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yespoetry · 5 years

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Caitlin Scarano: There Is No Ending

I know we’re all sick of poems with deer but let me explain

Last night: a forest of hospital beds

I want to ask all these strangers: do you ever think every day you’re getting closer to your death or do you wake in the morning with hope crusted in the corner of your eyes, your teeth already grinning at the air?

Grief is a very complex machine, it told me so itself, a matrix

that takes years

A. to navigate

B. from you like teeth

Dear J, I have a few acres all to myself now, you should see them

I’m sorry you had to turn so many stones

while I looked on at a careful distance

The male human heart at age 36

Who knew, I guess

It’s true that I didn’t mind the horses starving outside my window, as long as they

came when called, as long as they were gentle with their teeth

I mean, I had many apples going to rot, what else could I have done

I read about how the water in Lake Superior is replaced every 191 years

Remember the spot where I dove under and was rolled by a wave and for a moment I did not know what was up or down, what was past or present, you or⁠—

That winter, the lake froze, trace lines of cracks in the ice colliding, the fractures in my body all met

In another dream, you’re in front of me⁠—solid, tangible, with a dark beard and corduroy pants

I ask you about dying and he you say, Let’s go to this city I know

Then you disappear into a tangled forest and I follow, stumbling, ripped by thorns

You’re always just out of reach, always just turning the next corner

Remember those children we watched while we ate ice cream on that green bench in Sault Saint Marie? Silly

that isn’t my favorite memory of you, not by far but it’s the one I keep

coming back to

I took it so I should have wanted it

But the sugar made my teeth ache

Every memory is two-sided, like that day we lay in the grass watching ships pass through the lochs

Distance is deceptive

It was sunny, the photos you took prove it

But the wind⁠—

Or the wind and the rain that day we met at the lighthouse, you wore a black sweater, I hadn’t seen you

in years, you looked younger, time doing its mirror trick

The scene draws us

We weren’t ghosts but we were

both adrift, though only one of us knew it

When I reach the city you spoke of, it’s been abandoned for decades

Every memory is two-sided, like the time you were driving and the Jeep hit

black ice and spun out

Like the time I was driving and my car died as we coasted down hill

In a human dream, electric blue hydrozoan creatures blossom in the Superior’s deepest water

Every memory is two-sided, and nothing is mine to claim

I run these dirt trails near my house, I think of you, I touch my chest, count my breaths

One day I came upon this mother dear and two fawns, they were tiny, spotted, legs so ready to give out but they did not give out

J, you should have seen them

Generational, Domestic

I drink from the cup that made me

before blood congeals across the top.

Touch the muscles of your back

while you sleep. What does cruelty express?

A fear so deep it creates its own

gravity, the world pours in around

the rim. Despite how light clawed, it could not

get out⁠—not after, not from within. I live by a river

and dream of living by another river. Throw my baby

teeth into it like coins in a well. Wish and watch

water pass, think of how it bows and braids,

think of the circulatory system, nervous

birds on loop. My niece appears in a dirt-stained

dress holding yellow zinnias as they blossom

and rot, blossom and⁠—Does movement remind you

of death or escape? When you bite the inside

of my thigh, what memory of violence

unfurls like a seed? Generational, domestic. Your mother

tells you she prays for us and I swallow

it whole like a duck egg. A blue mud wasp

taps against my window, where its always

been. While we sleep, bindweed inches up

the walls and ceiling. Coils around the lamps.

Tomorrow, we’ll eat the heads of morning.

