Don't Patronize me!

As a person that would love to be able to make a living making the stuff that floats through my head and explodes in my dreams, I am aware that most artists starve: maybe all the time if they don't have a day-job, maybe just a little bit--mostly soul-starvation--as they put off the making and head to work to do what buys the groceries.  In a perfect world, I could make my stuff full time and eat regularly and all without the necessary, historical patron.

But in the rest of the world, we have developed an incredible thankfulness to the very rich--those community patrons that have there names on streets and public buildings and get to cut all the ribbons and attend every new community venture's opening.  Having heard the incredible words of praise for those families that are the patrons of our community, and from distant relatives, the patrons of their communities, I am struck with the obvious question:  "Why do so few of us have the financial ability or economic wherewithal to donate millions without interfering at all with their own luxurious lifestyle.  I donate $10 dollars and have to skip a meal that week.

I love genealogy, and have a lot of characters in the past, a few brick walls--translates frequently as someone that either had no family in the record, but certainly didn't start under a cabbage patch, or that had family with the kind of past that it was best to erase. My last immigrant relative, circa 1860's, arrived from England and the fact that a person chose to enter a country during a civil war is a sign they didn't have any reason to stay where they were.  His family was long lived and a story my Grandmother told of him was that he came here because in England, if you were born to shoemaker you would die a shoemaker, and that in England, the peasants had to treat the landed gentry like royalty and the landed gentry had to treat the nobles like royalty, and everyone had to treat the royals like royalty.  If someone of a better class came on a train, you might as well just get up before the conductor decided you were disrespectful and put you off the train.  Hint, I don't think he was a shoemaker, he was considerably poorer than that, but he came due to the rumor that in the US, we were all equal..

About those very wealthy individuals that are the patrons of cities and towns and small rural areas;  what do any of us know about them, where they got their extreme wealth, how they treat the people that helped them accumulate all that wealth and how they keep making more?  Do we check them out for ethical practices and kindness and general niceness factors?

Most of us just say "thank god our community has them,"  "Thank god."  Some of us develop a kind of hero worship.  Some of us try to find a way to see them from afar or even meet them in person.  They are celebrities, and our saviors.

I live in a town of about 15,0000, and we definitely are still worshiping the man that started our little burgh.  He was a self-made man, his mother a widow so he was raised by a woman without means.  He opened an orphanage, a widow's colony, donated his home to the town and on and on and on.  He passed away in 1926.

1926!

He was a man that tried a lot of things to make money, and came to Tulsa when it was an Oil Boom town.  He died before the market crash of 1929.   Who knows how that might have changed things, but now, ninety years later, his name is on the high school and on the widows colony, and on the road connecting us to  the big city.  His home is the historical society's headquarters and the town museum and its main exhibits are about him.

He is still our patron, even from the grave.

Our bigger neighbor, that city I mentioned--or didn't mention--has a long history of very wealthy, philanthropic families, also from the time of the original oil boom.  It also has a few Fortune 400 families and wannabes that are in banking and convenience stores and communications.  Their names and their business names are on those buildings that in times very past would have carried the name of the town, town hall, convention centers, museums, theaters, performing arts centers, exposition buildings, now all wielding the names of the wealthy and their business offspring.

We no longer get to pretend that those public buildings belong to the people, are the accomplishments of the people, are the legacy of the people.

We have now become fully patronized.

 

It is not a great feeling!

GO VOTE!

I know that wise people don't discuss politics or religion, but they are great topics.  It's no fun discussing something that everyone agrees on and both are belief-based so no right answers--its all opinion.
But sometimes the discussions become strange.  Take an argument about the pro's and con's of a candidate being argued by a person that isn't going to vote, that knows they are not going to vote, that has not voted in the past and is not registered.  Opinions are free, but why be passionate about a candidate if you aren't willing to put out the effort to go vote for them.

Why do we need to vote?  Because we have some ability to participate in the decisions being made about how we are governed. 

True, we are not a democracy--our top leader is chosen by an electoral college--translates to we vote for unknown people in a party that will select whether our state will chose the democrat or the republican nominee.  If 51% of the state votes one way and 49% votes the other, all the states electoral votes are for the party of the 51%.  Not a great system.  Definitely not a case of every vote counts.  But if 60% of the people vote and 51% of those 60% vote for one party while the 40% of those that didn't vote, were for the other party, the minority just won the whole state. 

Participate in your own future, choose the leaders that will determine whether your children and grandchildren will be permanent peons or people with possibilities.  Wake up!  Be aware of what is going on around you.  Be aware of those ugly fears and anxieties that allow us all to be driven to make foolish/reactionary choices.  Be involved in all parts of your life.

It is very easy to become overwhelmed with the media, to be swayed by those we love and trust even when they are listening to their own fear and anxiety.  It is also easy to be mired down in the minutiae of our busy, chaotic lives and lose the bigger picture.  Be aware of that also.

Listen to all sides of a story.  If something seems far-fetched or pointedly aim at making a group of people into the enemy, it may be propaganda.  If something seems unlikely as it is told to you, question it.   There are many sources for information.  Use more than one.  Question those things that make it sound like you need to buy 200 acres in Montana to build a bunker.  Question those that tell you to move to an island off the coast of South America.  Question all those panicky, hateful, stories that sound as if they were made to make you be afraid of people that are different than you.

We aren't that different.  Skin color, religious beliefs, political beliefs, traditions, all of those are obvious, but we are all driven by the same wants and desires, to be safe, to have enough to keep our families happy and healthy, to have people to talk to and activities to participate in.  We are social creatures.  And we are apparently pretty darn easy to scare.  All you have to do to scare us is threaten the safety of our loved ones, their ability to continue to believe what they believe, and their opportunity to dream their dreams. 

