Mornings on my porch these days are exquisite. I pry
myself from my bed and shuffle out into paradise in this (what
I call) cool Florida spring. Every day starts out at 70
degrees. Sun flashes through the dense foliage, creating lush
shadows and undulating sunbeams flecked with shimmering dust
motes. The mockingbird symphony (somewhere between Vaughn
Williams and Wagner, I fancy) is backed by a chorus of owls
chanting their baritone refrain. If you listen closely you can
discern the words. In fact, you may discern any words you
want. I choose to hear “what a world, what a beautiful world.”
Eight o'clock on a sunny May morning. It's hard to see
anything wrong with the world those first few moments each
morning on my porch.
Then I
remember. Reality intrudes. The e-mails. That fascinating and
disturbing window on the world. After careening through
hundreds of them every day, disconnected thoughts begin
flowing through my brain, even before I put on the
coffee.
When I
write something, people are always asking me for references,
links or citations, and I seldom can remember them, because I
have traveled too fast through too much cyberterritory during
the previous day to be able to cite chapter and verse. It's
the ideas that stick, though I often don't remember which
e-mail said what.
This
morning it's this one. We grew up thinking our leisurely
middle class lifestyle was the way life has always been. Some
of you white haired curmudgeons out there will remember a
wacky TV show called "The Life of Riley," one of those
carefree '50s half hour sitcoms where the bumbling head of
household was lovably inept and perpetually bamboozled — and
appreciated because of it.
Such an
innocent time. One recent e-mail pointed out that this social
condition — the very existence of a middle class — was created
by the aftermath of World War II, when the government assisted
all its military survivors with generous loans. The result was
a surge in college degrees and individual home
ownership.
First
the first time in history, a legitimate middle class was
created. It had never existed before, which was something I
never realized. But now, today, in A.D. 2005, it was being
deliberately exterminated. And might never exist again.
One of
the reasons this sad state had come to pass, as I recall, was
that these same auspicious conditions for prosperity also
created something very dangerous to the ultimate health of the
planet — out-of-control human reproduction and an
out-of-balance infestation of corpulent human locusts.
It's
like the climate in Florida. Every possible species of animal
thrives here. Eagles live comfortably in towns. Alligators
grow 14 feet long and aren't afraid to waddle anywhere, as
some people with missing limbs will attest to. Heck, in
Florida, the cockroaches — and their Schwarzeneggerean
cousins, the mighty palmetto bugs — will stand up and fight
you if you get in their way. No foolin'. Life thrives
here.
With
such a rich country and a government that actually supported
its population, after World War II, the population exploded.
All over the world, too. The world’s population quadrupled in
the 20th century.
So it
wasn't long before our controllers, the rich elite who get a
very different education than we peons do, surmised that too
many people put too much of strain on the world's resources.
Or maybe it was just their control of the world's resources
that they were talking about. In any case, they developed a
plan — they being some think tank called the Club of Rome —
that population had to be reduced radically if the elite were
to continue to live comfortably in their opulent,
Wackenhut-guarded enclaves.
If
you're old enough, you might remember the days when the
medical profession actually tried to make you healthier.
Rather than today, when all they try to do is rob you and kill
you, or at least maim you for life so you'll be forced to buy
more medicines.
Now
this Club of Rome thing has reached hyperdrive. Most of
allopathic medicines are outright poison, as is most of the
corporate food supply. You definitely can't trust what your
doctor says.
And the
brave military men and women who devotedly follow the orders
of our nation's so-called leaders? Well, instead of getting
free college and a loan guarantee to buy a house, they get a
guaranteed case of terminal cancer (cleverly inflicted by
their own poisoned ammunition, as well as their toxic
vaccinations, so they can spread their maladies to their
families and thereby reduce unwanted and unsightly population
more quickly, not to mention the benefit to the government
that paying parsimonious death benefits is much more
economical than shelling out for lifelong medical care) — all
this, of course, assuming that they survive their military
assignments, which, in this sad day and age, has become less
and less likely.
Now,
some of you, particularly some of you young whippersnappers,
might say to me: “You’re living in the past, Old Geezer.
You’ve got to get with the program.”
They
don’t realize what the program is. They’ve reaped the harvest
of living in a very fortunate time, for some. And they can’t
see beyond the parameters of their own pleasant porches to
understand the world is really not something of their own
creation, but rather it is something they just happened to
stumble into, and most of us never really perceive what we
have been given, or who has given it to us, or what plans they
— the ubiquitous, amorphous and unidentified “they” — have in
store for us.
