Wake up, America!

by redguard

As a writer…more specifically an editorializer, I’m profoundly inept. More often than not, the point of my dissertation is usually promptly lost beneath a sprawling veneer of emotional expression. I do that. That’s how I am. I tend to live and perceive my life from the gut (heart?). A whole lot of people will probably disagree with my perspective where this is concerned, but I find a certain degree of wisdom in it. I continue to believe that there’s a part of ourselves, something primordial that’s buried way down deep inside, that unerringly recognizes the difference between right and wrong (or good and evil, for lack of a better set of paradoxes). On a gut level, we know when something is wrong. We know evil. We know selfishness. It doesn’t take an abacus or a calculator to understand it. We inherently recognize every ugly aspect of human machination as soon as it rears its head amongst us. Likewise, we also quickly recognize that which is right, good, and sublime. From my very limited perspective, what we as a people have come to define as modern social “rationality” has served very capably to blur the line between these two diametric opposites.

Follow me here:

Gut instinct tells us that feeding the hungry, destitute, dirty, lady sleeping in the gutter is an act of kindness. Modern rationality tells us that by continuing to feed people like this, more of their ilk will ultimately migrate to the area, thereby dropping real-estate values and pushing out “respectable” clientele (please notice the use of quotation marks around the word respectable).

Therefore, rationality tells us that feeding the hungry lady is BAD. All manner of honest people will lose their livelihoods and perish. For God’s sake, property values will decline!

I say: Fuck rationality.

Or, more to the point: Maybe it’s time you shopped around for a more rational version of rationality.

-cut-

So, just the other day, I’m reading a typical second-page news article, and I’m sickened by it. I mean, I start feeling really deep down kinda soul-sick. Why? Well, it’s dealing, by and large, with the struggles of a woman and her Diet Coke addiction. What’s so revolting about that, you ask? Well..this may take a bit of time for me. Be patient and I will try to explain.

See, my abandonment of America’s new social “rationality” is somewhat to blame. And the root of it…the root of this whole thing, this whole terrible shaking anger boiling inside of my breast began when the towers fell in New Yawk.

By now, you’re probably wondering what in the hell is wrong with me. Have I lost my mind? Maybe. I don’t really know. I’ve always believed that insanity was an irrational response to a rational situation. My perspective tells me that this is quite the opposite. The normal situation within our society has become one of stunning irrationality, lately. In light of that, there are very few responses that I’d immediately classify as insane. But, hey, maybe I’m the exception. I can live with that. I’m quite used to being the exception.

It seems to me that something completely unintended occurred when Osama brought our towers down. I think, at the very least, much of the militant muslim world was hoping that Americans would feel, for the first time, the terrible sorrow of warfare and loss on their own soil. I mean, watching loved ones die does things to a man. It makes him stop and think, makes him realize the terrible fragility and grace of life. Some would even expect that such a fearless and overtly desperate gesture would maybe, just a little bit, cause us to pause and consider our role as citizens in the greater world. Maybe we as a people might ask, “what have we done to deserve this?”

But, that didn’t exactly happen.

Instead of looking into ourselves for answers, we considered their failings, naturally assuming that we as a people were completely beyond reproach.

The question then became something more akin to: “What the fuck is wrong with them?”

Rather than look for the meaningful answers to the tough questions, we chose instead to accept the easy answers for the tough questions. Pretty soon, the tough questions didn’t seem so very tough at all. They seemed easy. I mean, why do they hate us? Why, because we’re FREE, of course. See, that was easy. Hell, being free doesn’t hurt anyone. We can go on being free with a clear conscience and content ourselves with knowing those EVIL bastards for exactly what they are. Freedom haters. Fuck ‘em.

I never expected that. And, I think, neither did they.

To be honest, I don’t think the rest of the world expected it either. France and Germany didn’t expect it. But, fuck them anyway. The French have always been a bunch of cheese eating surrender monkeys, and the Germans…well, history speaks for itself, right?

