The Kids Are Alright 2

Where are those who speak out against blind faith and corruption?  Out of sight, and out of mind--hassled and detained on technicalities and infractions, led away to the pens to be reeducated about bullshit, or kicked out on the streets.  Those who don't want to play the game are not as well respected as those who use flashy domination and ladder climbing as an ideal, those who insinuate themselves into power and "society", by changing their stripes to match the herd's, but EVERYONE develops a skill that gives them an edge.  We are all cutting-edge in some way--all of us are.  We are all inherently skilled and creative.   It is part of human nature.  It is a basic aspect of life that we must compete in some way or join a religious retreat.  No one wants to identify as "poor" because we are still so rich in spirit and talents, but there is a flood of exodus from the upper-crust parties, even as wealth explodes for a tiny percentage of that thinning, infirm crust.  It is more like thin ice now, because the balance is tilting precipitously to overly weighty individuals skating around their pet institutions, and society is being subverted as it always is by people who forget their surroundings and imagine themselves untouchable.  However, truth dictates that if one aspires to leadership, one is REQUIRED to lead--everyone else falls to the physics of nature and sociology.  The good news is that in every reality, no matter how overbearing, the seeds of hope resprout in the garden of truth again and again.  We need some wealth in society to give us aspirations.  We need some poor to give us a conscience.  But when the wealthy are DELIBERATELY creating the poor, the balance will eventually tilt out of control for ANYONE/EVERYONE.  That's a fact of nature.  Look it up.

The message of Rock and Roll is that our humanity cuts across all strata and we are proud to be human.

Extortion rackets may prevail under the guise of "freedom" by those subverting the plan that was laid out for us, particularly in the American Constitution, which has been bent, folded and mutilated by wealthy patricians, and lazy lawmakers and their enforcers.  The Romans loved the Greeks and their ideas and talents, subsumed them, and their society flourished, but it was based on domination and slavery as much as example, and finally the example of greed, violence and corruption was self-destroying, crippling, not by failure of will of the people, but by failure of the will of ALL of the people to work together.  That built-in human auto-destruction gene which allows us to ignore problems rather than facing them, and to look up to people who keep up the appearance of being strong even as they are lying right to our faces about our finances is a death sentence.  It was a failure of GOOD will and balance.  People are smart enough--in any era--to understand when protection becomes a racket.  It was, and is now, a twisting of democracy into gratification rather than adhering to our own clear vision.  There is a valid argument to do so, for isn't the pursuit of happiness part of our mantra?  Isn't wealth often equated with happiness?  But for whom and how many?  What is the tipping point where a wealthy class is running roughshod over the poor, and the poor outnumber the rich ninety-nine to one?  Greed as a belief system rests on morals that are detrimental to the masses--the morality of greed over humanity is unsustainable no matter how powerful the giant institutions think they are, no matter what system of government we are using, and how many they support in weaker and weaker fashion as salaries at the top skyrocket, and salaries at the bottom dry up and blow away--but the people don't blow away, mostly, and are not all buried, forever, and are, alone or together, given the spirits of firebirds--and so that argument is soured like curdled milk, and the masses are either sacrificed and buried in the name of profit for some cadre, or rise up, slowly or quickly, to reassert prevalence by influence of truth over domination and defective reason.  Therefore if we are part of a cadre the only long-term solution is to REBUILD society by giving back to it, not just to see how much plunder we can get away with. That is moronic.  It's just moronic.  It is the philosophy of morons.  We have to feed back into the cycle otherwise it breaks into anarchy whether anyone wants it or not.  If all we can do is take, how can our resources ever hold out?  It is most definitely a question of respect for one another, and we are bleeding away our respect, instead of reminding ourselves what is truly important, what democracy means, and what we look like to each other, to our allies, to our enemies, and to our children.  What lessons are we teaching?

