They're Just Punks

My class watched The Punks Are Alright, a film about punk music around the world, I not only learned about Punk music but the reality of a third world country. The role of punk music in general is to be contradictory to the social norms but in third world countries like Brazil and Indonesia the punk idealism is stressed more in the United States. There the problems they face are more dire and in terms of religious intolerance, poverty, crime and government corruption, punk music is their way to draw attention to it. Many of Indonesia's problems can be traced back to capitalism and the encroachment of the Western world. There is a huge gap between the very rich and the extremely poor in Indonesia due to large American companies being in third world countries to extort money from the workers as the workers' government reap the benefits. I thought that I had no impact on the life of someone in a country so far away. Yet as we discussed further the impact that the Western world's capitalism has on the world I realized that even where I buy my groceries effects people thousands of miles away from me. I wasn't thinking of myself as a global citizen or even as an American citizen just as a person who wanted food.

 These people exist in a system where DIY is almost a necessity, there is no one who is there solving the problems of their community for them, the punk movement is a very small grass root movement that uses confrontation to point attention to problems. Then the DYI movement comes into play when they collaborate outside the system to fix those problems. Even though it is small and grass roots it is powerful enough to travel the world from Canada to Brazil to Indonesia.

I personally related to their struggles with religious tolerance. In Brazil the lead singer of  the Blind Pigs talked about the image associated with Catholicism and how he really did not fit into that image. I can relate to that just because I don't look the part during church and often can't relate to what the preacher is saying which I am often judged for. Also the U.S. can be religiously intolerant against non-Christians even to the point that  it is un-American to be anything but Christian or not hold certain Christian ideals. In Bali there were terrorist attacks because of religious extremism. The problem in both cases is not the actual religion but the extremism that the religions hold.