Does that sound entirely right to you? The French were responsible for providing many of our troops with ammunition and weapons to fight with during the revolutionary war. The French presented this nation with a gift of the statue of liberty, one of the vaunted symbols for this seemingly ubiquitous freedom that I keep hearing so much about. How many of generation-add-a-new-letter-to-the-end-of-the-fucking-alphabet know or even care about the details of our comparatively recent past?

(And, I know that I’m still missing the point here. I’m trying though. Hold on.)

Something else I never expected was the thick carpet of new social “rationality” that descended upon a great deal of the people across the nation. From my wildly skewed perspective it clearly manifested itself here even in this, the reflecting pool of our collective id’s. To me, that’s a tragedy. It fucks me up inside to see such a vehement abandonment of positive virtue rattling around there inside of our heads, and while I may be entirely wrong, I think I know why it’s happening.

The Army of Ignorance

(Yeah, boy. I’m going to make a lot of enemies here with this one. What the hell. I’ve never presented myself here for the sake of anyone’s pleasure, and I don’t see a reason to abandon that precept now. The truth is that honesty has always been a hell of a motivation to my posting here. Yeah. And beauty, too. Beauty and compassion thrown in with a little honor. Oh yeah, don’t forget love. You gotta have that. Strip away all the bullshit flags and –isms, left and rights, take away all the insipid partisan name calling, and that’s what I’ve always been about. All the things that it ain’t really all that cool to be these days. That’s what I’m about. I mean, you look at that list and what you see are a bunch of things that modern life ain’t going to reward you for venerating. Oh sure, you can get plenty rich by using, coveting, hoarding, tearing them down and manipulating them for mileage, but simply venerating these things because you owe it to them, recognizing that you owe the veneration for their having passed through and enriched your life by certain measure, modern life is not going to fatten your pockets for such an action as that. And the sad tragedy of it is that buried in that simple act of respect and honor, far beyond the sight of our modern social construct, is the only true reward these precious commodities have ever had to convey.)

So, what happened? Who are all these new flag-waving militants amongst us? Who are these new scions of global politics, these sudden wrathful historians roiling onto the warpath in America’s name?

Well, they’re us, of course.

And if that’s the case, who are we? Who are the American people, these sons of struggle, masters of discipline, hard-loving, hard-fighting, ancient and wise as the mountains…who are we?

Why, we’re the obese soccer-mom with the Diet Coke addiction of course. That’s who we are. We represent the daughters of Oprah and Jenny, whose primary concern is the struggle to slim-down. We work at desks in air-conditioned offices and bitch about only making fifty-grand a year. We smoke. We drink. We’re all of us obese. We get from here to there by the grace of Lexus, Infiniti, Porsche, BMW, and Mercedes. We are the graceful elite, the arbiters of world justice, who fill our minds with re-runs of Friends while our children wage war a continent away. We are the free who do as we will simply because we can, and for us that is reason enough.

And when you finally tie these concepts together, the concept of the obese no-impulse-control giggling diet-coke addict soccer mom and the concept of righteous guardians of world freedom, arbiters of international justice, etc…something makes me fucking sick.

We’re free, right. All of us equal co-pilots in the cockpit of this great democracy, right? Then why don’t we at least do this machine the service of learning what the controls do, or what’s going on outside and around us? Why don’t we know what kind of fuel this thing runs on, or what desperate people tremble now beneath the shadow of our coming?

Yeah. Well.

One of the things that have always offended me about the opinions supported by many of the people who consider themselves to be “Republican” “Right” or “Libertarian” is their forceful adherence that their chosen political system can (or should) somehow insulate them from responsibility for their actions and environment. If I were to write a modern bible, it would start with this phrase:

“There is no way save this: take care of where you live and accept responsibility for the shit you do.”

Freedom is great. Do it more than lip-service. Claiming some sort of national right to not give a shit, and simultaneously citing your right to “freedom within your democracy” is an obscenity to me. Like it or not, you have a responsibility. Just as surely as you’ve got a responsibility to stay awake at the wheel when you’re driving your car down the highway, you’ve got a responsibility to be aware and involved in the decisions that are being made in your name by the lumbering consumptive juggernaut nation that you claim citizenship in. That’s the way it’s got to work if it’s going to work at all.

