Every time I see this quote I realize how poor even very smart people are at looking at the long game and at assessing these things in context.
One of my favourite illustrations of this was in a First Aid class. The instructor was a working paramedic. He asked, “Who here knows the stats on CPR? What percentage of people are saved by CPR outside a hospital?”
I happen to know but I’m trying not to be a TOTAL know it all in this class so I wait. And people guess 50% and he says, “Lower,” and 20% and so forth and eventually I sort of half put up my hand and I guess I had The Face because he eventually looked at me and said, “You know, don’t you.”
“My mom’s a doc,” I said. He gave me a “so say it” gesture and I said, “Four to ten percent depending on your sources.”
Everyone else looked surprised and horrified.
And the paramedic said, “We’re gonna talk a bit about some details of those figures* but first I want to talk about just this: when do you do CPR?”
The class dutifully replies: when someone is unconscious, not breathing, and has no pulse.
“What do we call someone who is unconscious, not breathing, and has no pulse?”
The class tries to figure out what the trick question is so I jump over the long pause and say, “A corpse.”
“Right,” says the paramedic. “Someone who isn’t breathing and has no heartbeat is dead. So what I’m telling you is that with this technique you have a 4-10% chance of raising the dead.”
So no, artists did not stop the Vietnam War from happening with the sheer Power of Art. The forces driving that military intervention were huge, had generations of momentum and are actually pretty damn complicated.
But if you think the mass rejection of the war was as meaningless as a soufflé – well.
Try sitting here for ten seconds and imagining where we’d be if the entire intellectual and artistic drive of the culture had been FOR the war. If everyone thought it was a GREAT IDEA.
What the whole world would look like.
Four-to-ten percent means that ninety to ninety-six percent of the time – more than nine times out of ten – CPR will do nothing, but that one time you’ll be in the company of someone worshipped as an incarnate god.
If you think the artists and performers attacking and showing up people like Donald Trump is meaningless try imagining a version of the world wherein they weren’t there.
(*if you’re curious: those stats count EVERY reported case of CPR, while the effectiveness of it is extremely time-related. With those who have had continuous CPR from the SECOND they went down, the number is actually above 80%. It drops hugely every 30 seconds from then on. When you count ALL cases you count cases where the person has already been down several minutes but a bystander still starts CPR, which affects the stats)
Also, the custard pie has gravity on its side. Something falling from six feet up plus the height of the person dropping it (assuming they’re at the top of the stepladder), has a hell of a lot more force behind it than one that just sits there and does nothing.
Yes, I tend to take metaphors literally.
Which means you still TRY, you give it everything you have, because you might just make a difference, and this is where reblogging comes in, this is where quantum theory gets involved. How? Because small actions can have huge impact. Reblog that post you believe in, reach your followers, spread the word. THINK DR WHO. THINK THE LATEST EPISODE. THINK ROSA PARKS. One small act of resistance sparks change. One voice joins all the others until there are millions of voices all saying the same thing, until they have to be heard. If they are not there, then nothing will be done. So vote. Use your constitutional right to make a difference. If you don’t, then nothing will change. If you do, then things might change, they might not, but ask yourself, can you risk it? So, that person who just drops dead in front of you, are you going to ignore that person because the odds are against you succeeding at CPR? Or will you risk the chance that you could be in the 4% to bring them back?
To quote Gimli in LotR, “Certainty of death. Small chance of success. What are we waiting for?”
Every time I see this quote I realize how poor even very smart people are at looking at the long game and at assessing these things in context.
One of my favourite illustrations of this was in a First Aid class. The instructor was a working paramedic. He asked, “Who here knows the stats on CPR? What percentage of people are saved by CPR outside a hospital?”
I happen to know but I’m trying not to be a TOTAL know it all in this class so I wait. And people guess 50% and he says, “Lower,” and 20% and so forth and eventually I sort of half put up my hand and I guess I had The Face because he eventually looked at me and said, “You know, don’t you.”
“My mom’s a doc,” I said. He gave me a “so say it” gesture and I said, “Four to ten percent depending on your sources.”
Everyone else looked surprised and horrified.
And the paramedic said, “We’re gonna talk a bit about some details of those figures* but first I want to talk about just this: when do you do CPR?”
The class dutifully replies: when someone is unconscious, not breathing, and has no pulse.
“What do we call someone who is unconscious, not breathing, and has no pulse?”
The class tries to figure out what the trick question is so I jump over the long pause and say, “A corpse.”
“Right,” says the paramedic. “Someone who isn’t breathing and has no heartbeat is dead. So what I’m telling you is that with this technique you have a 4-10% chance of raising the dead.”
So no, artists did not stop the Vietnam War from happening with the sheer Power of Art. The forces driving that military intervention were huge, had generations of momentum and are actually pretty damn complicated.
But if you think the mass rejection of the war was as meaningless as a soufflé – well.
