Month: June 2022

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Solve the Worlds Problems

Once a month or so I reflect on the current state of the world and have some thoughts.

Soon the world will be under the total control of the one percent, unless a miracle happens.

Watching women’s rights being flushed down the toilet on this sad day as the Supreme Court overturned Roe V. Wade. Next plan is ban contraceptives and same sex marriages. Step back into the dark ages. Once again, we must rise up and fight.

If there are no guns, or, as a comedian on Bowling for Columbine suggested, bullets were $5,000 a piece, there would be no more mass shootings.

Health care should be free and available for everyone.

Ditto for bus transportation and education.

Everyone should get basic income, especially senior citizens and the disabled, in addition to their meager pensions. That might bring them to the poverty line. Maybe. Better than always being below it. No one in this world should be impoverished. There is no valid moral reason for it.

Housing for everyone. Everyone. Not tents and cardboard shacks. Brick and mortar. Appliances. Heat. Running water. Bathrooms, kitchens. You know, decent living.

Gone, gone, long gone are the days you could earn enough to buy the things you need and want. Further gone is the notion that if you just work hard and long enough you can better your life. Or that higher education will get you a higher job. Ha! Now the process relies on supreme brown nosing, and even then, no guarantees the boss will like you and promote you. And lord, what you must do to keep what you’ve got! Rewards? How about some pens and lifesavers for 27 years of service?

Education should be about relationships with other people, history, how to handle money, how to care for and treat animals and the environment and not about how to hide under desks when an active shooter arrives at your school.

Education should also be about learning, thinking, solving problems, innovation, and most of all, having fun.

We need to stop worshiping celebrities and billionaires, and get them to pay taxes. We don’t need more electric cars, telephones and space junk.

And last of all, enough with the lame ‘thoughts and prayers’ from our leaders. DO SOMETHING.

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Vehicles

Motorcycles, hotrods and trucks.

Instead of tanks and armies, these are the weapons of takeover in our society.

They are especially prevalent in the summer and impossible to police.

The strip of highway near my apartment is a perfect unpatrolled ribbon of straight road that motorcyclists and hotrods take full advantage of. It crosses a canal and a river and cuts through a park and is therefore just one big long bridge. A drag strip.

But many places in our city have become lawless avenues for vehicles. Witness the infamous trucker takeover in our downtown. Eighteen wheelers are massive and incredibly hard to move, noisy and smelly, and also pretty terrifying to encounter.

There seems to be a growing aggression in our world and the everyday man is resorting to vehicles to express their hostility. I think it is the only way to be powerful in a world bent on making us slaves and voiceless.

I have always maintained that the world is swinging to the right and violence because of the huge gap between the haves and the have nots. There is no middle class, no stepping stone from poverty to wealth. It is impossible to go from being poor to being rich. Hard work does not do it anymore. Luck and brown nosing works, but one is extremely rare, and the other, extremely costly.

There is nothing worse than not being recognized or compensated for your hard work, and to find yourself slipping farther into poverty the harder you try to get out of it. The system is rigged. Combined with our poor educational system, people cling to self serving leaders to fix things for them. Which, they won’t. The people who rage and hold others hostage with machines are undoing the good for all in the hope of bettering themselves. This will be the end of all freedoms and hope and secure the rich as rulers of our world. A global dictatorship. 1984.

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Schooling

I wish that all the formal education I endured through my life had been about learning.

Instead, school was about judgement. You were either an A student or a failure, or worse, mediocre. It was never about learning and growing. The focus was on passing exams, and acing reports.

No one seemed to care if you understood the material presented. No one cared if you could use your brain to solve problems, to discover things yourself.

No one cared what your interests were. You just needed to conform. You were an outcast if you didn’t do things the way they wanted you to. You were a failure.

Students were never developed, they were beaten into submission so they could become adults working as slaves in corporations.

I don’t think much has changed in my life.

Any learning I did was through my own efforts and plenty of hard knocks. A lot of pain could have been avoided if I had of been educated properly.

Schools need to guide minds to think for themselves, to develop their interests and talents and to, get this, have fun doing so. They need to inspire you. To encourage curiosity and develop a life long habit of learning.

My memory of school, including University, is endless, meaningless homework. Assignments on mundane topics. Terrifying three to four hour exams. Continual judgement. Not much, if any, fun. And not much valuable learning. That I got on my own.

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Newspaper Route

As a youngster I had a series of crappy jobs that prepared me to be a wonderful adult!

One such disappointing job was a short lived stint delivering newspapers when I was about 12. Getting up early was hard enough, I was a night owl, dawn and I were strangers. But there was something more sinister, that in my opinion was too much for a kid to bear. And that was collecting fees.

Yep. I had to get people to pay for their newspaper subscriptions. I had a little notebook that kept tabs and I had to confront some very disagreeable persons to pay up. Some were chronic offenders and wouldn’t answer the door. When they stopped getting a newspaper because of that, they’d be openly hostile towards me (it was a small, tight knit neighbourhood. Everyone knew me). To compound the affair, the newspaper itself would withhold paying me until I collected these debts. I hated this. Feared it. Truthfully, that was too great of a burden to put on a twelve year old.

The breaking point came one day, but not due to delinquent accounts.

One of the homes I delivered to was none other than one of the newspaper’s editors. He was a surly, royal sourpuss and fortunately, never awake when I delivered his paper. Except this one particular morning I was late, things happened to delay me and I was upset about it and freaking out. I hated being late for any thing and I knew people were counting on me to get their morning paper to them! Anyhow, I was late and he was awake and mad as wasps in smashed wasp nest! When I got to his door, he threw a tantrum and yelled and berated me for a good ten minutes.

I quit right on the spot.

But I shook for days.

That newspaper is now defunct.