is the Fear the American way?

     It's absolutely amazing how fear controls the human mind, to the point that everything one does is dictated by some sort of fear or apprehension. This history of the world is rooted in the use of fear to suppress the masses, stemming from the fear that the church placed on the common person. If a person is deceived into believing that this minister of a certain religion really has the power to affect what they themselves cannot really control, then this minister is endowed with a power that rivals even Gods. The fear of the afterlife has been a constant throughout the ages, independent of race or religion people collectively fear for what they refer to as their souls. Those who realized this took advantage of it and created the most deceptive corrupt and all powerful entity in human history; the church. Besides that fear is prevalent in all facets of society take for example the current state of the American government.
     Capitalism was heralded as the right way for people to live, as gods way, as the way of truth and justice but in truth it has brought more pain and evil to the world than its worth. People lose everything that they have and have earned for the good of the free market. A concept that was never laid out by those who founded this country, but nevertheless was adopted as the American way. Fear, however,  is the reason that we cannot change to a system that is much more effective. One such as socialism; which benefits all people and immensely decreases the gap between the haves and the have-not's. The propaganda that was rolled out by those in power has for so many years painted this monstrous portrait of a system that does right by all its people. The constant association with communism and radicals like Stalin, and Chairman Mao makes socialism look like it is evil incarnate and that it is something that we must avoid at all cost in order to preserve our precious ineffective democracy. Those who have the means to do so see that people don't know the truth about socialism because it would threaten their means of life it would open the eyes of the millions of people who vastly out number the controlling percentage. Why would they want you to know that under a socio-capitalistic government homelessness and poverty is all bit eliminated. Instead they feed you a dream that you can one day become wealthy and live the American dream one day if you keep supporting the system that has oppressed you and you pay your taxes and be a good citizen maybe you could have your piece of the pie.

why don't you smile?

     When you walk the streets of New York, you ride our trains, you visit our stores; one of the things that becomes readily apparent is that no one looks happy at all. Is that really the case? How could it be that in one of the richest most decadent cities on the planet; no one is happy and everyone is just living such a shit life. So much so that a scowl is a permanent fixture on every face. It is as if we have all decided that when in public we must suddenly become upset at the world and that everyone we see is just this horrible person that doesn't deserve so much as a smile.

     The truth is that many people are quite happy but wearing that happiness on your face seems to go against some sort of social normality. Why are we all so angry and indifferent and scared all the time? Could it be that those who have to power to influence public opinion often wield that power to create a climate that would advance a particular political agenda? Using tactics such as blatant misrepresentation of facts, fear mongering and just overall misdirection seems to have become commonplace. News stations and by extension big corporations and certain billionaires stand to benefit from mass hysteria because they always have the cure. What better was to make money than to ramp up fear so that people feel that something needs to be done and you are the one who can do it. Its exactly the tactics that our resident war hero General George W Bush used to get us to invade Iraq. If people are living in constant fear then what else can show up on their face besides that fear and anger at the fact that they are so afraid.

     In addition to the Geo-political aspect of this there is the domestic pressures that come with being a member of the American society.  If you smile at someone it can easily be misconstrued and misinterpreted into something that you did not intend for it to be. If a grown man smiles at a little girl he is automatically looked at as a predator or a pedophile or some form of scum. If a guy smiles at a girl she automatically thinks that he is trying too sleep with her or rape her or follow her or worse. What ever happened to common and uncommon courtesy? We are so preoccupied with how we appear to others that we dare not do or say anything that might be deemed as controversial. We just do what is expected of us and we say what is expected of us and we do not get out of line. Even the social non-conformist are all the same; following a set of rules that have been set out for how a social non-conformist is supposed to socially non-conform. We no longer wear our hearts on our sleeves for fear of being hurt, or broken or rejected. We no longer live with passion and emotion because its viewed as being to eager. Nonchalance has become such a virtue to the point where not trusting anyone and not caring about anything is celebrated as a triumph. It is as though you have won the social lottery if you can prove that you are the person who cares the least. 

who killed chivalry?

      Siting on the train I often wonder about a lot of things, the most often prominent is about the seating situation. Conventional wisdom dictates that a young man such as myself should easily be able to get up and give my seat to one of the many females that I find standing over me looking down on me with absolute disdain. But it's difficult for me because of the problem I have of thinking way to much about things that I should not be thinking so much about, things that I should really do out of pure emotional motivation. It doesn't work that way for me however because I'm constantly plagued with the problem of over thinking every situation that I am in. Whether or not this is a futile attempt to make myself feel better about being to lazy to just lift my ass up and give my seat to a woman I'm not sure of but I seem to rationalize my own reasons in my head. 

