My Response To The Readers Challenging Me At The New York Times
Readers pose the question: Where does one begin.
It transcends democracy. I live out of one bag. A camera bag (I am a photographer who also works with adolescent boys with HIV). I teach the boys about memory which is what photography is. The teaching is neurologically based. How memory works. If a thing does not fit into my bag, I do not own it. I am teaching the boys about ownership. What a member of our species can own, what we cannot own. In order to teach someone that it’s not about what anyone has, you have to model it. They must see not unlike the camera does.
It all becomes fundamental. I am a vegan. What our species does to climate and the murder of other species, is a crime against the planet we live on. If all people can see is the hierarchy of race, we have diminished ourselves. We are more than our greed.
These have been hard lessons for me. It doesn’t begin with teaching. It begins with modeling. In the past, I have modeled all the wrong things. Good people were hurt. Today, all I need are what fits into the bag. Basically, a change of clothes, some tech I am now using to write this, and cameras. I do not own a home. I cannot be homeless (again) because the world is my home, and I am in it. I understand that if we all lived like this, capitalism would collapse.
Good riddance.
It begins with how we model what ideas we live by as individuals. Finding our meaning, and exemplifying that, and those values in how we own our lives. We are all cameras and record what we see. Memory. We are accountable.