Wandering Toward My Shifting Self

Breaking News

 “City council banns fast food drive thrus! Townspeople protest.”

I listened with wonder at this snippet from the daily news. Finally government is doing something concrete to restore the Constitutional vision of the Founding Fathers.

Three hundred years before Jesus was born, Epicurus, a Greek philosopher, discovered the secret of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

“Be self-sufficient, honestly face up to danger and delight and never ever eat alone.” No ivory tower pundit, Epicurus sold his town house and moved to a small plot of ground outside the city.

There he and his friends tended a garden with a few domestic animals, spent afternoons quietly contemplating their pains and pleasures and then celebrated happy communal suppers.

Thomas Jefferson was a fan of Epicurean communes. He made sure the right to ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ was the first goal of the Declaration of Independence.

As president, he worked hard to implement his vision for the USA. He saw a nation populated by clusters of Yeomen farmers. Providing for themselves on small farms, they joined neighbors to celebrate happy independence with holiday feasts on the village green.

Two hundred years of history since Jefferson’s death have highlighted two blind spots in his Grand Vision of our Republic.

If he knew about Jamie Watts’ steam engine, he didn’t look closely at the Industrial Revolution already underway.

Recent historical research at Monticello reveals Jefferson himself preferred a more modern distortion of Epicurean. His extensive tobacco plantations worked by slaves allowed him to dine on fine French wines and exotic imported foods. During the War for Independence, he entertained British Commanders who occupied Virginia. Over luxurious dinners, he persuaded his guests to exempt his plantations from confiscation.

Ah Welladay! The black and white picture media presents to us, when closely examined has always been shades of grey.

I do wish that town council success eliminating solitary hamburgers in isolated vehicles. It’s a baby step toward Jefferson’s Constitutional Vision of ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.’

Big bad Numbers

Breaking News: Taxpayers cough up one billion seven hundred million dollars for every 9/11 Terrorist killed in Afghanistan.

$1,700,000,000.00 is a big, bad number.

Green Commercial: ‘If you use our water faucet filter, you can save three hundred plastic water bottles from a landfill.’ The USA dumps enough each year to circle the globe sixteen times!

16 x 131,479,713.54 ft is a big, bad number.

Personal Milestone: I recently reached two billion four hundred fifty nine million five hundred ninety two thousand seconds of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

2,459,592,000 is a big number. Is it also bad?

A storm of big number metrics swirl around us. All the big, bad numbers suggest our society is battered and broken. The times they are a changing! An accelerating Digital Revolution demands alterations in daily life.

In 18^th Century England, the Industrial Revolution shattered centuries old patterns of life. Citizens were confused. As their communities broke apart, all the bad ‘what ifs’ frightened them.

They found a way to face their future.

Jack be nimble,

Jack be quick,

Jack jump over

The candlestick

If you jumped over a lighted candle without snuffing out the flame, they believed good fortune would be yours.

It’s a big, wide, quicker new world that we live in!

I jumped over my 78^th birthday candle. It may flicker a bit, but the flame still burns. That makes 2,459,592,000 ticks on the clock a good big number.

Waste, Fraud & Abuse

Returning from a shopping trip, I found my garage door open. I’d been burgled.

I parked the car in its usual space. Standing in front of the open door, I tried to figure out what the thief took.

Our city contracts out garbage and recycling to an International Waste Disposal Corporation. Sleet or heat, 52 weeks a year they pick up trash from my curb.

They have and enforce strict rules of what they will pick up. It’s a dangerous job. Darting across the street avoiding impatient guys like me trying to get by the crawling truck, lifting heavy garbage cans into the hopper and jumping onto the moving truck to the next pile, I wouldn’t want the job.

Yet, I hate their rules about worthy waste. I know they work for a bottom line profit not civic pride. But my garage fills up with stuff they won’t take.

I love watching the Goodwill TV ads. Their spokesman sits in a lotus position on the tail gate of an empty truck. Looking straight into the camera, he offers spiritual counsel. “If your life feels full, give. If it feels empty, shop.”

