Yep! It’s Pearl Harbor Day – the day that will live infamy – for some, as many-of-us know that it was no “surprise.” But many people sleep better believing it was a surprise and that the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center was also a terrorist attack. Hell! These folks think that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman – despite monumental evidence to the contrary. Why do these folks want to stay “in the box”?
Well the box is safe for one: One has parameters with four walls and a floor and a ceiling. So, I guess staying in the box gives someone firm footing and a roof over one’s head. You just don’t know what you are going to get outside the box, for the Unschooled or the Unread. As Daniel Quinn so pointedly stated in Ishmael – there is nothing “out there” that isn’t on some library bookshelf: so fear becomes the enterprise of the illiterate. The foolish consistencies are indeed Emerson’s hobgoblins of small minds.
A co-worker of mine, who appears to be possessed by these hobgoblins (judging from the faces other colleagues put on when he engages in a monolog) wishes to lay the blame of Great Depression #2 at the feet of the unions – and can’t see his way clear to spread the blame around in more egalitarian fashion. I told him that I thought that “management” could probably match union indiscretions $-for-$ and that Wall Street greed and avarice might have played some small role: a $50 billion Ponzi scheme?! Come on! And that’s just one-of-a-few I’m betting.
But when I suggested that the war in Iraq was the “straw that broke the back of the American economy” – he almost went ballistic. As a true conservative (also see: Nazi or Bushie) he doesn’t think the over $1 trillion spent over there in a most masturbatory effort played any role in the current American quandary – it’s the UAW! The UAW have been the urban terrorists in this whole economic meltdown.
And this is some grand union busting that we are witnessing. I watched it with grocery workers here in Cali just-a-couple-of-years-ago and warned then that teachers would be next. Well, I told my father (who is also anti-union [even though he’s profited from them – as has my colleague??!!]) that once the UAW falls, the NEA won’t be far behind. I’m predicting a 15% pay cut for Cali teachers in the 2009-2010 fiscal year. Because we all know that it’s easier to balance the ant hill on the worker ant – and the queen can just keep pumping them out…
I think it was Frank Herbert (of Dune fame) who suggested that 10 acres with water is all a family needed to create a self-sustaining eco-system: and Frank definitely spent most of his life thinking outside the box. I almost had my mini-ecosystem – but alas, I remain on the grid, and the grid’s in the box, and the box has locks…