The car is a curse
Thursday, Nov. 19, 2009
The rain started just after I had finished the two mile walk to the auto repair place, just a drizzle at first, and now, after finally retrieving my car, a heavier mist, moistening every surface with its paint brush.
This car has been something of a curse to me, purchased in desperation a few weeks prior to 9/11, one piece of a long history of personal disasters that has tested my patience and my endurance. Now, we come to the end of the car’s life, and it dies without dignity, and I am learning how to walk long distances and to take public transportation.
Meanwhile the world progressively stumbles towards it own doom. Perhaps this has been the case for all of humanity’s short history, a need to self destruct that we some how manage to avert at the last minute like a drunk who stumbles this way and that way along an elevated construction girder, coming close to falling off the edge but stumbling the other way just in the nick of time – not out of any plan for salvation, but out of pure luck.
You have to wonder when luck might run out and humanity finally gets its death wish fulfilled.
Politics preys on me like a disease.
Perhaps people have always been as mean as they are today and I was too naïve to notice, selfish brutes who use their votes like a whip to keep the unprivileged down.
Someone once told me that nothing about humanity has fundamentally changed since we lived in caves, except that we raise our kids a little better now than we did. When younger, I refused to believe it. But after living through several cycles, I begin to accept the truth – there are good people, and there are greedy people, and the greedy people tend to rule the world.
Even people I would accept as good people seemed compelled by some inner need to become greedy, and so during a conversation with someone I like and respect yesterday, I had to listen to his spiel on not trusting any of politician to run healthcare. He seemed to think that greedy corporations would have the public’s welfare in mind. He is a good plan so why change? It is hard to paint the pain other people feel or how businesses tend to drop any plan that doesn’t make a profit, even if it means men, women and children might die as a result.
The brotherhood we all imagined would be part of our future has crash landed, and the civilization we thought so enlightened crawls through the mud of the crash site, dragging other people out of their way so that each victim can survive at the expense of all the other victims. As long as I have mine, why should I care about anybody else?
This was running through my mind when I got to work finally and found a man waiting for me, someone who tells me that he has the real truth behind the Watergate Conspiracy, and it has nothing to do with what most people believe.
I don’t know if I believe that there is a great conspiracy a foot, or more likely a series of petty conspiracies by a group of petty people seeking to preserve some advantage over the rest of humanity in much the same way a crash victim might horde a piece of fruit when everyone else at the site has none.
I remember people telling me in the 1970s that there was a group of powerbrokers who wanted to rid New York City of all its poor and make Manhattan a playground for the rich, one of the many plots that seemed to be unwinding during that period. Years later, Manhattan has become exactly what these people said it would be and I wonder, were they right or was this inevitable?
The election of Obama last November seems to have made the situation worse, not better, helping to galvanize the bases and most prevalent instincts of average Americans: racism. Defenders of Republican values try to hide this behind other issues, but in truth, America was founded upon one group hating another, and by one group of people becoming masters at the expense of a large majority of the population. Franklin and Jefferson once believed that if they gave every American a plot of land, we could find equality. Americans don’t want equality, they want superiority. They want to be the head of the household that tells other people what to do. This is true of some of the poorest people here, and why social revolution doesn’t work.