This is Reality:

I just read Colt's post about giving money to homeless folks on the street.

My morality, combined with my judgement, makes this a decently complicated situation. It doesn't even always apply to homeless people, though. I do remember a time when I was leaving after a movie with a friend at Ward, and a guy came up to me.

He told me he was just assigned to Schofield and that he needed 5 bucks to make his way there.

He wasn't in uniform.

What can you do in this situation? Yeah, I could've just lied, but aside from that...

I'm not sure what the threshold for my altruism is when in situations with strangers.

Sure, I'd take a bullet for a friend, but $5 dollars?

To a random guy who says he's military?

Not in uniform, no less?

I've been conned before. I gave money to a guy who insisted on needing money for food. Then I saw him buying booze with that same money 2 minutes later.

The fact of the matter is, generosity needs limits. Maybe it's because I'm a cynical bastard, but I'm not won over by overly optimistic feel-good situations. Like Colton, I'm not sure if giving money to a beggar makes me feel any better about anything. I'm pretty sure even if I had bought a 'genocide' shirt I would've rolled my eyes at anyone who told me I was "saving darfur". And, knowing me, I'm pretty sure I would not feel anything if I went into a slaughterhouse.

This isn't a very pretty example or answer to our essential question of "how should we live in this world?"

Take world peace. Logically, it should be possible. It should just be a simple matter of letting go of our preconceptions and losing some of the extreme prejudices that we apply to other people. So then why has the, for the lack of a better term, s*** hit the fan in the middle east? Why are the Palenstinians and Israelis even fighting? What's so difficult about a Palestinian state?

If only the answer was so easy.

I used to feel, in terms of world politics, that we should intervene to maintain some order in the Middle East.

Now I have moments where I feel that we should haul ass out of there and let that entire portion of the world systematically implode.

Right now, the United State's intervention process is basically a small, brittle plastic kayak.

The Middle East (Palestine, Iran, Iraq, etc.) is a Class-5 whitewater rapid system. Nice metaphor, right?

The US gov't is, apparently, showing evidence that Iran is supplying Shi'a groups in Iraq with explosive devices.

Why even bother? So what if we invaded Iran and made a mess of finding their WMD's? Apparently people are having a hard time pulling up similarities between this and Iraq.

As my friend Michael Minkin jokingly said whilst discussing Iran at open lab:

"We should just team up with Russia and nuke the crap out of everybody."

PS.


Speaking of reality, I was really...well, I'm not sure what the word is quite right now, but I was shocked to hear about Mr. Johnson's death. I feel that I should put this up here because I had him last year and he was a great teacher, but also a great person to just joke about with. I'm sure everyone has or has had a class where you watch the clock, hoping to get out. Well, Mr. Johnson was on the other side of the spectrum - I had a great time in bio. I'm not sure what's up with this year, but it's tragic that both Mr. Dahlquist and Mr. Johnson have passed away. I really do hope that his wife and daughter will be alright. You always do hear about these things, about people dying while swimming and stuff, but you never expect it to happen to someone you know - hell, it's practically a cliche. And to think, I said hi to him on Friday and looked at the pictures in his office. Man.

RIP