Hi. I’ve been paying attention to Occupy Wall Street. This evening, I had a chat with my girlfriend about the spontaneous eruption of democracy that is Occupy Wall Street. We had an idea I have to share with the rest of the 99% out there.

We create a new party where candidates agree to a much more specific job role during their political term. They would agree to:

• Inform the public of their progress as real time as possible. For example: live stream all meetings, post materials related to all votes, post video updates multiple times a day, etc.
• Vote on all issues using popular vote. Use some yet-to-be-built voting platform to collect votes from anyone who wishes to cast a vote. Something as reliable as Reddit or Digg is enough, and I have no doubt we could build something significantly better. I want to see something completely open source and distributed in nature.

My father wasn’t much of a “dad” to me in the traditional sense. We never played ball, he didn’t attend any of the my extracurricular activities, etc. If it wasn’t for my brothers, I might not have learned to ride a bike. When it finally came time for the birds and the bees conversation, dad seemed really nervous about it. The memory still makes me laugh a bit.

However, my old man was an amazing father. As a provider and a protector, he took care of his family. He was doing really well for himself in the 80s and decided to go into business for himself. Some bad timing and the total collapse of the oil industry put him into severe debt. My father never took the self pity path, he just got to work. Before he started his own company, he was already the fancy exec as well as company pilot. After his own company failed, the next job he landed was as a fuel truck driver. He worked hard, very hard, to rebuild his career and take care of his family. He took his trashed credit rating, bruised ego, and worked his way to a point where he and my mother are now retired to a beach front home in Mexico.

My dad is a hero to me in this way. It was only more recently that I realized what a hero my mother is as well. I do remember them fighting a bit during the hard times, but they saw it all through. My father grew up without a father, he had no real role model. He left him when he was 16 to get away from his abusive mother. To put it lightly, my father wasn’t always the best at being sensitive. Still, through feast a famine, my mother stuck by his side. I know she struggled at times. She went from fancy diamond rings to raising chickens in the back yard so we could survive off of eggs. She could have left, she could have looked for another man. She didn’t, she just jumped in and got her hands dirty too. They’re approaching 40 years of marriage together now.

Everyone likes to talk about what a problem attachment can be. Sure, you could say that my parents are very codependent. (Don’t tell my father that, he won’t like it much.) On the flip side, if you were witness to my life growing up, you could find many brilliant examples of how powerful a dedicated couple can be. My family built the home we lived in through my high school years. My parents lived in that home for over 15 years. We built that home from scratch, all by ourselves. To be completely fair, an extended family member was involved. My mother’s brother Tommy built and installed our kitchen cabinets.

Through thick and thin, my parents never gave up, they never surrendered. I took their bond for granted. I am now 34 years old and am taking on life independently. At least this time I am fortunate in that I’m sharing a living situation with some amazing house mates who feel like family. Maybe there’s a lesson here I have yet to learn before I’ll be ready to meet my own life long partner…

Everything I received, I asked for.

Thousands of voices are telling me what not to do.

Please, universe, send a little light of guidance?

Unless… I’m seeing it…

I brought her flowers on our first date. Turns out, she had a thing for orchids. I introduced her to sushi that night. I even remember the waitress. I used the perks of my job to impress her. I had a parking pass and access to a private basement arcade complete with a soda fountain. I knew she was the one when I heard her get all 4 ghosts in Miss Pacman. We had Amy’s ice cream. I had chocolate and she had vanilla with strawberries chopped in. While we walked down the street, I bumped her lightly with my shoulder. She asked if I did it because I wanted to touch her. I said yes. That night, she kissed me.

I don’t believe I had ever been so happy in my life. The rest of the story you’ll need to ask me in person… It becomes a complicated tragedy.

That was a decade ago. In March of this year, during a trial separation from her husband, all alone, Megan took her own life.

We had no friends in common. I was contacted by a stranger on Facebook who knew her well. He told me about the story of our first date in surprising detail. He was the only person with which I’ve been able to commiserate. He became the only other person I know who understands what made her so beautiful. In his own words, “she was pure light.”

I still have pieces of her artwork tucked away in a box. Tonight I looked at some photos from the last time I saw her (one is attached to this post). I thought about parts of our story I’ve avoided for a very long time. I’ve tried to write a blog post about her countless times during these past 6 months. I haven’t been able to finish one. Megan was always someone I could talk to. She was a true confidant. We’d often chat for hours every day, for months at a time. We had a very deep connection.

The whole of what’s happened in my life since her death is difficult for me to comprehend. I’ve changed my mind about how I’m living my life entirely. I’ve realized more options in life than I thought possible. I’ve started seeing people in different ways. I’ve realized things about myself.