Furthermore, the idea that international boundaries, lines drawn on maps, can somehow effectively compartmentalize suffering, destitution, or any of the horrors of poverty, is patently ridiculous. Even great geographical boundaries like oceans serve no noticeable insulation in this day of supersonic jet-travel, e-mail, and cell-phones. Too many of our national working class have lost their jobs to overseas labor competition. Paying someone four-cents an hour for their labor is a fucking crime, even if that four cents makes them ten times as rich as their Bangladeshi neighbor. This type of shit seems to bother no one these days, but to quote Dylan, “The times, they are a-changing.” Already, tens of thousands of IT and middle-management positions have been outsourced overseas to India, and the number is rapidly climbing. Recent estimates say that by 2015, over three-million management and technical positions will have been outsourced thereto. That’s about two-percent of our entire national workforce, folks. And, what’s more, it’s a two-percent that earns a pretty decent salary. Architects, engineers, designers, etc…ouch. Well, if you’ve already spent a couple hundred thousand bucks on your architecture degree at USC, you can always fly to Bangalore and join the workforce at a competitive salary of two to three thousand bucks a year. Suddenly, all that “in the name of progress” and “go corporate globalism” doesn’t sound quite so fair, does it. Maybe, soon, you and your ilk will yell loudly enough to cause something to staunch the hemorrhage. I mean, if any single group of people in the nation screams more loudly at the merest slight than a child freshly ripped from tit, it’s the white-collar crowd.

It seems as though there's a cloud of "rationalization" in our world that somehow makes things like...child labor, for instance...acceptable, so long as you're not the child laboring. I think that, as a society, we recognize the value of putting kids in school. You do, right? I do. So, by rationalizing child-labor overseas what you're effectively saying is that generations of brown kids from distant lands have to suffer the same abominable conditions that we survived through (or much worse in many cases) simply because it's required to progress their culture (I mean, that’s the only logical argument, right?). That's farcical to me. I mean, there're millions of things we do every day that were made possible by the invention and pioneering of those who have gone before us. Did you have to learn to smelt iron before you allowed yourself to be to pick up a fork? How about drive a car? Are you an engineer? Should we make our children actually contract polio in order to ensure their immunity to same? No, we give them the vaccine. We help them so that they don't have to suffer unreasonable conditions of existence. That's the nobility of humanity at work, on a small scale at least.

So, if it works so well in our favor, why does the price seem so unattainably high when we're talking about "we the people" having to step up to the plate in order to do something for someone else? Why is it so hard for us to deal with the idea that we may have to...sacrifice...something (perish the thought)?

There's a gulf between us that I don't understand. If you were hungry and I fed you, would you throw it back in my face citing the same rationale that you use so ably when defending our national complacency? Would you let your child work fourteen hour days if I said he didn't have to simply because you wanted your people to progress? It doesn't hold water from that standpoint, and well it shouldn't.

Even strong rationalization cannot sever the tethers of responsibility.

And what of slavery? Slavery is a crime, right? I think it is. And child slavery is a crime that ought to be punished by emasculation and death, in my opinion. Still, look to the fashion district in Milan and you’ll find five and six year old Thai children working fourteen hours a day and sleeping in piles of rags to bring you your Louis Vuitton bags at a couple of hundred bucks a whack. Still, these fat, bloated tick, American fuckballs continue to buy them. Completely ignorant, they stock up on all the big labels. They stuff their faces with chocolate, ignorant of the fact that nearly all of it comes from the Ivory Coast where slaves toil endlessly, day in and day out, to bring it in from harvest. Real fucking slaves, kids, just like Roots. We buy the diamonds, pieces of fucking rock, utterly ignorant of the workings of the diamond cartels in Africa and the savage price in humanity that they’ve wrought. We buy really big fucking cars, I mean REALLY BIG ONES and tell each other that we’re fighting a war on terrorism, a war against nations whose only income comes from oil and refined g a s o l i n e. You want to fight a war on fucking terrorism? Notch the national gas-mileage average back from its current fourteen a gallon to maybe nineteen or twenty and we’d need NO imported oil to sustain our nation’s needs. That’s fighting a fucking war. Cut off their bank. No more terror.