Our best hope for maintaining our descendants right to live free, is to wake up, be aware of our media surroundings and participate to the best of our ability in the governance of our land.

Who knows, with a little work, we may get the opportunity to change that ridiculous electoral system into a popular vote someday soon.

Caring for Children

I was raised by a stay-at-home mom.
My parents were both raised by stay-at-home moms.
I never met my father's mother, but my maternal grandmother used tell me stories about growing up.
She was grown, old enough to vote, when the 19th amendment was passed.  She was also married by then.
She had wanted to go to nursing school, but her family talked her into normal school.  She never got to work as a nurse, which was her life dream--she also never got to work as a teacher.  Married women could not do either of those jobs.  Thus, stay-at-home mom.
My own mother never knew a world where women couldn't vote.  She was a WWII bride, marrying right after high school graduation.  And while she had worked in the family business after school and weekends (think depression, think survival of the family) she only worked outside the home a very short time, while her husband was in the army.  She did find jobs after my sister and I were grown, and it seemed to make her feel better about herself, more capable, more independent.
The baby boomer generation of women are split about in half between those that didn't have to work while their kids were home and those that did.  It was a complex dynamic, with some stay-at-home moms doing so because their families were very traditional and so they carried on with a family constantly on the brink of poverty.  For others, the decision was based on the ability of the husband to support a family without a second income.  More than a few working mom's and poor stay-at-homes were envious of those women.

My own mother was that brink of poverty, stay-at-home.  She was always there for us.  All our meals were homecooked.  Most of our clothes were homemade or hand-me-down,  My father bought a house that hadn't been finished and finished it himself.  My mother was never very proud of that house.  It looked like he had finished it himself.  Not hillbilly, but the cabinets looked more like 1900 farm house than 1960 factory.  We had a "picture window" that he made from scrap metal and a welding torch.  It looked fine to me, but it didn't look exactly like the neighbors' picture windows.  She wasn't the only stay at home back then, but there were a few working women.  Most were secretaries, but one was moving upward in a corporation.  The other stay-at-homes were either married to white collar workers or were home with teenagers.  She had a huge garden, canned and froze everything she could grow.  She sewed and repaired clothing.  She took in laundry and ironing. She was called by more than a few of the other stay-at-homes to get rid of a mouse or help with a kitchen disaster. Her dentist called her a firebrand.  She was busy as a stay-at-home mom.
By the time I had children, there were very few stay-at-home moms.  There was jealousy of unemployed welfare moms and of rich men with  country-club wives and nannies.

AND there was childcare.

• It was expensive--if you made more than it cost, it often made the final NET very close to minimum wage, which was better then, but still hard to live on.  A husband with a good income was a perk, and if it was good enough, it was possible that staying home was as profitable as working.
• It was scary--it didn't pay well and because women were not valued and mothers were not valued and caring for children was seen as a thing that "Any old fool can do" the people you left your precious little connection to the future with was barely educated, very young, possible suffering from some chemical issue--who knew--the media tweaked that fear up pretty high a few times in the past, add some real abuse/deaths and it was so scary that living at poverty level seemed good.
• It was limited, as in most catered to 8:00 to 5:00 workers, but all those women in nursing, factory work, shift work, weekend work had no options or maybe one distant, very scary option involving an index card--i watch kids, 24/7 any day cheap--desperate mom or what?
• There was family, but no one wanted to use 40 hours of their week for your kids.  And, if they weren't working they wanted compensation and didn't want to pay taxes on the little money, so bye-bye tax credit (when that started--when did that start?)  That frequently meant an obsessive search for relatives that liked your kids, would watch them for a day or were open to shifting them to someone else for part of the day.  

When my children were little, there was talk of employers opening daycare centers so they would be open when your job was, in a hospital or a never-close store, that is important.  They needed to be affordable, we all wanted them to be a job perk, but business is business, and childless people are the first to make comments about their own mother's staying at home or the personal choice of whether to have kids or not and poor people shouldn't have children if they can't afford to care for them.  I always wondered if they thought those working mom's should have just drowned them like kittens since they weren't born into a proper home.
They are still talking about workplace daycares.  And now there is griping from people whose children are grown and who have no children because of the possible 1 year maternity/paternity leave.  Yes, we all want a year off paid, but what does that say about me if I already survived that awful first year of sleeplessness, daycare fear, poverty and guilt (for not being a stay-at-home mom with a wealthy husband) if all I want if for everyone else to have to go through the same thing--unless they are wealthy.

We really are crabs in a bucket.
We don't want what is best of children.  We just don't want any one else to have it easier than we did.  We aren't concerned with what is best for the happiness and success of children.  We don't want everyone to have a better life--we need someone to do bad so we can feel good about our own lives.

A look at America's top employers.

I remember when I voted for Ronald Reagan and his Trickle-down economics.  I look back and wonder "who was I".  In all honesty, I may have just loved "Death valley Days" by 20 mule team borax.  I decided to take a look at the theory in a little more detail but suspect I will get lost in the details.  So let me start with a preview of what I'm thinking.

The way it was originally explained is that rich business men would by things and would hire people to work for them, and by doing that those people that they hired would have money and would therefore hire people and buy things, and those people that were hired and bought things would create jobs for more people that would buy things.  (it's vague, i get that)

So, I thought I would look at the country's top employers.  (hired the most people, not were the nicest.)  I'm not going to look at the government jobs although between all the various departments, they are the biggest.  I will leave that to someone with higher security clearance than I have.

