I Have a Pull Chain in my Head

In this case the 'It' in question is:

Birthday number 45.

How'd this happen!? Who did this to me!? Someone has to be to blame!

Actually it doesn't really bother me so much, although I am finding myself asking the question: 'Is our children learning?' Wait. That's not the question I'm asking myself. It's: 'Am I doing anything useful with my life?' But I'm asking myself that one every day, so this 45 thing isn't anything new. And the answer is 'No', of course. I mean, with all the computer games out there to be played how could I possibly find the time to be useful?

Anyway. If ya care to you may wish me a Happy. Becky has some wrapped presents sitting out in the living room to tease me, but I'm not letting on that I'm the least bit curious. Not the least bit....

Posted by: Dean / 11/28/2004 08:42:00 PM 0 comments

The other day I was wandering around at work, listening to the voices in my head, when my Nextel phone went off. (It's a work phone with 2-way paging, just so's you know.) It was one of my co-workers.

"Is that you?" he said.
All the voices in my head stopped chattering and all of us replied, "What? I didn't call you."
"No," he said. "I was wondering if that was you walking like an old man."

At that point I realized that he was where he could see me because I had, in fact, been pretending I was an old man and had been walking accordingly...

.....

It's good to know that I've already mastered 'the old guy walk'. One less thing to worry about.

Dear Mr. Nader,

Sir, I like you. I really do. You make sense when you speak and that means a lot to me, but I still don't think I'd like to hang out with you and this seems to be the problem you have in these runs at the Presidency.

Ralph. As one guy to another,...you're a scold. And that doesn't work in politics.

Oh, I completely agree with you. You've been talking and talking to the people, but they just aren't listening. So, like any good scholar, you've studied harder and re-visited the issues, then talked to the people some more...and they still aren't listening. And all this study has made you knowledgable and that has made you certain that you have something meaningful to say. And that has made you hungry for a bully pulpit.

Well, I'd like you to take this last Presidential showing as an indication that you aren't going to find that bully pulpit in the political arena. You've built your fame upon the "outsider to power" persona. A smart man trying to make us safe from the greed-heads and safe from ourselves. When you make these inside runs, your own reputation is stopping you, Ralph. And when we see you trying to turn into an insider, well, it looks like hubris.

You're wasting your legacy. Now is not the time to be co-opted into the political system. Now is the time to get your ass back in the kitchen and start cooking up the sort of organization you're better suited too. You need to get it into your head that it's not about the cook, it's about the food.

Here's what we need you to do.

We need an independent and unbiased media in this country. I think there's a lot of that already going on with the small, hometown papers, but it certainly isn't going on in the big Media outlets. They're too interested in their bottom lines to want the truth and they've always been busy making, rather than reporting, the news. Many people believe them. (Or have come to just expect this trash and learned to live with it.) And the reason these people believe the media is...

...the sad state of our educational system.

Education is the major battleground, Ralph. I think you already know this. The creationists are sending in their skirmishers. Fact has become omission in the face of rampant, liberal 'political correctness' and supposed 'conservative compassion'. They all have their agendas, but educating a well-rounded human being doesn't seem to be on any of them. When those of us with working bullsh*t detectors compare what our authority figures (educators, politicians, parents) tell us to what the rest of our experience tells us, well...we stop listening, don't we? Trusting souls accept what they're told and wander through life lost in the comfortable 'certainties' they've been offered. Many of us stop thinking altogether.

If we taught Americans our real history, rather than our agreed upon folklore, then we might see a change in our political landscape. People might stop accepting the fiction of America's long history of 'freedom' and 'concern and sacrifice for the world'. Instead of believing we're 'already there' and 'just need to maintain our long tradition', they might learn to discern our facts from our fictions. And that might lead towards actually striving to achieve the ideals we're told we stand for.

So put your considerable intellect and energy into Education. Eviscerate our pathetic textbooks - not just the history texts, but our science and humanities texts as well. Get people to demand 'truth' and 'reality' over 'sensitivity' and 'insecurity'. At the same time, hammer on the media. Find an outlet to get out truthful, message-free, reporting. If unable to find one, create one! If unable to affect public education, open up alternative schools. If Montessori can do this, so can you and your people. Get your followers to be teachers and journalists. Support the small presses. Read Wendell Berry's Citizenship Papers and embrace the small.

Teach us something, Ralph.

And Ralph: get out of the limelight. It's ruining you. You give all the appearances of having forgotten your roots and that makes me more than a little sad. You're trying to be the beacon when you're best suited to be the power grid...and there are 2 generations of brand new bulbs among your followers just waiting for chances to keep lights on in their own windows. We want to find our ways home, but we can't see them past the shadow you're casting.

Love and respect to you for all the lives your safety measures have saved.

Dean Derby

Well I managed to last over a week (since the election), but the depression has finally set in. No higher ground for me, although I haven't given up wishing for it. But at this very moment I can't avoid the feeling that the world is an insane asylum and that there are only inmates here...no one is running this show. (And being up and tired at 3 am doesn't help my outlook any.)

