Some thoughts on my 81st birthday: Memes and wishful thinking
I hope I don’t offend too many of you who use the 1% vs 99% meme but it really is not doing much. Trumps election might even suggest a negative impact but that is giving it too much influence.
It seems clear that the people of the United States are not really fitting into those categories very well when it comes to political action. We evolve concepts slowly and language is a big factor in this. New concepts are difficult to express with old words. It takes hard work and lots of metaphorical loosening of the words we are using from their old meanings. It is always easy for propagandists to slip the old meaning back in.
People are hard to change. Once they develop a world view they tend to stick to it. Our civilization has been held up as a great thing and it hangs together quite well when presented that way. The idea that the way it is organized is screwing the vast majority of us is hard to swallow as a basis for changing our world view.
Over the years the capitalist memes have held on and attempts to confront them with a simple reality about the distribution of wealth has had its problems.
During my 81 years I have had to change my world view many times. Being raised in this country filled me with myths about who we are. Being a Catholic until 21 and then a “born again” Evangelical for another decade or so also gave me lots of baggage to get rid of.
Being a scholar I had to follow my learning and research until even there I found baggage to be discarded if I were to continue to grow.
This past year has caused even more shaking of my foundations for I was forced to learn how inadequate my political perspective really is.
I think I have found some new scholarly work to delve into about the nature of human consciousness from the perspective of the embodied mind.
Reality has become hidden more and more by the reciting of hollow memes and frames for the purpose of fueling an electoral system that is a sham used to blind us from that very reality.
It seems pretty clear that we have passed the point of no return with our destruction of much of the life on the planet. This probably means we are already extinct as a species. It is just a matter of how long it will take for the process we set in motion to go to completion.
I will spend my remaining time trying to understand how we could be so very wrong about almost everything. It makes me seem “abnormal” does it not? We said in the 1960s that being normal in a sick society is very sick.
Somehow I have these mixed feelings. I am so very sad for those who will live beyond me. On the other hand I am filled with an almost perverse satisfaction that my life of scholarship has provided me with rewards beyond measure. I look forward to each new day as another opportunity to learn. I miss teaching but you can tell from reading this that no one wants to hear what I have to say. So I’ll go on my way as if my thoughts were not there and play the game of life by other people’s rules most of the time. I have my special moments and am not greedy about them. Thanks to all who help me enjoy this life.
Comments
Oh, I think folks do want to hear.
First, Happy Birthday!
Second, as far as you saying, "... no one wants to hear what I have to say," that is not true. I can assure you that whenever I see that you've posted I am quick to click because I want to read what you're thinking. If nothing else (and there's plenty else), your 81 years has a lot to say.
Congrats
on your 81st!
Your are now a minority.
Regardless of the path in life I chose, I realize it's always forward, never straight.
Extinction of Homo Sapiens
Happy Birthday!! It's quite an accomplishment to reach 81 and still give a hoot about Homo Sapiens. We must be on the same wave length, because I was having similar thoughts about the extinction of our species today. If climate change doesn't finish us off, the lack of moral development among our leaders will do the job. Human beings require a cooperative environment to survive, and that concept is down the toilet.
Happy (!) 81, Don
Yesterday I became 64. It makes me happy that there are Olders still thinking, and practicing scholarship. You write, they may be messages in a bottle, but you leave a footprint. Perhaps I have tread too lightly recently. Should a published scientist stop at forced retirement? You would argue no. We are voices that people should hear, many years of education and training to specific details. But It was good for a generalist, some of us got a Long View.
You are right, Long View is now terrifying. Happy that I currently do not have grandchildren.
In this anti-science age, scientists need to speak up. It is not a scary existence, just different. We cannot let lies propagate without a nay or better explanation. Thank you for the nudge.
Hey! my dear friends or soon-to-be's, JtC could use the donations to keep this site functioning for those of us who can still see the life preserver or flotsam in the water.
Happy Birthday Don!
I too am always glad to see you have written a new essay.
However, I have to hold what you say in one hand, but hold the other hand up to the light. I'm 59 and my kids are 15 and 17. So it doesn't matter what the facts are. I still have to be an optimist. Realizing there is nothing I can do at this moment about the swirling forces of greed and avarice in the troposphere...I just try to love those around me.
Sounds pretty light weight... I know.
I wish you well as you continue to study and enrich our lives through your writings. Thank you.
Marilyn
"Make dirt, not war." eyo
Happy Birthday!
May you enjoy many more.
Please continue to write and contribute and staying engaged and looking outward as well as inward. My parents gave me the blueprint to happiness in late life and it was as simple as that - staying engaged and curious, even as an observer if not a participant.
