.cross.wired.mind.

I took a walk from my office near City Hall in Philadelphia to the mall called the Gallery some half dozen blocks away. It was lunchtime and the crowded streets were filled with a mix of city dwellers, suburbanites, and tourists. There was a lawyer discussing the details of a case with a cop. Further down the street two women shouted at each other about stealing perfume as a trio of Philly’s finest stood by, not quite knowing what to do. A group of people wearing badges proclaiming them to be on jury duty lined up by cart to order lunch. An elderly woman wrestled with her bags as she left Kmart and stepped out onto Market ST looking to hail a cab.

Sounds normal, right? Added to this usual mix of holiday pedestrian traffic was a woman I have seen many times on my walks around center city. She is in her early 50s. Her clothes alternate between two outfits, both clearly worn form frequent use. Her graying hair looks clean but never well organized in spite of the three or four hairpins she uses. She always has a mobile phone in her hand though I have never seen her use it. In her other hand is a ragged scrap of cloth that she uses to wipe away her tears.

She cries constant streams of tears and sobs almost inaudibly.

She marches down the street with purpose. The first time I saw her I thought she might be looking for a lost child, but she is never that frantic - just determined, or is it more fatalistic than that? She never begs, nor does she ask for help. She just walks, cries, sobs, dabs at here eyes, and clutches her phone with white knuckles.

Every time I see her I say a short prayer for her safety.

…

Go anywhere in center city and you will find people wandering in a daze, clearly suffering from mental illness, and clearly not getting the kind of treatment they need.

How is it possible that we could let anyone suffer like this? How is it that we can spend so much of our time, energy, and resources fighting over abortion, creationism vs evolution, gay marriage, and all of the other issues raised by the right and the left.

It is like two parents fighting in front of their children. Is our society so self absorbed that we cannot see the people crying, literally crying, in the street? Has our collective will been bent too long on fighting each other that we have allowed ourselves to slip so far to the edge of catastrophic societal failure?

The right blames everything from video games, to Harry Potter, to not going to Church on Sunday. The left blames cold corporate entities in collusion with a corrupt government. Frankly, I don’t give a damn who is to blame. We can fix it.

Why do we keep electing politicians that want to lower our taxes, cut services, and fatten the coffers of the richest amongst us? Why do we think that non-profits and religious organization can make up for the ever-shrinking tax base? Why is it that “promote the general welfare” has been reduced to hoping for wealth to trickle down? Rich people are very good at building wealth, not at redistributing that wealth to the people that need it.

O CHILDREN OF DUST! Tell the rich of the midnight sighing of the poor, lest heedlessness lead them into the path of destruction, and deprive them of the Tree of Wealth. To give and to be generous are attributes of Mine; well is it with him that adorneth himself with My virtues. - The Hidden Words of Bahá’u’lláh

…

Matthew 25:44-46 “They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’

“He will reply, ‘I tell you the truth, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’

“Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.”

…

And let not those of you who possess grace and abundance swear against giving to the near of kin and the poor … - the Holy Quran

… the quotes could go on and on. If we are truly a Godly and spiritual society (not a Christin country - that is different) - If we adhere to the ideals enshrined in the very core documents this country is founded upon, then why have we ceased to promote the general welfare? Why do we allow fellow members of the human family to wander the streets in pain.

Have we grown so cold hearted that we cannot see the reality of our world? And upon seeing that reality can we not do something? Drop money in the pot next to the ringing bells of the Salvation Army; give to charities that can truly help. Become aware of what this world is truly like. Leave the comfort of your homes and visit the people who are helping. Go to a soup kitchen and serve. Go to a homeless shelter and serve. Leave the philosophical and ideological bubble that you have been trapped in and walk amongst the poor and see what their lives are like.

I am sorry if I sound like a preacher but I can’t help myself. Besides - how many preachers out there are leading the way to help the poor? How many are sheep and how many are goats?

We can be sheep without them. Just do something.

Now, where is that bell ringer? I have to make a deposit in honor of the crying woman cruising the sidewalks of center city.

… wait, that would be insulting the Neanderthals.

So I was cruising the tubes of the Interweb when I stumbled into a blog called GamePolitics that deals with the intersection of … well … games and politics. There is a gem of an post dealing with the darling of right wing jibber jabber, Bill O’Rilley, and his views on why PS3s and iPods are killing our culture.

Now I try very hard to remain non-partisan. In fact it is an article of faith to remain independent of the machinations of partisan politics. Fortunately this is not a partisan issue. Bill O’Reilly is a dumbass.

Why?