A Litany of Dreams You May Borrow

The one where I pick sunlight off my skin like scales or sequins

Or I have a boy’s torso and a jaw

that doesn’t lock when I start to laugh

Any of the dreams with snakes or my mother trapped in a radiator vent

because they spring from the same well

My little sister and I are teenagers again, still speaking to each other, and she climbs a sugar maple and never comes back

The ones where rain comes through the roof but not the ones where it is snowing in my room

S. and I still live together but a gray horse circles the house, starving

No one names it

My father is in a hospice bed, holding up his rot-dappled organs one by one

as offerings to me

The cow pasture

where I’m in a wedding dress carrying a pitcher of his blood

B. and I are back on the beach at night and she kisses me except this time ocean is made of milk and sweet

No one invents sin so we sun ourselves on the rooftop

Any dream of my grandfather⁠—that skull for a face, the parrot watching on, the white sheet and long fingernails

In fact, you may keep them, convince yourself there is a lesson

The dream where the brakes gave out

His head is in my lap and the window is open even though it is January outside

A war between nations of men takes place in my mother’s dining room

My sisters and I watch from beneath a table

Those you can leave: any dream where he says my name

aloud or his mouth is against my hair, any dream

where the dead forgive

The first girl I loved asking Are you sure you don’t know me? until she disappears

The whole room slants and I fall from the bed to the wall as if the house is trying to shake me from itself like a parasite

The dream I had after S. found the knife I hid beneath the nightstand

The one where I saw our sons using sticks as swords, their mouths yellow

and chose not to have them

The first gentle boy from my childhood is back and we are in love

When the church burns down and my sisters and I are blamed

The one where what I love is not unwell, not in need at all, so I shrink to the size of a kitchen ant and crawl away

My mother is my daughter and when she speaks, hummingbirds fill her mouth like arrows

The one where I actually forgive him and he leans back then, rests his eyes, says

There is no ending

Alessandra sends me two pictures of her son eating his first strawberry

while I’m home alone reading about central sleep apnea because this morning Calvin woke me up at 5AM by rubbing my back because (he said) I kept holding my breath and he is afraid (but doesn’t say) that I might stop breathing all together. On our jog today Cara told me that she’s going to try dating again and there isn’t much out there so she’s meeting a corporate lawyer all the way in Seattle for lunch on Thursday. Part of me is jealous—to get to meet strangers that you might have sex with or raise a puppy with is to feel very specifically alive right? The internet says I cannot suffocate in my sleep. I have this one memory of when I’m four or five and my father is sitting in the tub and I just let myself in to the bathroom and ask him how often he clipped his toenails and he laughs like kids are so fucking werid and says and said Maybe once a week? When we can’t stop worrying about each others deaths this is how I know we need each other. I can’t remember Alessandra’s baby’s name even though I met him once when we were in Portland. I don’t want children but one time on a long drive I imagined a three or four year old kid in the backseat of my Subaru asking me smart and weird kid questions and me giving honest answers and developing this whole lifelong relationship with a human like there is a way to never be lonely. I was startled by a sound but it wasn’t really a sound just a door closing in my body. I didn’t tell Calvin about it. Instead we talked about our little sisters and how we’re scared for them. The internet says my brain will panic and wake me up. I tell him I want him to confide in me but what do you say to I have a very real fear that the next time I hear about her it could be that she’s dead. I get it at least somewhat—what it means to see a boat drifting away from you. The last time I saw M she was more angry than any person I can remember it was like being beside a live wire I wasn’t sure if I could speak if I could even ask her if she was okay without making her not okay like the whole world is made of string and it can unravel if you say or even think the wrong thing. I don’t think there is a way to never be lonely. In the pictures the baby’s fingers are red and his laughing and sitting on a checkered picnic blanket and it looks like real summer in Wisconsin. I don’t really want to date strangers again. Everyone good I’ve found I still don’t know how I kept them. Some days I don’t want him to leave the house for fear of what might happen next. I remember when M and I were little she was hardly ever mad just withdrawn and we were there like two islands beside each other never really able to say what we meant or needed and now my mother calls me and she’s just painted the trim in the living room mountain air white and she starts to cry thinking about thirty years in the house where she raised us that she wants to sell and I say You haven't left yet and she says I’m already gone. Calvin just texts his sister now even though he knows he won’t get a response and I imagine those messages floating in a black void with stars because it all goes somewhere. I write back Don't you wish you could remember your first strawberry? The interest promises me I’ll take another breath.

The mountain has no childhood to speak of

and no child to soothe. Thought it might tell you something

of its formation, even though it does not remember.

