Be the Ink

The squares are bigger than you could even imagine. They command the room, the space.

What a powerful source of memory, of honoring those who we have lost to AIDS.

As I have written about a few times already , I have been exploring the many squares on the AIDS Memorial Quilt, and have been remembering especially two men who were important to my Mom, to our community, and to my perception and experience with the death tolls from AIDS. Almost as soon as I learned, via their website, that the Quilt is stored and the foundation headquartered here in Atlanta, I called, left a message, and asked to visit–especially to see the two squares I had been pouring over, Craig’s and Parnell’s.

Richie, a veteran of the NAMES Project Foundation, called me back after the holiday season, and I planned a visit for today. This morning I spent some time crying, touching the quilt, reading the many lovely words, poems, thoughts contributed to each of their squares, and learned more about these two men via the wonderful memorial that this Quilt provides. It provides a way to remember, in a very communal and large-scale way, yet allowing for quite private and personal time with those who are being remembered. Richie pulled up the information on these two squares, 2744 (Parnell’s) and 5508 (Craig’s), so I could see where they had traveled, where they had been requested, and where and when they were each on display.

I learned that the demographic who has been contributing the most new squares–they receive on average about 400 new squares each year–are nieces. Girls my age, who have memories, however clear or unclear, of their uncles who died while we were young, and who have now reached the age in which remembering them properly has been an important part of grieving, or becoming an adult, of understanding how this illness has devastated families. I am exactly that generation, that demographic, though I have to consider myself an honorary niece only.

I made a donation in honor of my parents, who have been caring, compassionate examples for my brothers and me, and in honor of Craig and Parnell, obviously, and for each of their families. The wonderful (small) staff gave me a book of some quilt squares, and a calendar I have already poured over several times. I felt so welcomed, and depending on how much longer I am in Atlanta, I want to help quilt squares together as they need me. Seeing a modest and hard-working organization and staff like that also reminds me that I am in the right field; non-profits, working to educate and engage the public, and ensuring that life has been well-spent by taking care of the issues that matter most.

Take a moment to drink in how enormous each panel of this quilt is. Each square is intentionally 3 feet by 6 feet, about the size of a human grave. I was not prepared for the commanding presence, and for how much more meaningful seeing each component up-close truly is.

At one of my favorite childhood places, the children’s wing of the Dickinson County Library in Iron Mountain, Michigan, I have two specific memories. One is a compilation of the many hours I spent sitting in the carpet-lined claw-foot bathtub someone had brilliantly installed there, making it suddenly the most fun place to read a book. The other is of reading one particular children’s book, about a child my age who had HIV, who told me about the disease child-to-child, and about how it made her sick but that I could not catch it from her. I don’t have any other memory of any other specific book I read in that library, although I know there were countless. I remember not even knowing why I picked it among the others that day. I was by myself (surely my Mom was somewhere around, and probably brothers too, but I have no memory of anyone else around me), and I found myself engrossed.

Around this time, either before or after I am not sure, my second- or third-grade class had been ushered down to a small little room with an overhead projector in Woodland Elementary School and we had been taught about AIDS. This would have been around 1996. I’m not sure exactly the circumstances of any of this, but again, seeing the little video that played and learning that AIDS could be transmitted through blood-to-blood contact, and that it was very scary and sad, is one of the most vivid memories I have of that elementary school as well.

I bring these up now because I have been thinking so much about the illness, the virus, the stigma, the massive too-little-too-late effort to stem its spread, and the continued work by scientists, doctors, activists, and others to find long-term resolution (if not a cure). I bring up these memories because it is curious to me why I should remember them both so clearly, I can picture the rooms, and where I was sitting. I don’t have similar memories learning about cancer (several types having affected my grandparents), or my mother’s heart rhythm disturbance, both of which affected my own life in much more direct ways.

There is just something that hurts so deeply when I think about it. Yet it is a feeling I have embraced, it is important to feel deeply on this earth, in this life, especially when I have my health and so many do not.

Two of my Mom’s high school friends, Craig Koller and Parnell Peterson, died of AIDS. Parnell, who I do not remember, died in 1991, at age 33. Craig died in 1997, at age 40. I remember visiting Craig and his mother and sister’s family in Murfreesboro, Tennessee in spring of 1997, and I knew at that point that he was sick (though I’m unsure if I knew what was making him sick).

