Lives Of Quiet Desperation or OKAY:
These are the best of times. These are the worst of times. Like many others I live in the best of times. But I know, in my heart, that this is not the case for a large percentage of others on this planet. A common delusion is to view one's own status or circumstance as the basis for reality or justice. When I see or hear the phrase "America, Love It or Leave It" or any such variant of this phrase, I understand what it really means: "Things are good for me the way they are. I am very grateful for this. Now if things are not so good for you---tough! Don't let the door hit you in the ass on your way out".
It always seems to boil down to 'us' vs 'them' in so many aspects of life. I don't think anyone really in tune with evolutionary forces or our human innate ethical nature, can effectively disregard the plight of other humans, or other species, or any of the natural resources across our globe. I say effectively disregard because many, if not most, do disregard---but they are never the contented campers on this planet. I think back on the many sustained contacts I have had with so many of the 'successful' in our society---from the family of a woman for whom I was a live-in chauffeur early in my life, to various high intensity administrators, to successful business men/women, etc. These are very busy, busy, busy people. To sustain their power and position---financially, politically----requires a lot of disingenuous maneuvering, self promoting, prejudicial treatment of those whose support they depend on, a lot of indifference to injustices, and all kinds of protective walls lest some sort of unruly rag-tagians create unwelcome turmoil. Most of these 'managers' of our society are not unlikable--just rigid, harried, fearful, cautious, wound up energizer bunnies. Harried people are rarely thoughtful in any deep sense, or good for one's own nerves to be around too much.
I go for a lot of 3 mile walks, hither and thither, but one of the places I do this involves walking around these horse pastures. Part of the walk brings me past the back yards of very expensive and eloquent homes. You know, the kind of places with good acreage and the house occupies most of the acreage. There will be the requisite swimming pool and professionally designed and cared for landscaping---the kind as a kid you always dreamed of owning. What lucky people! There must be a dozen such houses whose back yards I pass. Only twice all summer did I ever see anyone out in the back yard. One lady was raking some leaves one afternoon and we chatted. Another lady came out once to try and get her two dogs to stop barking at me. I never saw anybody in the swimming pools, never saw any company. Even on Thanksgiving no one was entertaining--based on the absence of more than one car in the driveway---and so they must have gone elsewhere or had no more than one car of guests. For myself, during my productive years, being invited to those kind of places was painful. It was never the case of good or close friendship, but always the case of, for reasons of the moment, I was an appropriate guest to invite. The conversations were the most meaningless, apocryphal, charlatanish banter imaginable. The purpose usually is to grease the way to close a deal, or to elevate one's social position, or dutifully play to the ego of the guests or host. After fifteen minutes I would begin thinking of how soon I could leave and what kind of excuse would justify my departure. The point is, after you have gotten the wealth to have such a place, it becomes sort of a desolate outpost of eerie inactivity. Material wealth is not really the nirvana expected. Of course real poverty is a lot worse.
But as usual I stray from the topic at hand----lives of quiet desperation. There are parts of every city in America few people care to put their foot in. I don't know how dangerous walking through might really be, but I do know few of us care to be depressed at what we might see. Bars on the windows and doors, misfits of every ilk----people from life's other side. It is hard to know what one should think, let alone what, if anything, one should do about these people. And whose fault is it that they have to live like that? Well, it must be theirs, if they would just get their lives together like I did, and others did. Terrell Owens came from a ghetto, why can't these people be like him? And most people like me always like to relate how we had little as a child and got our act together to be a success of some sort. Of course it is a lie, people like me have always had a lot----good parents, good schools, good safe neighborhoods, and a zillion role models. Frankly, if I could not have made something out of myself with all the advantages I had going for me---which is not to say others may not have had more---it would have been shameful on my part.