I don’t know what Goodwill uses its trucks for! The ad’s a fraud. They, like other charity NGO’s second hand stores, will not pick up stuff from your house. But then they have a bottom line too. My garage continues to fill up.

Without venturing into my stuffed garage, I saw that my burglar had loaded a blown out computer, a 9 inch B&W TV and an obsolete VHS deck into an old canoeing packsack.

Did I call the cops at this criminal abuse of my property rights? No Way!

I offered an Alleluia to whatever urban gods exist. I hoped this Good Samaritan had found a niche market and turned a small profit on trash distained by Waste Disposal Corporation and charity thrift stores.

It’s a big, wide, free market world that we live in!

Identity Theft

I drove to my credit union to put some jingle in my jeans. I gave the teller my name. A new hire, she seemed confused and asked for my account number. “I’m Mr. 12345!”

She punched it into her keyboard. She gave me a hard look. “Please verify with the last four digits of your Social Security number.” She checked her screen and counted out my cash.

Driving home, I was ticked. After four decades of membership, they robbed me of my name. I had to prove who I was with numbers.

To be fair, the teller simply did her job. It was a hot day. I had shuffled in with my cane, unshaven, dressed in faded Tee shirt and saggy pants. If I’d learn to use an ATM, their brick and mortar operation could be in Antarctica and the issue of my name would be irrelevant.

As I punched the numbers of this transaction into my home computer, I got curious. So what does an average American look like?

I fired up a search engine. A billion Americans live on the two continents of North and South America. When you crunch the numbers, this is the picture you get of an average American.

This average American is twenty-five years old with a brown skin.  This average American is bilingual in the primary American languages of Spanish, French, English or Portuguese. They might also speak one of the original American languages like Inuit, Cherokee, Navaho, Mayan or Gullah. This average American lives in one of eighty cities with several million people, like Sao Paulo, Rio, Lima, Mexico City, Chicago, Port au Prince or Montreal. This average American uses a handheld digital device to communicate with family and friends as well as take care of necessary business.

My driver’s license picture looks nothing like an average American. The other card I carry gives me creditable identity as a US’er - a USA-American. Good thing I have a fourteen digit credit card with an additional three digit security verification number on the back!

It’s a big wide wonderful world we live in!

Flatbutt Society 2010

My daughters and I invented ‘The Flatbutt Society’ at a party celebrating a victory. Behind the exuberant silliness, we recognized long hours of sitting in chairs to gain skills that could make our book project successful.

Dreamer straps on his school backpack. He heads out to his educational war. He does battle with reading, ‘riteing and ‘rithmetic!

Sometimes he understands the assignment and wins. More times he misses the point.

He rushes home to sprawl on the sofa. His laptop turned on. He spends hours in hard thought. Why is he so different from other young men?

My oldest grandson has autism. When I visit him, I listen in astonishment as he introduces me to the history and daily life of complex civilizations in his digital world. With a gift for perfect mimicry, he passionately articulates the moral dilemmas of his life in the vocabulary of his fantasy world.

I recently watched in astonishment a 90 minute documentary about young warfighters who pilot drone bombers in the Middle East ‘War on Terror’.

Dressed in combat flight suits, they sit at the joystick controls of their war planes in an air conditioned cubicle in the Southwestern American desert. Sometimes they hit their targets. Sometimes they don’t.

After a tour of duty bombing the bad guys, they change into shorts and tee shirts. It’s a short drive in an air conditioned car to supper in an air conditioned suburban house.

They join their kids in ‘PlayStation combat’ games on a flat screen HDTV before bedtime. They wake refreshed and after breakfast set off on another day of killing human beings real life dead in a different desert on the other side of the globe.

Dreamer works hard at understanding who he is and how he can help family and friends. The ‘Playstation joystick’ warfighters seem to nonchalantly accept their job of killing people.

Some consider Dreamer a ‘weird’ defective person. Some celebrate ‘PlayStation joystick’ warfighters as patriotic ‘heroes’.

I wonder what is truly ‘heroic’. Struggling to know oneself in order to help family and friends? Killing “bad” people by remote control on the other side of the world?