Life Is Not Exactly As Advertised
I remember how simple it all seemed in grade school. We had already been told by our parents at home that good children got treats, bad children did not. If you were bad you would be punished. If you were lazy your could expect no help to get things done for you at the last minute. There were no bailouts by parents, we had to learn our lessons. The intent was, of course, that we learn how life works so we were prepared out there in the real world. We had to be good people, obey the rules, be helpful and kind and in return we could expect to avoid the most painful things in life. We would have friends, we would earn a living and we would be provided for in case of ill health or catastrophe.
Of course those were the same rules for everyone back then. In the post WWII civil world of the 50s and early 60s when I did most of my growing up decency and hard work did assure you a a decent lifestyle. Single income families could still buy homes and even send a child or two through college. Extended families would take in orphans within the family and for the rest there were orphanages run by charitable organisations and churches. There were no massive numbers of homeless on the streets and although there was a quiet mention of child abuse and incest now and again, as children we were blissfully unaware.
Abuses existed of course but it was not in your face day in and day out as it is now. It was kept from the kiddies because they should not life in fear. As most of us growing up back then I believed if I studied hard, worked hard, and lived a lawful and tax paying life with time dedicated to my community, all would be well. As long as there was no war, no natural catastrophe, all would be well.
How is it then that after a life of living between the fences of the law, working hard and paying my taxes, and without interference of war or natural catastrophe life is not well at all? No-one told me this could happen. If I had known I might have lived differently. When exactly did life change the rules on us and not tell?
Why is it all around me people blatantly disregarding the laws live oh so much better a life than I (or indeed most of us) do? Why after decades of paying the taxes and not complaining at all how much it was because after all that safety net it provided I might need one day, I am penniless and living the barest of existences?
No matter how much we worked we never could afford those nice homes and university educations for our kids as our parents could. Why do the law breakers have more access to services than the homeless? How is it the same continent bent on preserving the name of God in oaths and commandments displayed in plain sight is also applauding those who partake openly in pride/vanity (racism, classism, celebrity), avarice/greed (oligarchy, blind to conservation), envy (obsession with having what others have), gluttony (expanding waistlines, posh dining, oversize portions), sloth (easy money, crime, surgery over exercise), wrath (revenge over love, “with us or against us”), lust (predatory men targeting women and children, NAMBLA, adultery in the best of people – presidents, priests).
This world where human rights are mentioned daily and disregarded just as often. Like most of us living in fiscal peril I am a pen stroke away from a certain demise. The security of family and community have been taken away by servitude to production quotas, and other bottom line thinking. The machine tramples over all who are not cogs of the machine not owners of the machine. The arts and artisans are tolerated only if it suits the bottom line thinkers as being profitable and other discarded, trampled on. Those unable to work profitably are likewise trampled and occasionally thrown a pittance as long as they serve to scapegoat and pose in phot-ops during election years.
Mediocrity is the most anyone is expected to strive toward, being that it is easier to control those who know a little to those who know a lot. Those who know a lot are the ones groomed to take on the power their forefathers have carved out for them. Most government employ spinners and advertisers to tell us all is well and no need to think for ourselves. As long as the masses believe as I did that the poor and indigent choose to be indigent and poor because there are services to look after them, after all we pay so much taxes. The truth is there are services employing the silver spooners as activists, and they may even protest and hold fund raisers, but rarely are they helping the poor, the sick, the discarded in this society.
Somehow we are supposed to believe that there are no monies to house the poor, but we do have a budget surplus like never before. Am I alone in not being able to reconcile this? How is it that oil and tobacco companies make great wads of cash every year on items taxed beyond their profits and yet it is not enough to plough back into researching health and conservation? What does it take before people will agree they are being lied to?
Are there still people who do not think the current war in the middle east is not a money grab for the already super wealthy of both cultures? The lives lost are no doubt disproportionately the lower classes in both cultures. All in the name of their respective God.
I see all these foundations advertised for the great and good work they are doing and yet I see no evidence of it here in the trenches of the lower classes, only the constant complain that foreigners are making it worse and some people just don’t want help. Just as I’ve not met any poor persons who’ve found ways of earning a real living on the Internet, but lots of persons who once they had earned nearly 100 dollars putting AdSense articles on their website to make a little pin money were labelled frauds and had those hard earned monies taken away by the great “Google” with threats of what their lawyers would do to us if we tried to do it again. Apparently it was only designed for the on-line Casinos and Viagra sellers and not Joe in a wheelchair maintaining a blog.
Most people are shamefully self-indulgent and the notion of taking no more for yourself than you need on the verge of extinction, despite this being a fertile planet boasting a human distribution ability never better in the history of humankind. Most “services” are, in fact, corporations, prisons are privately run, so crime pays, no interest whatever in spending monies to rehabilitate. When someone is left to freeze on the street with nothing more than some drug or drink to warm them I don’t believe it is tight budgets borne out of a budget with surpluses keeping services being offered to detoxify, make whole, house and restore to dignity one’s fallen brother/sister.
I doubt they had thought the Internet would give so many of the non-aligned a voice and they are doing their best to silence them. After all it will require faster computers and more and more expensive software and perhaps this will take care of the poorer having a voice, that and not teaching adequate language skills in the public school system. Likely we are preaching to the choir, because the ones with the power are busy adding to their coffers and not a little interested in what they do not see.
This is not the world I knew as a child, and not the world I worked for as an adolescent protestor. Women are not better off (especially where other cultures forbid it, or poverty makes them servants to need with no regard for safety or dignity), men are not better off, children are not even allowed their own safe world having to wise up to realities much before they should (child soldiers, going to bed hungry), and animals are not better off even though their human friends can get militant about it in their name.
Big business peddles fear (green house gases, terrorism) and creates rifts between people. Governments walk in circles of self-importance and supporting activism du jour keeping the old boys club larvae well fed and round for when they are primed to take over the world. To manage any dissent there are labels of mentally unfit, unhappy, and dealt with through pharmacology or exile. Those labels can be brought back at any time to discredit their voices should the world be found to take an interest. There may or may not be a difference between a madman and a sage.
It will most probably get worse. Unwanted traits in humans can be engineered out, and many unconvinced this is not eugenics, but it is. I cannot image sameness, homogenous persons with homogenous views, it is too horrifying to contemplate. Illness and differences were points of inspiration for good acts, inspiration for works of art, it will be a grey and barren world with no-one to help us see beauty and experience it more fully through other eyes than our own overworked and tired ones.
Working hard and being decent guarantee nothing in this world, let’s hope it matters some in the next one. As I get older I’ve noticed there is little respect for experience and wisdom, and if history is not used as a learning aid, we are doomed.
