Perhaps when I was very young, things were different. But once I got in grade school, my mom had divorced and we were forever after poor. I remember thinking about the child support payments my father made, he was a good father who paid what he was supposed to in that regard. $82.50 cut in half, because my sister was the reason for the other half. My young mind translated his obligation, no, "responsibility" by working it out using math. My mother was a waitress and so I knew that a decent lunch tip for every day of the month, added up to about the same amount. After all, even at my tender age understood that my dad knew nothing about how to cook for himself. It worked out to $41.25 and I was pretty sure that I ate more food than that every month. Heck, the heat bill was over a hundred dollars a month in winter, so I was worth less than a month's worth of heat. More than two months of my keep, as it were, equaled one month of heat. These truths are not lost on little people, they see the same world we all do, but they have not yet been taught the sanitized lies that get fed to us along the way. Truth, is often more hideous than the lies we are told. This poverty is inescapable, because the tools that are used to survive assure that you cannot thrive. When growing crops, we make sure that the soil has everything the plants need to thrive, because to limit the nutrients and care given to the plants, limits their growth, ultimately costing money. With people, however, we seem to forget that the lack of nutrients, and care can limit the growth of our fellow humans. This racks up staggering deficits, a recurring depth (debts) which has inescapable costs over a lifetime. Forbidden to thrive. Farmers know what our politicians can't seem to fathom, if you want healthy next generations, you need to give this generation all you've got, or at least what it needs. Anything less is abuse.
Instead of lush possibilities, the poor get spit roasted, so their juices can drip off slowly, into the gaping maw of the ultra wealthy. This electronic revolution that surrounds the planet, where everyone has access to vast troves of humanities' collected knowledge and writing, has changed forever and qualitatively, the way we deal with that knowledge. Still, even armed with the greatest ideas, work ethic or tenacity in the world, (which the poverty stricken often, have to have; simply to survive) the impoverished are not able to secure credit, except under extreme usury, they remain unable build equity in their neighborhood, or get treated fairly by cops or shop owners. If they do get someone to give them credit, that person wears a suit and lives in a better neighborhood. There are anti-community, forces at work, from the wealthy, elite, culture that owns all the debt in the "hoods". I think of the things that ultimately paid their freight in my life and they were few. I worked many long and undervalued hours for tiny baubles that wealthy friends could afford to and would "lose" at a party or crash on purpose just to see what it would do. After all, it was given to them with no work required at all. I saved up for years to get a cassette tape player for instance, and worked a whole year delivering papers to get enough gear to go camping. My bikes were nearly always second-hand, my 8mm movie camera was a rummage sale find and when I bit the bullet and bought my Nikon FM, that too took over a year of saving from several jobs I worked even as a young teen. The long term expenditure of money adds to the costs of both film-making and photography and corporate executives who poisoned rivers at will made many hundreds more, perhaps thousands, on the film and processing. I calculated that my little movie camera pulled over a mile of film through her and nearly all of it was made into twenty minute filcks. I was not schooled in the concept of buying locally back then and even had I been, my desire to shoot both film and stills, required me to keep shifting money away from my local economic sphere. This economic handicap may actually be the best way to crack the nut of poverty, to show by example how money runs away from the very communities that produce wealth for the faraway "man". Had I become a major film producer in a town like Hollywood, millions of dollars would swirl around me, but only a precious few would grace my home community or be able to be spent "back home", wherever that had been.
My father, was able to join the jet set by consulting for an airline. He may have been one of the last people one would expect to break the law, but in many parts of his life, he bent and broke the rules, If not for that, he may have slipped back into poverty as well. Whether it was making gobs of money selling term papers, which netted him many-fold the cost of tuition and the way he saw it, as he studied for more classes, even subjects he was not taking officially, were like getting extra credits that he didn't have to pay for. He broke or bent so many rules over the course of his life that I'm sure even he lost count. However, many of the choices he made were out of desperately wanting to stay out of the poverty that spawned him. My grandfather told stories about how his family had spaghetti every night, with whatever vegetable was cheapest at the market. Spaghetti with peas on Monday, spaghetti with beets on Tuesday, all through the week, then, on Sunday, they would get spaghetti with meat. Luckily, my father was hard-working, bright and had squirreled away as much of the largess of his patrons as possible, to look flush while doing it. My father also had a lazy eye and wore superdark Wayfarers all of his life, turning his deficit into a superpower. The handsome mysterious, Italian thing was pretty big back then, so he was granted access to pretty lofty echelons of power. First as a Beatnik Theater Guy, later as a Management Consultant. For those who have not heard, a management consultant asks to borrow your watch, tells you what time it is and typically does not return the watch! He explained to me when I was in my Twenties that all those term papers he wrote paid enormous dividends, because he would use the same strategies to study the material as he used to study companies who hired him. He would seek to know more about their companies than they did, which made him very highly prized and worth far more than they paid him. He always got a thrill out of being the smartest guy in the room and many, to this day, believe that he was a spy as well, because he was exploiting the information he had, how shall I say it? Outside of work as well. He was lucky though because he was able to pass as a wealthy disaffected brat even from a young age, The privilege of being white helped him to attain wealth.