It’s strange what I’ve been feeling recently, since finding the images of each Parnell and Craig’s quilt squares on the NAMES Project Foundation AIDS Memorial Quilt. I am going to see the quilt next week, and they have pulled these two squares for me to see. My family, my Mom, Dad and siblings, contributed a tiny portion to Craig’s square, at the request of his mother, and so we are part of a collage of love surrounding Craig’s image on his doubly-large square. I did not know this until very recently, as that is one part in my saga that I do not recall.

But since seeing these fuzzy images online, and trying desperately and ineffectively to zoom in enough to see both of their faces clearly, I have been experiencing what I can only say is deep grief– to the extent that I can understand it, which I know I cannot fully. I have not lost a parent, or a sibling, or a spouse or lover or very close friend to this illness– or even to any illness. I have not had, as a deep-feeling adult, any such loss from any tragedy or illness. And yet, I think of lives gone too early, of what Parnell might have liked to do in his life, and I sob. I cry, I get angry, I am sad. It’s usually in the car rides home, during my commutes. Certain songs, or lyrics, and thoughts, and prayers, and images either on the road or in my brain, and I am heaving again. I do not remember crying so deeply about something so big, over which I have no control, except when I read The Kite Runner, and spent a few nights in my room, on my bed, reading and sobbing for Afghanistan. (The whole thing, the whole place, every person in that country, which has seen so much. If you’ve read it, you understand the injustice and the pain and the violence that cannot be escaped, and the hatred that runs deep along ethnic lines.) Other than that, I have not cried so much over people I remember so little about, or in fact, if we look at the larger loss, of millions of lives taken by HIV/AIDS, of people whose stories I don’t know.

I find myself wishing deeply, searching in futility, to learn more about their lives–Parnell and Craig. I search for anything I can find on the internet, time and again, on Parnell. On Craig. I’ve looked at the cold, simple statement of their deaths on Ancestry.com’s death index about a hundred times. I long to know what Craig did for a living, what he liked to eat and watch, things beyond his illness and pain. I wonder what Parnell was doing in the 1980s, as a twenty-something as I am now, so sure that he has his whole life before him, as I feel now. Thirty-three is not so far away. Did he know anything about the disease, as it was spreading? The things I’ve been reading about, the “gay cancer” and the doctor’s fears, and the devastation it would bring to the huge steps the gay community had made in those years before, what did he think of it? Who were his friends, how did he share his diagnosis with them, with his family? I do know that his mother, Mary Peterson, seemed like an amazing, talented woman. My Mom vouched that it was so. I wish I could talk to her now.

How long did Craig live with HIV before it became AIDS? Where was he in the 1980s? I know he and Parnell both lived near San Francisco; were they the kind of high school friends who made sure to keep in touch? Who did he lose to this epidemic before he succumbed to it? One of the most heart-wrenching parts of the story of AIDS is the proximity, the high number of friends some people lost in those first decades, to the disease, as the latency period was so long and the specific communities affected were so defined. It breaks my heart, truly, to imagine the young men who died alone, and who were not given memorial services by their families because of a denial or unacceptable of their son’s sexuality. Doctors and nurses tell of miserable, terribly painful deaths some endured alone. No one to comfort them.

That is what makes me so happy about the AIDS memorial quilt. I pour into it so many hopes, that unknown names, that the memories of countless people who are remembered no where else have been stitched lovingly into these 91,000+ squares. The squares are all shaped to resemble coffins, which is a stark and essential reminder that these are lives, lost. People loved them, people rejected or hated some of them, but they all had lives, beliefs, love, careers and causes, before HIV/AIDS. Randy Shilts, in his book And the Band Played On, talks about how there was a very clear line, for every gay man, in their lives and experiences: there was life Before HIV/AIDS, and there was After. I was born into the world of After, the world as we know it from now on With AIDS. And as Stevie Nicks so eloquently says in “Landslide”–a song it is impossible to not cry to–time makes you older, children get older, I’m getting older too. Time makes us older, literally, but also, it makes us older with the heavy things it lays on our hearts. As an adult, I am brave and I accept uncertainty, but man, does the world scare me, overwhelm me.

