The Spirit of “Anything Can Happen”

Zeitgeist.  It’s a simple word, even it it is German.  Roughly translated it means “spirit of the world” and it’s a pretty decent means of conveying the idea that there are times when ideas overtake the world and seem to form society after their image. It’s obviously visible in music.  You have the Bubble Gum music of my teens.  Of course there’s slightly older 50’s Rock and Roll. Both of these and more have epitomized an attitude about life that permeated society in general.

Lately I have been thinking about how TV, too, exerts a consistent image to watchers. And it worries me a little about what folks are watching.  If you look back a while, the programs for formative minds were the sort of thing that gave you wild dreams of possibility.  I’m not sure the world of cartoons is anywhere near as optimistic today.

Dexter’s Laboratory

When you thought you could create your own secret lab where you could do your thing and not have your annoying sibling ruin everything. Or maybe you associated yourself with DeeDee and just pressed every button you saw. And who doesn’t remember that “omelet du fromage” episode?

The Jetsons

This one made you believe that by the time you were a grown up, you’d be zooming through the sky in your sky car and then just have it become your briefcase. Oh and that you’d just jet off to Jupiter when you needed to dance your weekend away.

Captain Planet

You believed that if you reduced, reused & recycled, Captain Planet would recruit you to be a Planeteer and together you could save the world. (And your parents took unfair advantage of this.)

Scooby Do

You couldn’t wait to be a teenager because you thought it meant you could go on adventures in the Mystery Machine with your “gang” and catch colorful criminals in strange and exciting places. You also WISHED you could get a taste of Scooby Snax.

The Flintstones

The Stone Age seemed so freakin’ awesome and simple that you daydreamed about living in those simpler times when all animals were friends and also household appliances. Ah! The dream.

I think part of the current social malaise is that we seem to be afraid to laugh anymore.  I happen to be Polish and I suspect I’ve told as many Polish jokes as anyone.  I happen to believe that it’s good to be both proud of who you are, and to be able to laugh at who you are. Just because someone tells you something that causes you to laugh does not mean that you aren’t proud of who you are.  It doesn’t necessarily demean you, or your heritage, or your habits, or your … well, you can insert any of the things people get riled up about.  Humor isn’t 100% insulting, demeaning, or offensive.  A great deal of impact depends on the state of mind of the listener.

And that’s really the point behind this afternoon’s post.  Our state of mind means everything.  Our state of mind controls who we become.  In the case of TV shows, or music, or movies, or our personal conversation for that matter — where our head is at determines where we are going with our life.  The optimistic cartoonist will draw optimistic cartoons; the optimistic songwriter will write optimistic songs, the screen writer too will write about the places their mind has been: good, bad, or indifferent. These people are both the product and the producers of society’s state of mind.

I, for one, am usually a pretty optimistic person.  I’ll admit that the past couple years have made it harder to maintain that optimism, but then pointing out specifics that concern me does not mean I’ve stopped being optimistic, it just means that I see curves along the highway of life and I’ve put the brakes on so as not to have an intellectual crash.  It’s important to me to know where I’m going — even when I’m not the one driving the metaphorical societal bus.

I don’t now how, or whether, we would be better off if folks were watching more TV like we had back then.  The world then wasn’t all that great — after all, we had hatred and racism and an invisible gender glass ceiling that kept women even more downtrodden than they are to this day.  But we were at least optimistic about the future.  The world wasn’t all, “the sky is falling, the sky is falling” and instead of doom-saying Greta Thunberg, we had an optimistic young Steve jobs.

The world around us produces the heroes and villains we deserve based on what we “feed” their minds.  There’s a reason that society in the U.S. has produced a lot of gun toting school shooters.  While access to guns may be part of the problem and we haven’t addressed that, the greater concern is why society has produced people who accept the concept that doing great violence to others is the solution to their own problems.  Now THAT is a question that we do well to consider alongside what to do about weapons.

For complex problems there are rarely simple solutions.

But our ability to solve a problem first depends on whether we are willing to see the problem, and secondly on whether we can see possible solutions, or whether all we see are complications and more problems.

I vote for solutions.  They may not be simple, and one solution may not solve all problems, but I still vote for solutions.

