HGS

Yesterday got completely away from me, no idea how that happened.

But this morning I'll make up for it with an extended HG(S) as it were.

BUT FIRST!

I have to make note of the state of our collective consciousness.

First we have a guy, Steve, who lived all his life in Detroit. Due to economic circumstances he lost his job three years ago as a manufacturing engineer. let's assume Steve made more than a Zamboni driver.

Steve has been unemployed most of the last three years. How this is possible I'll never understand, since I'd starve within the first 12 months after unemployment and the savings ran out. Yes, I'm sure there was a nice severance, but still...

Steve accepted an invitation from his sister to move to Portland Oregon, and try his luck at the job hunt there. He landed a job in a bakery, and a job, yes, you guessed it, driving a zamboni. he's ecstatic that he's been asked to stay on at both jobs after the holidays since they were, in the beginning to be temp jobs.

Now, yes, I'm a snob, and yes, I'm an elitist, and though I acknowledge that's bad, you should see real snobs and elitists in action. I've lived with them all my life, and they're no fun.

But my point here is bigger than that. We're reduced to such a desperate status that we're thrilled to get jobs as menial as driving a Zamboni, which should be a job reserved for a kid in high school, not some old dude with a resume that includes the title Manufacturing Engineer.

Teachers, who should be revered, instead of reviled and hounded from the profession, are reduced to clerks. Engineers who should be designing the new cars powered by natural gas that don't look ugly like the Prius, are driving Zamboni's. Yet Rupert Murdoch, and his ilk are holding our minimum wage earning asses hostage so they can extort more money out of our empty pockets so we can watch Paula Deen teach us how to give ourselves heart disease!

And we pay it.

We are the new serfs. And the Rupert Murdoch's of this world are the landed gentry we answer to. we don't answer to the government, and it certainly doesn't answer to us. That's a myth. We both answer to big business, and we do what we're told because we're too damn apathetic to do otherwise.

Our talents are not valued. Our desire to be a part of something is laughable. Want to write a great novel? No one cares. Want to be a great artist? No one cares. Have a burning desire to explore the human experience through performance?

No
One
Cares.

Now learn to drive a zamboni and live in a hovel burning dung for heat and eating whatever carcinogenic swill the big agricultural conglomerates put out that you can afford without complaint, and you are their kinda folks.
When are you gonna stand up and make it stop? What will it take?

We're not new, this has all been done before, the pity is that we're just going in circles.

If I ever write my memoirs it will be given the title "Everything is a circle in the air." (Credit to Art Bratt)Cause when I'm gone in a few decades, this will all be done again by others who didn't learn, just like we didn't.

A few more concise laments than mine:

George Wilhelm Hegel:

What experience and history teach is this -- that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles.

Gustave Flaubert:

Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.
H. G. Wells:

History is a race between education and catastrophe.
Jane Haddam:

People always seemed to know half of history, and to get it confused with the other half.

Karl Marx:

History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.
Walt Whitman:

Future years will never know the seething hell and the black infernal background, the countless minor scenes and interiors of the secession war; and it is best they should not. The real war will never get in the books.

And so it goes:












Love, cause it's all you got.