I cannot on my own find a cure for HIV and AIDS. I am sad every day that I do not know more about the lives of the two men who were loving, caring friends of my Mom’s, whose generation (all three of them were born in 1957) was most directly hit with this unimaginably unforgivable and deadly disease. But I can love others, love those around me who might be different, but who are people all the same, like me, trying to survive in this big world, that has so much hate. I can also keep Craig and Parnell in my heart, grieve the loss of their lives, and keep their memory alive. I wish I could tell them I love them; I hope they know somehow that I do. 

And here I shall stop; I am sobbing again.

I have waxed poetic about my love for Twitter before.

Its way of lessening the distance between artists, authors, and other people we admire is my absolute favorite reason for the micro-blogging social network. (A close second place is how it has changed the way I think in my own head. In pithy little statements on life and what’s occurring in mine.)

I have squealed in delight when a respected writer or journalist responds to me on Twitter. It’s like little brushes with fame, or relative fame, and with people whose work you greatly admire but that you would almost never meet in your entire life. Yet here, on Twitter, it’s like they are those living, breathing people, who pass their thoughts along into the Twitter-sphere like the rest of us.

The relationship between authors/writers and social networking is also changing our perception and idea of what exactly makes the writer/artist. And as the title of this post suggests (and the NYT article from which it came), the digital age is transforming the way we understand authorship. I, after all, am also a digital author, this website as my outlet for things that would only otherwise exist in my head or among my friends and family (who can only hear me ramble about some things so many times before tiring, understandably). This blog has changed the way I communicate with everyone around me, and so has Twitter. So it makes sense that it is doing the same thing to professional writers, authors, journalists, artists everywhere, best-sellers or no. Some authors become humorists on Twitter, as it becomes an outlet for personas they didn’t have an outlet for elsewhere. The internet is well-known to affect people’s actual or perceived personas. The fascinating New York Times article on authors tweeting is well worth your time:

At their best, social media democratize literature and demystify the writing process. As Suzanne Fischer tweets of following her favorite author, “It’s fascinating to learn what an unsettling & emotional process it is for her to write characters into the world.” When that mythic author comes down for a chat, she gets followers.

Some of my favorite people to follow on Twitter:

@patricox / Patrick Cox, reporter for PRI’s The World, and creator/host of The World in Words podcast on all things language.

@elizabethlittle / Author Elizabeth Little. She has the best sense of humor. I think we would be excellent real-life friends.

@jenny8lee / Jennifer 8. Lee: Journalist, freelancer, author, Chinese-American. Her real middle name is 8.

“It starts with looking at growing cities in a positive way–not as diseases, but as concentrations of human energy to be organized and tapped.”

 

This series of photos accompanies the article I mention here, on urban living and the future of the planet. They are photographs of families in Seoul, South Korea, in their identical 150-square-foot living room spaces in the Evergreen Tower highrise. Of Seoul’s 24 million people, more than half live in highrises. Many consider them safer and a better investment for families than single-family dwellings. They are also vastly more energy efficient. Photos by Yeondoo Jung for National Geographic. 

 Last weekend I watched Contagion, a recent Hollywood rendition of what would happen to the planet and its people if there was a massive, contagious disease that wreaked devastation and death, spreading so quickly and aggressively that its MO was “figuring us out faster than we can figure it out.” Characters race against time in the film, doctors at the CDC (including Kate Winslet and Marion Cotillard), and other health institutes around the world, traveling and researching to find out what caused this outbreak and how to solve it, immunize against it.

And what do we learn about humanity? We are not nearly as orderly and respective to each other during crisis as the model Japanese refugees were during last year’s triple-crisis earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster. In fact, we panic, we flee, we become violent and kill each other to find food, to secure our own families. The scenes that play out as the epidemic spreads (and as fear spreads even more quickly) are terrifying and thought-provoking. What if this actually happened? Would many of us fall not by the hand of the disease that threatens, but by the hands of our own neighbors, in the spirit of the outrageous moment in which we find ourselves?

It’s not Oscar-worthy, per se, but I found the theoretical situation enthralling–precisely because it was also horrifying. I would not want to live through this kind of awful moment for humanity. Us at our very worst.