The
thought that our middle class lifestyle is going the way of
the dodo bird really saddens me. How lucky we had been to have
had such an elysian existence for so long. I console myself by
thinking perhaps it was only karma that it had to end, since
the vaunted American way of life was constructed on the
extermination of the native Indians, nourished by the blood of
innocent black people lying dead in the fertile Alabama dirt,
and sustained by the blood of the unsuspecting peasants all
around the world who never possessed this kind of leisurely
life in which we have for so long langoured. Perhaps it is
only poetic justice that we would one day wind up in the same
condition we ourselves (OK, or our forebears) have inflicted
on so many others. What goes around comes around,
right?
In the
same way that religious hysterics always predict Armaggedon in
their own generation (trapped in a blindness that prevents
them from seeing the mathematical unlikelihood of any such
prediction), another e-mail pretended to know what the overall
plan for the decaying United States was, that it was being
brought into line by the global elite to simply be another
province of the World Management System, and hence Bush and
his psychopathic partners were being instructed to destroy
America’s reputation and make it the pariah of the world, so
it would be attacked by a new coalition of the outraged and
dragged down to the level of, say, Zimbabwe, so it would be
easier to control by those who control
everything.
That
the U.S., with the help of quislings like Bush and Clinton,
was simply being set up to look bad, so that the rest of the
world would eventually get fed up and destroy us as being a
menace to humanity, which we definitely are.
It is
hard to deny that this is the way it looks. More and more you
read stories that America has lost its mind. And a cursory
review of history, objective history, clearly reveals that it
never had a heart. Oh sure, the people had a heart. People
everywhere have hearts. But once things congeal into a
monolithic government, the heart seems to disappear, and
wholesale rape — even of one’s own self — seems to inevitably
be the order of the day.
So, as
I sit on my porch, and a new strand of spring green ivy creeps
eagerly up the weather-rusted screen, stretching out its
tendrils to greet the infinite possibility of a new day, I
review the two remembered e-mails, which forewarned of the
death of the middle class, and the deliberate sabotage of the
American dream.
And
then one other e-mail flits across the clouded screen of my
bittersweet attention. It was from a doctor in Pennsylvania
who often buys my books, and sends me both frequent
contributions and books she thinks I need to read (and she’s
always right about that).
In her
note was a stark fact. Since 1970, the percentage of
population diagnosed as sociopathic (who the heck knows how
they quantify these things?) has tripled.
For
those who have trouble with the word, a sociopath is simply
someone without a conscience. “Sociopaths are interested only
in their personal needs and desires, without concern for the
effects of their behavior on others,” according to The New
Dictionary of Cultural Literacy.
As you
may have realized, this is now the new way of life in America.
The diagnosis, according to standard medical textbooks, is
clinically deranged.
I mused
momentarily on that scary fact. It explained a lot of things.
Combined with the corporate consolidation of media in the late
20th century, it explained the death of popular music. And the
loss of conscience in our nation’s newspapers. Perhaps it even
explained how a whole society could fail to object to an
unjust war ostensibly waged on its behalf that was murdering
hundreds of innocent people every day.
It
explained the effects of Prozac, Ritalin, fluoride, and beyond
that, the heartless zombification of America. It explained how
everyone could overlook the facile lies being used to justify
the sociopathic behavior of America, because sociopaths do not
object to sociopathic behavior. Why should they care? It’s not
their problem.
As you
know, a simple mind like mine tends to reduce these
complexities to simplicities by saying the real problem is
religion, on the theory that once they can make you believe
things that you know in your reasonable mind are not true,
they can make you believe anything. But I won’t bore you with
any more of that just now, although this is definitely not to
say I won’t in the future.
So as
the sun streams through my dusty porch, and little lizards
frolic on the languid leaves of the elephant ear plant that
climbs high up my mottled Australian pine, and the squirrels
fight the sparrows for the last few fragments in the bird
feeder, I make a mental note of things I must do to face the
day, items to acquire, people to meet, foodstuffs to
purchase.
In the
peace of the spring sun I notice that missing from my list is
anything about whose life I may improve or what wrong I may
attempt to right today, and as I write today I make a mental
note that this may be the very difference from the world we
have and the world we want.
And the
porch tells me, go outside now. You have done all you can do
here. But keep your eyes open for something you can do for
someone. It may make all the difference in the world, not only
for the world, but for yourself.
Love is
contagious, you know. And the revolution for a decent world
begins in your own heart.
John Kaminski is a writer who lives on the Gulf
Coast of Florida. His numerous Internet essays are seen on
hundreds of websites around the world. They have been
collected into two anthologies, “America’s Autopsy Report” and
“The Perfect Enemy,” and are for sale at http://www.johnkaminski.com
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