Democracy Is Not a Spectator Sport

Best things in life are free and my current favorite T-shirt proves it.

I kept hitting my head against the wall trying to put Howard Zinn and Massive Attack in one sentence. Oh, I guess I just did...

Professor Zinn's presence in and around my alma mater was too sentimental and I felt as if I had lost a mentor when the world lost him in January of this year. He was one of the main reasons why I attended BU, being introduced to him during a high school World History class. I took my first college date to his annual lecture in 2006, after which we turned the occasion into a special ritual to commemorate our anniversary.

Then there is Massive Attack who are still here, still rocking steady. Music has been my preferred medium for expression of radical ideas for a long time and last month's show was a sweet surprise. When the video installations rolled Howard Zinn's pearls of wisdom, something inside me shook so violently that at last, I was able to find outward expression of the dormant hunger for justice. All that was left to do was to act on the impulse to create, to destroy, to seek and to simply to do, act, work towards something meaningful. So I danced. I danced even more fiercely, and I hoped. I hoped that I wasn't alone in the crowd packed venue, ripping by the mad force that were the fanatic, maniacal Massive Attack fans. I hoped that they read what I was reading, that they saw what I was seeing. And that they knew what they needed to do more than I understood then or can fully comprehend now.

Synthetic, Artificial, Sci-fi and Cool

On a regular basis, I go back and forth arguing with friends on the impact of today's discoveries. We brush aside the much-publicized moral dilemmas and focus on the juggernaut, the coolness aspect of each innovation. In the end, whether we speak of genetically modified fruit in our insipid mango juice or the creators of the first synthetic cell, the new rock stars you may say, we seem to agree that the mass consumer will embrace the new as easily as they brush aside the old. But there's a catch. There is one condition - how to prove that the synthetically created, cloned or artificially modified product is just as good if not better than the natural, preservative-free, untouched one? Marketing helps, but preconceived notions are not easy to shake and for a reason too. I, as a consumer, could not care less where or how my food is produced if I couldn't tell the difference; moreover, if I knew for a fact that the new product is enhanced with vitamins without a single side effect much like its good old naturally-born prototype, I'll be the first one in line at the grocery store (a place I still dread to this day). To elaborate, I feel constantly cheated when I shop and know what food labels hide from me as if I were a character from Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" consciously choosing to ignore the truth. There are too many things that are wrong with our society and I need to pick my battles after all!