Or that there is no universally agreed upon definition

of a mountain. It would speak less about light

and ascension and more about its insides. I have veins,

the mountain would say, a circulatory system of sorts

but no organs. The mountain would predict your disappointment.

It would refuse your offer for a brain and a heart. Knowledge

and loneliness, the mountain would explain, pass from sky

to water to stone. Mountain embodies strangeness, thus has no notion

of strangeness. Mountain understands destination.

It has been desired. It knows you

think it’s trapped; that it has never left and will never leave.

But, if we let it speak, it would tell you: I have touched

every corner and crevice of this carved valley. Has seen so much

come and go⁠—loon, kingfisher, lynx. The people that

tried to erase people. Mountain has hounded

wander. But will have nothing to say about hunger.

If you sit with it long enough, mountain might admit, I am afraid

of dying. Of the slow wearing, the slow away. Wind and water.

Mountain will teach you a word that means both companion

and destroyer. Though it does not sleep, mountain dreams,

of being ripped out by the roots. Mountain wonders

if mountains bleed.

Caitlin Scarano is a poet based in northwest Washington. She holds a PhD in English (creative writing) from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and an MFA in Poetry from the University of Alaska Fairbanks. She was selected as a participant in the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists & Writers Program. Her debut collection of poems, Do Not Bring Him Water, was released in Fall 2017. Her work has appeared in Granta, Best New Poets, Best Small Fictions, Carve, and Colorado Review. You can find her at caitlinscarano.com

#Caitlin Scarano #poetry #special feature

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stoweboyd · 5 years

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An End To Predictions, A Call For Revolution

I think it is very hard to make predictions about 2019 because there are so many wildcards. Or, as Buckminster Fuller said,

We have a hard time getting out of the way of something we can’t see coming.

Instead of specific predictions -- like Trump being impeached and convicted, or Google buying Slack -- I will discuss a few trends, more generally.

I have left aside the churning whirlwind of technological advance, such as the rise of AI, and the host of technologies that form what many are calling the fourth industrial revolution. Those are creating a foundational acceleration underlying the world's economies, a disruptive and destabilizing force, acting like a current in deep seas. If you are sailing in the same direction as the current, it is a great help, but if you seek to head a different way the current will slow and deflect your efforts. Most importantly, the current is outside of our control: we have to fight it, sail with it, or stay on land.

Polarization and Populism

There is a deep cultural movement that is leading to tectonic shifts across society, manifesting itself in polarization and populism, on the historic right and left. So across the world we are witnessing the rise of populists, like the far right parties in Europe and Trump's rise in the US, but at the same time we are experiencing a transition away from conventional left-of-center parties contending with conventional right-of-center parties, as demonstrated by the rise of Macron's En Marche in France, and the the surge of interest in social democratic ideas in the US Democratic party, as typified by Bernie Sanders and Alex Ocasio-Cortez.

One way to think of this is a growing disillusionment with the left-versus-right polarity of the post-WWII era, and a shift to an up-versus-down dynamic, where the poor, working class, and middle class -- the precariat -- realize that the game is rigged by the elite against the interests of everyone else.

Far-right politicians will attempt to leverage fear of immigrants and xenophobia to back away from liberal immigration laws and international treaties that regulate the international movement of people. Brexit is in part motivated by these desires, and if Brexit is concluded it will be an outgrowth more of anti-immigrant culltural bias than supposed desires for economic sovereignty and self-determination.

In the US, metropolitan elites continue to think that the 'left-behinds' in flyover county are misguided bumpkins voting against their own best interests, rather than seeing that the neoliberal flat-world free trade regime of the past 30 years played havoc with the heartland's economic health and future, and neither the GOP or the Democrats really paid much attention. Witness Hilary skipping the rust belt states in the final months of the 2016 election, and what that led to.

These are global trends, but they will manifest differently across the world, and in distinctly local fashion in different locales.

I believe Macron has lost his way, and since he has no deep party system to help him he will fail to make the changes that he believed he had a mandate to do. Instead, it turns out that only the metropolitan elite and business sector is with him. Will a reformulated socialist party regain control, or will the far right inherit the ashes of his term? Will a socialist populism arise from the Yellow Vests, or is a far-right populism the likely outcome? Make your bets.