I'd love to howl at the world, but where to begin? And who's really listening? I'm as guilty of the last one as anyone, which makes it all-the-more disheartening. There really is no chance for broader communication among humans. No amount of history seems able to teach us anything, so why should any length of conversation succeed where generations of bloodshed fail?

What would I howl about? Pollution. Violence. Waste. Religion as mental illness. Child Abuse. The sh*t-ass way you lame wads drive and the giant pieces of gas-guzzling crap that you drive. Pig Ignorance. The foolishness of posting a blog entry when one is tired and depressed. Ad nauseum and ad infinitum.

And to all you optimists out there I have one thing to say: Don't ever study history. Stay as far away from it as you can because you don't want to see the patterns. They'll ruin you. Just keep fighting the good fight.

I think what frustrates me most is that I can't let go and move on. I'm convinced humanity has no real future, just a steady repetition of our past failures played out with new background scenery. But I haven't been able to take that feeling and use it to free myself to act in the 'now'. To go for whatever gusto I can grab while my chance to grab is good.

Guess it's time to give myself permission to give up.

That there are many people who are being 'informed' by some very questionable sources and who are holding on to some equally questionable ideas.

A few examples. While visiting a friend in Vermont, I naturally flipped on the hotel T.V. (I killed my T.V. back in 2000....believe I mentioned that in the post previous to this one.) and came across a televangelist. He's a very distinctive fella with numerous obvious verbal and facial twitches and a passion for drawing while he preaches.

Anyway, he conveyed a story about 3 guys in a war prison forced to do hard labor...a regular guy, a christian, and a queer. (I'm using his word here...just so's you get the sense of his story.) Well naturally the regular guy griped all the time, the christian sang hymns and worked hard, and the queer was lazy. One day the regular guy had had enough of the queer (being so lazy) and was going to kill him, but the christian stopped him, saying: "You don't want to damn your everlasting soul to eternal hell do you?" He followed this up, not with a discussion about word choices or why all humans have value (in the eyes of God), or anything else along those lines. His follow-up was about how accepting Christ as your savior made you into one heck of a happy, hard-working guy...like the christian.

Now this strikes me as wrong on so many levels, but obviously it doesn't come across that way to numerous other people. Not to the guy who was saying it and not to the people willing to tune into him every Sunday. I remind myself that these people vote and probably do so on 'issues of morality'.

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A second moment of instruction came from an encounter I had with a fellow co-worker whom I know to be technically/scientifically intelligent, relatively conservative (guns, smaller gov't, etc.), and highly opinionated. He said he didn't consider the abortion issue when voting this time, even though he feels strongly that women should have all rights over the control of their own bodies (liberal-think), because - now get this - he's sure that "the issue of abortion and Women's Rights over their bodies has already been decided. It's a done deal. They can't go back and change that."

What? Not only 'what', but 'WTF'!

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Paying attention to what other people are saying is, well, frightening. Reminds me of why I stopped listening in the first place. Carumba!

So the election results are in and I find that I just don't understand Americans. Not at all. And it's not just because Bush was re-elected, although that does have a lot to do with my confusion, but that Kerry was actually viewed as a desirable alternative when he was little more than 'Bush Lite'.

Who the Hell are you people? Why do I feel like a man without a country or a species? Why am I constantly reminded of phone sanitizers whenever I read or hear the news? (No watching, since I pulled the plug on my T.V. back in mid 2000.) When do I get to wake up from this dream?

I'm choosing a philisophical outlook towards this Election of our Future Sold (to the Highest Bidder tm). Kerry garnered more of the vote than I expected him to so I actually find it somewhat heartening that so many people tried to vote Bush out. Part of my choosing this outlook is that it brings me face-to-face with something so huge and so overlooked that I just have to investigate it. That something revolves around my first question:

Who the Hell are you people?

What makes you tick? What did Bush/Cheney say that resonated with so many of you? What did Kerry/Edwards say that resonated with the remainder of you voter types. (I actually voted this time and I'm getting sick of backing F-ing losers.) And what is keeping the rest of you from participating...especially you young punks who stand to pay for all of these present decisions with your blood and/or your money?

I want to - no, need to - understand. I want to write it off as part of what humans do and have always done...and certainly that's a factor. But if that were all it was, then we'd all be acting like our government and corporations do towards one another in our day-to-days...and we (generally) don't. So why do we hand that sort of power to our government(s) and allow (and even encourage) them to engage in behavior we would be embarrassed about if it were ours?

So I'm going to Puzz and Puzz. And I do expect it to make my Puzzler sore. And I may not understand what's going on any better than I do now, but at least I'll be able to say that I tried...because up until now I've written the lot of you off as lowest-common-denominators and I've wanted nothing more than to see all of you sterilized. As painfully as possible, even.

And that just won't do. Not because such thoughts make me feel bad, but mostly 'cuz I haven't got the time to get around to a job that big. And we all know that if you want something done right, well, you just gotta do it yourself.