Dare to do but making money

There was a time when men and women had time and the inclination to think about more than just making money, surviving, and personal hurts.  I know, because I was there and I remember it.

That sounds like such an old geezer statement, but the fact of the matter is that I have realized lately that I am mourning the absence of high thinking.  I haven’t heard of any politician in a couple decades actually being referred to as a statesman — a term that once indicated a point of view loftier than pragmatic and willing to take into consideration the requirements of all for the strengthening of all, because only in a healthy organism can it function efficiently — and a world beset by strife, war, pestilence and hunger is good for no one — other than Capitalists who prey on the weaknesses of anyone they can find.

Where are the great speeches?  Seems to me that at the moment they are coming out of the mouths of youth.  Not just Greta Thunberg either.  In the aftermath of several of the school shootings we have heard youth fired up and eloquent in their ideals.  And after every one of those there have been politicians and public figures who have pooh-poohed their words, made fun of their ideals, and generally ignored all the ideas.

We have no Henry David Thoreau’s who wander around Walden Pond and think.  Or at least that is how it seems — because they get zero attention.  If I walk into a bookstore in search of the latest and greatest publications on ideas, my visits are sadly disappointing.  I can find a lot of tell-alls, that don’t tell much of anything.  I can find a lot of prognostications designed to liberate some of your money from your pocket with schemes, investments, and plans for how you may be made rich.  I can find a lot of fiction — and I read a lot of fiction in with all the other good stuff — but it’s increasingly filled with sex and violence because that seems to be the only topics that U.S. readers care an awful lot about.  Which echoes the movies and television programs where sex is currently disapproved so that leaves us with a great deal of violence on the tube and screen.

I have no doubt — at least in my own little mind — that the decline in thought followed upon the popular rejection of religion. Religion has a way of holding ideals out in front of your eyes and forcing you to look at them.  Right.  Wrong.  While no one today seems to want to confront absolute truths — and there certainly isn’t any agreement on just what an “absolute truth” might look like — when we had the illusion of absolutes there was more incentive to think about ideas.  If for no better reason than to disprove them.  That seems to be the one thing modern society delights in doing: proving that the old farts who went before them were out of touch with our reality.

The summer I started in 7th grade I had been boning up on my Plato,  albeit in English.  I never was a linguist or a linguistic scholar.  As I went through the next 4 years of schooling I delved into a lot of the great philosophers of the past.  (I graduated at the end of 11th grade having all the requisite credits needed and being in a hurry to get on with my life.) They all had good ideas; many of which seem to come to mind in the last few years as we have seen the quality of government sink deeper and deeper into the abyss of ignorance and greed.

The thing is, fighting with ideas makes you realize that there are more than one way of reaching your destination.  I am not the only human ever to have a great idea.  And furthermore, some (many even) of the ideas accepted as great today will be pounced upon as totally inadequate in a few years as science and world knowledge catches up to those who spout words of “wisdom” without due consideration to their impact.  Politicians are great ones for this and many a pol has been caught by the memory of their previous declarations!  Too bad that politicians aren’t sanctioned as harshly as we sanction other professionals for misconduct.  Sigh.

It’s hard work finding ideas worth fighting for.  Our society loves it’s leisure.  And, our society loves it’s escapes from reality whether that escape is found in alcohol, or drugs, or … well, I’m sure there are many of you out there who are far more conversational with the ways you can escape reality than I am.  I’ve never been one to want to escape.

There are a lot of things about Teddy Roosevelt that I don’t much care about, but he did care about the natural world, he was important in setting aside national parks and wild zones.  And there was a certain something about him that I liked.  For one thing, he seemed willing to talk straight to the heart of a topic and we need more people doing that today, and fewer ones talking around a subject and trying to make something not true that is true, and something true that is not.  The backpedaling in government, and popular evangelical religion are excellent examples.

I can’t do anything about anyone other than myself.  But for myself, I find it essential to keep challenging my brain with ideas.  Some I like, many I hate, still others offer room for compromise and improvement.  I may just be a small cog in a big machine, but somebody’s got to do it.

If you notice, I said nothing about courage.  I don’t think courage is very highly valued in this society.  And I’m not talking about the courage that throws your body into battle.  There are other forms of courage than that, something I think we have collectively forgotten.

