5th grade recess
Friday January 13, 2006 - 3:46PM EDT
Our government and its policies along with popular notions of how to carry yourself in society are turning into something out of 5th grade recess. The reap what you sow attitude and the continuing posturing of not being intimidated is childish. Right now I see those two things becoming more extreme. It is becoming reap what you sow and be damned to everyone else. That is 1700's thinking. Protect your neck. It is us moving past that thinking that advanced us to right now why are we going back to that? I rememeber as a kid being told that one is not rewarded for every "good" thing they do. That was supposed to be the hallmark of growing up, right? Not being so selfishly involved as to expect some tangible offering of reward. It is still true in many aspects of life but what is happening now is that kind of philosophy is being chipped away at. Some things are becoming perform and be rewarded with some tangible things. Money or power. It is similar to that philosophy of everything needing to be a private business in order for it to function. The idea that because someone will receive somekind of monetary gain from doing something they will do it the best. The rise of social programs and collective responsibility from the FDR era through the 70's is being weakned by a new philosophy of "get mine". Interestingly enough what sparked the rise of the social programs was the remnants of Industrial Revolution "get mine".
Why are we going back to that attitude? It just seems like advancement of human society has gone along the path of more collective responsibility and cooperation. The trick today is that people are being bamboozled into thinking that that is what is happening when the smoke and mirrors are concealing what is really going on. What is happening now is that large programs are trumpeted to help the little guy. But at the crux of these programs lies the requirement of active pursual or enrollment into these things through a tightly controlled gate. The idea of making someone go and get something may sound fine and dandy and even superior in some cases. But that shit doesn't work all the time. Passively pursuing something by offloading responsibility onto the individual is only going to work in some cases. One could argue that it may work well, but the bottleneck is that gate. That is where everything goes wrong. It makes entrance arbitrary. Whoever controls the gate controls the system. Funny, now that I think about it. What is the deal with a gate in heaven. That concept of heaven being this gated paradise seems gross. A concept born of peasants clawing their way for scraps. Oh wait that is where it came from. What was I saying? Oh yeah, the gate of the system. To summarize, pathetic is the regression to private "get mine". I guess the question may be how do you allow the private "get mine" to coexist along with collective responsibility? That is what is still being debated and figured out in human society. Maybe we need to change what exactly we desire privately. Let's be honest here it is the accumulation of wealth everyone life is based on. The pinnacle of life is being rich. Not even rich but just having certain things. When was the last time some celebrated person was living meagerly. Ghandi probably. But for the most part we look up and celebrate those who are good at getting stuff. Which I guess is ironic because they are the people who most likely put the biggest drain on society in relation to their contribution. Not on purpose though, simply as a consequence of the system. It is going to be hard to change though, change the drive for stuff. Everything is built around that. And frankly I don't know if anyone knows or is sure that we can come up with a better way. I'm hungry