The Thought

essay

In what is appearing to be evermore the exception rather than the rule, I was hit with a flash of insight the other day. Can you believe it? And rather than the mundane, id-inspired child's fantasy which has become my trademark, this idea felt new and smart and revelatory. So rather than let it bounce around aimlessly inside my cranium looking for a dank recess in which to cower, I have chosen to give it voice, to pass my rare words of wisdom along to you all.

In a moment. First, allow me to pepper this arena with questions designed to massage your thought muscle.

•Are we, as a species, civilized or not?

•Are we, like other mammals, helplessly controlled by instincts, or are we able to instead examine our impulses and choose rational paths?

•Can we control our fear response enough to remain a civilized culture, or are we inevitably doomed to backslide and self destruct, time after time after time?

•If is true that we CAN consistently control these actions... then why the hell don't we?

I only bring it up to swivel a five million candlepower spotlight on the answer, which is:

Some people got it, and some people don't.

That's right. I'm saying that while some people use intelligence to create solutions, countless others rest on their simpler instincts when searching for lofty answers to humanity's jarring social issues. There are many, MANY, people who reflexively answer the call for original and complex answers with a chipper 'What They Said', all while pointing at husbands, bosses, labor leaders, captains of industry, religious icons or political officeholders.

In other words, they pass the buck.

Don't misinterpret me here. Some of us surely can work the gray matter, mulling over data and weighing it against years of past experience to hone shrewd solutions our college professors would give a 'thumbs up' to. Some of us.

But some of us can't even puzzle out a bus schedule to get home from work. Those people can't control themselves. They make impulse-driven choices over and over again without using the megaquads of data they've learned as a thinking, experimenting race which allows them to make wise choices.

And unfortunately, their number is growing with each passing day, each passing week, each passing of crappy legislation that further damages our nation's ability to impart rational behavior.

Unfortunately, those who cannot think clearly always seem to end up in charge. The politicians, the religious shepherds and most disturbing, the vastly rich, all somehow end up running the show and making irresponsible decisions from on high that benefit themselves greatly while eroding the veil of civility upon which all of modern society depends.

We see it dropping even now as our capitalist reins pull taut, bringing the forward motion of humanity to a shuddering, protesting halt, and revealing the inner animal each of us becomes when our survival is threatened.

These clear decisions I'm referring to are the choices we must make in order to keep society running smoothly. The ones our mothers (MOST of our mothers) kept banging into our heads: Be polite. Be fair. Share. Be the better person.

We used to all try to be that better person, in spades, in our nation's early history. Even then they still existed... but the rest of us could see them for what they were and so didn't award them positions of power and influence. In that way, magnanimous decisions which served everybody naturally won over those choices which would clearly serve the few. We were keeping the fear and greed and selfishness from becoming policy, a good thing. Unfortunately those policies have recently been re-instituted.

Thanks, fearful selfish greedy people. Thanks a fragging lot.

How did they accomplish this task? In the past these kinds of thinkers couldn't achieve such lofty goals-- their brains smashed into an intellectual ceiling which prevented them from reaching positions of power, the jobs which require benevolent behavior.

Simple. We made the dollar our conscience.

We gave corporations the right to be treated as human, along with the power to vote.

We decreed that money equals voting, so the rich always got their way.

We abandoned the tax structure which kept the rich and the corporations from becoming too big. We allowed them to convince us that taking some of their money in tax and using it for the good of all was somehow selfish, and we somehow were convinced to let them keep most of it.

We allowed them to screw with the nation's free education system, limiting the learning potential of the vast majority, then let them own the media so they could spread misinformation right through our television sets.

We stood by idly while they turned the country's finances into a giant Ponzi scheme prewired to steal our meager savings away and add it, drop by precious drop, onto the vast piles of the OVERrich, leaving the majority poor and frightened and worst of all, nearly helpless to do anything about it.

Wait... that last part wasn't completely correct. We CAN do something about it. We can VOTE.

But even that system has been corrupted. When a ballot measure passes by a couple of percentage points that is considered a resounding win. But when 90% percent vote for one side, it's called a mega-landslide, my friends. We don't see many of those because an avalanche of misinformation is issued prior to each election which confuses the voting public, obscures the real issues and prevents a true reading of the majority's desires.

There is one more tactic the megarich use to keep themselves in power. By the time any bill comes to a vote, it has already been polluted with additions and changes which make it a pale imitation of its original form, a method that would be immensely more difficult to make happen if ALL PEOPLE WERE WELL-EDUCATED.

So I guess my thought is more than "some got it, some don't". In the full exposure, I guess what I'm saying is: Let's make our populace smart and eliminate the twisted influences which destroy the modern mind.

Yeah, that's it.