Alphabet, Inc

Hello everyone,

I am aware that it has been a while. I am still alive, albeit quite a bit colder than I was three weeks ago. I haven't written because I've been a little busy. What have I been busy with, you ask? Thank goodness for electronic mail.

First (and least importantly), I saw Wicked 2. I have not seen the first edition of Wicked, but I did get it explained to me, so I was 100% filled in and knew exactly what was going on. Alphabet is wicked because she is green, but she's the only one who knows how to read the Grimace Shake. F-boyero is in love with her even though he's engaged to Ariana Galinda, who secretly knows about the whole situation with Alphabet and Ozzy but can't publicly reveal herself. Alphabet and Ariana Galinda are friends from Shiz. Then Alphabet's little sister, Musty Rose, gets killed. She was in love with a Munchkin (she is not a Munchkin herself, learned that the hard way) and she's a little bit scarily obsessed with him, but doesn't know that he was in love with Ariana Galinda. Alphabet goes X-Games mode on a bunch of people cause Dorothy ragebaited her by stealing her sisters sentimental shoes (even though she couldn't walk, she was both in a wheelchair and dead, but reasonable crashout by Alphabet), even though Ariana Galinda lowkey gave them to her. Ariana Galinda crashes out on Alphabet for stealing her huzz (valid), but then Alphabet fakes her death by letting Dorothy think she killed her and runs away with F-boyero. Oh, and I guess some animals got freed at some point. All cause of some ugly pair of heel click shoes that weren't even red.

Also, if I have to hear the phrase "clock-tick" one. More. Time. I am going to have an Alphabet-level crashout too.

Other than my surface level analysis, I thought there were some interesting rhetorical points raised in the work. There is a scene in which Alphabet and Ariana Galinda are talking to Ozzy and he tells them that the truth isn't what's true, it's what people believe. Sometimes people aren't telling you what's true, they're just saying what people believe. If that's how it works, then what's the difference? I like how Philip K Dick says it: "Reality is that which, when you've stopped believing in it, doesn't go away." This relates well to a lot of things I've studied lately.

I watched two very good movies recently, and both of them were so incredibly good. I can't explain how good they were, but I'll try.

The first was The Shawshank Redemption. This film follows a man named Andy, wrongly jailed for the murder of his wife. He meets other prisoners who really did commit murders, including Red, an older man who has quite a while left in his sentence. They quickly become friends. Andy takes everything given to him without complaint, and maintains hope that his name will eventually be cleared. He braves abuse to talk to guards until he gets on their good side. An older prisoner is released from his life sentence and commits suicide because he can't handle the pressure of being free. Eventually, his background in banking becomes a tool for corruption. After a prisoner arrives who has evidence for his wife's actual murder and is ignored (and murdered) by the warden, he takes matters into his own hands. He escapes through a tunnel he had been digging for years and withdraws all the illegitimate funds that he stole from his prison. He leaves some for Red, who is released later.

The movie is an excellent commentary on the prison situation in the United States and on the idea of justice as a whole. What is fair isn't always what it seems, as these prisoners were forced to endure far worse than they ever thought they would. If you play the objective justice game, you don't want to feel bad, because they retain their lives. The film does a great job at generating empathy for the human condition and an enmity towards institutions that strip that away. There was no good guy in this movie, only people with different types of actions.

The second movie also centered around an institutional problem: the situation with banks and traders in the years leading up to the 2008 housing crash. The common American did not set up the problem that they were forced to deal with. Like in Shawshank Redemption, otherwise normal people were taken advantage of by those in a higher echelon, whether through lies, coercion, or being preyed upon for their ignorance. Immigrants signed horribly flawed loans. Bankers kept money bet on the fact that those people would pay their mortgages. Nobody won. The only people who escaped with a profit were those who were willing to bet on the total failure of an entire society. They got rich, but they weren't excited about it. They were right, which meant widespread suffering. 

I was born in 2005. I had my 3rd birthday that summer. I couldn't care less about a housing crisis because I was completely ignorant to it. 

I find ignorance to be a very hard concept. There is so much suffering in the world, it is hard to condemn those who choose not to acknowledge it. I don't have the ability to do that; I have no choice but to see those problems, and sometimes I envy those who can live and never pay attention to everything. I wish that I could ignore things and trust that everything will work out, but I don't. Instead, I trust that I will do the best I can with what's there. I know that I think things through and that I will make the best choices when I can. I also think that if more of the world was willing to do that, there would be fewer problems. Sometimes, one must forget their ignorance and forget their own happiness to make the most informed choice they can. Hope isn't enough. You have to experience things, even bad things, so that you can know you're doing the best you can. If you live in perpetual financial security, you'll never support a charity. If you don't meet people different from you, you'll never vote on their behalf, you'll never condemn prejudice, and you'll never feel comfortable interacting with them. Confronting uncomfortable beliefs is also how you find your own. You will rarely realize someone else was right, but you should often realize that you were wrong. Being right isn't always a good thing. If you're right because 6 million people lost their homes and the world economy tanked, was that a good thing? Didn't think so.

We visited Normandy this last week. It was very cool. The weather was insane, with crazy rain and very strong wind. Of course I still went for walks outside and walked on the beach. Nobody wanted to go with me, but I didn't care. Who else can say they played their harmonica on Omaha Beach? Just me.

I was walking in the cemetery of all of the American soldiers and thought, "oh, it would be interesting if I saw someone's last name that I knew, I doubt it will happen though, since you can only read the closest ones." Just as I thought that, I looked up. My name was on the grave. Well, as close as it could possibly be. The man's name was William Otto. It stopped me in my tracks and my heart sank.

He was an engineer. He died not long after D-Day, on a day with minimal action. He was reported missing after a potential skirmish with a few leftover German soldiers in the area. He didn't even get to go home afterwards to his wife, and they didn't have any children. His obituary mentioned how much he hated the war and how he felt very torn in his participation in it. He missed his home and didn't want to kill anyone else, but he understood that the institution of Nazi Germany was evil.

I felt very similar to this fellow. It was like looking at my own corpse. I hate war. I'm some kind of engineer. I don't have a wife, but I hope to someday, and here was a guy whose beliefs I understood. He was dead and I wasn't. In one small, unreported incident, his experiences were stopped short and snippd from the fabric of life. He was only a few years older than I am. It was terrifying to realize that the only differences between me and this guy were that I was born in 2005 and didn't have an extra O at the end of my name. It was especially scary to recognize that they didn't see it coming. I am very lucky that I have yet to be put in a box and shipped toward my potential death. 

I've thought a lot about intentional suffering recently. With all of this death and sadness in the world, there is enough without you adding to it. People shouldn't make things harder than they have to be. It makes me sad when I see people piling on expectations, holding themselves to very high standards, or intentionally making things harder for themselves just because they think things aren't hard enough. There seems to be an attitude amongst many people my age that they need to be struggling to be doing it "right". I don't think that's true. I think that people should minimize the pain they go through and inflict on each other. More importantly, don't make other people work harder just because you are. Don't add stress for other people just because you deem their lives too easy.

Anyways, that's probably all. This sat in my drafts for like a week so I should probably just send it.

-william