It also made me think about the structure of our world, and a recent article in National Geographic about the future of our planet, and how cities can save us. I agree wholeheartedly, that, rather than the festering dirty urban spaces they have often been perceived as (and actualized as) in history, cities offer us a sustainable option for the survival of seven billion people (and an estimated nine billion by 2050), as people living in cities tread lightly on the earth: “Their roads, sewers, and power lines are shorter. Their apartments take less energy to heat and cool. Most important: they drive less.” Denser populations in cities have the added effect of lessening our use of remaining green space, forests, and natural areas and reservations. Humans and the earth alike need these green spaces an essential survival components–for our human psyche, and for the earth, literal survival.

As cities become more and more the agent of our sustainable survival, they should not all expand as Atlanta did. Sprawl and the massive expansion of suburbs have not helped or lowered our dependency on large amounts of energy. James Howard Kunstler, a critic of suburbia, called Atlanta “a pulsating slime mold,” a quotation that did manage to be included in the Nat Geo article, luckily for us Atlantans. But Atlanta is a perfect example of terrible teamwork among metropolitan counties, who could not agree on a transit system that stretched throughout the area, and so we are heavily, begrudgingly, seemingly irreversibly dependent on our clogged highways.

Theorists have had ideas and arguments for and against how we should design our cities for hundreds of years. Greenbelts surrounding cities were one proposed plan for stopping city growth, when it was perceived that urban centers that were too big would eat up all remaining space outside their centers. But as this set definitive borders to what would be considered the city, “greenbelts had the effect of pushing people farther out, sometimes absurdly far,” says Peter Hall in the article, a planner and historian at University College London.

Brisilia, the planned capital of Brazil, was designed for 500,000 people; two million more now live beyond the lake and park that were supposed to block the city’s expansion. When you  try to stop urban growth, it seems, you just amplify sprawl.

…Other government policies, such as subsidies for highways and home ownership, have [also] coaxed the suburbs outward.

The argument then, and the solution as well, is that you don’t try to stop city growth. You try to stop the suburban sprawl, and have your citizens living closer to where they work and play. What has been happening with more and more use and dependency on oil to fuel our cars and big, suburban houses in the United States is happening on an ever-greater level as China and India develop, and their citizens want the same ideas of the affluent, consumer life. As this trend quickens its pace, a solution becomes more important than ever. History has not always favored the teeming urban center. It has been seen as corrupting of the mind, dirty, disease-ridden, and a slew of other things. Which are valid claims, especially, rightfully, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But there’s a valid twenty-first century reevaluation and outlook:

Developing cities will inevitably expand, says [Shlomo Angel, an urban planning professor at New York University and Princeton]. Somewhere between the anarchy that prevails in many today and the utopianism that has often characterized urban planning lies a modest kind of planning that could make a big difference. It requires looking ahead decades, Angel says, and reserving land, before the city grows over it, for parks and a dense grid of public transit corridors. It starts with looking at growing cities in a positive way–not as diseases, but as concentrations of human energy to be organized and tapped. 

So we need to begin thinking about our cities as our saviors, and thinking about it seriously, even if, as I began this cheery post, we also risk the same things that have always been risky about cities: we’re all really close together, sharing buses, subways, hallways, all manner of public spaces. An event like the one in Contagion isn’t impossible, and cities are not the best places to stay if that did occur, as I was brutally reminded during the film. But Hollywood has not convinced me that the argument for cities isn’t worth our investment of time, thought, money, and lifestyle.

I hope you enjoy peeking into these Seoul living rooms as much as I did. It was one of my favorite series of photographs to ever appear in the magazine. There’s something so universal about our living spaces. 

In another life, I could have been a doctor, a medical researcher, someone spending a lifetime in the lab finding ways, meanings, solutions to diseases and maladies. I say this because I find medical history, the progression and discovery and trials and missteps, to be wildly fascinating (but honestly, fascination doesn’t equal brilliance in that field, let me be honest with myself). Part of it is the race-against-time nature of finding a cure for a sick person, or many sick people. It makes for a fast-paced kind of real-life mystery, and can also break your heart more effectively than any love story or fictitious depiction of loss, heartache, grief.

It is real human drama, watching medical history unfold, shuddering at the things we did to treat cancer just sixty years ago (like place rods of radioactive chemo medicine up a woman’s vagina to treat cervical cancer–in the case of Henrietta Lacks in 1951). It is vivid human drama seeing thousands of gay men die of mysterious diseases, all with the same immune deficiency, the massive epidemic only seriously considered and properly funded after heterosexual people began getting it, and dying from it (HIV/AIDS).