Number one is Walmart.  They employ over 2.2 million people.  Their average pay is $8.81/hour.  If they work full-time that is over $18,000/year.  Walmart prefer part time as they then don't have to provide benefits such as insurance, vacation, or sick time.  Their CEO makes $19,000,000/year.  The owners made a profit of $3.1 billion in 2014.   It is very hard to imagine anyone working at the same company being 1000x more important, but when you consider that $19,000,000 is a guarantee that the CEO will side with the profit over the fairness to the employees, it was Fortune 400 chump change well spent.

Next is Yum! brands, employing over half a million people.  Who?  The biggest fast food corporation in the country.  They are currently down to TACO BELL, KFC, Pizza Hut and Wing Street.  They pay most employees minimum age,  and under $13.00/hour for managers, with a big jump for financial analysts (over $100,000/year) (aww, so money is more important that what you sell!, got it)).  The CEO made $11.3 million plus a nice stock package.  This is a Fortune 500 company.

Third on the list is McDonald's, employing slightly less than half a million people.   The bottom pay is as low as they can legally go, the company does seem to offer improvement for those individuals that aren't just "fast food workers" though.  Throw in the fact that a very large number of McDonald's are franchises, and thus employed by the owner of the Franchise, and you start seeing that pay information may or may not be reliable.  The CEO stepped down in January this year, and had recently seen a decrease in compensation so he was making less than $10 million/year.  The franchise owners, a big part of McDonalds profits (from selling/leasing/whatever you call that), were not doing as well as they expected.  A lot of mom's and pop's saw a franchise as a grab at the brass ring.  In a lot of those shops, the franchise owners are working longer hours and for less money than they had ever thought possible.

IBM also employees slightly less than half a million people.  The CEO of this company recently saw her salary increase to over 1.5 million.  The average salary is $75,000/year.  While their is much grinching about low pay for experience, and less than great pay for very skilled positions, I have nothing to say.  (Makes me think that we may be looking at two different populations.)

Next is KROGER.  Kroger is the second largest supermarket chain in the USA.  It employees 400,000 people.  In 2014 the CEO made about $9.5 million.  Most jobs start between minimum wage and $15.00/hour.

Now, Target, employing about 400,000 also.(besides the familiar Target bull's eye, they have Dayton's, Hudson's, Marshall Field's, and Mervyns)  Their pay scale for workers looks like Kroger's.  starts at minimum and tops out fast till you get to the big main offices.  CEO in 2014, $28.2 million.

Home Depot, whom I owe my soul and first born due to basic repairs, pays $8.00 to $23.00 and hour, with most being under $11.00/hour. CEO--$1.3 million for a Bachelors in Business.  He did really improve their profits.

Hewlett Packard employees about 300,000 people, the CEO recieved $1.5 million with a compensation packet worth $19.5 million.  (I'm guess that is more than sick time and insurance).   Average employee salaries look to run slightly less than IBM, so IBM might not grinch so much.  

General Electric, which is older than me--at least--is next on the list, also employing about 300,000, but slightly fewer than HP (like GE only different).  GE is a huge, multinational conglomerate with a bunch of branches, . It is the most
profitable corporation in the USA.  CEO last year was compensated over $18.5 million. 

• GE Capital
  • GE Capital Aviation Services
  • GE Energy Financial Services
  • GE Real Estate
  • GE Americas
  • GE Asia
  • GE Europe, Middle East & Africa
• GE Energy Management
  • Industrial Solutions
    • GE Power Electronics
    • GE Power Components
    • GE Critical Power
    • GE Intelligent Platforms
  • Power Conversion
  • Digital Energy
• GE Oil & Gas
• GE Power & Water
• GE Home & Business Solutions
  • GE Appliances
  • Consumer Electronics
  • GE Lighting
  • GE Intelligent Platforms
• Electric Insurance Company

GE Technology Infrastructure

• GE Aviation
• GE Transportation

Healthcare

• GE Healthcare
  • Amersham plc
  • Datex Ohmeda
  • Whatman

Former

• NBCUniversal (now owned by Comcast) 

There is no way to find an average wage for the above behemoth.  I hope  their employees all do very well, all the way down to the housekeepers.

Sears is next, with wages that look like they start at the minimum.

The list goes on, but there is a theme--these huge employers  have very well paid top staff, very average for function paid skilled employees and a whole lot of bottom rung employees that need government assistance.
The argument about raising the minimum wage  hurting the small business owners was probably created by the big dogs that can pay all the c-suite and investors big money bonuses out of the money they saved paying the minimum and slightly higher wage earners barely enough. (that means our taxes are subsidizing their bonuses--they didn't hire a single low wage person whose job didn't have to be done, they are important, but our current supply of unskilled or low skilled workers is high and every company loves to act like the are hiring them out of the goodness of their heart.  Don't buy it.  I can't find someone to mow my lawn for less than 40$/hour.  They bring the equipment but if the lawn job--think every 14 year old boys summer business--is worth more than minimum, then probably cleaning your toilet and wiping up the mess from your kid in the Mctoy house is also.

Most of us have at least one relative that is stuck in the world of minimum wage.  It's tough.  It was tough 40 years ago and is 4 times worse now.  Back then you could find an apt that took about half your take-home and it was all bills paid.  You could get gas for under 50 cents a gallon, bread could be found at 4 loaves for a dollar, tuna for a couple of quarters--and the TV was free if a bit snowy at times.  If desperate one month because your budget was wrecked by a car breakdown or a medical bill, you could live on baloney sandwiches for a month and survive.  Basically, eat badly for $10 dollars a month, but eat every day.

