How can you be in two places at once....?

We’ve only been away from Portland for 9 months now, and the rate of change is evident - new buildings, new bridges etc.  I was reminded of the things I miss about Portland and Oregon - the people - friends and just random people on the street - they’re mostly comfortable and familiar, engaged and energetic. I miss the food, beer, wine, restaurants, grocery stores with righteous local kale and fruits and so forth. 

Away from the city during Cycle Oregon, out in the boonies, there was profound silence, stunning darkness and night skies that I don’t think are possible anywhere in Taiwan due to population density and general haze.  Fall is just starting - you can see it and feel it.  I don’t think there’s going to be much in the way of fall leaves in Taiwan  and the shift in the weather is likely to be a great deal more subtle - going from stupidly hot and humid to somewhat less hot and humid?  We’ll see and I’ll report back...

But while I was noticing all of the things I miss about Portland, I was also struck by the fact that I was far from home.  Taiwan is now, and for a while at least, fully home - we *live* there.  I was missing friends, missing the things that make it interesting, captivating and ever so occasionally frustrating - missing the noise and the lights and the scooter and road mayhem (seriously!).  I miss our apartment, and the view that we get from 22 stories up, I miss the food there (it’s different, but good), missing the jungle like vegetation, missing the challenges of navigating a foreign language and culture. 

I found myself chomping at the bit to get back to it and back to work on all of these new things - new work, new language, new culture, new home all the while feeling the pull of all that I miss and love about Portland and the larger Northwest. 

It will be interesting to see how and if this all changes over time - it’s all still so new for sure - 9 months isn’t that long.  Perhaps come my 2014 trip back for Cycle Oregon I’ll sing a different tune, we’ll see, and I’ll let you know how it feels a year later.

It is also interesting to consider the fact that I’m writing en route to Eastern Pennsylvania, where I lived from age 8 - 18.  Given that time of life, most people would identify that location as “home”.  Despite its good points, and the fact that family members are still there and close by, I don’t really feel like I’m going ‘home’ as such... It's certainly ‘home’ in the familial sense, but beyond that, not so much.   I guess me and that area just never really ‘clicked’.  I don’t type that with disdain or any kind of sneer - I don’t feel that I’m better than that place, nor do I harbor any ill feelings but I guess I feel that I don’t ‘fit’.

From a very early age it just wasn’t a place I saw myself staying - and in hindsight, my whole time there was a giant countdown calendar to when I could leave for points beyond, though I loved so much about where we lived - great woods to roam, good hills for sledding, a creek to play in during the summer - you name it, overall a great place to be a kid.

I feel fortunate to have lived a bunch of different places, and I’m grateful that I grew up in a family that moved around a bunch as  a result of my dad’s career.  I had it much easier than my brothers and sisters, I didn't move but once that I remembered, but I grew up in an environment open to new vistas and change.  As a result I have welcomed the opportunity to experience new places and make big changes.  And the time in Taiwan has been the biggest shift of them all thus far - and for that I’m also grateful.

Every breath you take, every move you make....

It’s been fascinating following the politics of Taiwan, there’s a bunch of interesting stuff going on at the moment.  Loads of controversy about a new trade pact with PRC that appears to me (and many Taiwanese) to be yet another sell out of Taiwan and its independence, and sovereignty  to the PRC.  There’s also a contentious effort to build another nuclear power plant, intra-party intrigue in the KMT, and the death of a soldier as a result of abuse by superiors.  

There have been numerous mass protests about these issues.  Ma Ying Jeo, the president is very unpopular and seems to be leading by decree, and the police have been pretty heavy handed at times dealing with protests.  Reading about this all I’m reminded regularly that this is still a *very* young democracy.  I was nearly finished with college when Martial law was finally ended, and they are clearly still dealing with vestiges of same.  Even more fascinating to me is that the KMT is the ruling party here... and the KMT was *the* (as in, only) political party during the whole of Martial law.  After all that happened during their reign (repression, massacres of dissenters etc) I’m astonished that they get any votes.  Why in the US, that’d be, oh, I don’t know,  like a bunch of neo-Confederates allying with remnants of the KKK to attempt to rule the US House of Representatives.....er, well, reality seems to have interrupted my attempt at metaphor, sadly.

When we first arrived here, I couldn’t help but notice how common surveillance cameras are at intersections.  These are not red light cameras as such, nor speed cameras (they have those too, but elsewhere).... no, these are run of the mill, collecting video of everything and everyone going by kind of cameras.  They’re on major streets, minor streets, in the cities, and in the middle of nowhere as well. 

A minor road, with camera....

And here's what it surveils?

After being here for a while, I hardly notice them anymore.  But reading about all of the NSA spying on American citizens and the lying, obfuscating and general attempts to minimize what is really going on, I couldn’t help start noticing them again.

