Tag: contemporary life

Why Do They Hate Us?

Our western world is the most carefree, benevolent society in history.  So why does half the rest of the world hate us while the other half is actively trying to kill us?  It’s a conundrum, and a lot of learned minds have written volumes hoping to figure it out.  Forget all that crap!  It boils down to the 3Gs: Grocery stores, Game shows and Golf.

groceryGrocery Stores – In North America, there’s enough food in the average grocery store to feed a 3rd World village for the better part of a decade.  There’s fresh food, frozen food, canned food, processed food and food that isn’t even food anymore.  (BTW, what does “meal replacement” actually mean?)  We’ve got so much food there’s an entire aisle devoted to food whose only purpose is to go on top of other food.  There’s another aisle for the food we eat between the times we’re eating food.  We can buy food and use it to decorate other food — and then just throw it away.  Incredible as it sounds, grocery stores even have a whole bunch of food that’s actually bad for us — not to mention the 600 different kinds of sugar water we can buy to wash it all down with.  And that’s just one grocery store: there are thousands and thousands of them.  The industrialized West has more food than it could ever possibly eat.

Game Shows – Jeopardy, Wheel of Fortune and The Price is Right are absolute WTF moments in modern living.gameshow  Contestants can walk away from these programs with more money than billions of people on this planet can earn in a lifetime — and they do it in 30 minutes or less.  And what do they have to do to collect all this coin?  Not much beyond spinning the big game wheel or making it “a true daily double, Alex.”  However, for insult to injury TV, nothing beats Survivor.  The premise of this game is that, for a month and a half, a  group of Americans have to live the way the rest of the world lives all the time.  After six weeks, the person who is sneaky, cunning and manipulative enough to outlast everybody else, wins a million dollars.  (A million dollars!)  That’s folding money in any country’s currency.

golfGolf – Nobody actually knows how much money is spent in the Western world on golf.  Even a conservative guess would put it somewhere around the accumulated GNPs of 50 of the world’s poorest nations.  A quick inventory of balls, clubs, tees, gloves, a bag, shoes, a collared shirt, and the dicky little hat and you’re into the game for a couple of thousand.  Add green fees, cart rentals and all the other etceteras and you’re looking at five figures to bang your balls around a pasture every week.  And that’s what it is — a Members Only pasture — and we have thousands of them.  Plus, we soak these pastures with billions of litres of drinkable water, thousands of metric tonnes of fertilizer and millions of working hours in maintenance.  (Some places cut their putting greens with lasers!)  To produce?  Nothing — beyond huge tracts of immaculately manicured, inedible grass.  All for the sole purpose of getting a little white ball into a tiny round hole, hundreds of yards away from where we’re originally standing.

These are the 3Gs, and it’s this kind of in-your-face affluence that pisses people off.

The Bucket List: There ARE Limits

bucketAs predicted in these pages, the Baby Boomers have gotten hold of the Bucket List (you can read about it here) and buggered it up beyond all recognition.  The collective bucket is now full and overflowing so ludicrously that 19-year-olds are making Bucket Lists for autumn as if the 2012 Mayan Calendar were coming back for a second crack at us.  There are even websites which will make your Bucket List for you, if you can’t think up any good stuff yourself.  Some Johnny-Come-Latelys have even taken to writing anti-Bucket Lists, just to set themselves apart from the horde/(Herd?)  “I’m never going to eat lima beans” kinda diminishes the spiritual value of confronting mortality, head-on.  So, since the Boomers have once again marketed the wonder and whimsy out of another part of the human experience, it’s time to set up some rules.  Bucket all you want, but there is a limit to what the rest of us can endure.

I’m going to write a novel.  The peak of conceit in our ego driven world.  It’s amazing how many people who can’t compose a decent email believe they have a novel inside them, struggling to get out.  Perhaps they do, but, if you answer most of your text messages with “K,” “lol” or “haha,” you might want to rethink this one.  The average novel has 50 to 60 thousand words in it.  At a more-talented-than-Shakespeare rate of 500 words a day, that’s around four months of steady 9 to 5 and beyond work.  Assuming, or course, that every word you write is a gem, every comma, colon and question mark is in the right place and SpellCheck can distinguish between “your,” “you’re” and “yore.”  Typing is easy, but writing is hard — even without rereads, rewrites or all the other editing bits which can — and frequently do — take years.  Honestly, with the Grim Reaper looking over your shoulder, do you really want to spend that much time staring at a computer screen?  Probably not.  You’d be far better off to stick to poetry which is quick, easy, still has the requisite dose of Vitamin I, and can be confined to 20 line bursts of creativity on evenings and weekends.

I will watch a whale, see a grizzly, hug a panda, walk with a penguin, dance, skip, jump and crawl with any number ofbucket1 other assorted exotic species.  Here’s the deal.  Leave wild animals alone.  Their mortality is just as precious as yours, and every time you and your guided tour touristas go stumbling through their environment, you’re moving them one hiking boot closer to extinction.  If you must brag, go to Mexico or some other such place where they’ve captured animals specifically for your enjoyment.  Play with them there –their lives are already miserable.  Besides, I think most people are fed up with the irony of somebody spouting off about swimming with the dolphins while they’re sucking down another order of tuna maki at the sushi bar.