Welfare expects $4/person per day anymore.  And that is also eating badly.

Every struggling person I know (and a lot that are no longer struggling so much), loves to gripe about the lazy, idiot that should have gone to 1. school, 2. college, 3. stayed out of jail, 4. stayed off drugs, etc. etc, etc, read as  "I'm pointing my finger at you because no matter how hard I have it, I didn't screw up as bad as you did"  It's what we do.  It's sort of like looking down your nose at the handicapped person and saying  "I'm just grateful that isn't me" then griping because they get government assistance.  The fact that we have groups of people that are outsiders that we think of as welfare people--other races, other religions, nontraditional lifestyles, foreign-born, makes bigotry even easier to maintain.

But let's face it.  We will never hate the rich, successful CEO, the highly reimbursed investor. 

We just want to be them. 

It's how we measure success these days.

CORRUPTION.

cor·rup·tion

/kəˈrəpSH(ə)n/

noun

• 1. dishonest or fraudulent conduct by those in power, typically involving bribery "the journalist who wants to expose corruption in high places" synonyms: dishonesty, unscrupulousness, double-dealing, fraud, fraudulence, ... moreantonyms: honesty
• 2. the process by which something, typically a word or expression, is changed from its original use or meaning to one that is regarded as erroneous or debased synonyms: alteration, bastardization, debasement, adulteration

 College history--American post-civil war, was very focused on specific instances.  It led me to believe that it was both rare in the past and unheard of in modern times.

•   During the Truman (D) administration, 196 local IRS staffers were found to be corrupt,pervasive systemic scandals, such as the role of money in normal politics, which purchases access and influence. Neither are 'revolving door' stories, which is the practice of hiring government officials to promote or lobby for companies they were recently paid to regulate. Though some rules now apply, to a great extent this is legal in the United States.

• Veterans Health Administration scandal of 2014 - It was discovered that officials in the Phoenix VA hospital lied about how long the wait times were for veterans to see a doctor.^[1] An investigation of delays is being conducted by the Veterans Affairs Office of the Inspector General.^[2][3] The Secretary of Veterans Affairs, General Eric Shinseki, voluntarily resigned.^[4]

• ATF gunwalking scandal – Attorney General Eric Holder was held in Contempt of Congress after refusing to release all documents which the House of Representatives had demanded concerning the Fast and Furious gun walking operation. (2012)^[5]
• Martha N. Johnson, head of the General Services Administration, fired two top GSA officials and then resigned herself after it was revealed that $822,000 had been spent in Las Vegas on a four-day training conference for 300 GSA employees. (2010)^{[7][8][9][10]}

• Dennis Hastert (R-IL) pled not guilty to charges that he violated banking rules and lied to the FBI in a scheme to pay $3.5 million in hush money to conceal sexual misconduct with an under age boy from his days as a high school wrestling coach.(2015)^[21][22]
•  Aaron Schock (R-IL) resigned his position after weeks of allegations that he used campaign funds for travel, redecorated his office with taxpayer funds to resemble the Downton Abbey TV series (a series about English nobility) sets, and other questionable personal uses.(2015)^[23] Schock's senior adviser Benjamin Cole resigned his position because he allegedly condemned "hood rats" and "black miscreants" in internet posts. Schock's office stated, "I am extremely disappointed by the inexcusable and offensive online comments made by a member of my staff.”

Hands in the cookie jar corruption seem most likely to create scandal. but there are other kinds.  Cover-ups of criminal behavior by those that are in law enforcement.  Cover up of creepy medical practices aimed at increasing profits with no benefit to the patient. Participating in routines that you know wouldn't look good on the evening news is not that uncommon.  And employees need their jobs.  If an opportunity to advance and make more money arises that involves a slightly shady side--that just might be job security.

What happened to our internal moral compasses?  When did we stop saying "I can't do that, that would be wrong"   Don't start about the loss of religion in our lives, some of the biggest and most horrifying stories come straight out of religion.  Religion is not internalized.  Beliefs are.  And in America these days, we have no problem espousing a religion while condoning practices that are forbidden by that same religion.

I'm not talking about accepting homosexuality or not stoning witches.  I'm talking about ignoring the very universal beliefs such as loving our neighbor and caring for the sick and poor.  I'm talking about forgiveness and acceptance.  I'm talking about being honest and keeping your word and doing what you say you will do.

How did corruption become all right as long as you don't get caught.

Who do we think we are?

Being born in the center of the US of A to a very traditional, cliche of a family for that time period, I always had certain beliefs about who I was and who we--me and all the rest of the Americans in the USA were.  We all loved our country when I was little, and no one here didn't.  My perception was less than 3 foot from the ground back then, and strongly colored by parents that grew up in the Great Depression and were military during WWII, and all their friends were also depression kids that went to war to save the world.

Back when I was short--really short--a regular "shorty" if you listen to some music--I knew with the power of the mind of a child that I was lucky to be an American.  I knew I lived in "the land of the free and the home of the brave".  I knew that soldiers were heroes.  I  knew that the POTUS was the smartest, kindest, most perfect leader of the world and that is why we voted for him.  I knew that we were all equal, all of us, every last one of us, that the law was fair, that justice was blind and was handed out in equal and fair amounts to each of us--just like Halloween candy when I went trick-or-treating.

