I found a new place to stash my work. It’s vastly more clean and nice than the other sites I’ve tried. If you are a designer or photographer, I’d suggest looking into this place. Cargocollective.com features the cleanest interface I’ve seen, with simple uploading and maintenance tools. They have a handful of CSS-based templates to use and edit. Of course, you can always create your own from scratch.
Hi China,
I’m just a silly American living in Atlanta Georgia, so forgive me if my thought process seems somehow naive and simplistic to you. You are a gigantic country with 1.3 billion people. I’m one 31-year old graphic artist dude typing on a computer. My blog gets very little hits, so I assume nobody will read this. However, it feels nice to get things off my chest when I’m a little angry.
It’s pretty much common knowledge that you have a tendency to imprison, torture and execute those citizens whom you feel don’t live according to your ideologies. I’m speaking particularly about Tibet, a country whose major export is Buddhism, a philosophy that could be regarded as a genius approach to increasing mental health, promoting peace and personal awareness. Since you don’t really seem to believe in a sense of self, and instead are more pro-collective, I guess I can understand your under-appreciation for this, however much that goes against all natural human impulse. But does it justify harming human beings because they support this? Already your country seems to be water-winging it in the capitalist kiddie pool. The more this spreads, (and it invariably does) and the more you want to be a real player in the world at large, the more the rest of us are going to point our fingers at you.
But let’s forget that. You seem to be a culture that thrives on efficiency and doing what makes sense. What I want to know is this: Is harming people because they don’t agree with you really working? I mean, if you execute someone for questioning you in a blog, as I am doing now, does that person’s death aid your country in some way? Does killing untold numbers of Tibetans help your country? Has that sort of campaign EVER helped a country prosper? In a way, we’re doing this in Iraq right now, and I can’t see how a million dead Iraqis are helping our country succeed in the long run or the short run. And in that whole vein, do you think it would do any good if you could somehow extradite me from the US and throw me in one of your prisons? With just a little effort, I could speak out louder against you from thousands of miles away than a handful of your own citizens could from right inside your borders.
China, your people are becoming more educated and individually successful by the day. The eventual natural byproduct of this is that they will desire a break from your control. This will increase until you reach a point where you have to decide to prosper and allow your people freedom, or stay in the dark shade of the light of the rest of the world’s industrialized nations and jealously guard a way of life that is basically a hill of shit to begin with.
Forgive me if my approach seems oversimplified. I’m only human.
As I have just moved to the Atlanta metro area from a medium-sized, economically divisive Northwest Florida city, the issues of class and diversity of thought smack me in the forehead every single day. I live in a sometimes rough, but pretty and culturally diverse neighborhood in the city, but work in a fairly bland, neutral, culturally lacking area in the suburbs to the north. I suppose you could solidly call it “middle class.” While I pursue what could be called a middle class income, I try to cultivate a way of thinking that is anything but. The pursuit of ultimate satisfaction and superficial dominance means death to a species that MUST swim to stay alive. But I look around me and see an awful lot of people who, despite the benefit of a university education, still have no idea how to think for themselves or what they should really be trying to become. The suburbs then, are a slow motion voluntary killing field of the psyche and serve as an effective means to corral the unthinking while they shop, disinfect their surroundings and wait to die. My sense of drama here is partially due to a healthy dose of selective misanthropy toward the ‘burbs that my childhood planted, and objective critical thinking as an adult cared for and harvested.
The post that follows is a direct quote from http://thoughtrenewal.blogspot.com. This line toward the end sums it up well and echoes something I have been saying for a while…that you are born into what you are, and you have to run like hell to get the escape velocity to achieve more:
The middle class have also deluded themselves into thinking that they are where they’re at because of their hard work. Most middle class folks thought they hit a double when in fact they were born on second base.
Poverty vs Middle vs World Class Thinking
The two greatest influencing factors on how we think (and thus how we live) are:
The types of books we read reflect how we think about ourselves. Are we constantly in “fantasy land” trying to escape reality by reading novels with little or no moral redeeming value? Or are we learning from history, engaging in personal development, and understanding how money and business works?
The types of people we associate with is also critical in how we think about ourselves and even where we end up in life. Take our income level, for example. Add up the annual salaries of your several closest friends and divide it by that number and you’ll likely have your annual income. We are who we hang around.
What this means is that we generally gravitate toward five broad categories of thinking and living based on the books we read and the people we hang around. According to Steven Siebold (author of 177 Mental Toughness Secrets of the World Class), those categories are poverty, working, middle, upper, and world class thinking.
Those with a poverty or working class mentality talk about (and mostly grumble about) the past. They are constantly blaming others for their failures, for not getting ahead, for their bad breaks in life. Could be a boss, a parent, a teacher. They got screwed over by someone and that’s why they are where they are at. It’s a victim mindset.
Those with a middle class mentality talk about other people - comparing up or down and always trying to position themselves a little better than their peers. It’s either keep up with the Joneses or it’s bragging about their latest toy. The middle class have also deluded themselves into thinking that they are where they’re at because of their hard work. Most middle class folks thought they hit a double when in fact they were born on second base.
Those with an upper, or better yet, world class mentality talk about ideas. They are always looking for ways to grow, increase, become better, build, influence more, impact more, do more, be more. And so they are reading books that help them think better. They associate with positive, excited people and avoid negative, limiting people.
Questions to Ponder:
I’ve been slaving away for weeks, revising and revising. I’m still not finished, but it’s at a great place, so up on the server it goes. If I can find some of my editorial layout and ad work, I’ll throw that in. Click here to download the PDF.