Yesterday my partner’s doctor was encouraging him to take certain medication because “we want to extend your life another 20-25 years”. and my sweetie said, “the way things are going in this country, I don’t want to live another 20 years”. He’s 73, but his Dad lived to 92, his Mom to 98, so that 20-25 years is realistic.
We often look at what is going on politically and socially, and while we both rail against the direction, we, at least I, have accepted that this is no longer our world. What we experienced in freedom, already somewhat curtailed, was glorious compared to what is happening today. But the other side of that is that today, a lot of people do not want the responsibility that comes with that freedom. Actually, there are generations that have implored “someone should do something about that”, instead of taking responsibility for their own actions leading to issues, they want someone else to make sure the situation never even comes up in the first place. And the “someone” is government; be it local, state, or federal.
You smoked, you risked cancer. First the government put warning labels on those packages, and then they started cracking down on the where and when you could smoke. Because people who were developing cancer (more often their families) were suing the tobacco companies. They took the risk of getting cancer by smoking, but someone “should have done something about that”.
People where killing themselves in traffic accidents by propelling their bodies into windshields during a sudden stop. First the government ordered seat belts as mandatory, then when people still didn’t take their own responsibility for fastening those seat belts, they tried all kinds of different techniques to keep cars from starting unless the seat belts were fist fastened.
Now we have to find ways to keep people from leaving their kids in their cars when they go to work because they’ve forgotten the kids are there and just gone to work and left them to die in the parking lot. Someone has to do something about that! Far be in that people be responsible for their own actions!
Now, we are also seeing the change in the way people are thinking because of the bias of media and the education system. Why do we have to teach a separate black history? Why can’t we teach history? One that shows how America gradually put aside slavery, ultimately leading to the Civil War to push that to being the norm. Why not teach that there were blacks that held slaves as well as whites that ran the underground railroad? Why not mention the thousands of whites that lost their lives to free the slaves instead of depicting all whites as evil racists?
Why don’t we teach how the great American experiment of democracy changed the way countries’ were run all over the world? and why not teach how we used our might to change things, sometimes for the good, and sometimes not. Sometimes we were help, sometimes we were harm. Just like all others before us. Why don’t we teach about pork barreling anymore? We vilify congressman John because he voted against that veteran’s (or senior, or health care) bill. No one mentions that he didn’t vote against that important bill, he voted against the billions of wasted dollars that were going into the 27 useless bills that were tacked on to that bill in a fight to get the first bill passed! The way of votes; sure, I’ll vote for your important bill, but you have to support my useless bill that will make my main election donor happy, says 27 other congress people until there is a whole lot of money being thrown into the garbage so we can have that one important bill. But we don’t teach that, or report that, anymore.
In my life time, I”ve seen injustice on a large scale. some that wasn’t widely publicized, like Leonard Peltier, and some that has been dragged into the mainstream like the hundreds of Indian children who died without proper burial at the many religious run schools. where children that were basically kidnapped from their families were forced to give up their language, their culture, their lives, denounce their families and religion to become “white”. At the same time, their culture, their language, was used by the military to send messages that the enemy could not intercept; Code Talkers were not limited to the Navajo. The message to the Indian is, we will use when we can, the rest of the time, we have no use for you. Stay out of our sight.
Lately, have been reading about LeVoy Finicum (look him up if you have to) and am embarrassed to say that I’d forgotten him myself. But I do remember the news reports at the time, which were initially unbiased, that he was shot in cold blood, that there was no gun. That the media eventually portrayed him and the entire group as being traitors and domestic terrorists instead of hard working ranchers asking for their freedom from government oversight. Over time, the videos that showed him being shot with hands in the air disappeared. and the trials that proved that government agents infiltrated their group and literally set him up in an ambush did not get wide publicity.
Just like the early films of 2020 showing the protestors being ushered into the Capital by Capital police disappeared until Tucker Carson started showing them. Unfortunately, Tucker has made himself so far right, most don’t believe him. But we watched the event live on TV, before the narrative turned. We saw it happen.
We saw the protest after the 2016 election that burned buildings and trashed vehicles parked on the street, but no one wants to talk about those protests. We saw white nationalists being beaten by young black men and just walking on, not engaging. But no one reported that. The protests in Portland, OR that have turned parts of that city into No Man’s Land. Still on going today.
I live in AZ and we know first hand the trouble that comes with undocumented people crossing the border. Oh, I do feel for the desperation that those people must feel to walk thousands of miles and put their trust in people who are only interested in the money they can collect for the “service” of bring these people through the desert. People who have no problem with dropping their charges at the first sign of border patrol so they die where they stand. People who have no problem with taking money to bring children into this country then basically enslaving them because there is no one to speak for them.
But as I recently read, too often we are bogged down with talking about the problems, and how we got to the problems, without working towards real solutions. Our failing education system, our border situation, the lack of jobs to support the people who have been encouraged to go into deep debt to get useless degrees. These are problems that are discussed endlessly, but with no real end game, so no solutions.
And the record employment rate, the low unemployment rate. (1) government is the largest hiring business on record. Record employment is record big government (2) unemployment rates are measured by the number of people on record as looking for a job. When you fall off the unemployment insurance collection numbers, you fall off the unemployment rate numbers. All those people living in tents and in cars and in old train tunnels are NOT measured in the unemployment statistics.
Unfortunately, there is no easy solution to help people who have not experienced what we did, to know what they are giving up. They don’t even want to experience what we did! They are involved in their social media and isolated worlds; their safe spaces and no risk life. They don’t know how unemployment is measured. They don’t know about children trafficking at the border. They don’t know that they have been stinted on their education. What they do know is what they don’t have. They don’t have the clothes, the travels, the life their favorite influencer touts. They don’t know that strawberries don’t grow in January in America. They don’t know their favorite food comes from China where there is no inspection or certification. They decry Climate Change but buy and throw away, they use plastic everywhere in their environment, but want to stop oil. They turn a blind eye to human rights abuses in mines for the Lithium, Cobalt and Nickel they want for their “green” cars. and they don’t really want to know because it does not fit into the narrative that they have been fed by government and media.
and they don’t want to know either.
So my sweetie,doesn’t want to live his full life potential. Not that he will have much choice in the matter,nor will I. But what we are living is not the future we had envisioned 40-50 years ago, and its moving farther and farther away from that vision every day.
thoughts and ramblings 