Just Thinking...

Hey y'all. I very much hope that this blog will be taken in the spirit intended...even though at the moment I'm not totally clear on what that intent is. No matter...onward. When I was a small boy I noticed some things that struck me as wrong, offended my innate sense of fairness and justice. One of those was that I could see that the picture of my folks and I, along with hundreds of others, working from before daylight to well after dark in the fields, and all of us doing very well to have some shelter (except for leaks) some clothes (though most were raggedy) some food (though not enough to completely quell that gnawing feeling in your belly), even some having a car (though inevitably quite old and rusty) - as juxtaposed (I could SEE juxtaposed even though I had never heard of the word) to the picture of the land owner who I never saw in the fields, but who had a brand new shiny car in which we sometimes saw him riding by, a very large fine home which we saw rarely and only from a distance - there was just something wrong with this picture. More than that though...it had a painful quality to it, the same kind of feeling I might have in my gut if I saw someone kick a dog and make him yelp for no reason at all.

I don't think I ever had a lack of intelligence per se, though I did have a humongous sack of naivete (yeah, long before I ever heard of that word too). A huge part of my problem was that I had a tendency to trust, to take things at face value. It's too much to say I assumed other people were good and smart and nice, rather it simply never entered my mind that anyone could be otherwise. It was not really until I got into school and was forced by circumstance to spend time (a captive audience, as it were) with many other kids, that I slowly started to realize that some of them were very different from me. Where it would never ever occur to me to whack someone just to be doing it, there were those who seemed to think this kind of thing was the funniest event possible, and it produced more gales and tears of laughter if the whacked party cried or screamed.

I honestly have no memory at all of HOW it came to be, but later, in my teens, I was going to see therapists at mental health centers. I'm quite sure no one ever told me I had to do this...still, there I was on monthly, sometimes even weekly sessions, with someone who was genuinely educated; someone (I assumed) with a college degree; someone who clearly should know much more than I about...well, everything. Perhaps this was a part of my struggle to begin to understand myself, I'm not sure. Seemed logical enough that a person whose JOB it was to study and understand people (psychologists, psychiatrists), should be able to explain me to me. Though they were all different and some I liked some much more than others, to my amazement, none of these people seemed to understand people any more than I. A bit more of my naivete broken away, floating down the stream. And when I finally got to a therapist or three who advised me that I had problems, that I needed to change my thinking and my behaviors, that I simply was not "fitting in" as well as I should because there was something wrong with me...I began to look seriously askance at them. After I was married, one actually came up with a genuine diagnosis; a NAME for what was "wrong" with me: Borderline Personality Disorder.

During much of this time, from when I was around six till into my teens, we also went to meetings of Jehovah's Witnesses. Again, my naivete (bolstered by cultural and biblical teachings) caused me to simply accept without any thought of question that the people around me knew much more than I did about...well, everything. After all they were grown people, adults, people who had lived several times as long as I had been alive, so how could they possibly NOT know a lot? When the Speaker at a meeting talked about how misguided and in error the rest of "Christendom" was; that Jesus was not really God but only God's SON; that the idea that everyone could go to heaven was tragically wrong, that only 144,000 "chosen ones" would go to heaven, etc., I simply accepted these things at face value. I did wonder for a while how one managed to be one of the chosen, but I suppose my innate underlying lack of ambition got me nowhere on figuring that out.

Oddly, even after I went through several years with the thought in the back of my head that I would not live past seventeen (because Armageddon would happen in 1975), and even when I saw that was bullshit and that JW's didn't know what they were talking about, I didn't lose belief in God...only in JW's. I just figured that they had probably been wrong about the rest of "Christendom" too, like they were wrong about Armageddon...after all, by then I knew the rest of Christendom was very much bigger than the JW's, and therefore more likely to be smarter and right.

When I got along in my teens and began trying to find a job, because obviously this was how one got money, which one had to have in order to have much of anything else, I assumed it would be a simple and straightforward thing...I would apply (ask) for a job and if they had one they would hire me. Another considerable chunk of my naivete (and this one hurt some), broke off and floated away. I discovered, to my amazement that it was not at all a simple and straightforward affair. I was asked what remains, to me, one of the stupidest questions ever: "What experience do you have?" "Huh?!" That rattled me. See, look, I am 16 years old, I have never had any job of any kind before, I don't have one now, that's kinda why I'm here asking for one. But we can't hire you without experience. A bit dazed, I nonetheless staggered off assuming that this was just a particularly stupid person (how could they even be running a business anyway?)

I did eventually get hired somewhere (I don't remember where), but only after many more "How much experience you got!?" and I was finally on my way to having a good life. I had a job. That was the magic thing in America. A job. Why a guy with a JOB could go places, could make money, SAVE money, get things he needed and liked...at some point it started to dawn on me that the only way that would actually work would be if one got paid a great deal more money than I was getting. And how did one fix THAT problem? Why, education of course, one with a college degree (remember those therapists...no friggin' dirty fingernails for them) didn't have to worry about being able to afford the gas to get to work. They got BIG paydays. Crap. So, I gotta go back to school for the GED. Luckily, I went to "Adult Education" and got the GED in a couple of months, rather than the couple of years it would have taken for the diploma in school, and so I figger I'm now finally on the fast track, took a short cut through that school BS and now, on to college.

Dammit. THESE people expect you to PAY MONEY in order to go to college...even JUNIOR college. WTF!? If I had that kind of money why would I be needing to go to college to make that kind of money!? *sigh* Okay, play the game (I've started to think of it as a game by now) and I find a "work-study program" in which I can go to two or three hours of classes and then work in the library restacking books (quietly) for another hour or two. Fine. I liked the ideas of sociology and psychology, partly because I found the idea of minds fascinating and partly because I wanted a BIG PAYDAY without the aching back and grimy hands.