"Who knows?  Not me, I never lost control/You're face to face with The Man Who Sold The World" www.youtube.com/watch?v=fregOb…  (NIRVANA [David Bowie's] The Man Who Sold The World, 1994)

It doesn't have to be dramatic revolution that reunites us into positive forward motion.  It never does.  Unfortunately polar shifts in philosophy of leadership CAN be extremely disruptive.  War is hell.  The truth is, we FOCUS attention on dramatic shifts, which break out when ideologies are rigid and are covering wrong-doing in guilty leadership patterns that can't admit what they have done to everyone until truth shatters the lie.  Generally that is how corrupted power holds on long past when it is safe for everyone.  Power is really shifting all of the time in fluid atomic polarity in societies, and WE are part of it.  There only needs to be an understanding of the difference between truth and propaganda, and a turning towards truth even when truth represents some compromise and some uncomfortable reveal.  Over the course of lifetimes our knowledge WILL get through any barrier.  That is all that has EVER been needed to form a lasting peace and bridges between peoples.  But to maintain a stable peace there MUST be balance of power and law with freedom of expression and civil liberties in ANY society, and we are sliding downhill AWAY from that ideal. It has already started.  The State is already rounding people up for speaking their minds.   Maybe we only had freedom when Rock and Roll still held sway, when people who had something to say said it, when we backed each other up, and freedom was what was good for society, rather than control.  I remember.  We had to create a space for freedom in the midst of controls with which even our own government can't come to terms, not then and not today--our secret agencies constantly undermining democracy and choice, even as they artificially and underhandedly try to build it up.  It is like building on quicksand when we are so undermined.  We reached a turning point a decade ago with The Patriot Act, AND TURNED IN THE WRONG DIRECTION.  Now we labour under the misconception that control equals protection, which is exactly the idea that America rejected when it was formed.  SELF CONTROL is what creates the balance any society needs to survive, and that is based on the idea that a people who are intelligent and happy can and will help police themselves by using self-restraint and the idealism of government to follow common goals for a free society for EVERYONE.  Is that too much to ask?  Apparently.  We do NOT teach the importance of democracy adequately because we have sold it out to big corporations who use their own version of reality and police it with the brainwashing and influence of our own government and militant police in greater and greater magnitude.  We have sold out to Law, which, continually chases its own tail to see if it can swallow itself, rather than staying on the message of freedom and hope. It continually strays towards punishment and reprisal.  We do NOT set good examples in government and secret agencies anymore, nor in our biggest corporations, but they are shining examples of how NOT to behave and so people turn AWAY from democracy and freedom and even business, all over the world, and the rest willingly fall under the spell of propaganda, become tomorrow's secret societies and millionaires and totalitarians and terrorists.  Our leaders act like petulant, frightened, unintelligent hoaxes rather than upstanding individuals.  With that to look up to, it is no wonder it is turning into a circus almost as entertaining as Rock And Roll, but with far more at stake.

In Rock and Roll it is expected to put on a show, a fantasy, but these are more akin to prophets rather than politicians, and prophets are leaders in spirit, not strictly policy, unless that is part of the show.  It is the ones at the TOP of society who bear the burden of the greatest example and yet so often achieve less than hero status.  If you aspire to CALL yourself a leader, then it does no good to dispense with your role as champion of the people as soon as your power base shifts to the rest of the wealthy and powerful.  That rocks the boat.  That is the danger of throwing your weight across beam to a cadre of wealthy patricians, a cabal that doesn't represent balance--the boat just might go over one day--especially when the ballast of steerage class has already jumped overboard to sink or swim rather than share a vessel.

We who were alive when Rock and Roll was a value system of its own remember that it has ALWAYS been a struggle between being a force of influence, whether for peace or competition, and maintaining loyalty and credibility at the grass-roots level.  The movers in government in those days, making money and power off of anti-hippie, anti-peace scare-tactics and secret arms deals and foreign land-grabs with totalitarian tribes and real terrorists, and business deals which see-saw the balance of power of good and evil, wealth of spirit and wealth of corruption--neither directly tied to monetary wealth but often having a lot to do with it, are STILL behind the scenes pulling puppet strings around our necks.  Insular power bases acting in our name, and under the umbrella of democracy, but without our democratic consent, manhandle world politics, religion and our resources, and we barely get a voice.  It is all done by remote control and behind closed doors.  We fill our own institutional halls with the pungent smell of bullshit.  This is explicitly what our forefathers warned us about and tried to prevent.  Did our forefathers plan for a country run from the shadows or from the boardroom?  Guess what we have now?  In Rock and Roll we would rather fill our halls with the pungent smells of humanity and enlightenment.