My view was not a world view.  I was in a segregated school.  Everyone in the school went to a protestant church--the catholic children's families could afford the church school at least for a few years.  We had a few "Indian" children, but in my state, everyone had a Cherokee princess as a great-grandmother.  There were a couple of kids that had mothers from Asia, and they looked a lot like the "Indian" kids.  Everyone acted the same------like a kid"  Not that there wasn't variation among kids;  those that had lived there all their lives, that had parents, grandparents and even great-grandparents in the area, they were a little cliquish, and everyone knew who was really poor and who only had one parent.  Poor kids were rather avoided--mostly due to the smell, it was the early '60's and except for 2-3 families, everyone was rather low on the economic totem pole therefore who we saw as poor frequently meant lacking indoor plumbing.  Reality is, the really well off family was a lawyer, big, big house and exotic animal heads on the wall of the study.  My family was in the middle, the bottom edge of the middle, but the middle was big.  The kids didn't really talk about the kids with one parent;  if it came up, it was due to the rarity, and eventually (go to school with the same 60 kids for 12 years) we knew, but it was more likely our parents were gossiping about that than us.  Parents were ubiquitous to us little people.

By third grade we knew all those patriotic songs that schools used to sing, "My country tis of thee" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Country,_%27Tis_of_Thee#Lyrics , "America, the Beautiful" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America_the_Beautiful ,  "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" , "This Land is Our Land", "God Bless America", "The Marine's Hymn", "The Star-spangled Banner", "Yankee Doodle Dandee", "You're a Grand ole' Flag".  That usually got us through a couple of music classes per week.
We all knew the words.  The words were poetic, grand, idealistic and made old soldiers cry.  Except for the national anthem, no one ever had us look at the lyrics or why the song was written.  Woody Guthrie would not have been impressed with how his song was used.

We also were raised on black and white war movies and news talk about a nuclear war---and we were all scared of "RED China" and Russia. We all knew that the USA was the good guys, the white hats, the best country in the world.    I was in College before I realized that the only country that had ever used a nuclear weapon was my beautiful American States.   That is also when I learned that Women were not necessarily included in that bill of rights and we had not approved the Women's Equal Rights Amendment.   The varnish was cracking and the truth was coming out.

We still raise our children to believe those songs, although the teachers that are doing the teaching may not be as enmeshed in it as they once were.  Most people still say things like  "America, love it or leave it"  "We are still better than every other country in the world so quit your whining",  "If you can't succeed in America, you can't succeed anywhere".  We are USAcentric.  We don't know about other countries except in relationship to wars in which we either fought against them or allied with them.  If you ask most children where a city is or where the person that invented something was from, they will guess America.
(read this for a nice side trip --
http://markmanson.net/america   )

We did not invent everything.  Many of the things we take for granted were invented long before Columbus arrived here--here being the Caribbean and not Plymouth Rock.  We did not discover everything, many of those basic Scientific discoveries were made centuries before the USA began, We are one nation, big, but not the biggest--we are number 3 in population, with both China (#1) and India (#2) being about 4 times bigger than us.  Geographically, we are also third, with Russia in the first place and China in the 4th place.  (Antartica, which is basically an unoccupied Continent in the second place for Size--who new Antartica was bigger than the USA?)  We are not the oldest, some will claim we are the oldest democracy, but we are not a democracy, and ancient Greece was also a Republic.

Maybe, the USA is really great at raising Cheerleaders.  We have an amazing PR department for our own citizens.  We have class for every citizen on patriotism.   Or maybe we are just drinking our own snake oil.

The media--corporate version, social media, questionable media like FOX where everyone knows what they are doing and if they only watch FOX they have no perceptual difficulties, has been telling us who we are since I was a child.  Public Schools, with their curriculum chosen by the politicians, has been telling us who we are via approved books on history, social studies, civics and government for as long as public school has existed.    Everyone born in this country has been told who we are.

So, before anyone tells me to leave if I don't like it--wait.  I don't like it.  I love it.  I love what I was told it was.  I love the ideal of it.  I love the myth that is my country's history.

I just want to make the reality match the original promise.  We can be who we thought we were.

The value of life, the cost of living

How is it that at a time that the cost of living is so how most people can't afford anything beyond basics, the value being placed on living creatures is so infernally low.

Trophy hunting is back in the news.  Every turn-of-the-century rich person had animal heads hanging in the man's version of the parlor.  Not this century of course, but the beginning of the one that just ended.  Most of the trophy's since that era of traveling to the jungles and savannah to kill something on its way to the endangered list have involved the heads of deer--think skinning cows that eat only grass, you know, like a cow, but have antlers, or large, well lacquered fish from a trip to the ocean. 

The fact that a bunch of rich, men's men from over a century ago would put dead things on their wall is not amazing.  Back then, we only studied animals and plants after we killed them, specimens floating in formaldehyde and butterflies pinned in glass covered boxes.  The idea of actually studying them alive, watching how they behaved was seen as odd and ridiculous--they were stupid animals, they didn't feel pain like we did, didn't think like we did.

That same time frame, we set lovely pictures of dead people, frequently posed as if they were alive, in our parlors.  We made wreaths of their hair and displayed them for all to see.  We pressed the flowers from their funerals and fastened them in frames.  We loved death. 

We also displayed the dead bodies of criminals in their coffins, and displayed the bodies of living and dead people and animals that were seen as "freaks".  Death decreased their value, but only slightly over the long haul and the net was good--they no longer required food and living space. 

We still have plenty of people that think like those individuals that loved to go ogle a three legged child or point and laugh at the corpse of a bank robber.  We don't have a lot of people creating art and jewelry from their dead loved one's hair. 

