Ruthless people

 

Wednesday, July 01, 2009

 

Perhaps I always understood just how cruel this world is and how fully stocked this pond we call life is with assholes.

Perhaps I have finally come to appreciate the views of Jonathon Swift on human folly.

With a little more than 30,000 years under its belt, civilization really hasn’t yet worked out the kinks, even though as a child I thought we had come along way.

Being born a baby-boomer, I assumed too much about human nature – that the advent of the civil rights movement and other noble efforts generated by our generation meant that we had some how evolved beyond the typical selfishness of previous generations.

But as physics tells us, for every reaction there is an opposite and equal reaction. As a result we saw jerks like Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush emerge.

Yet in truth, we have ourselves to blame.

The good intentions of the 1960s revolutionary movement dissipated the moment these were tested against reality.

People jumped back a large step during the 1970s shortages, and many people jumped the political ship once they actually had to live up to the promise of giving blacks equal opportunities in the work force.

Guilt over not celebrating the return of soldiers from Vietnam drove many of the same people who spit on soldiers to grab up flags.

I won’t even go into the concept of missing in action.

All this, of course, came back to me yesterday when I heard the reports on a ruling by the US. Supreme Court on dumping fire fighter tests because whites scored too well.

This came at a time when I happened to be walking around Hoboken and being run down by privileged whites on the sidewalks, who not only thought I was invisible, but tried to prove it by trying to walk through me.

We have hot-rod ghetto imitating whites who get their kicks by acting as black as possible.

We have the next generation whites, who now that the junkies have been thrown into jail and the homeless swept off the streets, flock back to the city, making it impossible for the poor to live here any more.

We have superior whites with their suits, ties and cell phones parading up and down the main drags of these cities acting as if their contribution to the economy is the reason why life has improved for their kind.

The utter selfishness of individuals, white or black, appalls me.

Yet I understand the need.

In the 1960s, many of us grew our hair or put on clothing so we could stand out from the crowd. We started a mass movement centered on the concept of individualism, so as a group we all pretended like we actually were individuals, when we really acted like a mob.

When this act became too inconvenient, for whatever reason, we reverted to the more traditional mob mentality, returning to churches we thought we would never pray in again, took up jobs we thought we would never need, turned into living clones of parents we thought we would never imitate, raising children who are even closer clones of the elder generations than even we became.

In this I’m showing my age, maintaining that our generation has more heart than the current generation, when each generation says that about the one which comes into the world to replace it.

But we have seen a shift back from the hopeful belief we could make for a better society. People in general seem more ruthless than before, a cocaine attitude of personal superiority over other people that I haven’t experienced before – or seemed to ignore if I have.

Perhaps people have always been as selfish and ruthless, but I never saw the extent of it before.

Perhaps I should have paid much closer attention to Swift than I did and might have been forewarned.