Al Otro Lado Del Ri­o

So I'm in one of those semi-trite, occationally beautiful moments post film viewing where I think anything is possible and I am enlivened by the struggle of peoples, collectively or individually.

the movie was the motorcycle diaries.

and I'm definitely thinking about che and his many mistakes, but also understanding his motivation.

Was talking to my mate richie about having a hard time believing in anything- in finding hope for the world. We discussed the rampant abuses of western culture, the exploitation and oppression of entire populations, the ever-arching impenetrable bubble that a middle class bourgeois upbringing grants against these other terrors.

We both agreed it's hard to find hope when you know that the generations before were looking for perhaps the same thing and wound up in violent conflict, or worse as a cog in an even bigger stronger machine.

the problem of belief is many sided. First I don't want to support something unless it will have some kind of true and positive effect. Second I don't want to end up like che- not only leaving out many arguments for the sake of my cause- but also entrenched in violence both reviled and perpetuated by myself.

The course I'm on is making it even harder to believe.

because we sit in a building, an institute of higher education and argue why things like institutes of higher education are both unnecessary and specifically a hindrance to progressive causes that this institute specifically espouses.

I know hypocrisy exists and I know that it, as a notion, is built upon the concepts of either/or.

I'm all for granting the multiplicity of peoples, things etc, and I know that my horror at the thought of being personally hypocritical and of witnessing hypocrisy heavily relies on my subscription to the idea that one cannot be contradictory. That if you call yourself a Christian and then do very unchristian things than you are a hypocrite.

So yes...uh... maybe I should get over my idea of hypocrisy- and let things be convoluted, messy, contradictory and multiplicitous.

but if I do that how am I to decipher if one multitudinous thing is better than another.

or if one action is better or worse. For example. Eating meat.

on one hand I campaign for a fairer treatment of animals and other beings, not only physically but intellectually, but then I eat highly processed, undeniably tortured animals almost every day.

... So yes, if I am to allow myself to be multitudinous, complex, with faults and failures and virtues and values, how do I choose which is the right action.

it's all seeming a bit arbitrary to me right now and that's probably the dirtiest word I've ever known.

arbitrary. I don't want to live my life arbitrarily. I want to be discernible, but so many things are pointing me to a place where my choices, my ideals are ineffectual and superfluous.

I am basically frustrated by my classmates because we sit and talk about what is wrong with the world- yet we participate in and perpetuate many of the problems and horrors that we are discussing.

I just don't get it. I see myself doing it- I see others doing it. But I don't want to just sit around and watch the world fall to pieces. Unlike many I, perhaps unfortunately, am not ignorant to the fact that most of the clothing I wear was assembled by people, probably women, in a "third world country", that the food that I eat comes from animals kept in unnaturally small cages, and injected with hormones, that this very act of typing this nonsense on my computer in my very lush London flat required the work of several hundreds of people whose names I will never know and whose time I can never replace.

you know how in dreams sometimes you'll be screaming but there is some neurological function that prevents you from actually screaming. Or you'll feel like you can't scream in a dream because your brain is preventing you from doing it.

that's what this feels like.

I am inspired but feel suffocated.

I can stop wearing these kinds of clothes, I can stop eating meat, I can drop out of school, give away all my things and try to live off the land....

but does that do any good at all.

for me maybe, but for those people whose time has been used to place the motherboard into my computer, who will continue to assemble computers or cars or disassemble chickens, pigs and cows- will it make any difference in their lives? Will it make things better....Or worse....

will it even be able to impact the lives of those chicken, pigs and cows?

it's just such a big machine- that doesn't seem to have something as convenient as a motherboard to destroy.

I don't know where to start, or if I should stop

or what to do at all...