Tag: contemporary thinking

Why Are We All Angry?

anger

Here in the Western World, we live in the most benevolent civilization in all human history.  The irony is a lot of us seem pissed off about it.  Odd as it may seem, a ton of people spend a ton of time complaining about our world and the collective bounty of 3,000 years of economic and social success.  Why?  There are three reasons.  I like to call them the Killer Bs.

Bewildered — Like our medieval ancestors, we don’t understand anything about the world we live in.  Face it, folks!  We’re stupid.  These days, most people couldn’t tell you the difference between an aardvark and an antelope if you put burning coals between their toes.  And it’s not just zoology that stumps us.  Common knowledge simply isn’t common anymore.  We might be able to read and write, but we’re culturally, historically, economically, scientifically and mathematically illiterate — and proud of it.  For some weird reason, smart is not a currency we use or even value.  However, without these intellectual building blocks, it’s impossible to make sense out of the 1,001 complex systems that govern contemporary life or to understand our place in it.  At least a 12th century peasant could rely on God to justify his existence.  Unfortunately, since Nietzsche shot his mouth off, we don’t even have that option.  So, unable to figure out the simple how and why of what’s going on, many people boil over with frustration and say “Screw it!”

Bored — Intellectually divorced from reality, we have retreated behind our videos screens which filter out all the complexities of real life.  This is a mutant utopia, scripted with gratuitous drama and broad music-hall comedy.  The problem is it’s all relentlessly the same: kittens have achieved maximum cuteness, blockbuster movies bust tired old blocks, and the only shock left in those “shocking finales” is a shrug.  There’s no place to go in the cyber-verse that isn’t somebody else’s sequel, prequel or reboot.  All that’s left is hours and hours and hours of looping YouTube videos, everybody “liking” everything and bum-numbing binges of “must see TV.”  Face it, folks!  We’re bored — bored to the bone — and it’s making us bitchy.

Betrayed — We may ignore it or fail to understand it, but this is still the only reality we have — and sometimes it can be nasty.  Unfortunately, when that nasty comes calling (and it always will) it’s so alien to our everybody-gets-a-rainbow existence that we think something has gone horribly wrong — and we want to know why.  Flushed with excitement at the possibility of a “real” problem, but unable to comprehend any of the nuances of it, we demand an explanation for how our society failed.  We want a  reason, and we want it yesterday.  When we don’t get it — we get angry.  We begin to see evil where it doesn’t exist, impossible plots and conspiracies, tidy theories of nefarious secrets and blame — lots and lots of blame.  Face it, folks!  We truly believe we’re being betrayed by the very institutions we’re supposed to trust.

The Killer Bs aren’t killing the most benevolent civilization in history, but they’re certainly making it unpleasant. If we could get them under control, we’d all be a lot happier.

3 Ages Of Our Modern World

time on

Everybody knows about the Stone Age, the Ice Age, the Age of Enlightenment and all the other designated periods of human history.  Unfortunately, most people don’t give a rat’s ass about any of them and generally believe that history is just a feeble attempt by old men with bowties to bore the bejesus out of us.  While this is true, history is also a living thing,  and since you’re reading this, you are a living part of it.  For example, if you were born before 1977, you’ve already lived through 3 distinct historical eras.

The Age of Elvis — (Not to be confused with the Space Age which happened simultaneously but was artificially created by World War II German scientists who didn’t want to go to prison for being Nazis.)  The Age of Elvis began when Elvis Presley appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1956.  (Sputnik was a year later.)  It was characterized by young people gathering in social groups to listen to music, drink and/or take drugs, dance with each other, talk to each other, touch, laugh and generally enjoy themselves.  The Age of Elvis died when Donna Summers’ soliloquy to sex, “Love to Love You, Baby” moaned its way to the top of the charts in 1975.  After all, that little disco ditty is best enjoyed by one, two or perhaps three people in single-minded privacy.