Almost without conscious thought, I have read three books in the last six months on medical history, all three enthralling, and with stunning casts of characters–doctors, researchers, patients, government and elected officials, journalists, insurance companies. We sit on the other end of the story, knowing what “happens” at the end of the sagas and what has evolved in the field of medicine and disease control, and this gives us an advantage on the people whose lives, discoveries, and decisions play out for us on the pages of history. We know which procedures will end badly, or which will prove miraculous cures, or which doctors and politicians will later be discredited or heralded as heroes.

It is almost the same way we look at medical practices now, imagining ourselves on the very cusp, the cutting edge of innovation, or medical breakthroughs, of cures and solutions without error. But we are humans, created procedures on solid research data, but apt to err all the same.  Shannon Brownlee, author of Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer, gets to just that point in how we view the medical field, some impenetrable, foolproof tower, and tribute to human medical achievement:

… We live in the age of science, after all. We think the difference between experimental and standard care is well-defined; that doctors adopt new medical advances on the basis of valid evidence; that new treatments represent improvement over the old. We look back at the history of medicine and its litter of discarded treatments with a sense of superiority, smug in our belief that superstition and ignorance have been banished from medicine. Until only a few generations ago, disease was thought to arise out of either an imbalance among the four humors or a contagion in the blood. Treatments were based on this faulty paradigm, and thus it seemed to follow, for example, that cutting a vein and letting the blood run out would rid the body of what ailed it and restore balance. Patients often did feel better after a bloodletting, or at least different, while the doctor could feel the satisfaction of having done what was right according to the prevailing conceptions of disease. We now know that bloodletting at best did nothing and at worst hastened death.

It is important, essential, to remember that we also lie within the timeline of medical history, as it unfolds and we learn more about disease, viruses, and the human body, and seek new methods of treating all three. The stories behind how we’ve gotten where we are now humble me, remind me of our fragility, our hubris, our good intentions–and not in an all-bad or all-good way. Modern medicine has improved our lives, given us the tools we need to protect ourselves from the things we can, saved the life of at least one person you know, and probably more than one.

Although it wasn’t very long ago, the United States medical field–both private and public players and pocketbooks involved–did an awful number on handling the HIV/AIDS crisis. Randy Shilts writes in And The Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic: “In those early years, the federal government viewed AIDS as a budget problem, local public health officials saw it as a political problem, gay leaders considered AIDS a public relations problem, and the news media regarded it as a homosexual problem that wouldn’t interest anybody else. Consequently, few confronted AIDS for what it was, a profoundly threatening medical crisis.” Shilts describes this as “a tale that bears telling, so that it will never happen again, to any people, anywhere.”

Our medical past certainly belies the mistakes and hardships that can occur no matter how “developed” and wealthy a society may be. And it is good to be aware of our humanity, and our mistakes, so that we don’t go thinking too much of ourselves. We’re far from the end of the tale of human medical science and discovery.

Reading list:

Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Randy Shilts, And The Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic

Shannon Brownlee, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer

Also, read a blog post about so-called “Patient Zero” of AIDS, Gaetan Dugas: “We all know the plague is coming”

 

I took French in high school over Spanish for a singular reason: West Laurens actually had a sister city in France, and did an exchange program every other year. In my junior year, my family hosted two French teenage boys in our home for a week, and then the people of Gerardmer, France returned the hosting favor half a year later.

It was my first time out of the country (besides an hour in Canada), and I was beyond excited. I had gotten my passport for this trip, and paid half of the $800 cost (split with my parents) with babysitting money. What I didn’t spend much money on was my digital camera, which would later be rejected by the student newspaper I worked for in college as being far too low of quality (at a whopping 3 mega pixels) to grace the pages of student-produced media. I bought the camera for the trip actually, and proceeded to play with the features, like sepia tone, which overran my France photo collection. Ben points out to me frequently (I know, Ben, I get it) that this is a dumb move, because you can always edit your photos to any kind of old sepia tone later, where as you cannot change it back to color after the fact. So, years later, many of these pictures exist, even in my memory, in their singular, sepia form.

