INFLATED MEMBERSHIPS

Inflated memberships: Years ago I got this application to join the NRA. I ignored it. Several months later I got my membership card. I wrote and told them I had not joined and did not intend to join. Every year until I moved a couple of years ago I would get my membership renewal notice, and each year I would ignore it, and every year a new membership card arrived. When the NRA frightens Congress with how many members they have I always shudder to realize my name is on their membership list and I guess will always be until the NRA has a membership which exceeds the population of the country. As a teenager I was baptized in the Baptist Church. I have never had my name removed and something tells me I am one of the current listed members of the Baptist Church. Ah, what the hell, no big deal. Public Schools which depend on enrollment for state or local funding often inflate enrollment. State College and Universities are often the worse offenders as all they have to do is find a way to get a student to enroll, even if it is under circumstances which they know will cause the student to soon drop out. Some students enroll just to get financial aid and then drop out. This inflated enrollment is often by a hefty amount. Prestigious Universities and Colleges often use inflated tuition figures as a tool to attract the best students. For example, if your tuition is currently at $30,000/yr you can increase tuition by $5000 and then increase scholarship grants by a similar amount and you win both ways: you impress the applicant as to how high up the ladder your University or College is, and you impress the applicant as to how much of a scholarship you will be giving them. I can remember the days when you could substantially work your way through college. I smiled at the experience of some guy named Tom Flynn. He was a member of the Catholic Church and decided he no longer was a believer and wanted his name removed. Finding this not so easy he decided to get himself excommunicated. His research determined that excommunication opportunities for lay-people are of three principal types. He found Canon 1364 which prescribes automatic excommunication in cases of schism (leaving Catholicism and joining another church), heresy (when a baptized Catholic 'obstinately denies' a well defined Church doctrine), or apostasy ( a thorough renunciation of Christ and the Church). Mr. Flynn visited the offices of the Archdiocese of Buffalo in Feb. 2008 and left a package for the Rev. Magr. David Slubecky, Vicar General and Moderator of the Curia. The package included his baptismal certificate, and evidence that he was no longer following certain Catholic doctrines. He requested excommunication. He never got an answer and then took his case to the diocesan office in Erie Pa. Again he got no response. Thus, at this date Mr. Flynn is a member in good standing of the Catholic Church. He is now contemplating excommunication via "desecrating the Sacred Species", which is to say he plans to take a wafer which has been consecrated by a priest and throwing it in a waste basket. The above is not an attack on the Catholic Church but yet another example of how so many organizations falsely claim members they really don't have. Well, I don't contribute to this sort of thing. If I apply to be a member of some group and they accept my membership application, I immediately decline. I don't wish to be a member of any group who would accept me as a member. I mean, how exclusive could it be? Unemployment figures, and only God knows how many other Government figures, are manipulated figures, tabulated in such a way as to minimize or maximize the problem. Even weather reports are often misleading, worded to get attention more than be realistic. I have been on trips and dutifully followed the weather reports back home only to find, upon return, that the weather crisis, as reported on the news, was a typical thunderstorm or whatever, nothing so momentous as portrayed on the weather news across the country. We live in a massive information age. There is very little information out there which cannot be found on the internet. I really like that. Maybe someday arranged marriages will return, only this time not by family, but by the internet. No more bar hopping, church socials, or whatever, you just fill out an accurate account of your own looks, character, priorities, hobbies, etc. and run it through some internet program and boom, just like that, comes the perfect bride or groom. Then maybe once a year both could fill out a form to determine current compatibility and boom, just like that, at the appropriate time, divorce could be declared with a print-out of who gets what---and to lessen the pain, a new spiffy bride or groom be coughed up so that no more than a couple of days of loneliness be suffered through. Of course this massive availability of the internet has downsides too. A good deal of the information is fabricated. And it provides every kook in the world (not you or I of course) to become connected through the internet with similar such kooks across the globe, allowing formerly isolated disconnected weirdos to become an effective force whether it be for good or bad. These kind of internet relationships have mostly replaced the neighborhood, the church, the schools, etc. as the social centers of our lives. People used to hang out on their porches or be busy going to club meetings or church functions, or community events-----not anymore, just block after block of houses lit up only by the dim halo of computer friendships in each person's room. Imagine telling some young person, "You have been bad you must go and stay in your room now until I tell you you can come out". You better say it quickly before they are already in the room and you better be prepared to beg them to come out after a reasonable time. So we find ourselves in a whole new world, at least those of us who are older, and what we are to think of it is an enigma. I kind of like it, the computer certainly makes entertaining oneself a lot easier, shopping a lot easier, getting information a lot easier, organizing a political movement much easier, etc. But the downside is that we all become more isolated entities of our social and physical environment. And what this all portends from an evolutionary standpoint for life on this planet is a $64,0000 dollar question. Maybe a case of the more we know, the less we really know. From an evolutionary perspective it might be garbage in, garbage out. 100 million people are projected to starve to death in the next few years and it will happen without hardly a murmur from any of us. It is the 3000 deaths from the World Trade Center bombing which generated massive response and actions. Imagine this, there will be over 3000 TIMES as many deaths from starvation in the next few years as died from the World Trade Center bombing and absolutely nothing much will be done about it. Reality and justice are too discombobulated for us to get priorities straight, or any justice for all right. All I really know, after all these years, is that TIME stays, WE go. And sometimes we never even get a chance to say goodbye, or good riddance, whichever applies.