The Age of Lucas — This period began on May 25th, 1977 when George Lucas released Star Wars.  Since the last human, Eugene Cernan, had left the moon in 1972 — with no hope of anyone ever returning — Lucas figured (quite rightly) that people were a lot more interested in watching space on a movie screen than actually taking the time and trouble to go there.  He built a virtual universe that earned more money than NASA spent in the last years of the Apollo program, exploring the real one.  Along with a few of his movie-making buddies (Spielberg, Scorsese and Coppola) Lucas changed our society from doers to watchers and made video viewing more than just an occasional leisure activity.  The Age of Lucas abruptly ended on May 19th, 1999 when George released The Phantom Menace, a piece-of-junk film that gave the finger to an entire generation of fans.  But by that time, they all just shrugged and paid their money.

The Age of Jobs and Zuckerberg — By the end of the last century, the Space Shuttle had run 95 missions and wasn’t even news anymore.  People were much more interested in creating a personal playlist for their iPods (introduced in 2001) or building a personal fan base on Facebook, the one-screen-fits-all virtual cocktail party, created in 2004.  Nobody cared that music had become a one person/one headset activity (unless you wanted somebody else’s gunk on your earbuds) and that many of our “friends” were people we didn’t actually know.  The truth is 50 years after our grandparents danced together in the rock n’ roll living rooms, basements and backyards of their time, the party was over.  Since then, our time has been measured out in bits, bytes and bandwidth, and now we’re very much in danger of having those weird guys with bowties I mentioned earlier, discussing the Age of Jobs and Zuckerberg as the era in history when humans finally abandoned human contact entirely.

However, history marches on, and one of these days, Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic is going to launch some tourists into space — and man are they ever going to send back some selfies that might change the world!

Let’s Fix The World!

fix the world

Let’s face it, folks!  We’re screwed — like totally.  Western society is in an unholy hole, and every time some bright-bulb-somebody shows up with a shovel and tries to fix things, they just end up digging us in a little deeper.  In my lifetime, the poor have gotten poorer, the hungry have gotten hungrier and the homeless have gotten — uh — well, you can’t actual get any homelesser, but given the wretched state of things, they probably would be — if it were at all possible.  The point is, we need to do something — yesterday — or we’re going to find out rock bottom has a basement.  Unfortunately, our world has been hijacked by stupid people.  We all know there’s no cure for stupid, but with a little ingenuity, we can limit the ability of these morons to control the agenda.  This is not a quick fix, and it could take a generation or two to get things under control, but if we act now there’s still time to save our society.  Here are three things we need to do immediately, or the next voice we’re going to hear is President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho from Idiocracy, declaring war on asparagus.

1 — We need to make people take a test (and pass it!) before they’re allowed to vote.  Here’s the deal: plumbers have to take a test (and pass it) before they’re allowed to play around with your sewer pipes; electricians have to take a test before they’re allowed to install a light switch; even cab drivers have to take a test before their allowed to drive you home from the bar.  Yet, when it comes to politics and selecting the folks who are actually going to run the world, we abandon all due diligence and let every dumbass who can make an ‘X’ have a say — an equal say, BTW.  No wonder most of our leaders have nice hair, good teeth and no brains.

2 — We need to make people who want to become parents go to Parenting School.  Here’s the deal: if you want to be a teacher and teach kids, you have to go to school.  If you want to open a Day Care and look after kids, you have to go to school.  Hell, in some places if you want to be an occasional babysitter — you have to go to school.  Yet, if you want to become a parent and be totally — 100% — responsible for a helpless child’s comfort, nutrition, safety and education, their physical, psychological, moral and spiritual wellbeing, and work diligently 24/7 for 18 years (without a day off) to turn them into responsible adults — all you have to do is have one too many tequilas, let a foot massage get out of hand and 9 months later — Shazam! — you’re a parent.  Does this make any sense?  Letting a bunch of people who haven’t got a clue about life have kids and pass their cluelessness on to the next generation is what’s exponentially killing our society.

But first — before we do all that:

3 — We need to take the warning labels off everything.  This is Darwinism at its best, and it might be exactly what our world needs right now.