Just take a look at what he had to say about electronic gaming …

American society is changing for the worse because of the machines… In the past to flee the real world people usually chose drugs or alcohol… now you don’t have to do that, Now all you have to do is have enough money to buy a machine…

So you would prefer us to increase our drug use? He continues …

Basically what you have is a large portion of the population, mostly younger people under the age of 45, who don’t deal with reality - ever. So they don’t know what day it is; they don’t know temperature it is; they don’t know what their neighbor looks like. They don’t know anything… because they are constantly diverted by a machine. Now what this does is it takes a person away from reality because they’ve created their own reality…

Or maybe you and your ilk have done such a good job of scaring the shit out of us. According to you our neighbors are sex offending sodomites that have gone off their meds and are planning a home invasion in cooperation the “the jihadists” who seek to terrorize us into changing our way of life. Dude, you are doing their job for them. Here is an idea - knock it off, shut up, go buy a compound in the mountains and leave us all alone. BTW - it is through online gaming that I now have friends in Scotland, New Zealand, Canada, the UK, Ireland, Germany, and all over the US. Yeah, I avoid reality. Sheesh … He goes on from there …

The newest thing is the PlayStation 3. Now this is a machine that allows you to play games in hi-def and all this other stuff… It’s the newest state of the art system from Sony…. It has a video game console, plays DVDs, connects you to the Internet, tells you how handsome you are. It’s six-hundred bucks. Now people lined up for hours to get this thing. Hours!

Welcome to the world of free market capitalism. Or, would you prefer a central planning committee to engineer our lives so we don’t have to be exposed to the evils of Mario Carts, Final Fantasy, and Halo …

The problem with this stuff is that some people can deal with it constructively… but other people get addicted to it, just like opium, just like drugs and alcohol… So this is a big, big problem. It’s going to change every single thing in this country.

WTF? Dude, ever heard the word hyperbole because you seem to love it …

The have-nots are growing. Why are they growing? Because the skill set that is necessary to earn a decent living is being deemphasized in a fantasy world of football games and shooting zombies and all that…. Now you have the “knows” and the “know-nots”, because if you spend all your youth being prisoners of machines….. you’re not going to know anything…. You’re gonna fail.

So its not the failed education system, endemic systemic racism, a complete lack of low skilled employment that actually provides a family with enough to live on, or the lack of social services provided by the government to help those in need. No. Apparently the problem is Madden 07.

Now if that were not enough O’Reilly turns on the stupid …

I don’t own an iPod. I would never wear an iPod… If this is your primary focus in life - the machines… it’s going to have a staggeringly negative effect, all of this, for America… did you ever talk to these computer geeks? I mean, can you carry on a conversation with them? …

Yeah! The geeks I know tend to be smart, witty, politically conscious, humble, and quite good at intelligent conversation. But Billy boy thinks iPods are sucking our brains out through their ear buds. Oh, and ironically - he has a podcast.

But here is the icing on the bullshit cake …

I really fear for the United States because, believe me, the jihadists? They’re not playing the video games. They’re killing real people over there.

Yes folks, buy your kid a Glock or an Uzi and set him loose because we won’t be a great nation until we raise a generation of killers. How did we ever let “the jihadists” get ahead of us in the senseless violence department. Damn those kids with their 360s and iPods, damn those parents buying kids Nintendos and Nintendogs. Get those kids organized into little Christian Crusader Squads and show them “jihadists” how real Americans roll … on full auto.

Why do people like Bill O’Reilly have a platform from which they can spread ignorance to the masses? Why does civilized society allow extremists to have a nationally televised soapbox?

I love free speech, but does not mean that we should give the biggest microphones to idiots like this.

If you are an IA, UX’er, code monkey, software or web product manager, or an exec that makes big decisions about web base applications or software then you NEED to buy designing the obvious … you just may not realize it yet.

Why should you listen to me? Well first of all I am not earning a dime from this. I am just a oft frustrated IA/UX professional who has spent the last 10 years banging my head against the walls of corporate America to get them to learn exactly what Robert Hoekman Jr. wrote. Like all great books he has taken an obvious truth that has been hidden in plain sight and captured it so we can all see it clearly and learn from it. We now have a common language and framework to bring this subject into the enterprise, into our garage web app projects, into the community of practice, and help folks understand just how critical this is.

By next week I will post my full review. Don’t wait untill then - just go buy it. Now. I mean it. Go to wherever you buy books and order it up. I don’t care if you just bought Gears of War and your a little short on cash. Go sell some blood plasma or something.

If you have ANYTHING to do with the creation, design, or development of web application than go here right now and get the damn book.

Don’t make me get the flying monkeys after you.

… talking about CFS.

Way cool.

To learn more go to the CDC CFS campaign site.

Behind the scenes …