lost, alone, afraid.
WE DON’T GET IT.
Why on Earth are the world’s ALREADY WEALTHIEST seeming only to continue the smash n’ grab of everything with an effort only to amass MORE?
And if you are not among the movers and shakers, you are reduced now only to a cost to be minimized at the expense of shareholder profit across the board.
Jobs. If you had to boil down all the crap that gets fed to the citizenry in terms of what the oligarchy is giving TO us all…it’s jobs.
Hey – we’ve already GOT jobs. We’ve got a bunch of ’em, actually – and we’ve got all those other jobs that you don’t even see. But why are you making everything so much worse and harder for everyone? It is SELF-EVIDENT how little regard the average citizen is given?
How about a job that pays better? How about health care that doesn’t bankrupt us if we fracture an ulna? (Exaggerated to make a point – a fractured ulna, by comparison, still sucks, but it’s also kind of dodging a bullet)
Education? Getting worse, going to cost us more, not even CLOSE to valued in this country, everything turning against the average citizen…yet also somehow still paving the way for the “best and the brightest” to continue their breeding.
And hey, we all know I’m just getting started. Our planet? How is short-term greed somehow still carrying the day? What, is the real plan to build some variation of Elysium? (Watch the film – apart from the “little guy wins in the end” part, I think it’s the most accurate dystopian representation out there … so far. And with the little guy not winning at the end, I can tell you – it isn’t a great existence for the little guy in that scenario.)
Taxes, blahblahblah bullshit.
And I’ll tell you another thing: you can take all the Trump impersonators out there, and throw ’em out. No one would be able to do Trump as well as the late James Gandolfini as Tony Soprano doing an impersonation of Donald Trump. He. Nails. It. Hands down. He wouldn’t even have to change a thing.
Politics has become legislating to benefit campaign donors so they donate to the campaign so the politician can feed you a bunch of crap so you choose them so they can then continue to legislate for the big campaign donors.
And I’m quite aware how this sounds so very cliche, the middle-aged guy ranting about the state of things….but I let myself keep going because I think a LOT of people who aren’t at ALL like me could EASILY be feeling the same way, IF NOT WORSE.
Take, for example, being an average teenager coming into this America. For most of them, this world is not really quite the way we’d hoped it would for them, eh? Would that the United States continued to choose more towards investing in its citizenry..
Would that citizenry had a larger component of understood civic responsibility, one at least equivalent to the emphasis on individual freedoms.
Would that we could learn more about each other by reconnecting outside of media. We have the limitations, still, of living bodies – and I believe much of our consternation has come from the ever-growing gap between the world of our brain and the world of our mind.
There is so, so, so much wrong in the world. I’m part of it, part nature and part nurture grown, inward, vexed, cowardly – I’m a functioning sufferer and addict, able still but only continuing to fail against the very reasonable ideal, and thus augmenting…
I see it in me, and project it out.
[I want to continue that thought, but I’ve been also compelled to add something I feel should be said early, but the rhythm hasn’t found its way there, so I’m injecting: for everything I see as pointed against me as a citizen, I remind myself that, by comparison, I have it very, very easy – after all, I’m a middle-aged, lean, white, able, straight, Christian, smart-ish, childless, healthy-ish male born & living in a semi-urban temperate zone on the United States East Coast(ish). That, dear reader, is running the board on the best demographic side to be on if you are a human on this planet. I ain’t bragging – I had very little to do with it. My point is, that for all I see turning against me, I have the easiest road, so it can only be harder for all those people outside of my demographic. My ‘ding’ is I don’t have a college degree. I lack a formal pursuit.]
I mean, really, we can’t all still be sold on the ever-growing number of us doing ever-growing more variations on the same thing driving this ever-growing free-market consume and have a job thing that we can all see just can’t sustain itself….can we? I don’t think so.
And if you’re younger than I am, then you can see how it’s been going on like this in America preeeeety much since the late 40s. And this whole thing is now stretching to its limits, and we have it in us to make all the changes – the better ways for everyone, I believe, are self-evident to most of us.
It is self-evident is me what I must change, personally…
And yet….
And yet, as below, so above – we have the capacity for greater change as people and as a people.
“Do unto others” has been said, a lot of different ways, for a very long time.
And yet the entire machine surrounding “civilized existence” says “Do for yourself” sooooo much louder. “Do for yourself” hits the survival nerve, and
Survival says “Do for yourself.”
Enlightened survival says “Do unto others” for it mutually lifts, and trusts the self survival to others. It overtly turns away from the survival nerve.
It negates the self. It negates the ego. It destroys the self. And thus it also destroys the self-driven agenda. It removes the desire of the self. And all of THAT has been said, a lot of different ways, for a very long time.
The turn from the survival nerve, generally speaking, could be called courage.
A courageous choice, generally speaking, is driven by an agenda that is not self-driven. Even a self-driven choice can be courageous if the effects of that choice change the self for some other agenda beyond the self. A courageous choice, then, is any choice away from desire – any choice away from “I want.”
And everything that surrounds us encourages us to take what we want, get what we want, choose what we want – which we can also then twist into NOT having what we DON’T want.
“I want my kids to go to a good school.”
is not
“I want everyone’s kids to go to good schools.”
In summation………ish:
I just don’t see a whole lot of hope.
And maybe that’s just what I need to feel so I can stay in this condition and never make courageous choices. No, wait – that’s not true. I’ll stop being an addict tomorrow. Wouldn’t it be so much healthier, so much better for everyone, so much better for me, just to flip the switch on it all? Years of self-loathing suddenly ceased, no more addictions wasting hours/days/weeks/months/years of my life, all my moments to come after filled with potential and opportunity….
Wait – what switch were we talking about?
[Eh, nevermind that – it’s just me being clever. I always ideate, but never follow through – the quick ones that include pain in some fashion are pretty much right out, and the ones I’d pursue that would “work,” in my estimation, require the first step towards fulfilling ‘the plan’ – which is a step I do not take.]
I just a whole lot moving against a whole lot of us – and it doesn’t matter if you’re red or blue or Republican or Democrat or urban or rural or white or non-white (that still does matter, ’cause it’s a lot rougher shake for non-whites) or male or female or on the coast or in the middle of the country or north or south – if you’re an American citizen and you’re not in that financial threshold, however it’s to be established (though the self-evident is somewhere closer to, what, $200K/year? Less?) – you’re getting devalued in every possible manner by those with the power to make positive changes.
So maybe the first step in reducing the power of the oligarchy – which is difficult to argue that’s the system of governance right now – is to stop considering socialism as a bad word and look at some of its practices.
All the cliches are true. They have to be. That’s how they became cliches, ’cause the ones that weren’t true over and over don’t get repeated over and over. In point of fact, it’s kind of a shame that there even ARE cliches: “Don’t put your hand on a hot stovetop” is not a cliche because once it’s learned you don’t have to say it over and over. “Be quiet, kind, and gently in everything you do” is a cliche because we HAVEN’T FIGURED IT OUT YET.
I know, I’m rambling. But I’m trying to make a point. This is my impersonation of your average American citizen who sees how they’re getting disregarded, disenfranchised, and devalued in every way possible – and is aware of their helplessness to change things.
Thanks for listening, eventually,
Philip
One Perspective 