On Camus

"But the narrator is inclined to think that by attributing overimportance to praiseworthy actions one may, by implication, be paying indirect but potent homage to the worse side of human nature.  For this attitude implies that such actions shine out as rare exceptions, while callousness and apathy are the general rule.  The narrator does not share that view.  The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions, may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding.  on the whole, men are more good than bad; that, however, isn't the real point.  But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance that fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill.  The soul of the murderer is blind; and there can be no true goodness nor true love without the utmost clear-sightedness"  --Albert Camus, The Plague.

This spring I took one of the most rigorous classes of my academic career so far:  Twentieth-Century European Intellectual and Cultural History.  A lot of the thinkers and philosophers we read frustrated me with their ideas.  However, one of the only thinkers whose work I found immediately appealing was the Algerian author and philosopher Albert Camus.  He seems to have both a lucid and uncompromising understanding of the world unlike few people I have ever read.  I don't agree with everything he says, but I always like the questions he forces me to consider.

On Ground Zero

One of the cool things about going to school in New Jersey is that I am only an hour's train ride away from New York City.  Growing up in northern Indiana, Chicago was the nearest big city, and it is one I still love.  I got to visit LA once, which was fun, but kind of a weird place--so laid back that I don't know how they ever manage to film tv shows on schedule there.  I've even gotten to see London and Paris and Rome.  But none of these big cities is anything like the sprawling monstrosity that is New York.  I've only been up a few times, but it has been delightful to play tourist and explore the city. 

My most recent visit was this weekend.  My sister is on Spring Break, so my mom took some time of work, and they came out to New Jersey to visit.  We did a whirlwind tour of as much of the city as we could.  One of the places that we determined to visit was Ground Zero, the memorial at the site of the 9-11 attacks on the World Trade Center towers

There is a security checkpoint before you can see the memorial--not quite as strict as an airport, though still reminiscent:  the x-ray's and metal detectors, those typical grey bins for everything in your pockets.  It was kind of eerie to experience a security check while thinking about how the attacks were carried out.

The memorial itself was all very well-done.  The grounds are very simple, but all with the same motif of towers and squares evoking the images that had defined the World Trade Center towers.  There are square blocks that serve as seats and long narrow paths to evoke the towers.  The lamp posts in the grounds are shaped like towers.  There are rows of trees planted, all surrounded by a paved square with a smaller square cut out for the trunk, kind of evoking the pools that are main part of the memorial.  There was a pear tree planted there that had survived under the rubble, been transplanted to Brooklyn where it "recovered," and then replanted at the site.  The first buds were just starting to come out on the branches.  It was all very well- thought out.

Then there were the pools.  They are massive.  But large as those cavernous mouths are, it is mind blowing to think that the towers that had stood there were even larger and impossibly high above it.  You can get lost watching the ceaselessly flowing water.  It is like watching fire or a waterfall.  I though about how many tears must have been shed because of the attack and how many are still being shed--how it changed our country, our society, and our world.  It is as though the earth itself is grieving because of all the pain the attacks brought about. 

At the bottom of the pools are holes into which the water is flowing.  They are haunting.  Always open.  Always dark.  Always swallowing up water.  In some ways, it is comforting:  the grief can flow away.  But in another sense it is bottomless.  There is no end.  And there is still a feeling that the land has been scarred; it is an open wound that still shows in the ground.  But in spite of that it is still majestic, stately, beautiful even in its way.  It pulls you in.

And around each pool, they have the names of all the victims engraved.  So many names, and all of them had a story.  There was one spot where I saw two people, a man and a woman with the same last name, and I couldn't help wondering if they were related, and how.  Husband and wife?  Mother and son?  Siblings?  Every so often there would be a flower over the names usually a white rose--someone nearby must have been selling them.  A couple of them were pushed into the names so that the roses stood up--a simple token, but very moving.  I also saw someone making a rubbing of a name.  I had to wonder, looking around, how many of these people were like me, tourists just taking in this piece of history, and how many knew or loved someone who had died there?

Before we left, my mom, my sister, and I huddled together to pray for families of people who had died.  It was all a very heavy experience.

On Awareness

Did you know it's internet blackout day?  Sites all over the internet of censored their own content as an indication of what the web might be like if internet censorship is passed into law.  The web is abuzz with opinions on SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect IP Act): two bills that seriously threaten intellectual and creative freedom on the internet.  The trickiest things about the bill is that it markets as self as defending rights (note the very conscious usage of the word "Protect"), but the way it goes about this could not only technically undermine the way the internet currently functions, but would actually hamper creative artists and freedom of speech, and would put control of web content into the hands of the government and big business.  I've posted some of my thoughts on the bill here before, but if you are interested in learning more, there are lots of ways to learn about these bills:

The Electronic Frontier Foundation's one page guide to SOPA: here
and their explanation of how this affects internet freedom of speech: here
reddit's technical examination of SOPA and PIPA: here
Dyn's explanation of some of the practical problems with implementing these bills: here
Information on protesting: here
You can always try Wikipedia, but since it's participating in the blackout, finding those quick easy answers may not be that simple.

And of course, if you, like almost everyone else on the internet, feel like voicing your opinion on this issue, be sure to tell not just to tell your friends, but the people who will actually be deciding on these bills.