#103 Letter To The Editor
TO: Editor Of My Universe
FROM: Concerned Consumer
RE: What The Hell Is Going On?
Allow me to introduce myself. Really, I’m nothing special. I’m just one of a breed of humans that I like to refer to as the “five percenters.” It’s the five percent of humanity who still wishes to, and therefore actually continues to think about the bigger picture.
We look just like everyone else. We’re not very different. Some of us are doctors, others are lawyers, some are Republicans, and some are Democrats. We even work at mini marts, clean rich people’s toilets, and serve fast food. A few of us, and I stress FEW are even working in politics.
The only thing that separates “us” from “them” is the fact that we do our best to act with the repercussions of our actions in mind.
Me First, That’s Mine, More for Me, The Jones’, and most people who run in elections to get a job, instead of interviewing with the person in charge of paying them; these fine folks make up the 95%.
And it’s got nothing to do with dumb or smart. I run into careless, thoughtless smart people ALL the time. In fact, these people piss me off more than the dumb ones. The dumb ones actually get a little pity out of me, and a lot less anger.
This is what makes me angry: The fact that most people don’t seem to want to think anymore. They want supervisors and superiors and all sorts of government programs to do their thinking for them, and I think it’s a crying shame.
It seems like most everyone wants to be given a job, a schedule, and a paycheck. They don’t want to pursue a cause they believe in and then see how that creates its own schedule, and its own paycheck.
Sure, wheels need axles, and machines need all sorts of reliable cogs and gears, but you can still be excited to be a cog, and take pride in it. You can still realize your intricate role in the system, rather than trying to un-realize your role by thinking as little as possible.
But that’s not the nature of Nature, and so I’m naturally neutralized.
I think I’m living in an age where I get to witness the beginning of a new humanity, and the end of an old and exhausted one; one that I wanted to see die.
But be careful what you wish for, man, because the dinosaur that was mankind rising up from it’s Neanderthal roots is now transforming into a modern Neanderthal…a Neanderthal that knows how to text it’s basic feelings. Instead of OOGA! Booga! Ooga Booga! It’s: LOL UR KEWL or BTW I C U L8R.
Sometimes when you absentmindedly pull on a thread, you can end up picking an integral thread, and then the whole carefully woven article unravels at a rate you never saw coming.
Hell, when you absentmindedly do most anything, you run a serious risk of not seeing what’s coming. NINETY FIVE PERCENT OF HUMANITY seems to be oblivious or unconcerned with this simple fact.
I was always bad with statistics. Especially the ones I make up. So I’ll tell you what; Take whatever percent of humanity it would take to lead the entire human race into the direction we’re moving in, and these are the people whom I hypothesize do not care about thinking any longer. They only wish to be entertained, nourished, and looked after.
Who was actually there to witness the opening of Pandora’s Box? We don’t know how it actually happened. Most folklore is a metaphor anyway. Not to be taken too literally. A picture is worth a thousand words. But no one had a working camera when and where Pandora lived, so give me a break, you don’t know and I don’t know who the four horsemen are, and by the time we realize who they are, most of us will probably possess a photo featuring one of them, have a subscription to another one’s media outlet, we’ll have elected the third one into an important office, and the fourth one will be on the New York Times Best Seller List, metaphorically speaking, of course.
We as a culture seem to enjoy revering and obsessing over the very people and things that are most bad for us. It’s in our nature. It’s no big deal, I was just trying to say one more witty thing before I went off to watch The Sopranos followed by Dexter.
The thread of modern man has been pulled in a funny way, and we no longer care about caring for ourselves. We’d rather be taken care of. And I can’t explain why this frightens me any more than I can explain just how much it frightens me.
I’m appalled by consumerism. I’m appalled because it has become evident that consumerism only works when the rate of consumption remains constant or moving in an upward trajectory. How can we realize this, and then continue to believe that we must remain a consumer based economy?
This is stupid. I feel like telling Coach that I wanna hit the showers, someone else can take my spot.
Actually I don’t. Not at all. But I don’t know a way to describe the feeling of apathetic disinclination towards participation that I sometimes feel.
It’s like that one time, when that country elected that cowboy and some oil tycoon friend of his into the executive office, and then let them run care free for eight years.
After four years, when the people said, “I’d like more of the same!” I kept thinking, but, uh, guys, we’re going to have to pay for all of this…isn’t this maybe a bad idea?
I felt like Piggy on the island in Lord of the Flies, only I have more charisma than he did, so I got laser eye surgery, ditched my glasses, and pretended to fit in as best I could.
I’d choose almost any state of life to death, because I’ve never met anyone who died, but I know that sometimes, living is FUCKING AWESOME!
And a lot of the opponents of the cowboy and his oil friend, the ones who backed the man who invented the internet and the man who somehow couldn’t tell the difference between oral and oval in his office, these guys told me not to worry, that, “soon we’ll get all the power back, and we’ll fix everything. Internet Man and Young-Multi-Racial Guy say that we can save the future by saying change, hope, and green a lot.”
And I ‘was all like,’ “um that’s more of the same too, just in the opposite direction. It’s just a different mantra. Are you crazy too?”
And so then EVERYONE told me I was a real downer.
And I was.
And I am.
Everyone then thought that I was too dumb to be a Piggy, I was more of a Chicken Little at that point.
And I was.
And I am.
Because every time a piece of sky hits me in the eye, someone passes another bill that stimulates our economy by creating an order for someone to create more fake sky pieces to install in the giant sky illusion before anyone notices that it is a giant illusion.
This is the sort of shit that can give Houdini a real Napolean complex.
I mean, I just thought that we couldn’t keep doing this.
Funny thing is, so far, I am so wrong.
So it goes.
Thanks, Kurt V.
Here, I’ll finish up this modern day history lesson in a way that I think you’d appreciate:
Where was I? Oh yeah, so the rich kid cowboy and his snakeskin oil selling buddy got kicked to the curb in a demand for “CHANGE!”
And then things changed. Really quickly. Stocks plummeted, crazy bitches in Alaska got even crazier, Wall Street hit a real wall, and some people didn’t jump for joy, but they dived to avoid the depression…meanwhile, we taught a whole new generation the word “Ponzi” and told them to scheme their own way out of this mess, cause we’re not really trying to change anything, and we’re ‘gonna take their money before they even make it.
We told them that money doesn’t grow on trees, it’s created the same way we create toilet paper, only it hurts a little more when you wipe with it, it burns differently when you ignite it, and it has more trace semen and cocaine in it. Oh yeah, and it’s way harder to counterfeit!
Next up, we decided not to penalize HMOs for making it hard to afford good health care, but we saw nothing wrong with telling “Homos” they couldn’t marry.
Penultimately, we decided that in order to save the children, we had to increase military spending by cutting back on education budgets, so we fired a whole bunch of teachers and told them to have an extended summer vacation.
And then, right when everything seemed about to fall apart at the seams, right when the big thread really began to unravel, the big old fat cats on the hill took a recess in order to avoid a meeting with some guy called “The Piper” who was making some ridiculous claim about being owed something in return for all that we took from him.
This piper seemed really steamed, and about to do something about it, but no one even noticed him, because football season was starting, along with a new season of Mad Men, which was a show that made people feel nostalgic about how covertly depraved things used to be, you know, before we got YouTube, Elliot Spitzer, and Energy Drinks.
Besides…what the hell is a Piper anyway? Can you smoke drugs with it, if you get cancer in a western state?
Maybe I’m a lot dumber than I thought.
