Ishmael comment

 By mother culture, I believe Ishmael means an omnipresent voice, the universal voice, the voice that tells and retells the story of humans. It's important for him to find individuals who are able to distinguish mother culture in their own lives and see patterns and look at the bigger picture. He needs people who question, ponder, mull over instances and events and encounters and incidents. It is important to him also because he's spent so much time in a cage thinking about overall questions. Observation goes a long way. Observation can yield theories and evidence can support these theories and ideas about human nature and the human race and behavior and why things are the way they are. I hope that statement isn't too vague but a lot of things in the world are astoundingly devastating and the simplest notion as to how to solve some problems can be the most difficult to explain. Observation and analysis of the world require deep thinking and frankly, a lot of people don't think about it because it's scary and once you start you can't really move on with your own life. The world doesn't make sense. People haven't always been one way and blaming human nature is silly. The prospect of the all knowing universe and not knowing some things; well some people can't handle it.

Mother culture is a constant contributor to my stream of consciousness and to my decisions. It's on the back burner but I've never stop pondering why is this a certain way and why is it so easy for some people to mindlessly accept and adopt societal beliefs when they are so agonizingly wrong? It's made me spacey and on a whole other brain wave length than most of my peers, and when I have explained it or jumped to a different reference I get blank stares. My friends have joked I'm like an old Greek man watching the birds and rattling on about life. Mother culture can persuade people into a certain mentality, and once it's recognizable searching for answers comes almost intrinsically.

It's part of the reason I'm so impatient and frustrated with my generation and with American society. We are all so reliant on technology and self absorbed and I feel even more isolated to people. In Chicago it's easier to strike up a conversation on the train since people are friendly, but I'm not ever sure if people are going to understand what the hell I'm talking about because in order to explain mother culture and all you have to have experienced the questions, the period of wonder, of searching for truth and answers. Perhaps more obviously people can base their morality by what they hear and see about and such which I don't think makes a very good sense of judgement. We have a weird sense of morality, I think, and revenge is commonly accepted and condoned, even, to my surprise, amongst children. "An eye for an eye." But poor behavior shouldn't create an opportunity to get back at someone. It's fucked up, if you think about it. Everyone's on their high horse about everything and that's allowed because everyone wants to seem better than everyone else. If it's about watching T.V. or recycling we do it to either to look good in front of others or because we really want to save the environment. Mostly getting to the top is on everyone's to do list, and so then surfaces another morality sub point: lying, cheating, and stealing. Mother culture is the voice that when you begin to formulate your own beliefs, you question. I'm not sure how much of this makes sense.