In the US, the GOP is facing the defection of suburban white women and large numbers of college-educated men: are there enough far-right and disenfranchised left-behind Republicans to continue as a meaningful party, once the dust cloud around Trump settles? I don't think so. (Note: Trump will either resign, be impeached and convicted, or wither in madness: he can't possibly be reelected.)

Also note that the separatist movement in Catalonia is a manifestation of populism -- in this case the desire of people living in Catalonia (principally Catalans) to be able to secede from Spain. Their motives are many: desire for economic and legal controls, desire for independence from Spain (a historically fraught reltaionship), and relief from paying more taxes to Spain than they get in return. Does Spain have the right to deny them their right to self-government, simply because they were annexed a long, long time ago? We'll see.

Capitalism and Gigantism

A second deep cultural movement is playing out in the West: a growing distrust of unfettered capitalism and the economic inequality it has engendered over the past 30 years, along with concern with the most obvious economic manifestation of today's capitalism: the rise of gigantic monopolistic corporations, like the tech giants and major multinationals in finance, manufacturing, media, agriculture, pharma and health care, and other industries.

This slops into the growing concerns about climate and ecological change, but is principally grounded in the precarity built into modern economic life: the broken social contract in the relationship between worker and employer, and the disinterest in modern governments to close the gap through either regulation of employers or through taxation and redistribution of wealth.

Note: I think of climate change as being critically important -- another area of broken promises by governments -- but it has to be an aspect of resolution of other issues, principally unfettered capitalism. Regulation, trade agreements, and taxation are all needed here, and immediately. We can't confront 'climate change' without embracing a litany of economic actions, all at once. Yes, I know: we only have a decade.

I expect that a discussion of new laws and regulations will be prominent in 2019, such as the national movements for higher minimum wages, medicare for all, portable benefits for freelancers and contract employees, prohibitions against anti-union tactics, and the banning of forced arbitration for employees in many instances, such as sexual harassment cases.

The surge of unionism in media is one example of counter-capitalist collective action, and I expect it will spread into many other 'white collar' and 'no collar' jobs, as the tide turns toward regulation of business instead of self-regulation.

As just one manifestation, consider the fall from grace of Facebook in 2018, as a consequence of its exploitation of data arising from its services. But this controversy is actually about the duopoly of ad revenues it shares with Google, which is a story of gigantism and the lack of regulatory oversight by the world's governments.

We should anticipate a forceful swinging of the pendulum in the opposite direction, which could even lead to the breakup of large corporations -- like Google, Amazon, Microsoft and counterparts in other non-tech sectors -- into smaller, more focused companies with the intent of decreasing their power, their amassing of capital, and opening the playing field to smaller competitors. Note that in the very near term acquisitions by the giants leading to market consolidation in many industries may continue at the blinding pace we're seen in recent years, but in a year or two -- if regulatory opposition to bigness becomes entrenched as I believe it may -- we may see a major decline in such acquisitions. So predicting the acquisition of Slack by one of the internet giants might make sense now, but may be blocked in 2020.

Moving from 'Normal' Organizations to 'Revolutionary' Organizations

The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge. | Steven Hawking

Hawking sets context for what I have been calling a 'movement' since 2005 or so, the movement to drive a transition from 'normal' industrial-era organizations that are role-centered, closed, slow-and-tight, hierarchical, and backwards-focused to 'revolutionary' post-industrial-era organizations that are human-centered, open, fast-and-loose, heterarchical, and forwards-focused. Like other movements, this work revolution is defined by the dynamics of opposing forces. On one side, we have those who explicitly or implicitly uphold the principles and cultural foundations of 'normalcy', and who actively or passive-aggressively oppose those, on the other side, who advocate revolutionary change in work culture, practices, and values.

I've picked the terms 'normal' and 'revolutionary' with intention. Specifically, I have borrowed them from Thomas Kuhn's central arguments in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, a work that laid out the analogous dynamics in scientific revolutions.

