I believe the internet has been eaten.

I envision a giant Pac-Manesque cyber critter munching down on all the interesting and diverse points of view and pooping out copy-paste like a bull munching grass and producing familiar smelling piles all over a field.  If you’ve seen one paragraph of BS the chances are good you’ve seen most of them. 

I remember way back when, (circa 1996), I got my own computer and started Googling and Yahooing everything under the sun; I found all kinds of information, message boards, little email groups, stuff that was off the beaten path.  Now it seems you can check link after link for various topics and see the same few ideas over and over, often right down to the same wording.  I think that this is more eerie than efficient.  Don’t believe me?  Try to find someone online who thinks it’s ok to not crate your dog, then try to find someone who doesn’t use the exact same verbal spiel yacking (usually angrily) about why you MUST crate your dog.  If I was brave enough I’d post on Facebook about how sick I was of never hearing any differences of opinion about dog crating then get lectured by my “Friends” on the necessity of crating (get your ass on board PLEASE) and simultaneously be treated to all the little ads for dog crates that would inevitably pop up along the side.  That’s just one possible example, (really, I don’t want to argue about the damn CRATE right now).

Diversity of thought seems to get digested into bullshit no matter what the subject or the media through which it travels.  Look at what happened to local radio?  Eaten by the syndication shark, which is simultaneously the most divisive and homogenizing creature around.  The Pac-Man web-eating critter is a guppy of irritation compared to this shark.  The syndication shark consumes local flavor and even people’s humanity.  The multitudes of “conservative” political shows spew incessant contempt for our fellow human beings; but if you’re lucky, and the radio isn’t slamming hate on most of the population, you get syndicated sports, music, financial advice, legal advice; syndicated – sameness, the latest and greatest flavor of vanilla since last week’s vanilla which was the greatest cream-colored dessert that had ever been!

I have no idea where we will go from here.  It seems the financial gamblers didn’t think much of the Facebook spot on the stock market roulette wheel, maybe copy-paste-sell-you-stuff is running it’s course.  Could little blogs of diverse information become more popular?  Like independant web sites, email lists, and message boards of old?  I really wish there was enough money in the world that we could have local radio back too, with its slow pace of local news and sports and the occasional buy and trade show.  People can do something about local issues, we can’t do much about the manufactured issues the world owners-operators work to keep us full of anxiety over.  Maybe someday we can sit around petting an uncrated dog listening to old Jim down the road call in trying to sell a used washing machine.  Wouldn’t be bad.

Too Much Racket

My Grandfather and his brothers saw a car for the first time around 1918 or so, and they chased it down the road because they had no idea what it was.  His daughter would go on vacations on a commercial airliner, like it was nothing at all (because it wasn’t), and his granddaughters have smart-phones, a tablet, e-readers, and a hybrid car.  That’s nothing at all either.

This is where we are, human beings have rushed into technology during the past century like it was now or never.  Before that we were running headlong out of the towns and farms into the industrial revolution which would cheapen life  as people became “labor”, then a couple of wars that would take life’s value below dollar store level.  We’ve been in a hurry for a little while, and changed more in a few generations than seems possible based on the slow evolution of people since we became more than apes.  But can we take it?

We live in a cacophony of input now, our brains are being injected with words and images from everywhere and all the time.  It’s great to have all the information imaginable at hand on the internet, but with every bit of value comes a whole lot of garbage.  While we get more information on everything and anything than ever before, we get more propaganda, more hype, and more cynical.  Is anything out there really unbiased?  I doubt it.  The “real” is in the eyes of the beholder, and we behold exactly what we want to see.  All this information is a self-fulfilling prophecy for each individual; we pay attention to what we believe and we believe what we pay attention to; and the rest is just trying to sell us something else.

How does anyone get any peace with all this noise?  I keep wondering if all this so-called advancement in the “information age” has anything to do with rising substance abuse, child abuse, animal abuse, suicide, economic disaster….Are we all going mad or does the media just like to hype the ones who do so we’ll tune in tomorrow to see who the next - Mamma’s boyfriend who killed her baby he was babysitting while she was at work – is. 

Every week there is some kind of study telling us what to eat or what not to, what vitamins to take or that they all will kill us; then in a week or month another one comes out with the opposite information.  They think no one notices but some things I remember.

I think the only solution is to turn it off, if you don’t feed something it will eventually die.  Attention is like steak and fries to this mess, we should at least make it subsist on white bread (with high fructose corn syrup) and non-bottled water!  That might make it pliable.  Then maybe we could get down to the business of listening to ourselves, figuring out where we are.  There’s something starting to go missing inside of us, and we might have to trace our steps back a while to find it.

Ceramic Face of Belief

On the morning walk with my dog we passed a yard that had, for some reason, put a stake at the edge of their driveway and covered it with one of those “hen and bitties” pots turned upside down (those are ceramic flower pots made for a type of plant that spawns new little family members all around and has holes on the side like little apartment openings to accommodate them).  The effect of the upside-down pot with two holes higher and one lower was like a Jack O’ Lantern head on the ground.  Just as I thought to myself that it looked like a weird head just sitting there by the street, my doggie companion got the same idea.  She stopped short of the thing then circled around sticking her nose out to sniff and trying to see all around the oddity without getting too close.  No way was she going to touch that thing! 