Save Nothing

Ok, Ok…. You can’t blame me. I see a picture of a VW camper and I get all squishy inside.  I’m a product of my times and I make no apologies for that! This stock photo showed up on my desk and it reminded me of all the goofy things we did in our VW’s.  But more than that, it reminded me of a time when we were young but we weren’t afraid to take a chance and try things.  When others were buying bigger houses and fancier cars we were going places and doing things they were not.  What a treasure trove of memories we have now. And what we retired we didn’t have to set off on a mad dash to go all the places we never went before or do all the things we never did before because we had done them as they came up and when we were strong enough and energetic enough to enjoy them.

BEING ALIVE is the occasion. I don’t say that just because I’m getting older; I think people who know me would say that I’ve pretty much always been who I am right now and we continue to look for new adventures.  Our problem now is that we aren’t as able to do them as once we were;  or, and in some cases this is just as large a deterrent — there are just too many people wanting to do them that the reason for doing it is gone.  Somethings you simply want to enjoy alone.  Or with a loved one.  But not with a bus full of tourists, or 50 buses full of tourists.

Whatever it is that you want to do, find a way to do it.  Don’t wait for that special occasion.  I think I’ve told you the story before but I worked for a company in the Western suburbs of Chicago for a few years.  I had periodic contact with the man who maintained the blueprint department — back in the days when real blueprints were still filed in real filing cabinets lined up in rows upon rows.  This guy had been with the company 45 years.  This was the only company he had worked for after high school.  Because he had a leg deformity and trouble getting around he started out in the blueprint department and he stayed there for 45 years.  The time came when the company told him he HAD to retire.  He fought it and refused to leave.  For a week after his “retirement” he came to the factory every day and spent 8 hours there trying to “do his job” but that was just causing problems.  At the end of that first week he was told he could not return the next week.  And… one week later he was dead.

I don’t understand putting that kind of priority on a job you have for someone else.  But it happens.  And the reasons not to put things off are myriad.  Health, family, finances, you name them.  But the bottom line is this:  it’s your life.  Live it.

A Book a Day

Oh, for the days when I could read a book a day! There were many of them, and Peggy often has to tolerate a husband who always has something in front of him to read, even when the TV is blaring or other things are going on.  Even I wonder how she puts up with me — at least in that regard! 

The thing is, reading makes anything possible. Reading makes every thing possible.  If you can read you can do anything.  Perhaps not eloquently, or artistically, or proficiently — at first — that’s what practice is for.  But reading opens the door to new possibilities and it reveals the fallacies and fiction of the past.

We’ve always had a lot of books in our married home.  And at one time I had well over 4,000 volumes (a good number of them were part of a business research library, but they were there and I used them — a lot) I started out buying books when I was in Jr. High school and I never kicked my acquired habit.  In college my parents watched me carrying 19 credits with an English Literature major and the paid for one of those Evelyn Woods Reading Dynamics courses which made literature all the easier, but reading dynamics could do nothing about the pondering that I so often find essential to true understanding.  It sometimes takes time for the reading matter to assimilate into my foggy brain.  Still, it did make a lot of reading easier.

I’m aghast as the literary ignorance of people in power and in government.  Many of them may have made a lot of money, and many of them may have their degrees but too often they sound nearly illiterate. ‘Tis a shame.  To have so much and still be undereducated.

Reading is what convinced me I could go, not only from job to job successfully, but also from industry to industry; there wasn’t anything I couldn’t do if I was willing to put in the man-hours to learn.  I don’t know what it’s like for young folk nowadays.  I’m not sure I choose to know; I’d probably be disheartened.  The “show” is more important today than the reality.  When I was getting started what mattered was results.  A piece of paper wasn’t nearly as important.

I don’t think Kindle or Nook have done readers any favors.  In fact, after the initial flood of reading devices I see very few of them today.  And our local library isn’t in fear of shutting down.  It still gets plenty of users.  Sometimes you just can’t beat a good book.  Why you can smash flies with one, you can use it to prop open a door, you can even use a book to hold the pages open on another book!