Kuhn argued that there is a cyclic form to science, where the work of a generation of scientist in any given field establishes a paradigm around which research and discourse are centered, like Newtonian physics. It started with various incoherent notions of motion (the pre-paradigm phase), but the central premises of gravity, and Newton's laws of motion led to the development of a second phase, where 'normal' science began, and the dominant paradigm structured the science for a considerable period of time, establishing consensus on terminology, methods, and the sorts of experiments that might lead to increased insights1.

Over time, normal science may lead to anomalies in findings -- unexpected results from experiments, questions that can't be answered -- and these can lead to questioning the old paradigm as its weaknesses are apparent. This can lead to crisis, and that can spark a paradigm shift, like quantum physics as an alternative to Newton's.

The crisis and the shift are not necessarily smooth, and there is often active disagreement and contention between the advocates of the previous, 'normal' paradigm, and the revolutionaries pushing for the new paradigm. This can lead to breaks in the scientific discipline, with huge controversies and great antagonism, since the reputations and livelihoods of the scientists are at stake.

At some point, the crisis ends, usually as a result of the establishment of a new paradigm, which eventually becomes 'normal' mainstream science, with new methods, terminology, and established approaches for experimentation.

We are at a time of such a crisis, although it's not in the traditional realm of science, per se. The crisis is in the world of business, and it is really predicated on scientific revolutions in several areas that impinge on business, namely cognitive science, behavioral economics, social psychology, and related fields. (And in the background behind the soft incursion of these revelatory social science findings, we can feel the looming hard technologies of the fourth industrial revolution.)

In the past few decades enormous advances have been made in our understanding of how people perceive the world and their relationships to others, how we reason (or don't), how people 'make decisions', how productive teams 'work', and how cultural norms impact our behavior. However, very little of this science has reached the C-suite. Consider, as only one example, the persistent problems related to diversity and the foundational issues of cognitive bias. However, few in leadership are educated in these issues, and no coherent new paradigm of organizational theory and practice has yet fully emerged.

At present, we are left with the strange dichotomy of entrepreneurial capitalism -- with capital growth and shareholder value as the highest aims -- and the independent considerations of making the world a better place, making the workplace more equitable, just, and less precarious, and attempting to construct the world of work so that people can achieve greater autonomy, meaning, and purpose in their lives, and not just a paycheck. These cross forces define a growing area of tension in the discourse about the future of work, the transformation of the 21st century business, and how to balance the desires of the many sorts of people holding stakes in these companies.

At the same time, we see growing interest in the principle that a revolution is business operations is needed to confront and overcome a long list of 'anomalies' in business and the economic sphere. The combination of increased economic pressures in a sped-up, global marketplace and the desire for greater stability and purpose for everyone at work leads to some broad trends that could stand as a proxy for the 'revolution' in organizational theory and practice:

Human-centered not role-centered. We lose a great deal when we limit people to only thinking about or acting on a limited set of activities in business. A machine press operator can have a brilliant insight that saves the copy millions, and a field sales lead can come back from a meeting with a customer suggestion for a breakthrough new product. But not if they are punished for stepping outside the painted lines on the floor. People can be larger than their job descriptions, if we let them.

Open not closed models of thinking and operations. This means a 'yes, and' mindset, where we consider alternatives rather than rejecting them because they are novel. This means activity rooting out systemic anti-creative and anti-curiosity patterns in business dogma. It means embracing Von Foester's Empirical Imperative: Always act to increase the set of possibilities.

Fast-and-loose not slow-and-tight operations. Agile, flexible, and adaptive methods of organizing, cooperating, and leading are needed. A less bureaucratic management style would increase innovation, and lead to building business operations around experiments rather than only well-established processes.

Heterarchical not hierarchical operations. The bronze age rule of kings, supposedly selected by the gods and legitimized by their personal charisma has led to terrible results, with narcissistic sociopaths all too often calling the shots. The occasional Steve Jobs or Yves Chouinard does not disprove the problems inherent to top-down-only organizations, especially in a time of great change and uncertainty. Organizational structure is another means to the ends that companies are created to effect, and serves as a powerful barrier to change when treated as sacred and inviolable.