Today, most of us are making money that is going up very slowly.  While the cost of living is averaging an increase of over 3% per year, wages are topping out at 2% for most of us and that is by merit, if you are an average employee or an unvalued employee, you are getting less than that.    That means we are all peddling as fast as we can, but the bike isn't moving, its slowly going backward. 

The cost of staying alive is barely attainable for many of the people on the planet.  The cost of staying alive for many animals is beyond them.  We have grand creatures that have long been the symbol of courage and strength and regalness that are not even safe in a protected preserve.  We have little creatures like sparrows and squirrels and possums that litter the edges of roads making only those with great heart question if we couldn't do more to stop all the death.  The cost of living is very high for most living things.  We have valued life very low these days.

Life is the one thing that we humans can't create.  We can reproduce and we can even clone using science, but that thing that separates living from unliving---we haven't really got it.  Reality is, the clone, like our own reproduction, requires a living cell to start with.

Life should be the most valuable, most honored and most important thing to us.  So why do we spend money to kill.  Why do we gripe about the space taken up by other living things and the way the place they live makes the place unusable to us.  Why are we blind to our own evil.

Each of us, each living human has more in common with a butterfly or lion or mouse than it does with some manmade thing that we rave about or beg for or dream about.  Things are not ever more important than life.  People are never things, just as trees, bunnies, dogs are not things.  Being poor, being ill, being homely or disfigured or scary to look at does not make any living creature a thing.

Its time to raise the value of life. 

Perception and what we believe.

"If information doesn’t square with someone’s prior beliefs, he discards the beliefs if they’re weak and discards the information if the beliefs are strong.
strongly held beliefs continue to influence judgment, despite correction attempts—even with a supposedly conscious awareness of what is happening."

The above quote is pretty boiled down.  If you want to know where it came from, copy and paste to your favorite search engine and it will tell you.

Lao Tzu knew something of this, or didn't know something of this---its complicated.

Stories about full cups and half-full cups and empty cups are often used to describe our thinking.  We use such analogies to explain positive attitude, negative attitude, gratefulness, and even openness to demon possession.  The thing to remember, sometimes an empty cup is not just good, it's a goal.

My favorite analogy with a cup has to do with giving someone more when their cup is full.  It's related to beliefs.  And compares beliefs to preconceived notions.  A little like prejudice but more consuming.

Take, for instance, a child raised in a fundamentalist religion.  Their world view is created by those beliefs.  The can't see scientific theories about the origin of the universe or about where people came from or even astronomy, without having their world view thrown into cognitive dissonance. 

Cognitive dissonance makes us uncomfortable.  It makes us question things we have never questioned.  It's like a mental earthquake. 

Some people are good at compartmentalizing--they put religious stuff and science stuff and their own moral compass/lack of moral compass into places that don't interact.  It allows them to believe the religion of their childhood while practicing business tactics that are hard on poor people and taking classes on astronomy at the university for their required science class.

"This is business, it isn't personal"

Compartmentalizing gets rid of cognitive dissonance.  It allows us to maintain conflicting beliefs for the long haul as long as we don't get all crazy and try to avoid hypocrisy or worse, try to examine our own beliefs with an honest and open mind.

Most people that lose the ability to maintain the beliefs of their childhood will either relegate the belief to one of harmless childhood magick--like Santa or the Easter Bunny, or they will become angry.  If you talk to a lot of atheists you will find they were raised in a religion, and their current "there is no god" belief has at its center, the belief that the religion of their parents was wrong, therefore--"there is no god"  A lot of teenagers that play with Satanism do the same thing.  They have not actually changed their beliefs, they have only changed how they feel about those beliefs.  It's a lot like a reaction formation.

The cup was full, it's still full, but they no longer like the taste of the beverage.

Emptying the cup is tough.  It requires tearing down the silos maintaining those compartments.  It requires not just the clear eyed examination of the beliefs that shape an individuals world, but the ability to identify what is colored by a belief versus what is just objective fact.

I'm not sure objective fact exists.  The one thing no scientist can eliminate from any study is the observer.

We all have beliefs.  We know our religion is belief.  We know that our faith is belief--no matter what we have faith in.  We know that anything we can't detect with our senses is dependent on a certain amount of belief. 

But what about our faith that our senses are telling us how things really are.  Colorblind individuals don't see the same as most people.  Creatures that use echo location, individuals that see sounds, animals that can differentiate thousands of smells---do we really believe (see how I threw that word in there all innocent) that we all share a common factoid-filled world? 

For those individuals that compartmentalize, for those individuals that allow themselves to only see what their beliefs--religious, moral, cultural, language-based, family-based--it doesn't matter, what they believe is all they can perceive.  They create their own reality.

So for those of us that are brave enough to examine our own inner worlds,  improving the current world we live in falls to us.

Be brave.

the animal vs the individual

There is an ongoing argument around my neck of the woods that pretty much says "all pit bulls are evil, crazy, killers"  "no they aren't" "yes, they are" "no they aren't".... and so on and so on and so on.  You get the gist.

I'm not in the argument---I'm a cat person.

But the logic of the argument is exactly what I'm talking about.  Most people will squash every spider they see.  They will us insecticides, traps, guns, whatever they can get their hands on to kill something if the creature they see is a "bad" animal.

What is a bad animal?

• predators that might eat something we can sell at market
• predators that might think we look like food when we are in their territory
• predators (not otherwise specified--they kill to eat so they are bad---think about that one)
• animals that sting
• animals that electrocute
• animals that bite
• animals that think you look like a diner
• animals that think you look like their next home
• animals that cost you money by sharing your space and causing damage
• animals that stink
• animals that look gross
• snakes, all snakes, evil snakes
• birds that crap on your property
• birds that like to eat fruit and berries off the trees and bushes
• birds that like to eat lap dogs
• all insects except ladybugs and butterflies.
• animals that are bigger than a car and not restrained

I'm sure there are more.

