En Silhouette

En Silhouette, originally uploaded by lucienphoto.

I have thought carefully what are issues that our society faces. We have an economic crisis. We have employment problems. We have an identity crisis. We have political turmoil. We have worker unrest. We have dissatisfaction with government. We have structural failure looming at every bridge and culvert. We have become the juggernaut and we don't know which way to turn. So here are my ideas.

Big business has always served the US well. Today Toyota Japan issued STOP orders on 8 of their best selling products. Seems that there is an acceleration issue.

So in response to the liberals I say this: Go back to the good ol' boy USA. Less government and more free enterprise. Business will always prevail when the market is allowed to set price and policies. We don't need the FDA - pharma will not try to push dangerous drugs into a stable healthy market. Why people would not buy those drugs. People, like businesses always look after their self-interest. If we eliminate the FDA, then there is more tax money to be returned to the PRODUCERS.

If we don't need the FDA, we surely do not need the EPA. Why would businesses pollute the water and air that we all have to breathe? It is counter intuitive to expect the government to be able to look after the environment when big business has a giant interest in the health of our water, air and soil. No smart business man would risk tainting the water of his work force. No smart business man would put toxins into pesticides or herbicides that could weaken a strong and sturdy proletariat. We need those workers to be healthy.

Let's eliminate public education, too! The CEOs don't really need an educated worker base. As long as they can take orders and follow directions we should be able to have a bristling economy. Education should be reserved for the ruling class; the elites. Workers can sign for their checks with iris scans or something that we can count on business to develop.

Child Labor laws are superfluous, too! We can achieve full employment when the restrictions on business is eliminated. Since we will not have even slightly higher education for the masses, we might as well put those children to work for the good of all. Safer streets and playgrounds are the immediate results. Curfews and not more than 10 hours a day.

Global Warming of course is another drag on an otherwise healthy economy. Can't believe those educated and biased scientists. The real science is coming from the labs and studies of corporate scientists on the payrolls of America's greatest producers. And the USA certainly need not heed the warnings of 3rd World hacks who simply want to undermine the productivity of our emerging global dominance. Why the US is only a small part of the world population. Why should we assume responsibility for the alleged warming problems. What about China and India?

Services to the underprivileged, developmentally delayed and vulnerable populations are best handled within the confines of family. We did not contribute to the problems those families have and we should not have to assume compassionate care for them. Each home is its own private castle with one KING.

Domestic Abuse Laws/Divorce/etc.
We simply do not want to know about those social ills. Again a private matter.

See how much we can save. Those new and pending government agencies are also a waste of taxpayer funds. Bankers and loan officers are best suited for making decisions about who gets what. Usury is an old idea that has no merit in our present society. Money costs and those darn regulations drive up the costs of making money.

Cowgirl

Cowgirl, originally uploaded by lucienphoto.

Cowboy has so many meanings. In this sense it means "highly individualistic" not so willing to trust or count on others.

We do the best that we can as parents. We give as unconditionally as we possibly can. We make sacrifices with the hope and expectation that those sacrifices will bear the likes of Mother Theresa or JFK, a sports or political hero. We hope for the Albert Schweitzers of the world and the kinds of winners that become Poet Laureates, or Nobel Prize Winners.

Life is not so neatly packaged though. Most of us are ordinary people. We go to work day in and day out. We toil at jobs that we sometimes love but may also abhor at times. We have great days and then some not-so-great days.

Wednesday evening was one of those not-so-great days. My daughter took off for school on her bus just as she routinely does. She probably gabbed with her friends. She laughed and she probably worried about her attire. Being a girl is tougher than I could ever begin to imagine. I have told her that I was part of the pocket protector brigade at her age. A bonafide geek. She, on the other hand, is a popular girl. She dates and she goes to dances.

But Wednesday was different. She had been planning something. Something I had no clue about. She was up at 4:30 the day before conspiring with acquaintances and cohorts to do what I can only think of as unimaginable. She did not actually go to school on Wednesday. This we found out much later. She probably continued to conspire with the people she had been busy and meticulously planning with for some time.

