Because You’re Worth (sh)It.

We build the world in our own image. See it as a scary place and it will be, see it as a gentle giving place and it will be. See it as a place where you need to grab as much money as you can to survive, and it will be. Rich or poor, this is where we are. We want more money because we want more stuff, and we want more stuff because 3 minutes in every 15 we’re being told we do. TV ads are for specific products most of which we’ll never buy but the general message is there’s stuff out there we all want to buy. It’s not always been like this. Go back seventy years and it was very different. There were picture ads in newspapers for tumble dryers and lawn mowers with a splash price from the local hardware shop along with all sorts of everyday things. They simply acted as a reminder of where to go when your old one was wearing out. You glanced and moved on in a fraction of a second. There were no glossy magazines and BBC radio and TV were ad-less. The level of wanting was centred on replacing broken stuff with a little new extravagance now and then. With no TV we had the time to learn to make and mend things with pride. Wages weren’t great. My first job in 1964 paid £20 a week, which was fine. Now on average we watch over half an hour solid ads a day plus magazines and radio and our level of wanting stuff is massively higher. Not scratchy black and white line drawing ads, full on audio/visual masterpieces of desire. We drool for a new smart phone, an iPad, a bigger TV, a laptop that all absorb our time like a giant sponge. Our level of wanting knows no bounds; even the rich want more. Wanting has become a veil of unhappy distraction punctured only by the brief moments of a new purchase. And we have precious little time for rewarding activities that build self worth; we’re either earning it or spending it and wishing we had more. It seems from abundance we have created a misery of not having enough and shackled ourselves to profiteering and time wasting. This is the world we have created in our own image. But on the bright side Comet’s selling a Sony Viao 15” laptop for £100 pounds off in the post Christmas sale.

The NRA Solution.

As much as I don’t like making fun of the criminally insane I’d like to analyse the logic of the NRA. So they put a ‘good’ gunman in every school. I calculate there must be around sixty thousand schools in the US so sixty thousand highly trained guys must be on high alert, fingers on triggers 6 hours a day 5 days a week 30 weeks a year to be there that one day in 7.5 million man/days per year to stop one guy causing carnage in a school, and who is likely to take the good gunman out first with a high powered assault rifle with telescopic sights and silencer. This constant state of threat will, in a small percentage of these noble defenders, cause them to become terminally bored after 427 days of futile vigilance and not see the bad gunman coming. And another small percentage say 0.05%, will become terminally paranoid and, given their love of shooting guns, will themselves run amuck in their own classrooms. 0.05% by the way would be 30 insane highly trained fully armed gunmen in schools. To stop the possibility of a tragedy happening it will be prudent if not essential to supply a second good gunman to watch the first. That should fix it and as a by-product help unemployment stats, and if one good gunman was in a bullet proof shelter while the other one patrolled it would stop a bad gunman taking out the good gunmen first with a high powered assault rifle with telescopic sights and silencer. That really would provide for all eventualities. Oh no wait. That would leave the good patrolling gunman on his own so if he became terminally paranoid whilst on patrol there would be no one there to stop him! OK that’s easily fixed. So there needs to be three highly trained fully armed gunmen per school, that’s 180,000 in total, two patrolling together while one stands guard in a bullet proof shelter. Finally we have a solution. And if we do find we need a fourth highly trained fully armed gunmen to watch the gunman on his own in the bullet proof shelter we’ll know exactly what to do. So the NRA aren’t so dumb after all. They’ve thought it through.

Hopi Red Hair.

Apparently there’s an old Hopi story that says at the end of the old Mayan calendar ie 20-12-2012 a new one will begin where humans will be given the “realisation that they create their own reality.” Now the wonder of words is we can put them in any order, like a ‘pink elephant foxtrotting superstar’ and just like that we can imagine a pink elephant complete with tutu dancing to rapturous applause. In a sense we created a reality of it. This facility has brought us all sorts of creative wonders from the wheel to the internal combustion engine. But it doesn’t stop there. I can create an internal reality of you, of your internal reality, of what I deserve, what I need, whether I’m better or worse, worthy or unworthy. The list is endless. And all this we create 24/7 to build a complex internal reality that guides our feelings and actions. It’s thus not unfair to say we create our own reality and mostly without realising it. We even cherish our creations as in how well we know ourselves and others and our ability to predict and/or deceive the world. So this realisation is going to be a lot more far-reaching than we might imagine. It will define that the only true reality is ‘out there’ and leave us naked in our acceptance of it. I seriously wonder what of ‘ourselves’ will be left. So much will go and the majority of it will be found to have been an encumbrance. And what’s left will be heart, our spirit of being. Not to be rich, but champions of our heart’s achievement, not to be powerful but in service to external reality, not to be shy, depressed or repressed, envious or disdainful but pleasing to our heart in what we find and do. We will find a freedom we would have not thought possible and an efficiency and effectiveness we would have not thought possible. We will find that possessions bought, sold and owned are the creation of our own reality and that the best violin will naturally fall to the best player who will know its quality most. We will not know self-importance, only that everything is. We will have no concerns for past and future except for what the heart has lost and planning to support the heart’s direction. What we know will be at the beck and call of curiosity. Teachers will be the purveyors of questions not knowledge because questions come first, experience second and knowledge last. We will be free to be wondrous excited. And today my hair is red.

