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Problems are not “puzzles” to be solved. That metaphor assumes that all the necessary pieces are already on the table, they just need to be rearranged and reprogrammed. It’s not true.

                                                                                                                  – Benjamin H Bratton

Benjamin H Bratton, a Professor of Visual Arts and Director of the Center for Design and Geopolitics at the University of California, San Diego delivered a TED talk entitled “What’s Wrong with TED Talks?” He did not like the fact that TED talks oversimplify complicated problems. He states that “a TED talk is a combination of epiphany and personal testimony. The speaker shares some personal story of insight and revelation, its trials and tribulations. What does the TED audience hope to get from this? A vicarious insight? A fleeting moment of wonder? A sense that maybe it’s all going to work out after all? A spiritual buzz?”  The audience is shown the journey of the speaker from the light bulb moment to the solution of the problem.

This intense oversimplification mirrors my experience with the Global Health department at Duke. It feels like I sit in a classroom and I am told over and over again that problems in Sub Saharan Africa can be solved by simply educating and empowering the local people. There is talk that it is important to consider the context, but there is a huge assumption that understanding the culture, the politics, and issues is also a simple endeavor, and this is frustrating for students who actually come from Sub Saharan Africa and cannot claim to understand their complicated countries. This is not because we do not care, but because one has to understand colonialism, exploitation, history, cultural norms, and many other things. Bratton asserts that “transformation” can only occur if we go through the hard stuff such as “economics, ambiguities and contradictions.” It is also important to understand the strengths of these societies and figure out how they can be used.

This is not about demonizing TED talks; I learned about feminism from TED talks by the writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and these talks taught me more about my identity than I have ever heard in my life. However, by reading Angela Davis, Claudia Jones and many other feminists, I have better understood the birth of patriarchy and the role capitalism played at the end of feudalism. By taking the time to explore the topic, I have also learned that mainstream feminism sometimes ignores the other types of oppression black and brown women face that has to be acknowledged and understood in order to make the movement help every woman.

We need to realize that everything is complicated and that we need to respectfully try to go deep and understand the complexities. It is time to acknowledge that in our pursuit for answers that will change the world, every problem has become a set of puzzle pieces.

I have a friend who is a history major. Every couple of weeks, we meet up in Café, eat crepes, and she tells me about the writers and artists who populate her classes.

Spoiler alert: they’re all awful people.

Past misdeeds include: cultural appropriation to the extreme, shooting one’s wife in the head, claiming that a man was a gay stalker and murdering him in a duel, helping a friend bury the body of the alleged stalker, sleeping with child prostitutes, marrying a woman to avoid jail time for burying a body, and advocating to remove stigma associated with pedophilia. Among others – the list goes on, but I really don’t want to.

And the thing is – this isn’t a study on literature produced by prison inmates. This is the beat generation – a generation known for its high ideals and devotion to defying convention and changing the way we saw the world. This is from the era of rebels, an era that deep down inside of us, we aspire to be. This was the era of nonconformity and social revolution. These were my heroes, man.

And they were utter rubbish. All of them.

It has been several weeks since I first was introduced to these deceased dregs of humanity, and I have yet to find one that was redeemable. I thought I had, but then the whole pedophilia thing came up and there went that idea. Of this entire movement, of this group that dominated thought and culture in San Francisco for several years, there was not one artist who had passed the not-too-high standard of decency that comes from not doing anything worse than trafficking illegal goods.

The point of this is not to say that beatniks are the worst and that sometimes there’s a good reason to conform and follow social norms, although that’s also an interesting conversation. The point is that these people are the greatest artists of a generation. And while they’re objectively horrible human beings, they’re also well-known for a reason – they were freaking good poets.

Now, since I haven’t taken a humanities class in way too long, I haven’t actually read their work. But my friend tells me that a lot of it is good stuff – witty, and self-deprecating, and insightful, and a powerful look inside the human condition. These men were awful, but they were great at what they did. And the nonconformist in me kind of wants to read it, see what all the fuss is about. But then I remember the multiple murders and assorted crimes they committed, and I figure it’s best not to.

So the problem becomes – how do we separate these people from the beautiful works they produced? Can we appreciate their work, laud them for their genius, while simultaneously acknowledging that they manipulated, betrayed, and destroyed people multiple times? Can we respect them and honor them while wondering how the heck they avoided prison? And part of me says no. This is the same part that refuses to listen to Bill Cosby, no matter how funny I used to think him. This is the part of me that has acknowledged that, classic or not, there are some movies I will never see because I don’t want to honor the people who produced them. This is the part of me that says that the artist can never really be separated from their art.