But recently I went back and adjusted the white balance on many of them, which transformed them, becoming images of my journey that took on entirely new life, more than I had thought would be salvageable from these usually murky, low-resolution shots. I secretly love them all the more for being so low-tech. It’s like I was trying to edit them into vintage, when in fact, they already look that way.

These are some of my favorites from Paris. Gerardmer and Colmar posts to follow.

This is the abandoned carnival bit set up right across from the Eiffel Tower viewing point. It felt old.

I stayed on the bus to see the Tower, so my camera’s reflection in the window remains forevermore.

People-watching outside the Louvre, including the miles of park between it and the Champs-Élysées. Ladies, babies, boats, boys, and a wedding.

Paris from almost-the-top of the Eiffel Tower, and the graffiti-ed “Beware Pickpockets” sign in the elevator.

This was me, in Paris, only a few weeks after my 18th birthday

Chic lady and a Vogue Homme in Charles de Gaule Airport. I feel no one else likes this photo, but I do.

I just returned from a week in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where both sides of my family have their roots, and where I was raised. There are lots of lovely things I’d like to share, but for now, I just want to share this stunning bit of cold, bright, beauty.

2012 Goals

Find a full-time job. A real one, with a salary, in an urban area, and most importantly, in my field.

Graduate with my Master’s in Heritage Preservation (on track for May).

Requisite fitness goal: will exercise on a more regular basis, and cross train rather than just get on a cardio machine and wait out forty minutes.

Continue to foster and build my quilting skills, and maintain my creative time with fabric.

Finish my 365 project, I AM 365, on July 31, 2012. I’m five months’ in now.

Pay off my other credit card, finally, once and for all, be finished with consumer debt. Hope, hope, hopefully.

Save money. At least, spend less. (Getting more cliche as I go, right?)

Move. This is apparently on my list every year. I’ve moved in 2006, 2007, 2009, 2010, 2011. And I will be again in 2012. This year though, I have no idea where. Wherever they hire me. Fortunately my field tends to revolve around urban areas.

Long-arm quilt, for myself, the Single Girl quilt that I began the day after my 24th birthday last year. I decided I’m going to finish it by my 25th birthday, fitting. It’s my first real quilt for myself, a gift to my twenty-five years.

Pray; support causes I believe in; and give when I can, what I can. [Biggies: My parents' mission with Greater Europe Missions, LiNK (Liberty in North Korea), public radio and WABE]

Not freak out when I think of all the factors that can change the plans I’ve outlined. I’m kind of at a crossroads here, finally finishing school for good, seeking a real and meaningful job, in a relationship that has last nearly four years, trying to find where I will fit into this world in 2012.

I have read two articles in the last week whose arguments have begun with Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 essay The End of History, which argued that as we reached the final demise of the U.S.S.R., “liberal democracy had triumphed and become the undisputed evolutionary end point toward which every national system was inexorably moving: fundamental political ferment was over and done. Maybe yes, maybe no,” Vanity Fair‘s January 2012 issue reports.

In this first piece, “You Say You Want a Devolution,” the main crux is that in the last twenty years, we have remained in a stagnant state of cultural development. “In the arts and entertainment and style realms, this bizarre Groundhog Day stasis of the last 20 years or so feels like an end of cultural history.” Kurt Andersen points to our nostalgic gaze towards the past, and the way our architecture and automobiles have remained looking mostly the same since 1991. We also dress nearly the same. Hip-hop, the last genuinely new form of music, makes an unapologetic use of old music through sampling. Fine art, which recognizably depicted people for every century before the 20th, is back to respectably representing human forms again. “It’s the rare ‘new’ cultural artifact that dosen’t seem a lot like a cover version of something we’ve seen or heard before. Which means the very idea of datedness has lost the power it possessed during most of our lifetimes,” he writes. “In our Ben There Done That Mashup Age, nothing is obsolete, and nothing is really new; it’s all good.” There are two major reasons, he argues, for this stagnated cultural state:

Why is this happening? In some large measure, I think it’s an unconscious collective reaction to all the profound nonstop newness we’re experiencing on the tech and geopolitical and economic fronts. People have a limited capacity to embrace flux and strangeness and dissatisfaction, and right now we’re maxed out.