Instead, "This way to the egress!" we are told. "Oh!  That sounds nice!" we say, and follow, like sheep, as we are herded out the doors of our own civil rights and power and expression and into poverty, poor health, and disillusionment and forced silence.  After having extorted us into vagrancy our business and political leaders feel no more responsibility and lobby aggressively to limit "entitlements" at the same time as they clamour for the "entitlement" to not pay back into the system and also to run it, ostensibly with lessening of governmental control, then tightening the lasso around our bank accounts as soon as they are back in charge, like the good cattle rustlers they are.  It is a shell game, a racket, and we are once again thrown under their campaign buses.  Enough already.

We can buy into the system  That is always a choice.  Why struggle?  Why fight it?  Perhaps because the shift in modern corporate-think approaches in the last couple of decades is to encourage industrialisation of OUR manufacturing in foreign countries who want to do trade, but NOT to fully encourage the civil liberties, child labour laws, fair pay, freedom of the press, and democracy in those countries, which raise costs.  Ideologically we can rail against working conditions and civil rights in those countries at the same time as we are exploiting them--win, win!  And so we make money off of slave wages.  The same is true of our own undocumented workers, and increasingly, as this business model spreads, our own workers in retail and food service.  This is modern slavery in varying degrees from foreign companies actually chaining workers of all ages to the walls and workbenches of factories and textile mills, to only paying indentured subservience wages, keeping workers living on-site (and also in prisons) and having to pay company fees and taxes for any amenities, including food.  Feudalism is the new (old) economy.  This is certainly happening and many of our top businesses have, in just the last few decades, lost the moral standing and dedication to American societal ideals, both abroad AND also here, to ensure that it does not.  They SAY they do, but not in practice.  In practice we are more and more paying below subsistence wages and industrialising our own prison population--the largest in the world, because of laws against civil liberties and the continual degradation of hope to support the American Dream in people's hearts and minds who have already been ground down.  It is a corporate-think mindset of exploitation and confrontation that is dragging us down.  Even when we are not doing it on purpose we are doing it, because we have been trained so well.  It is NOT "the poor" or "the needy"  who do this, it is not "permissive society", this is corporate wet dreams at play.  This is what they wanted, and it ISN'T working.  It is business ruthlessly streamlining and exporting and exploiting manufacturing jobs to those who are willing to sell human lives for a paper cutout of The American Dream, and this mindset we foster in other countries is bleeding back home to us in a travesty of corporate mismanagement of resources here at home AND abroad.  It looks great on paper--worthy of multi-million dollar bonuses.  Meanwhile the life played out on the streets is the poor and the underpaid shouldering the entire weight of corporate bloat on America's backbone, and on Europe's, and on Asia's.  THAT is the true bonus-worthy miracle--the lie that makes this seem glorious.  However, our dignity is not so easily bought and sold, and will long outlast the fake bankrolls and paid-for respect with which the rich believe they are absconding.  We are all in this together.  The rich are merely our own dreams gone wild.  It is up to us to have more realistic ones.

Why DON'T we want to join a mindset that is both built on, and has built our great countries?   Because it is a sham unless we continue to develop human rights in the way that we have had to fight for all our lives.  Otherwise it is all for nothing.  We have fed into this decades-old corporate brainwashing SO MUCH SO that our own People are sliding down the ladder that the American Dream granted us--AGAIN--and so THAT is where the disconnect is coming from.  Again it is all about respect.  There is little to go around, except along class lines and in inner circles.  Again, we are too caught up in our own tribal realities and fears.  In this mindset the boogie-man of "terror" gains power out of all proportion to our identity as Americans, and our reaction to it, our cowboy bravado, is trampling the balance of freedom against the untenable weight of unrestricted secret agency control both abroad and at home--it is dystopia approaching at too great a speed to navigate the curves with which natural cause-and-effect presents us.  The train is moving too fast.  I repeat: the secrecy train is moving too fast.  We are not in control of our own countries.