Forward-focused, not tradition-bound. We need to adopt a new paradigm for business, one that explicitly breaks with a great deal of what passes for conventional wisdom, organized around new science, new forms of social connection, and leveraging the possibilities in the points made above. And science is not standing still, so we must incorporate new understanding into our work and the operations of business.

This is predicated upon stating -- explicitly -- that a revolution is necessary, and that a long list of practices and principles will need to be identified as problematic and rooted out. This is exactly what I founded Work Futures to do, as a research and educational institute, and in 2019 I intend to push hard to advance that agenda.

This revolution has started, but the we are in the early days of what will eventually -- decades from now, perhaps -- be a wholesale recasting of business. But the world of work cannot be changed independently of the larger world. It is one part of a larger set of changes that envelope and animate it.

The larger societal and economic trends touched on in the previous sections -- Polarization and Populism, Capitalism and Gigantism, and the Fourth Industrial Revolution -- are imparting enormous stress on the human sphere. And, as a result, it is very hard to predict what will happen in 2019. However, I believe that by 2023 a great deal of the revolution -- this transition from the 'normal' to a 'revolutionary' form of business -- will have become more clear, as the new paradigm becomes more well-defined, and as the larger world shifts to internalize new approaches to the tectonic forces at work, at all scales.

I reposted the fourth section of this essay as a piece all by itself: Moving from 'Normal' Organizations to 'Revolutionary' Organizations.

Paraphrased from Wikipedia. ↩︎

#populism #gigantism #polarization #revolution #thomas kuhn #the structure of scientific revolutions #politics #climate change #capitalism #economics #revolutionary organizations #normal organizations #fast-and-loose

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alia15 · 7 years

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Comfortable Racism

As many of you know, I have a “Rant of the Day” segment on my blog that I try to do every month or so. As a little ‘behind the scenes’ action to how I come up with material for these, well... I just observe them in my everyday life. Any time I’m irritated, inconvenienced, enraged or impatient because of something, I jot it down in the Notes section of my phone to include in a later #ROTD post.

One of the things I’ve had on the list for a while? The term “comfortable racism.”

But I got to thinking recently, and this doesn’t belong in a lighthearted, intended-to-be-humorous segment on ‘AA.’ This is more serious than that. This isn’t a pet peeve or a slight nuisance like folks who take 37 minutes to take money out of the ATM or people who don’t arrange their food on the grocery store conveyor belt thing to fit your stuff (seriously though, I HATE that). No. This topic doesn’t belong among fluffy silliness like that.

This gets its own post.

I don’t know that there’s a technical or official definition to the term “comfortable racism,” but to me -- it’s the notion that a person feels so secure in their offensive and inappropriate thoughts about other people’s race that they feel empowered and content to outwardly share them with others.

In other words, if you’re like me, you incorrectly assumed that in 2017 racists would feel ashamed, embarrassed or uneasy sharing their racist beliefs and mindsets, but...nah. No, instead it seems as though something -- or someone -- has made them feel lately like it was OK. I’m not gonna name any names, though.

what? I didn’t write his name.

The first time I ever encountered something like this was many years ago at a job (NOT the one I have now) where a douchey, arrogant, wealthy WHITE male coworker saw my Gucci bag and bluntly stated, “Nice bag! I feel like Gucci recently became kind of a [N-word] brand, though.” He then immediately followed it up with, “Right?”

Right?! Don’t you agree with my disgustingly racist comment?!?!

(I shouldn’t have been surprised to hear him say this -- he once also called Barack Obama the “Anti-Christ” when he saw I was reading his book. #RollsEyesForever)

But this was the first time a person had interacted with me seeming all too comfortable expressing their distasteful and abhorrent commentary and THAT’S when I realized there were now two things to be furious about:

The horrendously racist comment and term used, and -

The fact that another person thought that I was someone they could say that to.

Well, he quickly learned I wasn’t.

It’s been about 8 years since that happened, and guess what? I didn’t stand for it then and I sure as shit don’t stand for it now.

These are some of -- but certainly not all -- the racist things men I’ve recently dated or gone out with have done or said in my company:

Questioning why the boardwalk in my town was so “dark” (AKA, a lot of non-white people there).