Newtown Shootings.

By all accounts I am a pleasant chap, father and previously son. I guarantee I will not shoot anyone. But that hasn’t stopped me and my sons at one time or another hating our parents as ‘agents of the state’ and its unspoken social norms. I guess that’s fairly normal and in most cases we’re given enough latitude to find ourselves, our self as a unique social, loving animal being. I also sense I have matured two quite different identities: One the social and one the individual. I feel lucky that for me these two largely overlap and neither one inhibits the other much so both have been free to develop benignly. I can easily imagine this not being the case, where an overwhelming social identity will suppress the individual and the individual more visceral identity will react antisocially.

This ‘final straw’ can be as ferocious as a camel as you break its back. Somewhere in the individual a switch is thrown. And somewhere in the individual the switch can find its way back to find genuine remorse for what’s been done.

In my youth there was little television, little wealth and the desire for it, and for fame and celebrity. Today we are far more the watchers and admirers of these things. The young are in a sense parented by screens on all sides and their parents also. The combination can be a feeling that within our social humanity there is nothing, no one that isn’t an agent of the state. Parents, media, the news, even much of the care professions seem in collusion to suppress the natural individual self, the only true sanity one has. And all, if you displease them, will call it insanity. It becomes a fracturing conundrum, a personal war with the universal zeitgeist. Parents and social institutions genuinely ask, “What more can we do?” They don’t understand that it’s an infection we all carry but only a few develop symptoms, so in an effort to help we crowd round their bed infecting them further.

If there’s ‘a cure’ I suggest it’s quite the reverse. Someone in danger of causing much social harm could be driven out into a deserted wild place with water, shelter and provisions and if possible a horse and left alone. They could be visited by someone robust and mature after 3 days and then weekly for two maybe three weeks, a sort of decontamination period. No help, no therapy, no contact. And at not much cost either.

The Trappings of Power.

I wonder if the inventor of this phrase was aware of its double meaning. Even the use of the word ‘trappings’ rather than ‘traps’ more accurately describes the ever increasing self induced entanglements that divert one from a happy life. Every quarter at the moment is showing me the profound poverty of the rich and powerful. From the celebrities in the jungle in rapture over a choc ice to the opulence of multi billionaires in New York rich enough to buy the government a single message is being fashioned. That the latter have a huge impediment to being happy fulfilled human beings. Straightforward logic suggests that if something as simple as an ice cream can leave one satisfied the acquisition of power and wealth that leaves one always wanting more must be essentially and profoundly unfulfilling. It only leads to a growing state of dissatisfaction as anyone serving the majority of these people will attest. Dissatisfaction or the adaptation to being permanently unfulfilled, being the ambient property of our elite, actively percolates our society until fulfilment is un-catered for; a forgotten menu option. The fulfilment of learning is replaced by the dissatisfaction of being told, the fulfilment of teaching is replaced by the dissatisfaction of indoctrination, the fulfilment of creativity is replaced by a repetitive career, the fulfilling contribution of work is replaced by the dissatisfaction of drudgery and even the fulfilment of purchase is replaced by the dissatisfaction of induced limitless acquisitiveness. Evidence of this percolation is everywhere; dissatisfaction and unfulfilment are everywhere. Yet the celebs in the jungle were fulfilled in ways our society has ceased to offer us and they came away with an unforgettably rewarding experience. Middlesonmouse graduated with a First in Maths. His fellow graduate’s first year salary as an actuary was £35k. He wasn’t tempted by a well-paid career and tried teaching (horrendous) and now runs his own company taking a ridiculously small salary and acquiring a skill set to fill a book because he loves learning new stuff and meeting new challenges. He’s a happy fulfilled chip off the old block. There is still hope if you choose it.