Few are granted passage to higher social classes, however, he was able to make the transition and spent several fortunes before his death. During the mid-Eighties, he was making a quarter million each year, spending wildly and investing in what turned out later to be frivolous investments.
My own experience was to go homeless twice, continue college while sleeping in a cardboard box. Interestingly, the day I got housing, I went back to the box, which had been in a cornfield behind the Lab Science building, just to get my dop kit and a pillow, I had left behind, too many belongings to get in one trip, but the whole she-bang had been combined off along with the corn, vanished without a trace! It snowed later that day, so I was glad to have a roof rather than cardboard, but I lost my favorite cake cutter which I still have not replaced. I never knew that my father had sold term papers, or my college days could have been very different!
After living hand to mouth for twenty years, I was far better at stretching a dollar than anyone else I knew. But for a few people I knew who had no problem stealing for their keep, I lived on far less than most of my friends. Not by choice, but out of necessity. Being the kind of conservative who would cut a piece of baloney in half to have some for tomorrow changes the way you see the world around you. It can be soul crushing to see the waste that has been codified in our subsidized, fossil energy culture. however, without that spirit crushing, there would be no wine of that vine, no insight into better ways of doing things, no inspired action. Now, we are experiencing a new age dawning. The general public is confronted with situations where doing the right things are actually cheaper and more effective than continuing to do the wrong things and many more of us are realizing every day how insidiously we have been lied to. Around the world, peasants are saying "Enough!"
We do not need cheap plastic crap from China, we don't need fossil energy at all, especially when we take into account the devastating ecological consequences of our fossil energy fueled legacy. not only our people have been impoverished, our cities and soils have been depleted, mined, carted away, or been turned to dust that blew away decades ago. Now, we know how to re-build soils and hold on to what we can scratch or glean from what giant corporations have left behind. We the people will not be denied our right to life, liberty or the pursuit of our collective happiness. The uberwealthy have consolidated their gains over the course of the last fifty years. as they realized how fast the ROI pays back when they buy politicians, and how easy it has become to shape the narrative and even define the terms of our debate, they have skillfully played us out of every hand we had, every foothold we could establish. The only thing we have left is a solid foundation of humanity, peace, love for one another and compassion. all else is just flack that the man inspires or throws up to divide us. flack, for those who may not know, was like an aluminum foil confetti cloud, used to obscure attacking planes from radar.
The most revolutionary thing we can do is teach and educate. Many have heard me rant on before that the second most expensive thing on the planet is education, the most expensive is ignorance. I'm not even sure where /I heard those words the first time, but I thank whoever uttered them, for it has allowed me to redouble my efforts to changing the world, one mind at a time. My father once commented to me that poverty looks the same everywhere on Earth. I took him at his word because he traveled the world and saw plenty of it. Now, in places like Detroit, Milwaukee and Cleveland, folks are left holding bags of debt after everyone fled the neighborhood. Some effort is being made to sustainably develop these decimated areas, but much of that soil will forever be contaminated with lead and other toxic metals, the opposite of what you want in your gardens. Often, because of structural abuse, we continue to make mistakes even when we try to do good. That is why I advocate for several things being taught at every grade level. first and foremost, the power and control wheel. also, like Italy has just done, require students at every grade level to have at least some content about global climate destabilization and how fossil energy use perturbs the atmosphere and our oceans. Every student, every year also should be learning age appropriate lessons on union history, some home economics skills and financial/baking skills as well. Handing young children over to a market at age eighteen with no financial skills of wherewithal is criminal. To operate under the new awareness, we need to have facility with our surroundings and culture, which have been left sorely lacking in recent years. getting every child up to the level of fully functional in all of these subjects may be too much to wish for, but we can try.