Asking me if I’d ever dated or hooked up with a black guy and when I said no, tried to high-five me.

Responded, “well, I’m kinda racist” when I told him I had ended things with ANOTHER guy for being racist. (Oh, well then. Good to know.)

I’ve listened to litanies arguing against the Black Lives Matter Movement and Affirmative Action. I’ve heard disparaging comments about Jews, Asians, Middle Easterners, Latinos and African Americans. I’ve heard comments about black people being criminals, lazy and uneducated. I’ve heard the N-word used like it was a term of endearment and therefore when I got mad they defended it like it was OK to use it that way -- ya know, because they have black friends!

[Side note: read this thread on Twitter if you have time -- it’s another woman’s story of comfortable racism in the dating world. Click HERE.]

The end result in every scenario you see above? I leave. I stop seeing these people. I get into heated debates and arguments and I stand up for my beliefs and what I feel is right, and then I leave.

That’s what you have to do in 2017 America where it’s become grossly apparent that the once closeted racists are now coming back out of the woodwork. And you don’t just encounter it in the world of dating; you see it in the news every day: swastikas on subways, offensive graffiti, a significant rise in hate crimes, racial epithets screamed at others in public, bomb threats to Jewish Community Centers, students and professional adults getting caught for despicable racism (remember the West Virginia official who publicly called Michelle Obama an “ape in heels?”)...I mean, the list goes on and on. You can read more HERE.

Hell, go to any article you read on the Internet and READ THE COMMENTS, for Christ’s sake.

So what can you and I do? We can’t ‘cure’ racism, sadly. But we CAN fight back and defend our stance when we find ourselves as witnesses to this stuff. We can let people know we’re not tolerating their ignorance and won’t stand for it. We can stand up for anyone we see being mistreated, harassed or threatened. We won’t just sit back idly and let people feel comfortable with their racism around us. We can unfriend and unfollow on social media and tell our “friends” exactly why we did. Where applicable, we can punish those for this kind of behavior; showing them there ARE repercussions for this ugly low-life behavior.

We don’t need to ‘Make America Great Again;’ we need to make racists afraid again.

Are you with me?

#racism #racist #donald trump #trump's america #racism in 2017 #race #current events #politics #dating #online dating #nazi #swastika #religion #beliefs #vandalism #harassment

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sweetstielow · 4 years

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Are advertising creatives rebelling against the system that created us?

Building the Church

David Ogilvy once said: “If it doesn’t sell, it isn’t creative.” He is boldly declaring the terms of advertising creativity by giving it a Darwinian purpose. Although advertising wasn’t born in the Mad Men era, Ogilvy’s was a golden age for the industry that set a new bar for storytelling, art direction and big ideas.

In the 19th century, newspapers started relying on ads featuring slogans, images, and minimal copy for profit. But it was two major milestones I think solidified advertising as a full-blown industry: the introduction of ‘brands’ in the late 1800’s and the formation of ad agencies in the 1940’s.

The first half of the 19th century ushered in a new era of capitalism in America. The economic boom of the 1920’s saw the invention of new products and a surge in consumer goods, while corporate giants started controlling most of the country’s wealth. Shopping was no longer just buying soup, rather having the choice to buy Campbell’s. With the marketplace churning out more and more products, advertising was there to package their perception into the new American ideals. A car became a symbol of class. A shampoo became the voice of a gender.

It was advertising that built the culture around consumption. It was advertising that humanized corporations as ‘brands’. It was advertising that became the reinforcement of our freedom to choose. And advertising that exploited our socioeconomic status to sell us a better version of ourselves.

Capitalism in America isn’t designed for the greater good. By promoting individual opportunity above all, it suggests you versus them. A for-profit system creates a metric for quantitative growth and advertising perceived that our value as citizens could be intrinsically tied to profit. Advertising arguably blurred the line between church and state. People’s sense of self became conflated with the politics behind the products they bought, hailing advertising as the religion of economics.