(P.S. you want a good read? Go out and pick up the September edition of National Geographic. It’s got photos of zebras humping on the cover or somesuch thing, but a great deal of the magazine deals with the issue of international slavery. They were shocked at what they discovered. Maybe it’s time you were shocked a little, too.)

Our ignorance extends so deeply and is so firmly entrenched that we don’t even know who our enemies are.

“Osama? Yeah, he’s that guy with the turban. Hates freedom. I know him.”

Right. Osama bin Ladn, the guy who initially built Al Qaeda as an impromptu means of ejecting Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. Of course he was living in Saudi Arabia at the time, a close personal friend and advisor of the King himself. Osama’s rationale was that he wanted an all Arabic force to expel Saddam from Kuwait citing that Americans, if allowed into sovereign Arabic territory, would set up major military bases and NEVER leave, ultimately using them as a foothold to gain control of the oil in the region. Ten years later, we’re still bombing Saddam and it looks like the motherfucker was right. We never did leave. We probably never will. At least not till the oil’s gone anyway.

But go back a little farther and consider Osama’s initial rise to power. What set him apart from the rest of his dune-dwelling brethren. Well, association with our old friend Ronald Reagan, of course. Reagan’s administration funneled hundreds of millions of dollars into the pockets of radical Islamic jihadists in the quest to thwart the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. He gave them guns, he gave them money, he even gave them stinger missiles to shoot down aircraft with (another thing I’m wildly surprised we’ve not seen happen here yet…a stinger attack). And, all these years later when the Bush administration was hunting Osama in the northern hills of Afghanistan, what’d they do? Why, they dumped briefcases full of millions of dollars onto warlord’s villages in order to pacify them or bribe them into helping. The same brilliant tactic that brought us Osama AND the Taliban used to devastating efficacy yet again.

Would you drive if you were drunk? How about blind? This great mass of ignorant fucks is expected to be piloting the NATION through a serious obstacle course, one where the lives of countless millions hang in the balance, and ninety percent of the people you ask opinion in the street will still come back with a witty retort like: “Sorry, I don’t do politics, tee-hee.”

The Gym Room Analogy

Okay. I go to the gym. A lot. It’s become, quite simply, what I do.

People in the gym have real responsibilities just like in real life.

There are people who attend the gym and use the weights and equipment with a sense of respect for both the materiel and the people around them. These people are widely respected and are quickly accepted into the internal community of the gym.

Make sense?

So, there are also people who go into the gym and don’t bring a towel with them. They sweat all over the machines so that the next guy who sits down ends up in a puddle of filthy, stinking, slime. They also usually fail to replace the weights in the rack when they are through using them. Mind you, there are no rules stating that you must clean your own messes up…it’s just expected.

As a direct result of these shirkers inattention, equipment is often difficult to find when you need it. Sometimes people trip over errant plates lying on the floor and end up hurting themselves. Often, smaller gym-goers cannot manipulate the large plates left on machines by these inconsiderate dickheads, and often resort to hurting themselves while trying to undress a machine or simply missing that part of their workout.

The people who are responsible for this sort of carelessness are not respected and often find themselves functioning completely outside of the internal community of the gym.

Which, I might add, is not a good thing to do.

If you want to keep your kidneys.

Responsibility and Grief, Intertwined?

So, for some all but completely unfathomable reason there’s a growing belief that people who give half a damn about the what’s going on in the world are sad, miserable sons of bitches.

Hmmm….

I think that perhaps there are those out there among you who have mistaken most critical-political observations as the dyspeptic ramblings of some perpetually discontented soul. That’s surprising to me, but not quite entirely beyond my comprehension. I can see where some of you might draw that assumption.

Or, maybe I’m just being kind.

More to the point, I don’t generally equate a strong sense of social responsibility with sorrow, much in the same way that I refuse to acknowledge steadfast irresponsibility as being in any way associated with lightheartedness.

Or, maybe less clearly, it doesn’t take a suicidal goth to drive a car responsibly. And, likewise, people who let go of the wheel in mid-acceleration and hurtle into stanchions are not necessarily deliriously happy at the time.

In fact, most of the latter are either very unfortunate or very impaired.