However, in these past 6 months, I’ve also lost my job and my girlfriend. The job loss was unrelated. I’m not so sure about the girlfriend. My first date with that girlfriend was as beautiful, powerful, and unique as the one with Megan. For a year and a half, we made beautiful memories together. She’s gone from my life as well, she will not talk to me or see me. I didn’t always deal with situations the way I would have liked.

Today, I’m stable and healthy. I’m stronger today than I have been in a long time. I’m even fairly happy. Life is pretty good and I think I’ll remember these times well. It all still hurts a bit though.

For hours, a series of astonishing yet simple realizations pounded my awareness in the most violent of manors. My imagination poured with blood and rage as the most basic and most obviously integrated-bits of information finally formed together into a cohesive perception. The resolution was low and the data loss high, but there was a definite signal lock.

Perhaps it was too faint to know for sure.

This new perception slaughtered what was left of a beautiful feeling stored deep inside my soul. Beautiful, at least, in my attachment to it. A mental room faintly marked with a flicker of hope suddenly has no doors or windows. Not a single spirit remains standing in a space that was once, perhaps, a little crowded. In the center of this room is an alter to trust, resting silently now in pitch black.

And if this is life, if the signal reads clean, then the dream of salvia was not so much a nightmare but rather the reality. In the nightmare, there was nothing beyond I and I was all there is. In this room exists no one now but myself and it has been far too long since I held regular occupancy. Have I ever?

Something about this seems terribly terribly wrong. This gaping hole left in reality where the meaning falls out, into nothing. This can’t be reality? The purity and intensity of the irony would be far too great.

Is the illusion truly that grand? I certainly hope there’s noise in this signal.

The loss of my Nino as my partner in life was my breaking point. I fell deep into self pity for a while. I have amazing people in my life. Some tolerated my pity party while others gave me just the right direction I needed. Tonight I am extremely content with my life. Furthermore, I’m really excited about my future. I haven’t felt this way in some time.

I’ve had a series of profound realizations about why I am the way I am. They’ve finally come together to form a complete picture that I can work with. The confusion, not understanding why I was doing the things I kept doing, drove me nearly insane. For a while, I could truly see myself going the way of my dear friend Megan.

I have more trials ahead of me. I know what some of them will be. I was scared of them. In particular, I was scared to take them on myself. I realize now, that if I’m going to handle the heavy loads, I need solid ground under my feet. I’m the kind of guy who lives in the clouds. It’s easy for me to float away. I was just making plans to float on off to outter space.

Turns out, there’s a lot of really wonderful people down here on the ground and I just happened to be surrounded by a cluster of some particularly amazing people. I’m proud and grateful to be where I am right now, today. I love my job and my coworkers. I’m proud of the work I’ve done. I love my home and my house mates. I love me, the skills and knowledge I’ve developed, the way I’ve taken care of myself, and the uniqueness that makes me me.

One week ago, I couldn’t sleep or eat. I was begging the universe to give me back the things I lost. Tonight, I don’t miss them. There’s one thing, in particular, that I do hope comes back around, but my reasons are different now.

I’ve lost my fear and am left with nothing but happy. I’ve carried this with me for so long… but I feel like I finally released a demon. This blog entry barely begins to describe the joy.

In 2007, I was hired by a big name health and fitness company to develop an online community. The effort began well, but was quickly derailed by many of the most common mistakes that big companies seem to make. I departed the venture in 2008 and moved on to social media centric projects. I went back to check on their progress and found that the entire community, one that used to be hundreds of thousands of users strong, was wiped from the face of the Internet entirely.

I started sifting through my mental database of experience. I also had a couple of high level conversations about community building. Some of my contacts from the 2007 project have moved on to viable community and social media projects elsewhere. While thinking about the viability of these projects, I was suddenly struck with just how much the atmosphere has changed in the 15+ years since I first fell into the game.

One of my contacts, in particular, hit the nail on the head pretty hard when he mentioned sites like Facebook. Community development changed social networking came onto the scene in force. Now, successful community development plans need to include social media and networking giants. Furthermore, a highly successful community development project can exist entirely on top of the technology platforms provided by these giants.

The entire game is different now. It’s as if the open spaces of the Internet have all been industrialized. Now, instead of building in an open field, you have to find space in a high rise complex. Technology paths are seemingly locked down and users are settled into routines and assumptions that will be extremely difficult to crack. The major game players have establisehd themselves. Some are more stable than others, but the top dogs aren’t going away any time soon.

