Wednesday, April 9, 2014

Like That


That's how it feels some days. Not lonely, not depressed, just sort of locked-up mentally, thinking,"So, this is where we're at as a country, as a society. This is where we've evolved. This is the state of Man." 

And thank God, I've got someone in my life to pull me back from the abyss; someone with whom I can share my joys and sorrows. It's good to not be alone. It's comforting to have a partner and a few friends who are a source of truth, who confirm that I'm not crazy, and that being a dreamer is a positive quality.

It's rewarding to have my music; to have the ability to create pleasurable sounds, to be able to express myself in just one more way. Sometimes music can express emotions as strongly as words, and sometimes music itself is a special language. And it's cathartic, too.

You know, Man is a complex creature, but his motives - the concepts that drive his thoughts and actions - are fairly basic. There is a little disagreement amongst professionals as to the definition of those motives (category and number), but there is more common ground than division. Maslow's pyramid is a sufficient explanation of our drives/needs.

At the bottom, we have self-preservation - air, water, food, shelter.
Once those needs are met, we can move up to social ones - friendship, love, sex.
Next, come higher-level concepts like self-esteem, confidence, achievement and respect.
At the top are things like self-actualization, morality, creativity.

So, when I look at people who expend energy (much less money), working against things like access to healthcare, equal pay, equal consideration under the law I attempt to reduce it all to it's basic terms. Instead of seeing people agree on basic concepts, basic shared freedoms, and saying,"Let's try to find the best, the most effective way to make this happen," they're fighting against it!

I'm looking at people in the comfortable position of having a certain thing, a comfort, a security, a freedom, and basically saying no, I don't think others should have this.

From what dark, twisted corner of their soul - assuming that they have one - do they come up with such utterly selfish and arrogant thoughts?

Just a little over 300 miles north of Washington, D.C. is the Canadian border, on the other side of which 35 million people enjoy the comfort, the security of a single-payer healthcare system. If you fall off the curb in Montreal and get hit by a bus, they pick you up, take you to the nearest hospital and fix you up, without asking who your provider is. Every. Single. Person. 

According to air-head Terri Land, women aren't that interested in equal pay.  What? 

And it's things like that which totally confound me. I'm like Robbie the Robot in the movie Forbidden Planet, where his electronic brain has a meltdown, because the incoming data just does not compute.  I think to myself,"No one could be that stupid. That clueless. That…evil. That selfish. That arrogant, to speak for an entire gender and say, no, they don't want that.'"

And again, I'm thankful that I have psychological mooring lines that keep me from just flying off into space, into madness, because it's impossible for me to adopt that attitude of,"Oh…doesn't affect me, so I don't care." 

Most of the time, I'm fairly stable. Safe. Secure. But that Dark Side of arrogance and stupidity is always out there, lurking like some unspeakable evil in a story by H.P. Lovecraft.

Anybody else out there who can relate to that feeling?

2 comments:

  1. Only very briefly. Then I remind myself that there's nothing I can do about it, and I'd do far better to concentrate on the positive.

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  2. Well, there are in fact things we "can do" although they may seem only small and insignificant. I will never accept that there's "nothing I can do." And yes, I do focus on the positive things. We live "in" it. We are affected "by" it. Surviving means both focusing on the positive AND making at least a small effort to work against the Darkness, even if it's only writing, such as you did in your piece on education/learning.

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