Which are you?

Alternatives

With congress being asked to appropriate another eighty-plus-billion dollars for war in Iraq, and acknowledging the plying of foreign warlords with suitcases stuffed with millions of dollars, would it perhaps be too much to ask that the US might exercise some of this profound power...benevolently. I mean, the "benevolent bombing" of Iraq aside, and "benevolent bombings" altogether aside...what sort of good might a suitcase stuffed with millions of dollars do if it were dropped on say...the local school system rather than the local warlords. Or maybe one might argue that a billion bucks could buy several of “high-tech” farms, a dozen cutting-edge middle schools, several capable universities, etc… What sort of freedom could that sort of power and money really buy for an oppressed people?

More on Labor

Why does it seem that this selective crusade for freedom that our nation states itself to be motivated by is so often directed against social reformers? Why do we continue to prop up brutal dictators who agree with US policy while persecuting those who speak out against it (principally those who tend to nationalize or socialize their systems of economy)?

It seems to me that even the most politically aware among us are choking on our own lies. Bombing for freedom? C'mon. How in the hell can the US support nations like Israel and Saudi Arabia so openly while simultaneously declaring its vehement drive to liberate people who live beneath the yoke of oppression and tyranny?

Whatever the case, I cannot look at US industry glutting itself on "cheap labor" and not be sickened. I can't imagine that any argument or "rationale" is going to bend me in that direction. Not only are families being forgotten at home, but new poorer browner families are being used up over there. And, I'll tell you what...Nikes haven't gotten any cheaper since they've been whipping them together in Viet Nam. Have they? I haven't noticed.

When you can convince me that using poor people is more...well, right than HELPING poor people, then you've got me. But, then of course you've also got a really good argument to keep lots of poor people around, don't you? That's where I see the US as being, morally, ethically, and in practice. That, to me, is an argument for bad...caca...evil.

Let's go back to basics:

Ensuring people suffer = bad.

Helping suffering people = good.

And no, you can't "make up for it" by having multinationals use the impoverished mercilessly while American housewives donate to charity. In fact, fuck charity altogether. It's a sad and very stupid belief system that supports the continued existence of charitable organizations altogether. If some shit is broke, fix it! Throwing money at it is like continuing to bail your basement out with a small bucket while your house floods from a broken water main. It might make you FEEL like you're doing something, but c'mon. FIX IT. F I X I T. Fix the problem at its source.

In some instances that might mean farming. It might mean education. It might mean healthcare. It might mean lending technology...and if hoards of rapacious fiends are spilling over your borders, it could even mean resorting to guns and bombs. More often than not, however, fixing social ills will probably require supporting social programs, (both at home and abroad) something that America has lately seemed loathe to do.

Mother Jones

And, look up Mother Jones when you get the chance. Read about her kids and their march on the white house. Hundreds of little grimy bastids holding up signs in front of the whitehouse, while the president played croquet, reading: Mr. President - we want time to play.

Yeah, that was a time when the wealthy believed that working our own children fourteen hours a day in the factory was somehow helping them out, too. It was "doing the family a favor." Of course, it was also really cheap labor, but that was an aside, wasn't it?

How far do you think our culture might have advanced if our children continued to work fourteen hours a day on the factory floor and public schools never "popped" into being? Would you be the better for it? Would America be a better place? How then could you possibly rationalize that it's working for so many poor people overseas? Is it because they're browner or because they have a different culture? What is it? Enlighten me.

We’ve always been irresponsible, why should we change?

Pertaining to this enduring notion that "irresponsibility" has existed since time immemorial and so it should naturally continue, I posit this:

There was surely a time when the concepts of clothing, hygiene, and even fire were all new to man. Surely, we all went around naked, unwashed, shit sticking to our asses, cold...following your argument for continued disregard for our failings, we should all still be that way. Why aren't we? I think it's because wiping our asses and staying warm were positive things for us - as individuals. We liked smelling clean. We liked being close to the fire. So, maybe it's time to progress to the point where we might someday be able to do things for those of us who suffer needlessly, even if that means sacrificing a little time or material in the short run.

Evolve.

Thanks for your time, [email protected]