Lately I am haunted by the predicted 100 million people who are going to die in the next few years from starvation. I mean, I thought losing 2000 innocent people in the World Trade Center bombings was horrific. And it was. But what about these 100 million people who are going to starve to death----something seems badly out of balance here. That will be 50,000 more innocent deaths than the World Trade Center deaths. Certain things get in my psyche and disturb my otherwise tranquil existence. The tragedy of this stuff overwhelms me. I have little patience for those who prate on about the evils of birth control or abortion, or oppose family planning clinics, and never---never ever---talk about the inhumanity of our attention to those already living lives of quiet desperation. When they start preaching about the sanctity of life, and to them it is just some sort of abstract moral dogma, I would like them first to be in the shoes of one of these 100 million who will starve to death in the next few years. There is no sanctity about these lives. Get real. Sanctity of life is entwined with quality of life. To separate the two is cruel and inhumane. Sanctity of life to these 'sanctifiers' obviously means human life and some human life more than others. Who is more supportive of all the killing fields across the globe than these sanctity of lifers? They have never met an American invasion they didn't support.
Life, at least to me, has been a long slow process of shedding delusions. No one could have been a better 'patriot', in the dumbest sense of the term, than I in my youth. My country was always right. Period. If we overthrew a government somewhere, good for us, and they surely deserved it---the bastards. If we attacked a country, it was self evident they deserved to be attacked. It took the death of 2.1 million Vietnamese for me to finally come to grips with what I had supported. For exactly what did 35,000 young Americans die and 2.1 million Vietnamese die? No one has to tell me what it is like to be a supporter of mass murder because I was. Humans---all of us---not just the Germans or Taliban, or any other group, are capable of supporting the cruelest of actions, including torture, the killing of women and children, slavery, suppression of rights to this or that group, etc. A real patriot, to me, supports his country when his country is doing right, and opposes his country when it is doing wrong. Even this notion of always supporting our troops is nothing more than a means to support aggression even if the aggression is unjustified. There is only one way to legitimately support our troops in Iraq, or before that in Vietnam, and that is to bring them home or never send them in the first place. Get their ass out of somebody else's Civil War and their intolerance of each other. What parent could claim any sense of ethics by saying, "I know my son shouldn't be in a gang, but he is and so we supply him with the best of automatic weapons so he can properly defend himself." Yeah, okay Mr. and Mrs. Good Parent.
Delusions abound in all of us. Any success is always because we 'earned' it. Our genetics, our parents, our place of birth, our schools, or physical abilities or appearance, our intellect, inheritances, etc. are irrelevant---it is always "I earned it". Okay. Our inherited religion we delude ourselves into thinking is the true religion. Okay. God is on our country's side. Okay. If we amass wealth legally from the society in which we live---our children deserve that wealth when we die----I guess they 'earned' it. Okay, they earned it. We don't have any prejudices towards others. Okay, if we say so. Unrestricted capitalism is the fairest way to allocate wealth. Okay, another convenient delusion.
Daydreaming is mostly delusions. But we sure need to daydream or lose our sanity. We are not a bad person. Of course not albeit most of our bad behavior is mostly one of inaction rather than any direct attack on anyone. We often believe what we want to believe. We all do, of course you more than I. A good friend remarked not long ago that Obama drew 80,000 people to an Oregon rally because there was a rock band warming up the crowd. Okay. I once had a student who brought to my attention several instances where she had the right answer and I marked it wrong. I apologized and told her I often grade exams while watching a foot ball game (not true). The next exam she pointed out I again was careless and I again thanked her. She then got a letter expelling her from the course for cheating. She went to the Administration and raised hell. The administrators warned me she was heading to my office irate as hell. She verbally let me have it and reminded me that she went to church every Sunday and no way was she a cheater and I could not prove otherwise. When I pulled out of a drawer a copy of her exam which I had xeroxed before handing back her exam she became speechless. Never said another word, just left. She genuinely deluded herself into thinking she was not a cheater. Okay. I recently lauded myself because for the first time in like 50 years I sent a holiday card to a bunch of people. Of course it was an internet card which took like 30 seconds to send to dozens of people. And I was lauding myself for being so thoughtful. Okay. How thoughtful was it really? 30 seconds of thought. Wow.