…The other part of the explanation is economic: like any lucrative capitalist sector, our massively scaled-up new style industry naturally seeks stability and predictability. Rapid and radical shifts in taste make it more expensive to do and can even threaten the existence of an enterprise. One reason automobile styling has changed so little these last two decades is because the industry has been struggling to survive, which made the perpetual big annual styling changes of the Golden Age a reducible business expense. Today, Starbucks doesn’t want to renovate its thousands of stores every few years. It blue jeans become unfashionable tomorrow, Old Navy would be in trouble. And so on. Capitalism may depend on perpetual creative destruction, but the last thing wants is their business to be the one creatively destroyed. Now that multi-billion-dollar enterprises have become style businesses and style businesses have become multi-billion-dollar enterprises, a massive damper has been placed on the general impetus for innovation and change.

He goes on to ponder what this cultural moment–frozen mostly for the last 20 years–means for western civilizations as a whole, for their existence and sustainability in the future. I am not convinced it spells anything like the end for the West. But, he has a compelling overall theory, and when you consider the photographs and comparisons through the years of our cultural changes–buildings, clothing, cars–you see he is absolutely spot-on.

I ear-marked the article and set the magazine in my current pile, and excitedly picked up Time magazine’s Person of the Year issue, which features, for 2011, The Protestor as the Person of the Year. Absolutely the right call–that’s the only “Person” we could choose to represent this amazing, tumultuous year.

And wouldn’t you know, the lead article begins its discussion, its explanation of this 2011, with the exact same Fukuyama theory, explained in The End of History, this “end” theoretically beginning around 1990. Then, only as I went to write about both of these articles and t he impact they’ve had on me as I reflect back over this year and its events, did I realize both are written by the same man, Kurt Andersen. Of course, that explains the similar thought process, and the similar sources of influence as Andersen himself was reflecting back over the year 2011.

The Time article has a more optimistic overture, even while explaining that there is no saying where the future will lead, after this year of tumult and protesting, and voices exploding over the things wrong with the world, all over the world. He points out several things that never occurred to me, things that make 2011 distinct from any other year in the last twenty, since the theoretical “end of history,” and that make it distinct from any other year since 1968, and–he argues–even farther back in history.

Once upon a time, when major news events were chronicled strcitly by professionals and printed on paper or transmitted through the air by the few for the masses, protestors were prime makers of history. Back then, when citizen multitudes took to the streets without weapons to declare themselves opposed, it was the very definition of news.–vivid, important, often consequential. In the 1960s in America, they marched for civil rights and against the Vietnam War; in the ’70s, they rose up in Iran and Portugal; in the ’80s, they spoke out against nuclear weapons in the U.S. and Europe, against Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, against communist tyranny in Tiananmen Square and Eastern Europe. Protest was the natural continuation of politics by other means.

Then came the End of History, summed up by Francis Fukuyama’s influential 1989 essay… The two decades beginning in 1991 witnessed the greatest rise in living standards that the world has ever known. Credit was easy, complacency and apathy were rife, and street protests looked like pointless emotional sideshows–obsolete, quaint, the equivalent of calvary to mid-20th-century war. The rare large demonstrations in the rich world seemed ineffectual and irrelevant. (See the Battle of Seattle, 1999.)

It is stunning that I had never thought of this before, because in my history classes and even in simple living in this world, I have often thought of the protests of old as exactly that, as relics of eras gone past, a people, a group, a generation more connected, more concerned, and more committed to bringing change and making a difference than anything my generation could or would ever see. It seemed complacency had replaced this spirit of fighting, caring, standing up against The Man.

And then 2011 came out of nowhere. Spontaneous protests, beginning with a fruit vendor in Tunisia last December, and his death on January 4, 2011, snowballed around the globe, North Africa and the Middle East, in Europe, Asia, North America. But, historically, it was right on time:

In short, 2011 was unlike any year since 1989–but more extraordinary, more global, more democratic, since in ’89 the regime disintegrations were all the result of a single disintegration at headquarters, one big switch pulled in Moscow that cut off the power throughout the system. So 2011 was unlike any year since 1968–but more consequential because more protestors have more skin in the game. Their protests weren’t part of a counterculture pageant, as in ’68, and rapidly morphed into full-fledged rebellions, bringing down regimes and immediately changing the course of history. It was, in other words, unlike anything in any of our lifetimes, probably unlike any year since 1848, when one street protest in Paris blossomed into a three-day revolution that turned a monarchy into a republican democracy and then–within weeks, thanks in part to new technologies (telegraphy, railroads, rotary printing presses)–inspired an unstoppable cascade of protest and insurrection in Munich, Berlin, Vienna, Milan, Venice, and dozens of other places across Europe, as well as huge peaceful demonstrations of democratic solidarity in New York that marched down Broadway and occupied a public park a few blocks north of Wall Street. How perfect that the German word Zeitgeist was transplanted into English in the unprecedented, uncanny year of insurrection.