One of the greatest challenges we face is the deeply ingrained, but mistaken notion that Malthus was right. The reason that these lies are absorbed so readily is that it confirmed the older notions of Calvinism which had been resurrected from the Divine Right of Kings. The ultra-wealthy do love their long held beliefs and "reasons" for pissing on the rest of us! I can't imagine a single psychopath or sociopath would! Malthus was wrong, Calvin was wrong and the Divine Right of Kings was wrong. The hacking away at our nation that happened over the last fifty years may not be corrected at once, but without a drastic shift right now, the ship of state will continue to take on water in the form of corporate welfare and subsidization, debt for the many to enrich the few that will cripple, forever any chance of rebuilding. Not getting what an individual needs cripples the individual and their community, but crippling the community cripples everyone's chance of survival. Those who own our indebtedness need to give back and there are simple ways to do it.
Instead of lush possibilities, the poor get spit roasted, so their juices can drip off slowly, into the gaping maw of the ultra wealthy. This electronic revolution that surrounds the planet, where everyone has access to vast troves of humanities' collected knowledge and writing, has changed forever and qualitatively, the way we deal with that knowledge. Still, even armed with the greatest ideas, work ethic or tenacity in the world, (which the poverty stricken often, have to have; simply to survive) the impoverished are not able to secure credit, except under extreme usury, they remain unable build equity in their neighborhood, or get treated fairly by cops or shop owners. If they do get someone to give them credit, that person wears a suit and lives in a better neighborhood. There are anti-community, forces at work, from the wealthy, elite, culture that owns all the debt in the "hoods". I think of the things that ultimately paid their freight in my life and they were few. I worked many long and undervalued hours for tiny baubles that wealthy friends could afford to and would "lose" at a party or crash on purpose just to see what it would do. After all, it was given to them with no work required at all. I saved up for years to get a cassette tape player for instance, and worked a whole year delivering papers to get enough gear to go camping. My bikes were nearly always second-hand, my 8mm movie camera was a rummage sale find and when I bit the bullet and bought my Nikon FM, that too took over a year of saving from several jobs I worked even as a young teen. The long term expenditure of money adds to the costs of both film-making and photography and corporate executives who poisoned rivers at will made many hundreds more, perhaps thousands, on the film and processing. I calculated that my little movie camera pulled over a mile of film through her and nearly all of it was made into twenty minute filcks. I was not schooled in the concept of buying locally back then and even had I been, my desire to shoot both film and stills, required me to keep shifting money away from my local economic sphere. This economic handicap may actually be the best way to crack the nut of poverty, to show by example how money runs away from the very communities that produce wealth for the faraway "man". Had I become a major film producer in a town like Hollywood, millions of dollars would swirl around me, but only a precious few would grace my home community or be able to be spent "back home", wherever that had been.
My father, was able to join the jet set by consulting for an airline. He may have been one of the last people one would expect to break the law, but in many parts of his life, he bent and broke the rules, If not for that, he may have slipped back into poverty as well. Whether it was making gobs of money selling term papers, which netted him many-fold the cost of tuition and the way he saw it, as he studied for more classes, even subjects he was not taking officially, were like getting extra credits that he didn't have to pay for. He broke or bent so many rules over the course of his life that I'm sure even he lost count. However, many of the choices he made were out of desperately wanting to stay out of the poverty that spawned him. My grandfather told stories about how his family had spaghetti every night, with whatever vegetable was cheapest at the market. Spaghetti with peas on Monday, spaghetti with beets on Tuesday, all through the week, then, on Sunday, they would get spaghetti with meat. Luckily, my father was hard-working, bright and had squirreled away as much of the largess of his patrons as possible, to look flush while doing it. My father also had a lazy eye and wore superdark Wayfarers all of his life, turning his deficit into a superpower. The handsome mysterious, Italian thing was pretty big back then, so he was granted access to pretty lofty echelons of power. First as a Beatnik Theater Guy, later as a Management Consultant. For those who have not heard, a management consultant asks to borrow your watch, tells you what time it is and typically does not return the watch! He explained to me when I was in my Twenties that all those term papers he wrote paid enormous dividends, because he would use the same strategies to study the material as he used to study companies who hired him. He would seek to know more about their companies than they did, which made him very highly prized and worth far more than they paid him. He always got a thrill out of being the smartest guy in the room and many, to this day, believe that he was a spy as well, because he was exploiting the information he had, how shall I say it? Outside of work as well. He was lucky though because he was able to pass as a wealthy disaffected brat even from a young age, The privilege of being white helped him to attain wealth.
