Things I don’t understand but wish I did:
Why do we celebrate Columbus Day if Christopher Columbus didn’t discover America? In Philly, they have a huge event. I’m half Italian, and I still don’t get it.
Why are the residents of Alaska entitled to big fat annual dividend checks (upwards of $1,000 most years, and last year a whopping $3,200+) from their state and the oil industry as part of the “Alaska Permanent Fund” while we “Lower 48-ers” fork over taxes year after year? Isn’t Alaskan land American land? Isn’t it odd that these funds haven’t become part of America’s total wealth especially when oil prices skyrocketed or, at the very least, been used to trim federal fund allocations to that state (think: Bridge to Nowhere, but the funds still stayed in the state)? Growing up near the now politically famous Scranton and knowing how dirt poor much of the coal region was and still is, I can’t recall anyone I know in PA getting a check for access to our resources. Except for paychecks, and lemme tell you, they weren’t much.
Why don’t we see pictures of flag-draped coffins of American soldiers returning home? Why shouldn’t we all have to bear the grief their families must endure?
Along the same lines, why are we sending the same soldiers back to Iraq and Afghanistan over and over again instead of instituting the draft? When are the soldiers who are sacrificing everything for our freedoms allowed to return home and till their own lands and tend to their own lives, families, souls?
Why can’t anyone explain the true nature of the financial bailout? How come the plan keeps changing – and why doesn’t Congress or someone have to approve that or at least explain it to us in language we understand?
What is the world going to look like in 20 years? Environmental issues aside, people are so desensitized, and there are more ways for assholes to be assholes (thanks to this blessed Internet) than ever before. If you’re not zombified by the crash-fast track of life in today’s America, you zombify yourself as a protective measure from trolls of every shape and size, walking around in every part of your life (if you’re not a troll yourself). If you want a glimpse of the nightmare we face, go to 4chan.org’s /b/ forum. If people lack common decency or respect for human life, governments will have no choice but to step in and monitor everything, control everything. Which, by the way, is already happening with all the cameras and wiretaps and stuff like “no football if you boo La Marseillaise.” So what does 2018 look like?
Why are there so many shitty TV and Web shows about young, catty women (girls) who backstab each other for pleasure, sex, money and power? Why are they so popular? And does anyone else think there’s a connection between shows like these and the uptick in vapid, antagonizing, cloyingly sweet yet manipulative and scary young women we’re seeing in schools and workplaces today?
Why do I feel more connected to people than ever before in my life, in more ways than I can count, and simultaneously more protective of my time and who I spend it with – as well as slightly resentful of the never-ending technological ways people can track me down when I need me time?
How long would it take for the world to go completely bat shit if the markets collapsed or a dirty bomb blew? I read once that we are 9 meals from revolution. If there were no electricity or gas, no way to get or make money, and only enough food for a week, what would happen? Wouldn’t people start losing their minds? They lose their minds over stupid crap everyday, like someone cutting in front of them on the turnpike or trying to buy 15 grocery items in the express, under-10 aisle. If they had no food and no way to cook it, no heat, no gas, nothing – that would be a real picnic in our entitlement society.
We learn about world history in schools. Why don’t we spend a few months learning about world religions? Wouldn’t that make things seem less scary to some, and boost tolerance of our differences?
Why do we work all our lives? For money? Is that what humans were put on this earth to do – make and consume money? It’s one thing to “earn your keep” and “contribute something good to society.” But in the history of humanity, you have to admit our species has jumped at warp speed from the kind of agrarian lives people led not so long ago to one so disconnected from our roots we’re drifting. Some say upward, some say forward. I feel like we’re on the Fast Track to Nowhere, and the sights along the way are pretty grim, so I’m not sure the ultimate destination is one to look forward to.
Why can’t we compel students in schools to wear uniforms? Wouldn’t it put a lot more focus on the educational mission and less on the socializing one? We’ve got a generation at risk here…. They’re socializing plenty and brazenly, even proudly ignorant about issues that define the past and present and will most certainly impact their future. Gap and American Outfitter might not be too happy about it, but cash-strapped parents and people concerned with commercialism and class wars certainly might be.
These are some of the things that plague me at night, on long drives, at moments when I feel life is complicated enough and I need and want to start uncomplicating it.
Maybe we’ll start exploring them, one at a time, right here.
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Left Is Right
C Berg
Ian Curtis
David Sirota
Patrick McEvoy-Halston
Kathy Riordan
Salon.com
Comments
I grieve for the soldiers who are continually called upon to serve. I fear for their mental health. I fear for their future lives and families. It's not as if our country's done a whole lot to make their lives here easier (although my husband's VFW magazine did note new legislation with some beefed up benefits - but is that enough?).
Interesting speculation about how we'd react to a market collapse -- I've been pondering the same question. I live in a fairly affluent community that prides itself on being politically progressive, but we get bent out of shape when the local Whole Foods runs low on our favorite farmstead cheese...
As for why we work all of our lives, I have a similar question, one that undoubtedly reveals my ignorance about economics: why does the economy have to keep growing? Why does this year's Christmas shopping season always have to be bigger than last year's? Why are towns always seeking to expand? Is a steady state model impossible? And, if so, how are we any different than - I don't know - a malignant tumor?
But I, too, have been questioning this line of thinking in a big way. Your metaphor says it best: "...how are we any different than - I don't know - a malignant tumor?"
It's comforting to know others see that too. Not necessarily agree with me? Rather, see that possibility too.
First I have to calm down. . . . I really got wrapped up in what you said. I think I even began to feel how you must still be feeling about all this. And the worst part of it is, none of your questions have any immediate and good answers.
About the only one that can be answered is the one about school uniforms. Here in Kunming, every kid wears a school uniform from kindergarten right up through their senior year in high-school. Once they're loose in college, that's when they can squander their money like all the spoiled American kids (and my own two kids, a son and a daughter, were just the same when they were that age).
American society is so rife with this madness to consume, to eat, to buy clothing and then throw it away not even a year later but next month; so selfish that no one can even conceive of riding a bus because only underclass people ride buses; so stupid because learning is automatically disqualified as cool and fun because parents either don't give a shit about it, or they're so obsessed about it that it reaches the point of toxicity and naseua for their offspring.
Have you read Jose Saramago's BLINDNESS or Cormac McCarthy's THE ROAD. These books are very very dark, and if you have a good imagination and a faint heart they will absolutely scare the shit out of you.
Don Stacy