– Update on 2011/04/04: Japan seeks Russian help to end nuclear crisis (Reuters). What do you know? It seems I was quite accurate after all…

I had taken some time away to let myself marinate in a lot of thoughts and feelings that I have for awhile, and also because a project in my job is sucking the life out of me. However, there is something about what is going on underneath the surface of the Japan nuclear problem that disturbs me so much that I feel like I have to write.

If you hadn’t been watching the news, basically the nuclear problem in Japan has been worsening since day 1 and how it will completely unfold remains unseen.

These seem to be where we stand right now globally regarding this:

• Some countries had sent some units to help with the rescue. (token humanitarian effort? — no insult to the people who actually went to help. I have utmost admiration and respect for them.)
• All countries with residents in Japan are telling them to flee.
• United States media is taking the opportunities to report as much as possible and hopefully get better ratings (euphemism)
• The nuclear panic had led to a hoarding of salt and some other every commodities in China
• The nuclear panic had led to a hoarding of potassium iodide pills in the United States

Here is where Japan stands:

• some 50180 plant workers heroically (and I do mean heroically) stayed behind to work on the different reactors… (but think about how many people are needed to deal with an exploded pipeline on the street? while there are 4 nuclear reactors malfunctioning…)
• They are now down to dropping water from helicopters to try to cool and prevent a nuclear meltdown.

Do you have any idea what that implies? That implies, if not for certain, that Japan is down to its last trick to try to stop things from getting worse. They may have the will but they are at the limit of their abilities. They are at their wits’ end. The question we may ask, “How’s that related to me?”

Maybe you’ll answer “crap, we’ll have a gigantic nuclear disaster”. It is a minor-partially correct answer because the true correct is that we will have another world economic problem in our hands. This deal is sealed the day people decided “globalization” is the next greatest thing.

With a nuclear disaster on who-know-what-scale, Japan economy is shot, companies with bases in Japan are hampered, all global resources(food, energy…) will need to be further divided, and who know what other consequences.

I am not saying it will or has to happen, but with this pending problem… instead of addressing this real problem, which also includes risking of thousands, if not millions of lives, the mighty nations of our globe and leaders of big nations decide this is what they will do…

finance ministers from the Group of Seven nations announced a coordinated intervention in the currency market to prevent the yen from rising further

Despair, anger, frustration, speechlessness, darkness… are a few adjectives that describe how that makes me feel. These global power instead of sending specialized units that deal with nuclear contamination (they have to have these units, especially countries with nuclear weapons…) to help prevent and mitigate the real nuclear problem, they decide… “oh, let’s just make sure to keep the money flowing. Money is what matters, and that is above the significance of humanity… we’ll get to the saving human life part later [and only perhaps... if there's something we can call we save...]“.

Is it me or this is f#@$-ing retarded? When it is time for global population to do right, this is what we have?

Solving the real problem not only will keep the money flowing down the road (because Japan will rebuild herself and probably into something better than before) but will also save lives… and lives that had yet been born…

The only hope is that, what is said here is ALL wrong and things do not actually worsen because otherwise, we will have some very horrible situations in our hands due to some very very terrible man-made errors that will make the earthquake and tsunami pale in comparison.

Speaking in a different context, the decisions that are being made by people world-wide throughout this situation had already demonstrate a very narrow narrow model of thinking prevalent in our human culture (because observe what most people are ONLY concern about…). How little we truly, genuinely care about each other… The path this current human culture is taking is not good, but this should be the subject for another day.

People who know what these last few words mean will already know what they mean.
People who don’t know what they mean, well, feel free to email me and with questions and I’ll be happy speak and respond and have a conversations.

Man created time, and then let time mastered him.
- Kin

We believe in change where we force everything outside of ourselves to change for us, maintaining status quo or continuity as much as possible — even if it means beating everything else into submission with force, often in the name of goodness.

We don’t believe in change where we change and grow ourselves in junction with the ever changing world deemed external to us.

If genuine change means first to look into ourselves and then outside for understanding before the action of change, what we truly believe is pretentious change.

Thus we are now seeing the consequences in various aspects of society around the globe that somehow, and in most cases incomprehensible to our logical minds, turn out to be hideous and disastrous — despite all the claim and acclamation of goodness, morals, and positivity.

It is as if we are promised gold, but when we finally come to realization, we have cow poo in our hands. Except, it is none other than ourselves that promise us gold.

I had the thought of naming this post the poor rich bastards… well, I didn’t and now you know anyways :)

There were lots of talk about increasing taxes on the rich, a battle between classes, 1% of the nation owning most of the money, all that jazz.

It is always my fascination to re-examine idea that is common sense, and we should take a look at the word “rich”.

Dictionary.com says that rich means “having wealth or great possessions; abundantly supplied with resources, means, or funds; wealthy,” and when we say somebody is rich, it simply means “that dude has a f load of money.”

There is a reason I called the rich people poor in the title. Because I have come up with another meaning for the word rich.

Rich means having more than enough.

The tricky part becomes, a person is rich only when a person knows what enough means to himself in various aspects — financially, materially, physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.

Quite obviously, we can observe few, if any, of the people we called rich know what it means to be enough, demonstrated by their behaviors of hoarding more and more, be it money or power and let alone the other aspects where those people either have the faintest idea or simply don’t give a crap. Same can be said about those called poor.

As something Bill Maher said (paraphrase), “Americans would do anything and everything, to oneself and to others, for money.” Well, maybe not everyone, but definitely enough people do not know “enough” to fall into that definition.

Oh, these poor bastards.

The rich can be poor.
The poor can be rich.
Of course, rich can be rich and poor can be poor too.

Current culture is about consumption.

Consumerism.

What is consumerism about? Instant gratification. And what is it that we wanted to be instantly gratified…? Sensory stimulation.

But why sensory stimulation? Perhaps it is about our need to FEEL alive (feeling happy and excited is another way of expressing it), as if we are not alive already. Now has gotten to the point where we are constantly stimulated, as if we need to always live in an OMG(oh-my-god) state of mind, be it good or bad.

All current trends that people so desperate seek after these days resolve to the same end — sensory stimulation. Fashion, TV, video games, social networking, extravagent food, traveling, drugs, sex, whatever new “technology” we try to create, and even activisms to “save the world” inevitably have more to do to drive/cater/create need to be sensory stimulated than anything else. I am not condemning them and please read on.

Again, it has to do with us wanting to feel alive… when we are already alive. But when we over do a process that is natural of itself, we bring chaos and more troubles than necessary.

Try too hard to do something, mark my word, you will fail.
Try too hard to shoot a basketball, you will miss.
Try too hard to play the piano, you will sound like shit.

That is why if you know yourself, you know you are alive at this moment. You can simply live. You can embrace all your desires that will never become excessive and thus no need to repress them… desires that companies’ marketers and advertisiers so desperately want to instigate, with the sole intention to cause us to consume more.

The idea is not to be able to feel awe and wonder in the presence of extraordinary things. The idea is to be able to feel awe and wonder in the simplest things in life.

Perhaps to make a broad general statement.
It is not about living an extraordinary life
It is not about living a simple life
It is about living a simple life extraordinarily.

Then if you occasionally seek after more stimulating experience (and perhaps even over do it a bit), it’s absolutely alright and acceptable, and you definitely will not be addicted. You will not NEED to consume more and more, and thus spend so much money, and thus trade your time for more money… and consequently and inevitably be forever in the so-called rat race.

In the end, it still goes back to knowing yourself, which lead to a simple life. Be mindful it is not the other way… forcing yourself to have a simple life will never work, nor does repressing desires.