Thursday, April 29, 2010

Is it me?

I woke up today to the liberal morning talk show rantings of NHPR. It sounded completely insane. Has the country fallen apart overnight? They were talking about things like late term abortions, torture, genocide, assisted suicide, concentration camps in Arizona, health care, etc.
It was laughable. No way to wake up. I've been slowly reading about Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations...which is boring me to death, but apparently since 1750 at least there has been almost no progress on the affairs of men. The exact same issues between government and people were a major concern in Smith's time. It's safe to say where there is a government there will be a pundit. And where there is a pundit there will be people talking about that pundit as though they aren't pundits but really they are. We all are. The size of the government, the influence of the American government, the over all power of the government is really Unamerican. If I weren't American I'd say this can't be a democracy. It's a democracy on paper, but it's like calling Wal-Mart a neighborhood bakery because there is a bakery and it is in the same state as a neighborhood. We've got a government that basically rules every fragment of our lives and no one is happy about it. If we weren't all living so well I'd call it a disaster. It's really only a disaster if a) you care about individual responsibility. b) you live in a country other than America.

I'm turning over a new leaf today. I'm going to really work at living like the poor uneducated person that I am. No more delusion. I'm not going to be prejudiced against the rich anymore. I have an idea of where that trait came from but I've had enough time to purge it and have failed so far. Let's just say that in the debate of nurture and nature I'm seeing a lot of evidence for nurture being the major factor. All you parents out there keep that in mind.

Today's sermon-
I planted trees for a winter and these tree saplings were 7 inches tall and I'd plant one every three seconds. I think I planted half a million. Anyway, you plant a sapling perfectly straight because if it is slightly angled it will take years to right itself. Just a bit extra attention to planting it straight will make the tree's life SO MUCH EASIER. But if you intentionally and willingly plant a tree on a completely skewed angle and also hide it in the shade or piss on it and leave a shovel lying on it for years then it's a miracle if the thing grows at all. The tree itself has a very good chance of surviving, unless you totally ignore your responsibilities and abuse and neglect it. IF you abuse it then you shouldn't be planting trees. That's pretty obvious. But, guess what? This isn't about trees.

The headlines are alarmist and the talk shows are even worse. It's hard to pretend we aren't on the eve of destruction. Americans are living what is called a "Five Planet Lifestyle" that is, it would take 5 earths to support us. The way we manage to survive is by taking the difference from other countries. We justify this by demonstrating how technologically advanced we are. Look how small our phones are! Yes, the cataclysms we are causing are mostly hidden from us by the media and it probably wouldn't matter if we did know about them. Go to a KFC buffet sometime and watch people pig out. If the extra crispy vat is empty they just wait for it to get filled up again. They don't think "Hey, did I eat too much?" ha.
We can ignore the problems because they will likely not cause much of a problem in our lifetimes but the problems we're passing on are going to take absolute genius to fix. Hell, we can't even define the problems yet and someone is going to have to solve them eventually.

I'm taking advice from Michael Jackson and starting with the man in the mirror. With that in mind here's the video:

2 comments:

hardworker said...

Thanks for the links to cl adult entertainment, that's been fun.

I also agree with you on american consumption and the insustainability of our lifestyle, I just don't think refusing to work for those richer than us will change anything. Perhaps it would. If we refused to dig in coal mines, diamond mines, oil wells, then the rich wouldn't continue to be rich, because it takes a very poor man to do the dirty work. A poor man is a desperate man. Imagine what you would do to feed your children if you had some and loved them?

Maybe a world wide strike is in order.

Oggy Bleacher said...

I wish my mouth was smaller than my brain...or the other way around.

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Man in the Van by Oggy Bleacher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.