She somehow found herself back at home. She walked in the front door, up to her bedroom and gathered some items (she had probably pre-selected these) and stomped back downstairs. Uncharacteristically, she gave her brother a hug goodbye, expressed her love for him and walked out the door to a waiting car. That was the last that any family member saw of her.

We have had contact with her since. I hacked her cell phone (she left it if you can imagine) and texted her to the person that we suspect is her accomplice in this heartbreaking story. She did not want the cell because she knows that it has GPS tracking "capability". Smart enough to know that.

We did not have a clue that she could be so very miserable. We did not have a clue that she was contemplating her grand escape from the mundane and boring world of the day-to-day drones that we so easily and quickly become.

She has made it clear that she 1) WILL not tell us where she is; and 2) has no intention of coming home.

Chew on that!

Pantages

From the Barfly, originally uploaded by lucienphoto.

I have listened politely to the detractors of Health Care Reform. I have heard the arguments that it will bankrupt this country; that it will mean that illegal aliens get free health care; it will mean that the quality of care that we have come to know will diminish. I am tired of the government bashing; the lack of respect for civil servants and the slavish devotion to a market economy gone beserk.

Here is my take on what has happened in the grande ol' USA. We let the pundits and financial wizards convince us that they could spin gold from straw. We bought it all. Profits beyond your imagination. Those profits came at the expense of the working people, the safety of our economy, and very physical environment in which we live. Easier to make huge profits and pay pennance to a government agency for fines than to take a look at the big picture.

We all allowed our greed to blur our vision. We eagerly trod upon those lower than us on so many scales - education, SES, racial, gender, work hierarchy. We were thoughtless and callous because the never-going-to-end profit orgy was too good to pass up.

While we were gluttonously stuffing our bank accounts and putting profit before service or profit before resources we forgot that you can't fool nature. Like us she is bound by the laws - physics, gravity, economics. We manipulated those laws but that was only a small detour on the road back to reality. You can't devour your capital and still hope to profit.

Human capital. Human resources. Human productivity. We keep wanting to take the humanity out of our reality. Examples abound in the real world. My wife works for a Big Ten university whose president is determined to make it a world class institution. The football coach makes $3,000,000 a year. She is in HR and specializes in compensation. Many of the employees are now looking at furloughs. Days without pay. Days when they will not work but will still be responsible for the end product. Has anyone asked that coach to give back anything? No, she said.

Corporations invest in art so that they have an air of prestige while denying health care for children, the elderly and the disadvantaged. This is the face of someone who might be denied health care because she can't afford it



The corporations and the Christian Right (what does that really mean anyway?) are stuffing their pockets with your dollars and building temples. What is in those temples? The riches of our labor. Will that protect them from aging? - No!

Walmart keeps lowering prices. Ironically, even the Walmart employees don't really make enough to shop there, but where do you go if Walmart is too expensive. At what price have we saved a penny? My money is going to the local seller, if I am able to do so. That local seller may have a relationship with a supplier who has a family to feed. What happens when all the manufacturers in the USA have been put out of business by cheaper (both definitions) suppliers in other places? What happens when there are no jobs here at all that pay a living wage because the corporations have uprooted themselves and moved on to cheaper labor somewhere else? Think it could not happen?

Ask yourself how the USA has changed since this



Is it better? Do immigrants (all of us nearly) make this a better place? Did your family have opportunity? What kind of social programs really exist here? Does education count? Maybe we should all just pay for the services we get benefit from! Or better still, just the services we approve of and really need.

Children do not need music in their lives.



We can eliminate art, too, because it is a frivolous endeavor. No life was ever enriched by art education.

Education should serve a purpose. That purpose should be determined by the market. Market needs slave labor. No need for education. There are enough managers for now and they can tell us when we need more bodies, more middle management, engineers, and...

See what I mean.