metapunk

People of Walmart

A friend of mine recently told me about the People of Walmart website, featuring pictures of Walmart shoppers in various states of dress as they go about their business, and occasionally, their vehicles. Some of them are silly, some are disturbing, but most of them are simply a slice of someone’s life, replete with all the assumptions you can make about that life based on a photograph.

But there’s something terribly, tragically human about these photos, and it occurs to me that Dukkha is never more apparent than in a Walmart. Dukkha is a Buddhist word from the Pali language that usually translates to “suffering” or “unsatisfactoriness.” It refers to the desperation of the human condition as we pass from life to life through the cycle of Samsara. (continue reading…)

One of my most interesting teachers in university was anthropologist David Turner. After bringing convocation hall to order with a Didgeridoo, he and three other teachers began the first day of my first year anthropology class, describing the four branches of anthropological science (physical, linguistic, archaeology, and socio-cultural). Later that year, Turner taught the socio-cultural portion and I think for the first time in my life I realized that indigenous people really don’t think like us “civilized” folk at all. I mean, like night and day.  As someone who has been dissatisfied with the conventional thinking of Western Civilization all of his life—well, I took that realization to be a sign that there may, in fact, be some intelligent life still left on Earth. (continue reading…)