Advertising’s capitalization of culture set the stage for discrimination, stereotyping, sexism, and ulterior profit motives that would become a source of controversy throughout the 20th century — but would also ultimately challenge us to recognize how we see ourselves.

The Creative Message

Creatives don’t think like capitalists. At our most noble, we believe that creativity has the power to innovate, make progress and move society forward. At a fundamental level we get to be arbiters of the human condition in a liberal democracy. And at our worst, well, sex sells. We look for convenient truths and shape consumer narratives that influence, inspire, engage and entertain. To a creative, value is understood as an emotional measure.

For example, good design can inspire positive feelings that lead to happiness. The dissemination of ideas can provoke. The creation of art can give us purpose. The creation of beauty; empathy. Establishing commonality builds community, and so forth. Of course, it’s really the brands that are doing all the talking, but at some point creatives started asking questions on behalf of the brands they worked for.

What if we made people think? What if we questioned the us vs them? What if we challenged the socioeconomic stereotypes set in motion by our forefathers? Creatives learned to carve out a voice of resistance in culture. One of my favorite ads of all time is the Independent’s Litany. Aired in 2000, the British newspaper provoked the viewer to question the rules of society using reverse psychology. It said a brand could defy the system and (ironically) gave permission to the consumer to challenge the status quo.If we are lucky, we get to create messages for brands that move people beyond the comfort capitalism provides.

Advertising Today

Thanks to the internet boom of the 90’s, the advertising playing field has expanded enormously. Social media’s hyper distribution of ideas at scale presents another opportunity for advertising to capitalize on culture. It’s not just a mass message in the form of a print or TV spot, it’s a highly-targeted, hyper-personalized message around sports, entertainment, art, travel, or wherever your interests lie. That it’s a conversation between you and the brand hasn’t changed — it’s just more malleable, more dynamic, more in this moment.

The internet made us more self-aware. The worst of our actions were suddenly in our faces. Our self-doubt and physical insecurities. Our century old gender stereotypes. Our capacity for bullying. Racism. Sexism. Homophobia. All started surfacing. And advertising took these truths and mirrored them back to us. Advertising challenged the norm and then repackaged it, offering up newer, timelier American ideals. Dove’s Real Beauty. Always’ Like a Girl. Burger King’s Proud Whopper. Glossier’s Body Heroes. And so on.

The rise of connected society also meant the dark side of capitalism starting at us. Brands have had to shuffle to cover up their shady business practices and bury stories about inhumane working conditions in third world countries. Consumers started to become more aware of how a for-profit model doesn’t always add up to a feel-good message.

Advertising for Progress

All of this self-awareness birthed another evolution. Advertising is now held to a standard of being on the side of progress. Our connected era has yielded a crop of brands that submit to conscious capitalism, where purpose has a say in profit’s bottom line. There are brands that make products that invest in our global future, like Patagonia, Tesla, and Apple. And there are brands starting conscious-raising, non-conforming conversations, like Rihanna’s Fenty Beauty, Thinx, Hims, Impossible Foods.

Thanks to conscious capitalism, we can now opt into the concept of for-good by choosing to buy certain brands. We can now have meaningful conversations around what that better version of ourselves is. And it goes both ways. As a copywriter, as someone who wants to contribute meaning to a soulless political system and put truth on a pedestal, I have to recognize that advertising creativity comes at a cost. There would be no platform to start these meaningful conversations if it weren’t for the system that got us here, would there? But in this Darwinian indsustry, can you fault us for just trying to survive? And so I find myself asking some questions.

How codependent are we on rebelling against the system that created us?

If there were no norm to challenge, what would our message be?

And if the status quo we question is just a product of capitalism, are we really just rebelling against a contrived version of ourselves?

When did we start to depend on mass media for validation?

Do we remember what it was like to see ourselves before we received any brand messages at all?

At best, advertising for a creative is an outlet for self-expression and an opportunity for awareness that leads to real progress.

At worst, I’ll forever be stuck in a loophole, challenging yesterday’s cultural ideologies. For better or for worse, as long as we’re buying, we’re believing.

#capitalism #creativity #ogilvy #david ogilvy #advertising

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