Try sitting here for ten seconds and imagining where we’d be if the entire intellectual and artistic drive of the culture had been FOR the war. If everyone thought it was a GREAT IDEA.
What the whole world would look like.
Four-to-ten percent means that ninety to ninety-six percent of the time – more than nine times out of ten – CPR will do nothing, but that one time you’ll be in the company of someone worshipped as an incarnate god.
If you think the artists and performers attacking and showing up people like Donald Trump is meaningless try imagining a version of the world wherein they weren’t there.
(*if you’re curious: those stats count EVERY reported case of CPR, while the effectiveness of it is extremely time-related. With those who have had continuous CPR from the SECOND they went down, the number is actually above 80%. It drops hugely every 30 seconds from then on. When you count ALL cases you count cases where the person has already been down several minutes but a bystander still starts CPR, which affects the stats)
Also, the custard pie has gravity on its side. Something falling from six feet up plus the height of the person dropping it (assuming they’re at the top of the stepladder), has a hell of a lot more force behind it than one that just sits there and does nothing.
I have a habit of waking up my boyfriend with news alerts but I think this morning I’ll let him sleep just a little bit longer before mentioning we’re officially back in the Cold War
North Dakota Secy of State – Al Jaeger, Republican
_____
Florida Governor – Rick Scott, Republican
Florida Secy of State – Ken Detzner, Relublican
Are the major news medias talking this?
CNN is especially with the new law suit against Georgia for it’s purging of voters. The claim is they were all dead people.
North Dakota Native voters who do not have a residential address: here are instructions so you can vote in the midterms. Please print this off and share with others who don’t have internet. Call this number if you have questions: 1-701-255-0460
there’s also S.3543 – Native American Voting Rights Act of 2018 which was just introduced to the senate october 3rd, you can write to anyone in your state isn’t currently sponsoring the bill, the easiest way is probably with resistbot
Please, if you can, rt/spread it, let it keep popping up in those writers’ mention. It may not make that much of a difference, but at least it will show them they can’t just write whatever they want anymore without consequences.
this level of self-congratulatory is honestly just mind-blowing to me
who are you to decide that the feeling i, as a person born, currently living in the country you have hurt, experienced while reading your comic, is some kind of “bullcrap”? and it’s not just me, the whole comic community here is angry. and this is their reply.
That guest of Sen. Dean Heller is none other than known Nazi Peter Cvjetanovic. It would be a shame if the electorate in Nevada found out about this from the asshole who said he wouldn’t take away healthcare and then voted to repeal it anyway.
Friendly reminder that this jackass also voted for Kavanaugh and is running in a tight race for senate against Jacky Rosen:
A gentle reminder that Jacky Rosen is a Jewish woman. She was the former president of her shul and also has specifically cited tikkun olam (repairing the world) as one of the reasons she decided to enter politics. If that is Peter Cvjetanovic in the photo with Senator Heller, her running against a white supremacist at worst, a host to white supremacists at best is more than just beating the Nazi. It’s a Jewish woman winning against an Amalekite.
The thing about emo (as a musical genre and a cultural phenomenon) is, I think, that it was a response to the September 11, 2001 terror attacks and the Bush administration’s painful mishandling thereof.
No, I’m serious. My Chemical Romance was formed as a direct result of Gerard Way witnessing the towers fall. Green Day’s ‘American Idiot’ (an album that, at least as far as I can tell from having been a teenager in Canada at the time, was seminal in influencing the look and sound of emo) is all about the Bush administration – all the lyrics are about life under a democratic dystopia and many reference current events from the time – and it came out in 2004, halfway through the Bush presidency. A bunch of Linkin Park’s stuff makes reference to it also, especially their album ‘Minutes to Midnight’, where they first started moving out of the nu-metal/rap sound they’d been working with before and into a more mainstream emo-rock sound. That album came out in 2007. All of the really big bands with that kind of sound – and most of the smaller ones with more of a punk/hardcore sound but similar themes – were active in the mainstream from around 2001-2010. Many of them didn’t survive past 2009, and those that did either totally reinvented themselves (Fall Out Boy, Panic! At The Disco, MCR for the five minutes it took to produce Danger Days, Linkin Park) or became near-totally irrelevant (Paramore dropped an album sometime in the last two years; did any of you know that? And Green Day haven’t mattered since 21st Century Breakdown, which was released in 2009).
Why? Well, many of you are probably too young to remember this, but the 2001 terror attacks were what really made ‘Islamic terrorism’ a real threat in the minds of most Westerners. We’d never experienced an attack of that scale on American soil, and it was just as the internet was really becoming a mainstay in every house and my generation was getting online. As a result, it was not only a major political event, but it was hugely personal – the coverage was everywhere, in everybody’s home, all the time, and there were a lot of kids being exposed to the coverage in such a way that they often had no good way to process it. I’m not exaggerating when I say it changed the way we live. I’m Canadian and I felt this shit. Before, we could fly to America domestic, without a passport. Now? Half the draconian, ridiculous rules that hold you up at the TSA today were initiated in September and October of 2001. It was the only thing anyone could think of to do – lock down, protect your own. People were scared, on a continental scale.