Then we see these stories, or videos in which one animal is best friends with somebody or saves a child or whatever, and we become fans of that individual.

Humans love to categorize.  We assume that things belong in categories.  There is no evidence that we humans have ever considered that the categories we make are just man made constructs to help us store information in our brains.

Obviously, we don't just do that with animals.  We label everything, then put it in a category that has a judgement attached.  We miss all kinds of good things by doing this, from foods that look funny to religious wisdom from other beliefs.   We like our categories to have an unspoken good/bad attached to their meaning.  It is the basis of all kinds of atrocious behavior.  It is the basis of hate crimes, of man made extinctions, of wars, and it is the reason you can't get a decent tomato at the supermarket. (bruised tomato-bad, perfect tomato good, try shipping that 3,000 miles)

I currently hate zoos.   It hurts me to go to them.  I have heard that the people at the zoos get attached to the individual animals they care for, and visa versa, and hope that is true.  Every single life form is an individual.  No matter our instincts, or brain function, we are not all identical.  If you doubt it, talk to a set of identical twins.  We treat every creature as if it is just another of its species.  Why can't we see that every creature is also an individual, living its own life, experiencing, learning, and being unique.

The planet is not our sandbox to do with as we wish.  We need to share.  We need to respect our co-life forms.  We all need each other.

 And who knows what great  inter-species friendships we have all missed.

The changing of "to kill a Mockingbird" to "Go set a Watchman"

This is not a book review.  I haven't read Harper Lee's latest, but I probably will.

Her first book was required reading in high school for a lot of my peers.  I didn't read it in High School because the small, independent school district I attended wasn't actually integrated until the 1990s.  The black students that didn't go there didn't miss anything.

After college, which was a desert in which good fiction books were water, I read a lot.  After I went through all of Shakespeare and all of Bradbury and had stayed current with Stephen King, I was down to the books I found the mockingbird book in a stack in the back of a relatives book closet.  They told me it was ok and that it had been made into a movie.  I didn't watch the movie until videos came out.  It was also ok.

In my first job, working nights, where coffee and off-topic conversations kept us alert till while working in a hospital and waiting for the next patient need, the mockingbird book came up.  There were 3 of us, a blonde a year or two younger than me that probably hadn't read anything since high school (not a blonde joke, it was from a bottle, but she kept it yellow as straw) and a big, black man a year older than me.   He and I had been discussing the latest King book, and she asked us if we had ever read "To Kill a Mockingbird".  I said "yes", he said, "everybody had to in high school,  I hated that book"
She said "why?  it was great?  It was about black people?"  The man, looked ready to pop a vein.  Considering he was one of those comedic men that everyone loved, it was an unexpected reaction.  I gave it minute, he was not answering, other than some colorful words not in actual sentences.  Then I told her,  "It wasn't about black people, it was about a stereotypical black man, a unsophisticated, and helpless and the amazing, brilliant white lawyer that saved him"

It was her turn to stammer for a while, and she left.  His response was simple, He was amazed I had noticed that.

After 2 reviews about the new book coming out today, the first by a person that considered "To kill a Mockingbird" a literary classic and the second a biracial poet raised in the south, I have a good idea that there is going to be a lot more said about the new book.

To me, Harper Lee just gained a little perspective.  What she saw as "a good white man" is now less concrete.  She pulled down the glasses of white privilege, at least a little before she wrote.  I believe that just maybe she has grown a little, has seen things from more views, has tried to bring a fairer truth to her writing.    The author was born in 1926 and won a Pulitzer for the first book in 1960 at age 34.    I think it is possible she was already writing this new book when she won that prize.  I would like to think she is publishing it now because she sees what is happening in the country right now.  I could be wrong.  I don't know her.  She is my parents' age.

My father told me, over a decade ago (but while he was still alive--no ghost stories here) that the world would be a better place when his generation was gone.  We were discussing racism when that came up.  I recently heard the same comment from a Millennial where we were discussing race.  She might be right, but I think that the people that taught racism when my father was a child, also taught the teaching of it.  While a lot of us have thought about it enough to know right from wrong, others accept what they learned as small children and never examine those teachings for truth, rightness, justice.  Self-awareness is much less common than common sense.

We are living--again--in racially troubled times.  I like to think that every couple of generations, when it all boils up again, we actually make a little progress as we stir it back down.  

I would love to think that those sweet, cute, babies born since the start of a new age will never see race be the topic of discussion again.  No one needs to die for that to happen.  But we do need to use a little empathy.  Every toddler can tell you that when the candy bar is cut in half unevenly, and one get the bigger half and the other  gets the smaller, it isn't fair.  

It's time to play fair. 

On being right and always winning!

I remember reading something on the internet, back when some of us were still calling it/them bulletin boards.  I'm sure the stuff is still out there somewhere.  It was evocative. It was racist and claimed that those of European descent were all about being right and winning. I immediately decided they were wrong.

I am having issues at work.  Our department is small.  We are all opinionated and know everything.  We have silo's because we don't want to share credit and recognition.  We have dirty looks that speak of death rays and malicious intent when someone disagrees with an opinion.  Its like a large but dysfunctional marriage.

Why do people need to be right.  Not just "I don't want to speak until I have a good idea of what I'm talking about" not "all the science says this is true" but "I think this, therefore I'm right and  I'm going to argue about it until I win or hell freezes over, damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead--I'm right, your wrong and need to admit it or else"  That kind of always right.