It looked like a person-head, in an odd sort of way, so it HAD TO BE; but it didn’t pass the smell test no matter how hard she sniffed, better to be cautious and skirt the issue.

That’s a good illustration of my past relationship with religion.  None of it ever completely passed the smell test for me, but by the way people acted it looked like it HAD TO BE true, didn’t it?  I had a lot of trouble accepting a lot of stuff, like when I found out as a kid that all my friends were going to hell.  WTF?  That didn’t make any sense!  And later when I got dragged to a Bible Study in a vulnerable time in my life and heard some poor girl, who seemed to have it all together compared to me, talk about how she and her boyfriend had to come to the conclusion that they had to give up the idea of getting married or being together because he was divorced, and the split up.  OMG!  I was lucky I didn’t wreck on the way home I was so mad.  Why loving this living, breathing human being nothing compared to following some wretched rules?  How can spiritual be so heartless and evil?  But no one seemed to question, no one spoke up about real people in the here and now hurting because of Bible quoting, and preacher voice, and bad hair galore.  It just WAS, and I kept feeling like I’d better decide to believe someday before I died or I’d burn forever if that hateful crap was true.  I kept being told to respect it, that no one would be “good” without it, and I wondered if it wasn’t just the reverse?

I hit a wall a decade ago and started reading.  Not the Bible, I still can’t read that, way too much baggage, but scholarly books about the origins of Christianity (since that’s the one I’d personally been plagued with).  I learned that ancient people wrote things for purposes of aggrandizing their nations and rulers, and metaphorically to make points, and also passing down stories that predated them while changing the names of the main characters to fit the past they built, this was the story of the Old Testament.  I also learned that the New Testament was written long after Christ, and not by his disciples.  There were even elements of more ancient stories mixed into his to give continuity, or even tell the kind of tale that was expected for someone considered great.  Nothing is carved in stone by a Universal power, and that spelled RELIEF.

That freed me from “belief”, but not from curiosity.  I have lots of theories about “spirit”, “connectedness”, “essence”; but I reserve the right to change those as I see fit.  Belief is such a loaded word that it seems like society only officially offers particular flavors of it or none at all.  To believe (or the opposite) I have to be pretty damn sure, and honestly, I doubt that many people are if they think about it. 

Consequently, there are a lot of things I think, and think about, that could be cataloged as “spiritual”.  I think a lot about reincarnation, other dimensions, human souls, and animal souls.  I like thinking about those things now and am free to do just that.  I’m glad Atheists are free to think about how nothing either spiritual or religious can be real in their opinion.  Free to think is the big deal with me. 

If something doesn’t interest me, offer answers that resonate, offer love and acceptance, or doesn’t pass the smell test I’m gone!

I bet my dear doggie love would reconsider her avoidance if a piece of chicken was on the top of that pot, it’d pass a whole new smell test then!

Screaming to Deaf Ears

I was going home from work the other day, in that stagnant movement you get when car volume meets traffic lights and everybody just sort of oozes down the small city street, when I saw an entire troubling scenario play out in a matter of seconds.  There was a wild-eyed, middle-aged man wearing a back pack literally screaming and pointing at a woman waiting to pull out from a grocery store parking lot.  It made no sense at first, but then I saw her slowly back up a few feet with him still screaming and pointing wildly in her direction.  She had evidently pulled onto the area where the sidewalk crosses the entrance to the parking lot as she waited for an opening to pull out just as the now raging man was coming along.  Whether she came to close to him physically, or was impeding his walk I have no clue, but his rage was intense enough for me to feel it all the way out on the street in a line behind a red light!  The woman did what I would have instinctively done, pretend he wasn’t there then try to appease him by backing up and hope he went away.  It’s a technique I was reminded of in one of my training classes with my dog, ignore the bad behavior and it will eventually extinguish.  It actually will work….with your pooch.

I have some history with trying to appease enraged people, got some personal history with dealing with various levels of mental illness too; of course there’s absolutely no proof that a mental health problem had anything to do with this situation, but I have a clue besides the raging and the wild eyes; the back pack.

Mental illness is the elephant in our society’s living room.  Various social services seem to me to randomly throw help at it hoping something sticks, well, anything but reality.  Mostly the goal seems to be to pass the person along and make it look good.  There just aren’t real resources out there, and even if you have insurance, In a lot of places it seems hard to find Psychiatrists that do more than just shuffle you in and out of their office with the prescription that is supposed to work on the diagnosis they made by assessing what is most likely your problem, considering your age, social class, treatment history, and drug/alcohol history.  Do they diagnose you the human?  Maybe not, they look at what is supposed to be going on, that I know from personal experience with a close family member with good insurance. 

I have a bit of a prejudice here, but the plight of the mentally ill is looked at through the lens of reality, we aren’t showing people in need any kind of love or compassion. 