I disagree with you about whether the concept of the 99% has taken hold and permeated the zeitgeist and the collective unconscious, because I believe it has. Sometimes I get confirmation of this from the most surprising sources. To me, it's the caldera beneath the surface we walk on that could blow at any moment, hopefully towards massive positive change for the better as we simply refuse to accept the world crafted for us by the current PTB.
In real life I'm not anyone that someone else would give a second glance to at the grocery store - you would think me just another typical middle-class Boomer American consumer. No one would think that once I leave the supermarket with my cat food and Triskets that I come home to write or comment about oligarchs, neo-liberalism, banksters, trade deals, social injustice, etc. And yes, sometimes the shorthand we use discussing among ourselves becomes trite, hackneyed, and cliche and subject to easy ridicule by those who would like to continue to dominate us.
But that's okay too, because things only become banal after they have become accepted and for those that laugh at us as foolish dreamers, we laugh right back at them as the trusty class, whose job is to maintain order on behalf of the wardens. They don't get that we get it and understand what is happening to us.
What we know about the person next to us buying Friskies is that they too belong to the 99%. I think it's a 50/50 chance they they might be one of the enlightened, aware of the screwing, 99% as well. Not bad odds, really.
" “Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free people. A nation does not have to be cruel to be tough.” FDR "
words to live by
Many happy returns old sir!
Total copyright infringement
Well maybe if I review this live performance...
I especially thought the part at 2:50 was sublime...what do you think?
We will need to discuss further if this song is appropriate for your birthday Don.
All in the name of non-infringing artistic criticism you understand.
I want a Pony!
Happy Birthday!
I am an avid reader of your writing here. I want you to know that it makes a difference to me and therefore to everyone who has contact with me. It keeps going onward from there. Happiness, Peace, Love, and Long Life to you.
Linda
I always read your posts too Don
but I will admit, sometimes I don't know right offhand how to respond to them, I have to walk away and think on them for a bit. And that is the priceless part of what you write, for me anyway - it makes me think outside the box, to put it tritely.
Only a fool lets someone else tell him who his enemy is. Assata Shakur
Happy Birthday, Don!
I hope your special day will be a very enjoyable one.
Like the others here, I have always enjoyed reading your essays. You make me think beyond the relatively shallow perimeters of my own mind. Sometimes, I may not always understand some of your deeper posts as I do not have the education or background of many others here.
Sadly, I believe you are right that we are already in the midst of an extinction. It begins with the animals and plant forms most sensitive to our environment, but it will affect all life here on this planet, including human life. While it is difficult for the average person to accept that climate change is a life ending event, the oligarchs should know it and yet they persist as if their own lives will not be affected.
Sadly, they consider the rest of humanity as simply dust in the wind.
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tH2w6Oxx0kQ]
Do I hear the sound of guillotines being constructed?
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." ~ President John F. Kennedy
Thanks to all
for your kind words
An idea is not responsible for who happens to be carrying it at the time. It stands or it falls on its own merits.
I'm not quite so pessimistic
As near as I can tell, this is just a repeat in a long running historical cycle where leaders descend into excess and corruption and then eventually there is a correction. Global warming isn't likely to finish off homo sapiens. Heck, not even the inevitable wars that global warming will spawn is going to finish us off. I find it much more likely that we'll be knocked back a few hundred years or so.
I see this as "human wiring" being played out. I see it as the conflicting drives of self-interest and social-interest balancing out in an unstable equilibrium. I see this as simply who we are... or one point on the curve of "who we are". I always remind myself that humans are the most aggressive and deadly animal in the known universe. That aspect of us shows in how we organize our societies.
A lot of wanderers in the U.S. political desert recognize that all the duopoly has to offer is a choice of mirages. Come, let us trudge towards empty expanse of sand #1, littered with the bleached bones of Deaniacs and Hope and Changers.
-- lotlizard
Don. Peace.
For me, I focus on my own biologic being, rather, my health. Mind you, I am forever watching the forest for the trees. But me. Right now, it's all about me. My health. My healing for specific problems. Pretty much all the degenerative diseases. It's amazing the success that I have has with all this self-help stuff I have drunk-up! online. It's empowering and enlightening. [I'm talking cancer, heart disease, kidney, and liver. As important, periondontal. I could never talk openly to my doctor about this, because (it's not in their lingo/training)). Ultimately, it's so fascinating! Luckily, it's my nature to seek/solve these issues.
WHY AREN'T THESE ANSWERS ALREADY DOCUMENTED FOR ME? WTF?
I am no longer a people person (not by choice, but by genetics/chemistry) so this imminent devolution is but a scenario, a chance event... (I was going to delete this but didn't. Maybe you can relate, or not.)
Peace.
Peace Don.
For reference, see Marc Sircus and J. Mercola.