And to make matters worse, George W. Bush’s government, which had to somehow respond to and take point in the response to this unprecedented event, didn’t seem to have the first foggiest clue what they were doing. This was a government that not only didn’t seem to listen to its people, not only lied blatantly to its people, but did it badly. They made hugely unpopular decisions, including starting a war in the Middle East that dragged in multiple countries and completely failed to achieve its stated goal of catching Osama bin Laden or proving that he had in his control weapons of mass destruction (the whole war was predicated on the fact that these so-called weapons of mass destruction existed, that the Bush administration had good reason to believe that they existed, were under the control of the Taliban, and were going to be used against Western targets, none of which was ever proven to be true).
So, from 2001-2009, the two (TWO) full terms of the Bush presidency, there were a whole lot of people who couldn’t vote (be they under the age of majority, like most of the emo kids I knew, or Canadians unhappily dragged along with the US’ boneheaded foreign policy decisions because we’re allies, also like most of the emo kids I knew) and therefore felt, not only scared of basically the impending end of their world in a way that they hadn’t previously had to feel, and not only angry about being clearly lied to and clumsily manipulated when the truth was obvious to anyone with eyes, but also powerless to do anything to change anything about that. And meanwhile, people kept dying in this pointless war and the president kept trying to hold together the illusion that everything was hunky-dory.
And what was popular with teenagers from about 2001-2009? Yep. Emo.
Emo as a genre was very personal, very focused on the individual (with the exception of the albums I noted above), but lyrically and musically, it fit right with the cultural atmosphere of the time. People were scared of the impending end of their world/their lives? Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge and The Black Parade. People were angry about things they felt powerless to change? From Under The Cork Tree and Decemberunderground. Emo captured what kids were feeling about trying to fit into a world that was so clearly fucked up and broken and pretending to be okay, putting on a strong face to Show The Terrorists They Didn’t Win. Emo was about stripping away the mask, exposing the messy, angry, frightened, sad, true underbelly of American society at the time, and exposing hypocrisy – in individuals as much as in politicians. The hatred of ‘preps’ and ‘posers’? Totally not just a My Immortal thing. Emo was about wearing your heart on your sleeve, about it being okay to mourn, to rage, to be afraid for your life beyond this – and to keep moving forward regardless, step by slow step.
So what changed in 2009 that made the phenomenon fade without so much as a whimper? Simple. Hope. The Audacity of Hope, to be exact.
Barack Obama won his presidency largely because young people supported him. Those were the young people who suffered through feeling helpless and powerless under Bush, who wanted things to change but felt they had no chance of making it so. Barack Obama was a chance. One of his first campaign promises was to end the Iraq war, a promise he followed through on. And even if his presidency hasn’t been perfect, it has never been the Bush administration, with the feeling that the will of the people was being entirely and quietly ignored by those in power to further their own agendas.
What I am saying, then, I guess, is that it’s time to buy stocks in Hot Topic, because whatever happens in the upcoming US presidential election, there are a lot of young people who may soon be needing black, white, and red graphic band tees and Manic Panic hair dye.
From someone who was in American high school in 2001, we were also incredibly terrified for at least the early Bush years. We were all pretty sure that the draft could possibly be reinstated and we could get sucked into the war. Some of my friends and I had plans on how best to get Don’t Ask, Don’t Telled out of the draft. We were all absolutely terrified of the prospect.
tbh I feel like a lot of us in our early/mid 20s who had an “emo” phase are going back (or just listening to more of) music from that part of our lives. and for the life of me I can’t figure out if it’s because we’re just at that age where we can be nostalgic for early teenager angst or if it’s because of the crushing global angst we’re all now very much aware of.
Huh. This is interesting
Yeah, I started listening to American Idiot again. At first I was like nostalgia. Then I blinked , listened, and was like no actually relevance.
I think there is a little bit of nostalgia though, but it’s not for teen angst. It’s because I know I was able to put these albums away before. I remember that things got better. So if we fight, things will get better again.
Check your voter registration. If you have any mutuals in Texas, specifically, inform them of the need to check their voter registrations but they are trying to pull this crap all over the country. Check your voter registration early, and check it often.
Three men are sitting in a cell in the (KGB headquarters) Dzerzhinsky Square. The first asks the second why he has been imprisoned, who replies, “Because I criticized Karl Radek.”
The first man responds, “But I am here because I spoke out in favor of
Radek!” They turn to the third man who has been sitting quietly in the
back, and ask him why he is in jail. He answers, “I’m Karl Radek.”
DarkestElemental616 