What about that back-pack?  What in the hell do I mean about that?  School.  That store is within walking distance of a good sized university and a community college.  Going back to school seems to be the go to advice for people with problems.  Go back to school and better your lot.  Doing a lot of drugs to self-medicate something going wrong in your brain!  Quit that!  Go to some meetings where the untrained can fix you up for free, take out a bunch of loans and go to school.  Those nasty drugs or booze must have really been your problem.  No addiction problem?  Sure?  Well, in that case our Psychologist with prescribe the most likely medication and send you on your way.  Go to school, get some massive loans and a profession that will help you pay them off by the time you’re around 80 and it’s all good!  You will be occupied!

I’m a rotten person aren’t I?  Thinking everyone shouldn’t have the opportunity to get an education.  No, that’s not what I think at all.  I think we, as a society, gets fixes in our collective system-oriented heads that just aren’t the best for everyone.  Then we proceed to apply those fixes in an assembly-line fashion that would make Henry Ford proud!  As a society we don’t really want to put out any money for people to go to school, and we sure don’t want to put anything into mental health care.  We don’t want to help those nasty mentally ill, maybe we can dress them up and not feel so bad about ‘em?

I knew a lady that worked at a university, one of the students she had contact with told her he was a recovering drug addict and trying to stay clean (not very successfully), and he was back in school.  He never had to pay back any of his loans, he died of an overdose before he finished.  Too much pressure on a fragile person?  Perhaps.  I realize the going trend is to always blame the sick guy for not falling in line, but there’s more to it.

I’ve got no proof, to right to make assumptions about the situation I witnessed, but I’ve seen help gone wrong in the past and the grocery store incident jogged my memory.  People just aren’t Model T’s, assembly line, cheap, get it done fast fixes don’t help society or honor them as equal individuals in our society.

Tradition Walls

“Tradition” is one of those words that is supposed to conjure respect, honor, nostalgia, and warm fuzzies of goodness in people but has the opposite effect on me.  I’m wary of it.  A lot of times calling something “tradition” is like pointing out the pretty new wallpaper in a house whose foundation is crumbling in. 

I think a lot of people suffer because words like “tradition” and “culture” read like “hands-off our nastiness, we’ll do what we want because we always have”.  Think of honest-to-God cults that operate right here in the US!  People like (fill in the blank, you’ve heard of some), living in their compounds and raising their children knowing nothing else but the fear and hatefulness beaten in to them.  Try to talk about how awful that is to a lot of people and what you get is “respect their tradition, they have a right to do what they want, it’s their choice”.  But is it?  If you grow up without any clue that you have the rights granted to everyone, that most of us take for granted, do you have a choice?  Then people will say “they could leave if they wanted”.  Really?  Some girl made pregnant at 15 or young boy working in hopes of earning enough to someday be able to buy the enlightenment the cult he was born into promises.  We pretend that with no education, no job, no contacts, no nothing but the words of their insane-thinking  role models ringing in their heads and real promises that they will never see their blood relatives again, they could leave?  With a community surrounding them sympathetic to the cult ready to take them home?  They might as well be in Iran, they would probably be better off.

Two American Psychologists discovered something called “Learned Helplessness” back in the 60’s through some brutal experiments on dogs.  They would shock the dogs in boxes; some were given escape routes that led to boxes where they wouldn’t be shocked, some just got shocked no matter where they went.  What they found was that overwhelming majority of the dogs that just kept getting shocked would stop trying to escape their punishment, even when they were provided with accessible escape routes later on, learned helplessness. 

With our wonderful tradition of freedom of religion, we look the other way while children are raised in mental shock-boxes so we can conveniently say “if it were that bad, they would leave”, “we might not agree with their traditions, but we HAVE TO respect them”.  I get in trouble all the time with people because I won’t, I can’t.  I can’t even stomach the dog experiment but if we can connect with our own empathic core enough to see through walls of tradition down into the learned helplessness, those poor dogs suffered in vain, and human souls will continue to suffer as people trying to do the “right thing” and be good with all the right and proper attitudes look the other way.  We have learned helplessness too.  If we are so hog-tied by our own convoluted “laws” that we can’t see any way of helping people who will never have the rights our country claims to grant with these laws, we’ve got to justify why things are like they are.

I know what the next huffy traditionalist would spout at me after this spew (they’re sadly predictable), “Well, what do YOU think could be done about this?”, or the ever popular “What gives YOU the right to think you could dictate their lives?”, or the “I don’t know where to start!  You don’t even  believe in freedom of religion!”  Yea, they can’t arrest me for speaking up but they sure try their worn out tactics to shut up dissension.  I’m doing what I would do every time I talk about it.  No solution can ever be found if people can’t talk past the verbiage used to try to humiliate others into silence to support the status quo.  I get so tired of hurt.  The first step in consciousness on this, in my opinion, is to take the individual responsibility to see the defects inherent in respecting anything because “that’s the way it’s always been”.  To dismiss someone’s pain as self-induced when they were born into it, or even conned into it during a vulnerable moment.  Take the responsibility to say that something just isn’t right and keep saying it even if it would take all the powers in the Universe, known and unknown, to ever change it even long after we’re all dead and dust.