       The most simple of these reasons being that I have no idea who this person is that I am so dutifully surrendering my comfort to. Granted we have the fact that I am young and male and probably in better physical condition but who is this anonymous lady anyway? What if this woman is the most despicable of human beings, a woman who by no means should be given anything at my expense. There is no way I can tell the character of the person who I am helping, should I just willingly help all who cross my path ignorant to whether or not they are deserving of my kindness? I suppose most would say that you should not be concerned with whether or not the person is deserving because if you do that then you would never do anything nice for anyone because you could never tell. If everyone thought that way then nothing nice would ever be done for anyone else. I sit here and I think about this, what if I am more deserving of the seat in every sense of the subject? Thus I am at in impasse because unless I spend my time trying to get to know the person that I am trying to help, a person who more often than not will not be willing to digress about their personal lives, then I will never know. Not to mention that I neither have the energy nor the desire to get to know every eligible candidate to receive my seat. 

     The more intellectual argument involves the state of the society that we currently reside in. In our American society women have rightly obtained a great deal of equality and opportunity, but still they insist on a double standard. I do not understand how a person could want to be treated equally and yet want to hold on to the remnants of an inherently unequal societal structure. To that end what do we want our society to transform into? A place where we have no real gender differences? Eventually if we continue along the path that we are on I strongly believe that men and women are going to be the exact same and there will be a complete devolution of the modern family. But in any case, why do women want to be treated like women and yet also treated like men? In past societies there was always a give and take when it came to gender roles, the woman was not always involved in decision making or considered as the head of anything but she was treated as precious. She was given honor and looked at as a work of art, something to be cherished, loved and respected. In that situation then rising to allow her to sit is a given because of the role that she plays in society. But now philosophically it seems almost unfair to treat a woman as special and yet give her all of the things that men have enjoyed. Is a man supposed to be treated specially?

are poor people really just lazy people?

     It has occurred to me that people have the wrong idea about why some people are poor and others are rich. Many of the people i have come into contact with have the notion that poor people somehow choose to be poor or are just too lazy to get themselves out of the mire. How can that be true when the thing that gives us as human beings the most joy in life is work. Not to say that all of us want to slave all day on a construction site in the hot sun or pass out from heat exhaustion while underground mining for coal but work nonetheless. The work of our choice often doesn't seem to feel like work at all because we enjoy it. We get a sense of accomplishment when we are given the opportunity to drive ourselves and pour our hearts into our passions. This could be a great music composer spending countless hours on his masterpiece, or a doctor scouring over medical journals to come up with a cure or even a chef traveling the world to gather the best ingredients for his greatest dish. People love work and they love the feeling of a job well done so to think that some people; particularly the poor, just have no drive to do anything just seems completely perverse.
     Given the opportunity to work and support themselves and their families the poor are no less inclined the work hard than the rich, they are just people. In fact many poor people are forced to work more than one full time job just in-order to be at a living wage. If that does not show a willingness to work hard what does? The fact that a person does not have the drive to be successful in the traditional sense of the term does not mean that the are completely devoid of drive. It may just mean that this person is more willing to do a more labor intensive job that they are willing to do one that is more mentally intensive. Why does this mean that their efforts are worth so much less than the work of someone who chooses the standard route. This is not to say that a person should be rewarded according to the level of contribution that they make to society because they certainly should. A person who has spent years in law school to learn and master his craft should certain be rewarded handsomely for the the time he dedicated and the effort expendid. However that does not mean that a person who instead of going to college after high school, chose to become a security guard and start a family should not be able to live relatively comfortably and be afforded a measure of dignity.
     If by some unimaginable circumstance you were given the ability to create an economic system for a society in which you would be blindly place at either the top of the food chain meaning the very rich, the bottom of the food chain meaning the very poor or at some point in the middle; what kind of system would you create? Keeping in mind that you do not know where in the system you would end up, wouldn't you want a system that is as fair as possible? Would you want a system such that if in the worse case senario if you end up poor you would still have the means to get by and to live a modest life? There is the possibility that you could end up at the top of the food chain but their really is no guarantee so it would certainly be in your best interest to make sure that you don't create a system where you can end up massively wealthy but there is also a strong possibly that you can end up in-humanly poor. Now consider if you were a newborn baby, what kind of world would you want to be born into?