Work loves to talk about teamwork, "we are all on the same team"  "we are in this together" "we are on the same side"  We are all working toward the same goal."  But for some, maybe for a lot, we have to win.  We need the recognition.  We need the reward, even if it is only the reward of saying "I told you so"

These are competitive times.  We were raised to compete.  We were raised on "survival of the fittest" and "there can only be one".  We were raised in a time when rich, successful, famous people are winners and everyone else is just a contender, or worse, a loser.  Ask someone that likes to win, why it is important and they will look at you like you are crazy.  Our current culture is immersed in it.

A competitive world is dependent on a winner and a loser, or even a bunch of losers.  But there is always only one winner.  We don't just leave that for sports or games, but for everything.  If you are on the fortune 400, its important to be the most 400ish.    If you are the meanest, the saddest, the biggest, the fastest, we have a whole book that is continually updated to show that we love the "ist" winners.  There is no book for those that aren't the "ist"

And on a day to day basis, in the world of ordinary, everyday people, the ongoing, never-ending competition is all about being right.  I have seen people change from voting for a good candidate to voting for a scary candidate when it came down to vote day, because they wanted to win, they wanted to be right.  I guess when it comes to opinion, majority just might rule.

But what is the prize for being right?  A feeling of self-importance?  Confirmation of personal superiority of mind?  If we are talking facts, you know if you are right, and you have nothing to prove--science/observation/has already made the point.  If you are talking opinion, yelling the loudest, being the rudest, making the most disparaging remarks about the other persons equally unfactual opinion only proves that you are more concerned with being right than getting along.

Not everything is worth arguing about.  In fact, if a thing is arguable, it implies there is no one answer.  If a question can be answered with a fact--I'm not talking about an internet search for individuals that agree with you, I'm talking a body of good scientific research, then there is nothing to argue about.  Either you hand the person the research, accepting that some people are not swayed by fact and prefer their own personal fictions, or, if the fact is not really going to change anything, you can just leave it alone.

The person that always has to be right, always has to win, always has to have the last word---they lost.  Perhaps not the argument, but they lost.  Most of us just avoid the company of constantly argumentative, always right winners.

One thing that disappeared from the vocabulary of people born after 1950 is humility.  It now is only used in the form of humiliating, and seems to mean being embarrassed.  Being humble is seen as a sign of weakness.  We had a lot of wise and wonderful leaders that knew the meaning of being humble, and using humility and while they will never get their own reality TV show, some of them are still around and still trying to improve the world through cooperation and altruism and good works.

Read the quotes below that are about humility and being humble.  The best winning is when we all win.  Dichotomy is the actual root of all evil. 

“There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.”
 “On the highest throne in the world, we still sit only on our own bottom.”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays
 “It is unwise to be too sure of one's own wisdom. It is healthy to be reminded that the strongest might weaken and the wisest might err.”
― Mahatma Gandhi
 “True humility is not thinking less of yourself; it is thinking of yourself less.”
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity 
 “These are the few ways we can practice humility:

To speak as little as possible of one's self.

To mind one's own business.

Not to want to manage other people's affairs.

To avoid curiosity.

To accept contradictions and correction cheerfully.

To pass over the mistakes of others.

To accept insults and injuries.

To accept being slighted, forgotten and disliked.

To be kind and gentle even under provocation.

Never to stand on one's dignity.

To choose always the hardest.”
― Mother Teresa, The Joy in Loving: A Guide to Daily Living
 “A great man is always willing to be little.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson
 “The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes.”
― Winston S. Churchill
 “Who is more humble? The scientist who looks at the universe with an open mind and accepts whatever the universe has to teach us, or somebody who says everything in this book must be considered the literal truth and never mind the fallibility of all the human beings involved?”
― Carl Sagan
 “The biggest challenge after success is shutting up about it.”
― Criss Jami
 “If anyone tells you that a certain person speaks ill of you, do not make excuses about what is said of you but answer, "He was ignorant of my other faults, else he would not have mentioned these alone.”
― Epictetus
 “It is not for me to judge another man's life. I must judge, I must choose, I must spurn, purely for myself. For myself, alone.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha 
 “A true genius admits that he/she knows nothing.”
― Albert Einstein
 “It's okay to disagree with the thoughts or opinions expressed by other people. That doesn't give you the right to deny any sense they might make. Nor does it give you a right to accuse someone of poorly expressing their beliefs just because you don't like what they are saying. Learn to recognize good writing when you read it, even if it means overcoming your pride and opening your mind beyond what is comfortable.”
― Ashly Lorenzan
 “I have three precious things which I hold fast and prize. The first is gentleness; the second is frugality; the third is humility, which keeps me from putting myself before others. Be gentle and you can be bold; be frugal and you can be liberal; avoid putting yourself before others and you can become a leader among men.”
― Lao Tzu

“Stay hungry, stay young, stay foolish, stay curious, and above all, stay humble because just when you think you got all the answers, is the moment when some bitter twist of fate in the universe will remind you that you very much don't.”
― Tom Hiddleston

“Life is a long lesson in humility.”
― J.M. Barrie, The Little Minister 
 “Every person that you meet knows something you don't; learn from them.”
― H. Jackson Brown Jr.
 To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness 
 “There are two circumstances that lead to arrogance: one is when you're wrong and you can't face it; the other is when you're right and nobody else can face it.”
― Criss Jami, Diotima, Battery, Electric Personality 

If you read these, and some of them seem false/wrong/offensive, don't contact me, just ask yourself why?