I had a thought that I hadn’t seen anyone else share regarding US government spying and the larger changes in the US since 9/11.  So I wrote the following and posted it on Facebook:

Almost 12 years ago America’s authoritarian betters said that terrorists hated the US for its freedom.  So maybe it’s all been Aikido-like redirection since then?  I mean if you piss all over the Bill of Rights and destroy those freedoms then the terrorists have nothing to hate any longer and no reason to attack, right? 

Brilliant plan, except for the destruction of freedoms that were beautiful and noble in ideal if sadly not always fully and fairly applied to all.  It seems we’ve dropped the pretense to nobility and decided they just don’t apply to anyone anymore.  Hey look equality!  Whoo! USA! USA!

And for anyone thinking that the BS of the last 12 years has been necessary or helpful, I think Ben Franklin said it best: “Those who would give up essential Liberty to purchase a little temporary Safety deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

There were some interesting comments, including a question from a guy that asked what things I saw as being affronts to our rights.  He stressed that he agreed with me, and though I believe he has a number of political views that differ significantly from mine, I didn’t get the sense he was just trolling me.  So I responded with the following in answer to his query:

Most all of the First Amendment (separation of church and state, freedom of speech - “we need to watch what we say” said Ari Fleischer,  how about ‘free speech zones’... I was under the mistaken impression that the entire country was a ‘free speech zone’, freedom of the press,  freedom to peaceably gather (which is largely true only if you don’t mind pepper spray and baton blows to the head), the Fourth Amendment (NSA, TSA), the Fifth Amendment (Jose Padilla, Guantanamo, due process violations and seizures in the ‘War on Drugs’, targeted, extra judicial killings of American citizens), the Sixth Amendment and the Eighth Amendment (people held indefinitely without charges, torture, months of solitary confinement for no justifiable reasons for Bradley Manning, Jose Padilla and others).  One might reasonably suggest elements of the Ninth Amendment especially if you are inclined to think that the founding fathers imagined a right to privacy (a reasonable inference given the content of the other Amendments and their writings, I would say).

I believe there is a case currently in process with real Third Amendment issues regarding the police demanding to occupy a private home to surveil a neighbor, so we’ll add that one in as a ‘maybe’ as I haven’t researched it to say for sure.

While not in the Bill of Rights, I’ll throw in another few key ideals pissed upon, like separation of powers, the idea that voting is a right not to be infringed upon for base political gain.  And lastly the increasing militarization and ‘us vs them’ policing practices of so many police forces across the nation.

So yeah,  it seems they’re really mere suggestions at this point, especially if ‘Terrorism/scary brown people/drugs/poor people/others we need to silence’ come in to play.  At this point it’s all kind of a ‘Quaint Notion’ if you will... bonus points if you know who used those words in  reference to what*.

Our modern technology affords us the chance to be very unprivate... like posting all of the above on Facebook, or writing a blog?!  In my case, very few people see it, but it’s available for anyone with an internet connection. I’m being pretty public and to a degree surveilling myself for all to see.  And yet the most crucial piece of all of this is that I’m choosing what to share, not having the NSA decide what I’m going to share (ie **everything**). 

Technology also affords the opportunity to gather, store, sort and access tremendous volumes of data.  Not that long ago you could walk around a place like Taiwan and see all of the surveillance cameras and think, with some justification, that they can’t actually be storing and monitoring all of this footage.  Now, storage is cheap, searching using facial recognition is possible and getting better all of the time.  When we consider other types of surveillance, searching databases of calls and emails is even easier and more focused.

As for the NSA, we’re living in an electronic fishbowl, where virtually everything you do electronically is likely being accessed and stored.  It’s really interesting to think back to how we viewed East Germany’s Stasi... it appears they had nothing on the NSA... and I don’t think that’s a particularly hyperbolic statement.   We keep hearing how the NSA has oversight (like a rubberstamp FISA court system or Congress) and trained professionals (at private contracting firms), and that they’re only looking for ‘Terrorists/bad guys’ (but it is curious, sad and painful, how the definition of Terrorist/bad guy seems to continually grow and expand. Besides the obvious loss of privacy from surveillance, here’s a fascinating article that details other pernicious effects such surveillance has:  http://www.theguardian.com/science/head-quarters/2013/aug/26/nsa-gchq-psychology-government-mass-surveillance

Sadly the US government has done a lot of awful things both to Americans and others through the years.  Despite these things, it seemed to me, from my very fortunate, white, middle class upbringing, that there were at least efforts made to live up to the ideals the country was founded upon.  It is clear that they have not been applied equally or always consistently, but yet they remained and endured as an ideal (again, it seemed to me).  But viewed through the lens of the last 12 years, I can’t really say that anymore - we’ve lost something and we need to work hard to get it back - not just to the rather imperfect place it was before September of 2001 - we need to work to get the US to *really* live up to the ideals upon which it was founded - and make those beautiful words and ideas real and lasting.