That’s an extraordinary paragraph to consider. How 2011 is unlike anything we’ve seen in many, many dozens of years–arguably since 1848! Also, I finally had to look up the root of the word zeitgeist, as too many intellectuals and writers have been brandishing that thing around, and it means, “the spirit of the day.” In fact, 2011 has a very distinct spirit, changing the course of what all the years to follow might hold.

This year has made many commentators reconsider things they thought were political, social, academic truths. I took several courses during my undergraduate years on global politics, and especially on Southeast Asia (India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh), and East Asia (China, Japan, Koreas, etc.), and what we spent a lot of time discussing was the misconceptions our own countrymen had been laboring under as they sparked the last decade of war, and many of the current skirmishes we continue to manage. A lot of those class sessions might involve some serious reconsideration after all, and eating of our words, as we see the demands and freedoms protestors are asking for now, in this moment, themselves. No matter your opinions on the wars we have been fighting, it has been pretty stunning to see the events unfolding, lead by those citizens of the nations, who may want the same things as us, after all. Where these revolutions head now, only time will tell. But it has been an incredible year.

I think what Andersen has done best, with both of these pieces in separate magazines, has been to show how we are simultaneously experiencing everything the same and nothing the same. And for some reason, this contradiction makes perfect sense. Reading these two articles almost back-to-back (absolutely unintentionally), one reads as a cautionary tale of a western culture gone a bit stale, the other as a means by which to rediscover ourselves, our values, and what is important in this life. And this year has been the perfect one in which to discover both these truths about ourselves, and to seek to bring them together harmoniously, using them for renewal, reaction, redemption, reward in years to come.

I have been fascinated by Ai Weiwei, the 54-year-old provocative artist and voice of dissidence in China, since May, when I heard an interview with his English translator on one of the my favorite podcasts. He was detained and questioned and kept by the government for 81 days this year, after his blog incited uproar from citizens who agreed and officials who saw him as a dangerous beacon. A tumultuous year has left him listed as one of Time magazine’s People of the Year, as “The Dissident.”

I find him interesting in his amorphous and fluid form and interpretation of art, connecting what we think of as “Art” with unconvention and with blogging and microblogging (i.e. Twitter and very brief forms of connecting online), combining his artistic impulses with his gift for words, writing pithy and prophetic bits. That’s a kind of artistry I greatly admire, especially in the face of the Chinese State And All Its Men. There is quite a difference–and a kind of bold bravery I cannot imagine–between being an artist in a free and functioning democracy and being an outspoken artist in a state which does not value or embrace free speech, open access to information, or the fullest extent of self-expression–even if it means criticizing the men upstairs.

In his Time interview he was asked “What would you like to see in China?” This was part of his brilliantly explained answer:

We need clear rules to play the game. We need to have respect for the law. If you play a chess game but after two or three moves you change the rules, how can people play with you? Of course you will win, but after 60 years you will still be a bad chess player because you never meet anyone who can challenge you. What kind of game is that? Is it interesting? I’m sure the people who put me in jail, they’re so tired. This game is not right, but who is going to say, ‘Hey, let’s play fairly’?

I’ve been studying China, Chinese politics, language, culture and history, for more than six years now, and my own thoughts on its political system have shifted at times between the two most polar ends of the argument: that either the “Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics” official plan has merit, is working, can improve and continue; or that China will inevitably give way democracy because it has already given much up to a free market economic system, and its people still hold memories of the extreme poverty and problems that stemmed from early plans in the early years after the Communist Revolution. People–around the world–have spent much time waxing on the future of China’s political system. No one has explained its crucial fissure in its system so well as Ai Weiwei, himself a son of China, and the actual son of a revolutionary poet.