I’m going to get a meaningful tattoo.  What the hell does that even mean?  How is any tattoo significantly different from the millions of others adorning everybody west of the Russian Mafia?  Back in the day, tattoos were neat and unique, but there’s been a lot of ink spilled on the middle class since then.  Freudian symbolism aside, these days, tattoos have more to do with disposable income than creativity.  After all, with a thousand bucks in your pocket, you can get as creative as the market will bear — including making sure there are no spelling mistakes.  Perhaps that’s what “meaningful” really means.

I’m going to skydive, bungee jump, hang glide or engage in some other “extreme” nonsense.  Why is it that when people finally realize they are eventually going to die, the first thing they do is try to hasten the inevitable by challenging gravity to a duel?  I trust technology as much as the next guy.  However, I’m certainly not going to jump off a bridge when the only thing between me and the Gates of Valhalla is an elastic band, secured to my leg by a second year Rec. student who may — or may not — be high on peyote.  The modern fetish for jumping (literally) out of one’s comfort zone is a testament to just how cushy life is for some people in the 21st century.  I suppose that when your biggest challenge to life and liberty is who took your parking spot, a controlled explosion of adrenaline is something of an adventure.  (After all, you’re not really going to get hurt when the guy on top of you has the ripcord.)  However, I wonder just how mundane our lives have become when we have to manufacture danger to fulfill them.

bucket2I’m going to tell the truth about X.  Don’t!  Now, or any time between now and the dirt nap, is not the time to confess an abortion, an adoption, an affair or even a fantasy — especially if it involves something sticky or your daughter’s swimming coach, Morgan.  In the words of Mohandas Gandhi, “Shut up and move on.”  (He didn’t actually say that but…) There are certain things that should safely accompany you to the grave, and if that’s too big a burden on your soul, suck it up, you big baby.  It’s not always about you.

As I’ve said many times, I approve of Bucket Lists.  I’ve had several.  However, now that they’ve become a retirement requirement, we’re rapidly reaching the tiresome top end of one-upmanship.  A sunrise isn’t good enough, unless it’s seen from the slopes of Kilimanjaro.  Spain is not complete without playing dodgeball with the bulls of Pamplona.  And no mountain is worth climbing if it doesn’t have a recognizable name.

If your one desire in life is to eat Fugu soaked in Absinthe served by Albanian virgins off silver trays, by all means do it.  But for God’s sake, shut up about it because I’ve only have a finite number of days left to enjoy my morning coffee.  (It’s Maxwell House, and I like it.)

Two Kinds of Stupid

stupidOne of the many things they never tell you in high school is that there’s a big difference between knowing stuff and being smart.  If you know stuff, you get to amuse your friends and win impromptu arguments, but unless you get on Jeopardy, it’s not really a paying proposition.  However, if you’re smart, you can write your own ticket.  Here’s a simple example.  Given a map, I can generally find most of the countries in the world.  I get a little confused with all the new “stans” that showed up in Asia in the 1990s, and I don’t think even John Kerry knows what’s going on in the Balkans, but I get by.  For the most part, this is useless information, since, in all my years, no one has ever come up to me and said, “By the way, where’s Singapore?”  My point is that just knowing something is useless — unless you know what to do with the information.  Knowledge for its own sake may be a philosopher’s wet dream, but in practical terms, it doesn’t pay the rent.

However, let’s not get carried away with the educated idiot analogy because the other thing they never explain in high school, even while they’re teaching it, is that in order to be smart, you have to know stuff.  Information is fundamental to problem-solving, and you need to learn as many facts as possible because, without them, even the smartest person in the world is a dolt.  Again, let me explain.  Because I do know where Singapore is, I’m way ahead of the curve.  I understand a lot more about my world than the person who doesn’t have a clue about the Lion City.  For example, I know why it’s King Midas rich, how it got that way, and why it’s probably going remain in the Daddy Warbucks’ Top Ten.  Take a look.  Singapore is on the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, on the fastest trade wind from the industrial East to the All-Consuming West.  That means it’s a natural stopping point for literally millions of megatonnes of shipping.  When that kind of dinero is going in and out of your front door every day, some of it is bound to sit down and stay awhile.  This analysis is a no-brainer — as long as you know where Singapore sits in the world.  However, without this tidy little tidbit, even Google can’t tell you why an insignificant city state the size of Philadelphia can cough in Asia and people in Rotterdam, Antwerp and Hamburg get a cold.

Here’s the deal.  In this world, there are two kind of stupid people, and even though they might look like there light yearsstupid3 apart in education, income, social status or what have you, they are essentially the same person.  First, there are the folks who believe that because they know who wrote Candide, they’re qualified to spout philosophy.  Then there are the other folks who’ve never heard of Francois-Marie Arouet but spout philosophy anyway.  Group A thinks that learning inherently makes them smart and Group B thinks they’re innately smart and don’t need to learn anything.  However, talk to anyone in either group and the conversation is the same.

Basically, it works like this: whereas you can know stuff without being smart, you can`t be smart without knowing stuff.

And if they’d just teach that in high school we’d all be better off come election time and at dinner parties.