We have so many delusions of lesser or greater importance that maybe on our tombstones we should inscribe: My delusions are gone---AT LAST. How many times are we wrong about others? How many opinions do we form about others of this or that which have little basis in fact and often prove wrong with the passage of time? The sad thing is that most all of us can be deluded about most anything. Born in a different time and I would believe slavery is right; that women shouldn't have the right to vote, that different races should not be in the same schools together, etc. Delusions seem to originate as a means to feel comfortable about being wrong about something. While we have an innate ability to distinguish between right and wrong, delusions are the tool whereby we can excuse our doing the wrong instead of the right. Every age has it's own peculiar delusions. Most still are deluded to think it is ok to spend more money to educate some children than others (money is not the answer), that it was ok to kill 2.1 million Vietnamese (we were defending democracy), that it is ok to continue to kill Iraqis even if it was wrong to invade the country (because we are there now), that gays don't have the right to marry (it is not natural), that nuclear weapons should be banned except for those who already have them (what is, is), that a diverse country should have a Christian government--governed by any laws a simple majority of Christians can muster,that the right to have as many children as wanted is sacred (faith based feelings), that natural resources are unlimited (God gave us enough to last forever), that vast fortunes of amassed wealth belongs---after death---to the relatives of the deceased (there is nothing wrong with allowing the wealth of a nation to accumulate in the hands of a few), graduated taxation is unfair (the wealthy already pay a good percent of the total taxes). Is that so? Yes it is. Well, if 1% of the people own 90% of the wealth maybe they should be paying 90% of the taxes. And of course how can any nation prosper if all the wealth steadily accumulates in the hands of a few? Even now, with the stock market tumbling and depleting the savings value of most people, the wild fluctuations on a daily basis provide large speculators with the opportunity to amass large fortunes on these swings. But of course we all have been deluded into believing an unrestricted market is a good thing---the right thing. We were deluded into believing the price of gas was near $4 because of supply and demand? Really? Then in like one or two months the price of gas dropped in half. Because demand dropped in half? Okay. God has blessed the companies who own the natural resources of the world. How else can they be making record profits every quarter? Deregulation is good. No delusion there. Okay. And besides, most people believe the economy always goes in cycles, up, then down, then up again----not to worry. Times will get better. All we need is a bail out and everything will be okay again. OKAY. After all free enterprise is just doing it's thing. Everything will be all right, slavery is dead. Really, is slavery dead or coming back stronger than ever? Isn't making products at a cheap price via slave labor slavery? Isn't anyone forced to work at less than living wages a slave? (of course no one is making them work, and they are not forced to live on plantations in chains and owned by others). Maybe this is just more sophisticated slavery. But I think foolishly here, we all know slavery ended a century ago. I personally know some people to manage to get by on less than living wages and can pay their bills and even own a car and house. Of course they work three jobs, but who the fuck cares, that is their life, their decisions, and not of my concern. I guess not but one wonders, in moments of non deluded thinking, how long this can go on before those of us with a good life will need to circle the wagons? Does anyone ever realize that if class riots start, the modern methods of terrorism will make circling the wagons a waste of time? Some delusions would be devastating to let go. Everything is going to be all right. Bad times always pass. I agree. And evolution proves it. Of course some bad periods last hundreds or thousands of years. The Dark Ages lasted 500 years. If we won't take care of human overpopulation Mother Nature will and maybe already is. Let's all take a moment right now and say a fond sympathetic farewell to those 100 million people predicted to starve to death in the next few years. Me, I am going to take a nap now and then gobble up a sumptuous meal, then take my three mile walk in nature, then write a musing, then read some books, then watch a Netflix movie, and then, when becoming pleasantly tired, I will put on some music till I fall asleep. Everything is just fine in this best of all possible worlds. The proof is in the living. If others don't like life, why don't they go elsewhere or just desist living---fuckin' misfits and free loading retarded parasites. Thank God for gated communities and security guarded high rises. Okay. We all safe. Okay. Our economy, priorities, and ethics are basically sound. Okay. Zipeddy Do Dah Day.....Okay.
Sign of the times: Cluster bomblets are packed by the hundreds into artillery shells, bombs or missiles, which scatter them over vast areas. Some fail to explode immediately. The unexploded bomblets can then lie dormant for years until they are disturbed, often by children attracted by their small size and bright colors.
The group Handicap International says 98 percent of cluster-bomb victims are civilians, and 27 percent are children. Nations across the world have signed an agreement to make them illegal as weapons. The U.S., Russia, and China refuse to sign claiming these are useful military weapons. OKAY.