But the best thing about books, is it keeps the stupidity away.  🙂

The power of healthcare

I doubt there is a worker in the United States who has not made a decision about which company to accept a job with who did not heavily factor the company healthcare package in their decision. I know I did several times, and Peggy and I talked about healthcare a lot when she was looking for a job in the 1960’s and I was a independent trucker — paying for the full cost of healthcare myself. 

One of the realities of retirement is that you easily forget what things were like when you were working. I know I have been out of touch with the insurance market since turning old enough for Medicare.  And the two years before that I had to buy coverage for myself (Peggy being eligible for Medicare when she retired, but not myself).  I was eligible for COBRA because of her, but when that expired I had to find a high risk plan with the State of Wisconsin and I sweated bullets when I learned, just before becoming Medicare eligible that the state plan was being phased out and I’d have to find alternative coverage.  Yikes, there were a good number of sleepless nights back then.

But just like the writer of this little meme — I never thought about the way business can, and does, use healthcare to their advantage and as a tool against their workers.  It’s a point of attraction for new workers, but up till now no one really thought much about what would happen if they engaged in a job action — as we used to call labor union strikes back in the day.  There haven’t been many “job actions” in recent years.  In fact labor unions have fallen on hard times because workers thought that they were being taken better care of by business than by the union.  And now the ugly side of that “bargain” shows it’s face.

Given the escalating costs of medical coverage — and the number of “pre-existing conditions” now recognized by the industry — risking your healthcare coverage over a job action becomes a serious consideration.  But, that’s the thing about Capitalism run rampant:  we are finally seeing what end stage Capitalism can do to the workforce when there is nothing to hold it back.

September rushes on

We continue our regular visits to the Milwaukee lakefront. This time of year it’s fun watching the attrition of boats from the marina as we approach the marina end of season.

Today we got a closeup view of the MV Dennis Sullivan, a real old fashioned sailing vessel that was built right here on the shores of Lake Michigan. The construction project was done by students, took several years to complete, including the good old fashioned part of boat building which includes waiting for things to weather.

Nowadays it’s still a school for mariners, as well as a “portable” classroom that visits ports around the Great Lakes some years, and does tourist cruises when it’s here at it’s home port.

Hidden Monsters

It has always been that the old despise the young.  I have no doubt about that.  Those with age and maturity seem to think, sometimes seem to demand, that those who lack age and maturity owe it to them to listen and obey the ways of the aged and more experienced.

What has not always been is a culture in which the young not only have access to all the information the aged think is their exclusive domain, but their experiences are completely different than the experiences of those who have gone before because the generation now reaching maturity has:

1. Never had the experience of being a prosperous American (they are saddled with education debt and too many of them cannot find jobs commensurate with their education)
2. At the same time they live in a society where our definition of poverty is 31X (yes, I did actually mean to write “31 times”) above the global definition of poverty.
3. Never lived without computers, never had to survive with out gadgets, have no idea the challenges endured by those who lived before the computer age.

A lot of comments have been made about the mean age of Congress, and it’s not just Congress that tends to be populated by old white men.  Our national government continues to be disproportionately representative of that population.  Laws have been made over the life of this country making it harder for women, majorities and the young to effectively make their voices heard but that is gradually changing.

All of which is why I love this graphic.

The world will change. Old white men will not hold the majority of power forever.  By ignoring the rise of a new electorate, the political powers that be are sealing their own fate.  And those who can see the hidden monster (just perhaps) can’t wait until it does.

The rich, the really, really rich, may think that they are insulated from the demands of the poor and the so-called powerless, but French aristocracy  thought the same before the French Revolution, Albanians and Poles and Czechs and Kashmiri’s thought the same before the Soviet Union collapsed.  Before the Arab Spring people in the Middle East refused to believe that the world was changing too.

The thing is, you cannot stop knowledge.  And when people realize how downtrodden they have been and get to that ignition point all the armored vehicles and all the tear gas or water cannons won’t keep them in the pre-defined boxes that society has kept them in.

The best hope for the world is not that governments wake up to the challenges of climate change.  The best hope for the world is that the generation facing climate change will  prevail over the old ways — however unruly that might be for corporate goals , or how violent it may be to those in seats of power and authority.

Just when that little girl will release the monster isn’t up to those who think they are strong. But they have a rude awakening awaiting them.

Books not bombs