Being stupid

 

Tuesday, August 25, 2009

 

Spent the weekend doing chores – the usual routines after several weeks of upset.

I want to forget politics for a while, but this is a bad time of year for it with everything brewing. So I’ve been studying the film “Harvey” and realize that down deep I want to be just like him and know it isn’t possible.

I’m too angry inside, and think I have the obligation to tell off assholes.

I keep thinking about the street gangs I taunted when I was ten years old and my mother dragged me to live with her in the housing projects in Paterson or the football jerk in high school I told off so much he hunted me through the  halls.

I am in perpetual road rage about how unfair society is, and the jerks I see around me, and I have to stop. The rage will kill me and do nothing to make the world a better place to live in.

Dowd in Harvey has the right idea – his mother telling him he could be smart or pleasant. He tried smart, but recommends pleasant.

I just can’t resist telling assholes off. It’s become a habit more addictive than heroin, and potentially more deadly, since the biggest assholes are often the people most prone to violence.

The level of human stupidity appalls me.

I keep hearing people screaming against health reform at public meetings, getting hot over what they’ve been told by some health company official is wrong with the plan, but doing damage to all of us in the end but not knowing any of the facts.

Perhaps there was never a time when people discussed things reasonably, and disposed of a matter through discourse not rhetoric. But I like to think at some point people didn’t cheat or lie to win an argument, the way people do today.

Modern society now mirrors the social patterns I used to see in bars where half drunk people fight to be right even when they are wrong, lying about anything just as long as they end up on top at the end. They make up facts when actual facts do not suit their purposes.

We get people like Sarah Palin telling us that the Obama plan has “death panels” she calls evil, while her friends in the health and pharmaceutical companies keep making money off the constant injection of drugs into patients long beyond needing them.

In the end, everything comes down to money – those who have it, those who don’t, and those who are constantly trying to figure out how to get it out of your pocket and into theirs.

The government used to protect us from such scoundrels, until people like Reagan and both Bushes turned the government into a tool for those scoundrels, and the money flows even faster out of our pockets.

The minute someone wants to turn the government back to becoming the watch dog it once was, the scoundrels howl about how unfair it is, how we’re trying to kill off our senior citizens by asking why they are taking medicines and getting procedures they don’t need.

We have a CIA filled with sadists, hiring sadistic private contractors to help them torture people. We have utility companies, telephone companies, credit card companies and banks engaging in practices characters in The Godfather would be ashamed to admit.

There was a time when these companies could be shamed into behaving better, but now we get screaming people at meetings who insist on keeping those scoundrels in place and accuse those of us who want to make things better of being criminals or worse.

A pack of contractors in South Jersey recently yelled at regulators for fighting to provide affordable housing, calling them “Socialists” because the regulators wanted to set aside a number of houses ordinary people could afford to live in. But the contractors didn’t want affordable housing, didn’t care whether ordinary people could have  roof over their heads, as long as the projects kept generating money and the more money the better. Oddly enough, the same people calling regulators socialists are the very people the affordable housing was intended to house, but the contractors were too stupid to notice or care.
A few years ago, the Bush administration put a gun up to the heads of senior citizens telling them they had take up a prescription and medical plan that made drug companies and insurance carriers rich. We heard only a few whispers of protest. But when Obama decides to remove the gun from their heads and provide a plan that would help all people, those same seniors attack Obama – allowing themselves to be taken in by the same people who held the gun to their heads years ago.

Perhaps I get angry at their stupidity uselessly. Perhaps these stupid and arrogant contractors and senior citizens ought to get what they ask for – having no affordable housing or health care in the end. Maybe they deserve what they get – only, they take other people down with them. They deny other people these benefits, too.

Jefferson and Franklin once presumed that if each person in the country had their own small plot of land they would be happy and free, when in truth, most Americans don’t want equality, they want superiority, even when someone else is superior to them. The contractors, the seniors, the poor whites, all looking down their noses at someone they all need to keep in place, so that they never have to confront the fact that the system has gotten over on them, too.

We don’t want affordable housing because we hope someday to be so well-off we won’t need such housing. We don’t want to give public health care because we don’t want to have to help pay for other poor people’s care. We only care about ourselves, and oppose anything that remotely smacks of human decency, even when in opposing it, we hurt ourselves.

And people wonder why I’m angry?