a medical intern. I have never in my life received such attentive care, nor have I seen anyone in my family get such attentive health care. This was in the middle of the largest natural and humanitarian disaster in American history.

The doctors were playing cards in the middle of this hospital, protected by an army of private security who were there, as they said, to keep the junkies out. I couldn't get out because it was past curfew, so after I got a few stitches I tried to interview the staff. I asked my intern, this young guy in his 20s, if he worked the hurricane, and he said, "No, thank god, I wasn't on duty. I actually live in the suburbs."
"Did you go to any of the shelters?" I wasn't trying to be a bitch, I just assumed that someone who'd just learned how to be a doctor would want to help.
He looked at me, confused. It actually hadn't even occurred to him to go to one of the shelters. Just as it hadn't occurred to any of the doctors and nurses in the hospital that, instead of staying in their fortress, dealing with three or four patients, they could be out there.

What we saw with Katrina was an apartheid state where the wealthy unite, where those with credit cards got into cars, drove and checked themselves into motels. This is a two-tier system. They had already accepted the idea that some lives are worth more. And once you do that in your health care system, you are mentally prepared to do that in a major disaster.

It's a heardening of hearts that's required on a daily basis to run a luxury hospital in a city like New Orleans. It's the same heardening of hearts that let people be abandoned on their rooftops by their country.

State Sanctioned Pedophilia

8-Year-Old Girl Not Old Enough to Divorce Husband, 58

A Saudi court has ruled that an 8-year-old girl who is married to a 58-year-old man cannot divorce her husband until she is older.
After the girl's father married her off for a £5,000 dowry, the girl's mother, who is separated from her husband, filed for divorce on behalf of her daughter. "The judge has dismissed the plea because she does not have the right to file such a case, and ordered that the plea should be filed by the girl herself when she reaches puberty," said lawyer Abdullah Jtili. Relatives say the father and husband have a verbal agreement that the marriage will not be consummated until the girl turns 18, and she still lives with her mother.

COMMENT: I'm glad she lives with mom, and it's oh-so-nice that dad and the husband have a verbal agreement, but I suspect when push-come-to-shove, if the hubby wants that marriage consummated, he'll do it, verbal agreement or no. This stinks. -NefariousNewt

8-Year-Old...

"She doesn't know yet that she has been married," lawyer Jtili said then of the girl who was about to begin her fourth year at primary school.
Saudi Court...

Dear friends, our lives are too dark for you to even imagine. Scores of young girls are too timid to deny the wishes of their parents and too often marry men who are of an advanced age to be grandfathers. Once legally bound, these young girls feel as though they have no choice but to do this man’s bidding. They leap to fulfil his every wish. In the dark of their bedrooms, they have sexual intercourse with men whom they fear! The thought of such pitiful lives lived in perpetual dread is too much to even imagine. The physical attacks women in Arabia endure are accompanied by mental abuse.

From an early age, female children come to realize that their lives pale in comparison with that of male children. This is a cruel existence, even if there is no physical abuse. To always feel that your status is undesirable creates a distressing sadness in our young women. If you ever have occasion to witness the behavior of an Arab women, most likely you will notice that they will respond in a bashful, hesitate manner. This is a direct result from their childhood lessons that their thoughts, dreams and wishes do not matter.

Even in my own family, a family that rules the land, there are women who are beaten and sexually assaulted by the men who are responsible for their well-being. This happens frequently, even though in my religion it is forbidden for a man to behave in the manner too many Saudi men believe is their God given right. Letter from a Saudi Princess

Perspective is Everything

Leading Church Bodies of America - 2000
(incredimazing.com)

Click on map to enlarge.

Perspective is Everything

(incredimazing.com)

Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization

(Excerpt)

We've reached a point in our civilization where counterculture has mutated into a self-obsessed aesthetic vacuum. So while hipsterdom is the end product of all prior countercultures, it's been stripped of its subversion & originality, & is leaving a generation pointlessly obsessing over fashion, faux individuality, cultural capital & the commodities of style.

An artificial appropriation of different styles from different eras, the hipster represents the end of Western civilization - a culture lost in the superficiality of its past & unable to create any new meaning. Not only is it unsustainable, it is suicidal. While previous youth movements have challenged the dysfunction & decadence of their elders, today we have the "hipster" - a youth subculture that mirrors the doomed shallowness of mainstream society.

Lovers of apathy & irony, hipsters are connected through a global network of blogs & shops that push forth a global vision of fashion-informed aesthetics. Loosely associated with some form of creative output, they attend art parties, take lo-fi pictures with analog cameras, ride their bikes to nightclubs & sweat it up at nouveau disco-coke parties. The hipster tends to religiously blog about their daily expolits, usually while leafing through generation-defining magazines like Vice, Another Magazine & Wallpaper. This cursory & stylized lifestyle has made the hipster almost universally loathed.

Gavin McInnes, one of the founders of Vice, who recently left the magazine, is considered to be one of hipsterdom's primary architects. But, in contrast to the majority of concerned media-types, McInnes, whose "Dos & Don'ts" commentary defined the rules of hipster fashion for over a decade, is more critical of those doing the criticizing.
"I've always found that word ["hipster"] is used with such disdain, like it's always used by chubby bloggers who aren't getting laid anymore & are bored, & they're just so mad at these kids for going out & getting wasted & having fun & being fashionable," he says.

It is rare, if not impossible, to find an individual who will proclaim themself a proud hipster. It's an odd dance of self-identity - adamantly denying your existence while wearing clearly defined symbols that proclaim it.

Marketers & promoters get paid to co-opt youth culture & then re-sell it back at a profit. In the end, hipsters are sold what they think they invent & are spoon-fed their pre-packaged cultural livelihood.
Hipsterdom is the first "counterculture" to be born under the advertising industry's microscope, leaving it open to constant manipulation but also forcing its paticipants to continually shift their interests & affiliations. Less a subculture, the hipster is a consumer group - using their capital to purchase empty authenticity & rebellion. But the moment a trend, band, sound, style or feeling gains too much exposure, it is suddenly looked upon with disdain. Hipsters cannot afford to maintain any cultural loyalties or affiliations for fear they will lose relevance.

We are a lost genaration, desperately clinging to anything that feels real, but too afraid to become it ourselves. We are a defeated generation, resigned to the hypocrisy of those before us, who once sang songs of rebellion & now sell them back to us. We are the last generation, a culmination of all previous things, destroyed by the vapidity that surrounds us. The hipster represents the end of Western civilization - a culture so detached & disconnected that it has stopped giving birth to anything new.

Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization
Douglas Haddow
Adbusters #79


Comments (adbusters.org):

*It's a very hipster move to write a quasi-academic article for a hip magazine ain't it? So the author can get the street cred by writing about hipsters for adbusters, a pretty trendy publication in itself? But it's a little much and quite obnoxious to claim one vapid group of urban dwellers is the end of western civilization. For every hipster there are a number of people in my generation doing fantastic things to better society and the world. I don't think disco in the 70s or those craaazyy flappers of the roaring 20s made much of a dent on western civilization.

*I used to be a hipster but then I ran out of money...

*I'm reminded of 1999's Woodstock.
That, like hipsterdom, marks the difference between the genuine article and its manufactured counterpart.