You can't help but have a deep appreciation and respect these days for the Power of Facebook, Skype video, and other means of virtual communication. Heck, it played a significant role in the Egyptian's peaceful overthrow of its government last week. No small thing.
But I remain troubled by it. I was in my local bike shop yesterday, Electric Bikes NW, to get a tune-up, and got to talking with Eric the owner, catching him just as he was heading home on his bike. We moved quickly from talking about bikes and into talking about the state of affairs in our world today, as seems to be our pattern. Eric has traveled much of the world, and is such a believer in self-reliance, that I think he must be 4th generation Amish. In between talking about the pluses and minuses of Obama and how corporations everywhere are hosing us, we got to talking about how easy it is to miss seeing the pain we cause to one another by our selfishness, ignorance, or just plain mean-spiritedness. We humans can act so nobly at times, and yet are such total bozos the next. I want us to design social systems that encourage us to tap into our Better Selves. Eric favors us all just voluntarily wising up and doing the right thing.
But how is it that we sometimes listen to our Better Angels, and others times just tell them to go to hell?
Family upbringing, religious/moral conviction, cultural norms all can be big influencers for doing the right thing. But even when these things pull us toward being a jerk, getting to know someone really different from ourselves, through meeting them face to face , can have a powerful, life-changing impact in changing how we see ourselves and others. It’s why I love to travel to unusual places like Iraq or India. Travel is the ultimate elixir that can turn a Muslim or gay basher into a Muslim or gay-accepter. or turn someone who thinks the poor are all lazy and need to pull themselves up by the bootstraps, into someone who finally decides that “there but for the Grace of god go I”.
I read a remarkable book some years ago, called Childhood's Future. It showed how our culture has dramatically shifted the past 40 years so that we no longer have to interact during the day with anyone who is in a different social or economic class. We can now go to our own private gym rather than a public park, travel in a private car to our private office without ever having to come in contact with others through public transportation. Even when we do enter public space, like on a subway or walking a downtown street, we can keep closed off to everyone else. I was walking on the streets of Amman Jordan last year, lost as usual, but the first 20 people I met on the street were walking alone, talking on their mobile or texting somebody. It felt intrusive to interrupt!
This is one more reason why the bike can be such a revolutionary tool. You are way closer to folks on the street with a bike than when in a car. And when we go somewhere, we can interact with all our senses, not just tweet with one. I went to a small town in Mexico recently and rented a bike for a day. At every turn, I seemed to meet and interact with folks along the way, waving, asking for directions, stopping frequently to look at some locally-made street art. The girl pictured here was producing her own art masterpiece, and then went on to explain its larger meaning to this gringo, while her mom worked nearby!. A bike, it seems to me, is just a small tidbit of technology that generates revolutions, even revolutions of the heart, if we use it well...
I like to write too, don’t get me wrong. Yet, while we can post blogs to each other all day, what really sticks with me as I write this was talking directly with Eric yesterday, the falling winter sun shining in his eyes, as we went back and forth, figuring out how to fix the world and ourselves....
I'd say more, but I gotta go, I haven’t had a chance to check in on my Facebook page today....
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