But at the same time, the beat generation was a thing. They shaped hearts and minds, and changed the way a lot of people saw the world. They were a movement that had long-lasting effects on the ideals of San Francisco, and effects I’d probably understand if I actually took the class. We can’t just say that history doesn’t exist just because we don’t like some of the characters, and we can’t just close the book on that chapter because we don’t like the way it ends. If we just stopped studying the beat generation, stopped giving them and their estates the posthumous honor of our royalties, attentions, and critical thinking and essay writing, if we failed to favor them with our analysis, we’d lose a lot of valuable information of what makes us who we are, now.

I guess it can be argued that there’s a distinction between reading for pleasure and reading to understand (a distinction I feel all too clearly with my Semiconductors textbook, which somehow fails to provide either). In studying their work, we’re analyzing it not for a poem as a work of literature, but as evidence of a time different from their own. Reprehensible or not, it’s a manifestation of the way they thought and lived their lives and led a generation. And without understanding this particular incarnation of rebels without a cause, can we really understand the counterculture movements of today?

And at the end of the day, people will still read the work of Kerouac, and Burroughs, and Ginsburg, and Snyder, and they will be awed by their brilliance – because, let’s face it, there was a reason people followed these guys. The world has been changed by the mark they left upon it. But when we read their work, see the world through their sketchy eyes, it’s important that we ask ourselves how this world is different from our own, and what steps we need to take to keep it that way.

It’s only when we see them as all of what they are – as liars and scoundrels and philosophers and cretins and dreamers and lovers and philanderers and artists – that we can truly do them, and their work, justice. They are more than what they have created, and yet a product of the time they lived in, and while that does not excuse or condone what they have done, it provides a backdrop for their work. We do not have to like them. We do not have to hate them. But we do need to try to understand what they were and who they stood for. All of us, rebel or patriot, poet or criminal, deserve that much.

When I was ten years old my grandfather took me to the range for the first time. He told me I’d pick it up quick, but after six rounds of skeet shooting I must’ve only hit a single disc and, even though he cut the stock about six inches below the factory recommended minimum length to accommodate for how scrimpy his grandson was, my shoulder was blue and black for a week. Nonetheless, it was intoxicating and I’ve loved going to shooting ranges ever since.

This was long before I knew anything about the political divide in our country, or that the issues surrounding guns widen that gap every day. Long before the year of 24/7 Fox News leading up to the 2016 election or the countless, tense dinnertime discussions with my mom about our radically different political views. But, I digress. The election ended, I am off in college now, and what little time I spend with my mom I very intentionally avoid any conversations that could spoil the moment. Seems simple enough, right?

It really was simple, at first. My mom’s house is a twenty minute drive from campus and I see her once or so a month for dinner and generally there is so much to talk about that we don’t have time to argue about the latest Trump tweets. But then, starting at thanksgiving, a new gun would appear on the dinner table every time I visited. It started with two pistols. An AR. A shotgun. Another AR. Another pistol. Yet another AR. At this point you probably have a pretty good idea of what issue this post is trying to tackle: “how do you deal with the people you love sharing none of your views???”. Well, no, not exactly. The problem is how much I like the guns.

When I go to the range I get the same giddy feelings that I had when I was ten: I still love shooting. Now, I am by no means a “gun nut”, nor do I think that owning guns is necessary, but it’s significantly harder to tell my mom that I think it’s unnecessary when she knows how much I like them. This is complicated even further by the fact that every person I meet at the range is respectful, kind, and, above all, concerned about safety. No backwoods hillbillies who have guns to “protect themselves” and to piss off liberals, just normal people who enjoy a different kind of sport.

Now, one school shooting was enough for me to say “Okay, there needs to be greater regulations on the purchasing of firearms”. It’s unfathomable that, nine weeks into 2018, we are already at twelve school shootings and that thought hasn’t occurred to every single person in this country. I, like most, don’t know how to move forward. But I have an idea of how we can avoid moving backwards. I’m sure you’ve heard it before, but we need it now more than ever. It’s simple, and applies to nearly every polarizing, politicized issue in this country: stop demonizing the people on the other side. At the end of the day, they are just that: people. No one should be screaming at the people clinging onto their guns for dear life, or berating the people trying to take away your precious firearms: as sappy as it sounds, we need to meet somewhere in the middle and analyze not how this is affecting Democrats and Republicans, but how this is affecting the people and children of the United States.