Somewhere in there I figure out that it's really irrelevant to these folk how smart you are, how much you know about anything; what matters is something called college credits, and these are acquired mostly by the time spent in classes (not what is or isn't learned) and the rate you get these credits are slower than a turtle in mollasses in February. I gotta get through at least two years of this JUNIOR business, then another four years at "real college", then still more years at medical or other specialty schools... when does it end? I start to think maybe these peeps are about as screwy about their thing as JW's were about theirs.

And so it was, that I ended up with a GED which was not as good as a real diploma which, in turn, wasn't really much good for anything other than getting into college, where one can spend still more years pursuing credits and certificates and degrees, and now, by the time I am fifty-three, it might well be that I could by now have gotten seven of these degrees and still be lucky to get a job flipping burgers in Micky D's. Instead, I can't get a job at Micky D's or anywhere else, due in part to the stress and worry instilled by the notion that one's purpose in life was to "provide for your family" if you managed to have one of those, and to pursue the "American Dream". Instead, I sit on my ass all day (most days) and play and research and learn and write on my computer and I have no worries whatever about paying bills, because money arrives in my account for that - nowhere near a DECENT amount of money, mind you, but enough to allow me to spend whatever time I have actually living my life (within the restrictions that being one of the American poor imposes), rather than forever trying to run faster on the wheel in order to stay in the same place.

And when I look back through all this and all those years and see how many times "pursue" is used I wanna bitch slap the Founding Fathers for including that "pursuit of happiness" thing in the Bill of Rights. Hey, Greyhound dogs in race tracks all over the world engage in "pursuit of the (totally fake) rabbit" all the time, and how many of those dogs do you suppose ever actually see a real rabbit, much less eat one? Phuck "pursuit".

The study of people still fascinates me, even though by now I have learned too much about them to make the study fun any more. Now it's more like a morbid fascination, like rubber-necking at an especially bloody and violent car wreck. Humans now look to me like a guy in an ocean of quicksand and people who sincerely mean well pass by and toss him an anvil on occasion, assuring him if he will only hold tight and believe he can use it to get out on dry land.

I honestly never really thought of myself as an especially smart person. I still don't. But I can't ignore what is around me either. When I first truly began to see people in general I was stunned and shaken to my core. That feeling has never really left. I suppose it's a bit like actually taking a good look at the man behind the curtain; seeing exactly how the illusion is done. You are smarter, you know more, you are enlightened...but somehow, the feeling of being let down is as an elephant slowly settling upon your chest. I so wanted it to be true. It was so cool. As I said in my last blog, I did "coin" that silly motto, "I'd rather hear the single worst truth in the universe than ten thousand beautiful lies". For part of me that is true. I do have a deep abiding respect for truth as much as I can determine and understand it. The part that ain't so good is...knowing that some of these truths cannot be changed, at least in any kind of "reasonable" time frame on human scale. Also, not without quite literally changing the very foundation of what it currently means to "be human".

I hope that some of you have enough interest to watch the videos I'm including here. One is all about propaganda...and no, it's one of the "conspiracy theory" types. I hesitate sometimes to put things like this in. One reason is because of Matthew 18:6: "But whoso shall cause one of these little ones that believe on me to stumble, it is profitable for him that a great millstone should be hanged about his neck, and that he should be sunk in the depth of the sea." I hope you understand I mean this in the metaphorical sense. Sometimes it's better to be in the (relative) bliss of ignorance than to know disappointing things that you cannot change. So, beware.

George Carlin was one of the really bright people who understood this. This first video is George explaining the basic reason why politics is fucked up - and always will be. At least if you buy the notion that "we the people" elect our leaders. That reason is...the public is stupid. George...

People in general tend to have a grossly inflated opinion of themselves. In many psychological tests and polls as many as 19% of respondents said they were in the top 1% of their group. Chew on that one. There are several reasons why there never has been and never can be actual democracy here or, for that matter, even "representative democracy" which is a propaganda statement if ever there was one.

In the following video there is mention of a man named Edward Bernays. He and a man named Ivy Lee are often called the fathers of modern public relations. Even that term itself - public relations - is actually a euphemism for the more accurate "perception management". That is, it really doesn't matter what is actually happening or why. What matters is the public's perception of what's happening and why. They have even told you that flat out sometimes in advertising: "Image is everything". The very sad truth is that "the public"..."we the people", in aggregate, are as gullible and ignorant as any flock of sheep you can find. Of course "PR" didn't start with these guys, the idea has been around probably as long as humans have. But with the advent of mass communications, it became amazingly easy to manipulate the masses of people.

Sometimes I just shake my head at those people who yell, whether from the right or the left or some "lunatic fringe" somewhere, to the people, "WAKE UP". How loud and how often do you suppose you would have to scream "WAKE UP" to any given flock of sheep in order to get them to come to understand their place in the world, their relations to humans, what humans are, what humans use them for and why? How long would that take? Just about the same amount of time it would take to "wake up" the masses of people....for they are genuinely, in aggregate, just as clueless as the sheep. They no more have the capacity within them to "wake up" than do the sheep. It is their fundamental nature...within their genetic and neural makeup. If and when this is ever deliberately changed on a global scale...call it eugenics or whatever you like...things could change...until then nothing can significantly change. It is against the very laws of physics. To borrow a phrase from Keith Olbermann... good night, and good luck.

Also viewable at....


http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/psywar/

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