Few are granted passage to higher social classes, however, he was able to make the transition and spent several fortunes before his death. During the mid-Eighties, he was making a quarter million each year, spending wildly and investing in what turned out later to be frivolous investments.
My own experience was to go homeless twice, continue college while sleeping in a cardboard box. Interestingly, the day I got housing, I went back to the box, which had been in a cornfield behind the Lab Science building, just to get my dop kit and a pillow, I had left behind, too many belongings to get in one trip, but the whole she-bang had been combined off along with the corn, vanished without a trace! It snowed later that day, so I was glad to have a roof rather than cardboard, but I lost my favorite cake cutter which I still have not replaced. I never knew that my father had sold term papers, or my college days could have been very different!
After living hand to mouth for twenty years, I was far better at stretching a dollar than anyone else I knew. But for a few people I knew who had no problem stealing for their keep, I lived on far less than most of my friends. Not by choice, but out of necessity. Being the kind of conservative who would cut a piece of baloney in half to have some for tomorrow changes the way you see the world around you. It can be soul crushing to see the waste that has been codified in our subsidized, fossil energy culture. however, without that spirit crushing, there would be no wine of that vine, no insight into better ways of doing things, no inspired action. Now, we are experiencing a new age dawning. The general public is confronted with situations where doing the right things are actually cheaper and more effective than continuing to do the wrong things and many more of us are realizing every day how insidiously we have been lied to. Around the world, peasants are saying "Enough!"
We do not need cheap plastic crap from China, we don't need fossil energy at all, especially when we take into account the devastating ecological consequences of our fossil energy fueled legacy. not only our people have been impoverished, our cities and soils have been depleted, mined, carted away, or been turned to dust that blew away decades ago. Now, we know how to re-build soils and hold on to what we can scratch or glean from what giant corporations have left behind. We the people will not be denied our right to life, liberty or the pursuit of our collective happiness. The uberwealthy have consolidated their gains over the course of the last fifty years. as they realized how fast the ROI pays back when they buy politicians, and how easy it has become to shape the narrative and even define the terms of our debate, they have skillfully played us out of every hand we had, every foothold we could establish. The only thing we have left is a solid foundation of humanity, peace, love for one another and compassion. all else is just flack that the man inspires or throws up to divide us. flack, for those who may not know, was like an aluminum foil confetti cloud, used to obscure attacking planes from radar.
The most revolutionary thing we can do is teach and educate. Many have heard me rant on before that the second most expensive thing on the planet is education, the most expensive is ignorance. I'm not even sure where /I heard those words the first time, but I thank whoever uttered them, for it has allowed me to redouble my efforts to changing the world, one mind at a time. My father once commented to me that poverty looks the same everywhere on Earth. I took him at his word because he traveled the world and saw plenty of it. Now, in places like Detroit, Milwaukee and Cleveland, folks are left holding bags of debt after everyone fled the neighborhood. Some effort is being made to sustainably develop these decimated areas, but much of that soil will forever be contaminated with lead and other toxic metals, the opposite of what you want in your gardens. Often, because of structural abuse, we continue to make mistakes even when we try to do good. That is why I advocate for several things being taught at every grade level. first and foremost, the power and control wheel. also, like Italy has just done, require students at every grade level to have at least some content about global climate destabilization and how fossil energy use perturbs the atmosphere and our oceans. Every student, every year also should be learning age appropriate lessons on union history, some home economics skills and financial/baking skills as well. Handing young children over to a market at age eighteen with no financial skills of wherewithal is criminal. To operate under the new awareness, we need to have facility with our surroundings and culture, which have been left sorely lacking in recent years. getting every child up to the level of fully functional in all of these subjects may be too much to wish for, but we can try.
One of the greatest challenges we face is the deeply ingrained, but mistaken notion that Malthus was right. The reason that these lies are absorbed so readily is that it confirmed the older notions of Calvinism which had been resurrected from the Divine Right of Kings. The ultra-wealthy do love their long held beliefs and "reasons" for pissing on the rest of us! I can't imagine a single psychopath or sociopath would! Malthus was wrong, Calvin was wrong and the Divine Right of Kings was wrong. The hacking away at our nation that happened over the last fifty years may not be corrected at once, but without a drastic shift right now, the ship of state will continue to take on water in the form of corporate welfare and subsidization, debt for the many to enrich the few that will cripple, forever any chance of rebuilding. Not getting what an individual needs cripples the individual and their community, but crippling the community cripples everyone's chance of survival. Those who own our indebtedness need to give back and there are simple ways to do it.
No comments:
Post a Comment