Is the world a better place now? No. We’ve shaken the world of copyrights and intellectual property. We’ve create new ways to create and share information and media. We’ve empowered people with new technologies. We’ve done a lot of good things. However, if you look at the big picture, the revolution of the Internet has had precious little impact. Propaganda and misinformation are still rampant. Our online experience is still heavily controlled by large corporations. Our connectivity is grossly overpriced. The entire system is laden heavily with scammers, liars, cheaters, and manipulators.

Not only are citizens around the world being heavily fined for violating the intellectual property rights of major corpporations, but major corporations are making profits by respinning the intellectual property the masses are freely creating for them. We don’t own our data, sites like Facebook and Youtube own our data. It is nice that more and more people are beginning to question how and why the system is what it is. Still, there’s precious little momentum for change and what momentum that exists is on the decline.

We’re still mostly a world of consumers. One has but to compare the number of people passionate about the Free Culture movement to the number of people passioante about the iPad to clearly see just how far we are from evolving. We humans spread out from Africa. We constantly discovered new wonderful places to explore and develop. We took rich natural wonders and turned them into poluted cities full of crime and noise. We slashed, burned, dug, and paved our way into our modern metropolis while precious few wrote utopian stories of how things could be. When we finally got the the digital open spaces of the Internet, we treated it the same way.

I figure… if we haven’t figured this out before we leave this planet, we’re going to do the same thing to the Moon, to Mars, and where whatever else we manage to touch.

And that’s how some people want to approach the issue of illegal immigrants in the USA. Everything I know and understand about life aligns clearly to say that building a wall between the US and Mexico is a horrible idea. It’s not like Mexico is mounting an attack and we have to defend the castle. They’re sneaking into the country to find jobs. To cover the issue from my own perspective, I’ll offer three planks and then a plan.

Plank 1: The actual problem.

The most widespread problem with illegal immigrants is the notion that they are a cost burden on government funded social services. This is a legit issue, but it’s also an overly exaggerated issue. There’s also a pile of attached issues that fall out of immigrants being “out of the system.” As an example, an undocumented immigrant can’t obtain a license to drive nor insurance – leading to an increase in uninsured motorists.

Plank 2: Recent rise in illegal immigrants.

From my own memory, illegal immigrants were considered more of a “resource” in the early 90′s, rather than a burden. In any significantly large southern city you’d find a street corner were mostly Hispanic laborers would gather waiting to snag a job. Somewhere around the turn of the millenium it seemed that the attitude shifted. It also seemed that the numbers of illegal immigrants what on a rapid rise. It seemed this way because it was on the rise. After 9/11, the number of illegal immigrants coming into the US increased well over 20%.

Plank 3: We made legal immigration harder.

Something else happened right around 9/11 that just might relate to that huge increase in illegal immigrants. The US made it significantly harder to legally come work in the US. You can find out about some of this here and here and here. It does seem logical that making it harder to do something illegally might increase the number of people doing it illegally. Take, for example, our completely failed war on drugs.

Solution: An easy legal path.

Immigrants flock to the US for one main reason – opportunity. Illegal immigrants take low paying labor intensive jobs. These are jobs that Americans, no matter what they claim, generally don’t want. To the laborers, these jobs provide better income than what they’re able to find at home. If we lose all of these laborers, I strongly believe it will increase the cost of goods and services across the board. Regardless, building a wall and increasing the amount of man power at the borders has not only cost us enormous amounts of money, but it has completely failed. More ironic is the fact that, as our economy tumbles, we’re seeing far fewer illegal immigrants. Unfortunately, we need them now more than ever.

Given all of this, why not create an easy to access foreign worker program. This isn’t a new idea. In fact, it was proposed by George Bush. This was the Bush plan previous to 9/11 and was related to NAFTA. Such a program could make it easy to document and track workers. This would create a system where we can regulate access to social services and track the impact of migrant workers.

Wrap Up

The problem is that we’ve resisted the flow instead of working with the flow. Any surfer or martial artist knows what happens when you try to fight a flow of energy much larger than your own. It’s a huge investment. However, catching the wave can take you on a ride you could never otherwise achieve. Unfortunately, I think that most of the public discourse on illegal immigration has turned into petty racial hatred and blaming. When so many lives are negatively impacted, the way our economic slump has done to so many, folks really want someone else to be angry at. Getting “tough” on illegal immigrants is like going outside and kicking the dog when you get mad at your spouse. If we use this negative energy to create our immigration reform, like what we’ve seen in Arizona, we’ll only be digging a deeper hole.

Having completed the course, all we need to do is give the DMV a few dollars and we’ll be ready to hit the streets. Well, first I’ll have to actually buy a bike. That will be a whole new adventure.