If you want to govern the people,
you must place yourself below them.
If you want to lead the people,
you must learn how to follow them.

- Tao Te Ching, 66

For the past 8 years, the US has been governed by fear. Fear that the world is against them. Fear that barbarians are at the gates.

And that fear has left many Americans feeling hollow and empty.

But today is a day of transition.

If Obama represents anything, it is the shift to governance by inspiration.

He on his own can do very little. But if he serves to empower others to take matters into their own hands, to accept responsbility for their own actions, and to create the world we all want to inhabit…

That is a very powerful change.

If someone doesn’t have the same opinion as you, most people take it personally.

That was a great movie! How can you not like it? This music sucks! Your taste is awful. And so on.

Our preference often becomes part of our identity. So when someone else doesn’t share your preference, we feel they’re insulting us personally. And this isn’t limited to music/movies/food.

Politics and religion also falls under the identity umbrella. Some people believe the US should have invaded Iraq. They have based their opinions on what they read/watch and what they believe they “know.”

Radical fundamentalists hate our freedom. War is unfortunate but necessary.

If you try and demand otherwise, it doesn’t matter. Any amount of facts won’t change the mind of a person who has already settled on “the truth”. Persisting will only cause them to feel their worldview (and by extension, identity) is being personally attacked.

So how do you change someone else’s mind? You can’t…directly.

You can only offer alternative information. If they choose to absorb it – to allow it into the realm of possibility – then you just might have a chance.

Why oh why can’t Obama run for Prime Minister instead of President?

As Lawrence Martin said in a recent column, Obama is “an American politician with a Canadian mindset. Or at least what has generally been considered a Canadian mindset.”

Which is all the more bizarre when you discover that we just re-elected a Conservative government.

Let’s make up our mind people!

Courtesy of Dan Froidevaux here’s an outline of how each party wants to tackle the current (and future) environmental challenges:

What do you think – cap and trace or carbon tax? Or is climate change a bunch of malarky?

Photo: Biden offers his stance on the Iraq War.

There’s a odd trend in the US that wants to mess with the TV aesthetics of things that aren’t broken.

For example: illuminating the movement of the puck during a hockey game back in 1996. Rather than aid the viewer, the effect resembled a lazer shooting around the ice. Thankfully the effect was dropped two years later.

But now this trend is affecting the news.

Anyone watching the debates on CNN were treated to an “audience reaction meter” – basically seismographic lines running along the bottom of the screen.

The idea is that voters from each party can register their “gut reactions” in real time while the candidates face-off. Viewers at home, like myself, can see if our own feelings mirror these lines on the screen and see if we match up.

On the one hand, it seems like an interesting idea. On the other, not so much.

Blogger Megan McKarty writes:

Whether the CNN seismograph running along the lower third measured any real shake-ups was a little harder to tell. For the most part the device seemed an inscrutable distraction, sloping up and down along basically thematic partisan lines but dipping and peaking steeply at random and inexplicable times.

The other, and more serious issue, is what the graph (and other “meters” crowding the screen) mean to the viewer: it’s becoming impossible to have an unfiltered opinion.

More than anything, the presidential debates are meant to be raw. No more hiding behind their own party rallies. No more ten second sound bytes repeated by the media. The debates are meant to offer the most accurate criteria for the average voter to judge the candidates.

But no more. Not only do we have hours of meaningless pundit analysis after the fact, the filters are being layered during the debate itself.

As another blogger writes:

Don’t you think that those active lines would have put some sway on the viewer, at least some, as they watched in “real-time” how the pointless “audience” reacted? It was a horrific and sketchy idea for [CNN] to do that.

In the guise of “aiding” the audience, we’re simply being told what to think.

Megan McKarty wraps it up best:

CNN, as the first all-news-all-the-time cable channel has become a parody of itself. The 24-hour news cycle is now getting broken down into seconds. Do we really need viewer and pundit reaction to every word, every smirk, every breath, and every phoneme uttered by a political candidate? With units of meaning in news getting smaller and smaller, we may be missing the forest for the green lines.

What did you think of the “audience meter” during the debates? Share in the comments!

Aside from the great interviews, I was struck by the following observations:

• naked people are bizarre for about 10 minutes, then it becomes so normal you barely notice
• there’s something very beautiful about complete inhibition to social code
• looking around it’s entirely obvious we’re utterly dependent on cars, and it’s interesting to think how we let it get this way
• it may be fun to join the ride next year

What do you think of the naked bike ride? Share your thoughts in the comments!

Last year, while watching Children of Men in the theatre, I remember feeling a slight twinge of deja vu.

It wasn’t the personal type that makes you wonder if you’ve dreamt a certain experience that actually came true. Rather, it was the unshakable dread that here, on screen, was a bleak vision of a future that may be.

David Roberts, reviewing the film for Gristmill, agrees with me. He writes:

“[Children of Men] It puts some flesh and feeling on the warnings of the doomers: the peak-oil doomers, climate-change doomers, nuclear-terrorism doomers, global-virus doomers, general-malaise doomers.

The techno-optimist response to, say, peak oil, is hey, when oil starts to get expensive we’ll respond in an orderly fashion and shift to something else, right? It’s not like there’ll be riots in the streets. Right?

But one thing Children of Men shows to visceral effect is just how shallow civilization is. Just how quickly the veneer can be ripped away and the lawlessness and brutality let loose. They’re always closer than we know.”

Walking out of the theatre that night, I wondered about my feeling of dread. Is it possible that the film was meant to serve as a warning to the very real possibility of it coming true?

Confirmation, in a roundabout way, for my question came more recently in a passage from Carl Sagan’s book Broca’s Brain. In praise of science fiction, to which he owes his childhood interest in science, he writes:

“The greatest human significance of science fiction may be as experiments on the future, as explorations of alternative destinies, as attempts to minimize future shock. This is part of the reason that science fiction has so wide an appeal among young people: it is they who will live the future.

It is my firm view that society on Earth today is well adapted to the Earth of one or two hundred years from now (if we are wise enough or lucky enough to survive that long). We desperately need an exploration of alternative futures, both experimental and conceptual.”

Viewed in this light, Children of Men is certainly an exploration of an alternative future. One that will come to pass if we do not remain vigilant in the ever-creeping erosion of our personal freedom, and collective control over the fate of our civilization.

As the list of films/books speaking to this future grows, we can’t pretend we didn’t see it coming.

Wow. The only word that comes to mind is: utter farce. (Oh wait…that’s two words).