By business using the lie of recession, putting our own workers out in the cold, or in the food lines and on the government aid rolls, using jobs as collateral until their party is back in power so they can continue using the same procedures unabated, we can barely afford to coexist with, OR to work for our own business culture.  We are SOLD on the idea that our businesses are powerful because they are making money and we DON'T bother to understand HOW.  Often we are revolted when we find out how many companies use tricks and truthless tactics to rig the system AGAINST us, not for us.  How CAN we have a culture which protects and even RESPECTS wrong-doing and dissolution of our own great society(s) in the fast-tracking of slash-and-burn management?  We are being fleeced of our money coming and going AND our own ideals and notions of democracy and freedom and are supposed to feel proud and excited when we learn how to play the same shady games ourselves.  These businesses who become giant and profitable and powerful BECAUSE they are sell-outs, bullies, cheats, not just to each other, but to their own employees and their own customers, and their own country are nobody to look up to for leadership.  They are comical, not commanding.  They are on shaky, shaky ground just by means of their own increasing immorality.  They are only "too big to fail" in the fantasy bubble in which they have been living.  We've seen these big companies go down before--all by themselves--all by their own collapse of reality.  Only brave companies are willing to stop, and remind themselves what is truly important after all.  The same values that build happy families are the ones that build happy companies AND happy societies.  Only brave companies are willing to treat their workers as human beings and families and part of their OWN family rather than profit margins.  Rarely we hear about those businesses who NEVER sold out to this idea of ruthless efficiency as the highest ideal, but they are there serving their communities in the same solid fashion they have been for years.  They deserve a tip of our hat.  They deserve our respect.

Nineteen eighties and nineties corporate-think was only ever a temporary boost to the corporate world, flashy new gaseous mixtures, like nitrous oxide in a street race car's air intakes (or in their giddy oxygen-starved brains): dramatic, great for short-term profitability, but ultimately unsustainable and damaging to the engine because it was never designed for those at-the-edge tolerances.  The plans included haemmorhaging integrity and credibility as well as employees.  This is not the quarter-mile.  We are in it for the long haul.  This is an endurance race.  We are still seeing the evolution of these ideals unfold into nightmare scenarios of people continuing to lose their livelihoods as well as respect for the entire system, both inside and out, some of whom, in their financial fear, and their cultural terror, are hoarding the resources of the entire world and preaching hate as a distraction.  Hate is every bit as contagious as respect, moreso, and just as circular in its boomerang effect.  The seeds of revolution are not being planted by radicals, but by poor leadership.  This is of our own making and will continue until we come to our senses, in business, in finance, in government, in educating for truth and accountability in our institutions, not only for the citizen, but for our highest leadership, rather than secrecy and sham society, hoping no one will find out how degraded we have become.  Grass-roots spirituality and kindness are watchwords and practices among young people everywhere.  Why?  Because they have not yet been made to sell out.  Those emotions were ground under the boot of Cold War tactics and the permissive society of unrestricted business and finance in the years following the fall of Soviet communism and nuclear threat.  Whatever golden ages of enlightenment we have had in the last few decades, they are always subsumed, subverted, and disreputed by those who fear them without understanding them, who think they can take the teeth out of them and replace them with saccharine trust in industry or religion.

"Everybody, listen to me/And return me, my ship/I'm your captain, I'm your captain/Though I'm feeling mighty sick" www.youtube.com/watch?v=fyF5J7… (GRAND FUNK RAILROAD I'm Your Captain [Closer to Home], 1970)

We only rarely (but with hopefully increasing frequency) hear about companies who are coming back to their senses after having been gassed by the lure of nineteen eighties and nineties corporate-think, building on itself in the new millennium, into the new age of robber-barons, but they are few and far between still.  We are still selling our ideals and morals about civility and freedom and democracy piecemeal to control and profit, and the charlatans of corporate bloat, because we are addicted to "the next big thing" and fall all over each other to look smart and efficient, to kiss the ass of the gods of business so we can write books and give lectures about how brilliant we are, and instead look like greed-addled idiots to history.  That corporate-think business model has bled back home to us and is bleeding us dry.  Who can afford to support these superstreamlined companies now that we have all been "excessed"?  The corporate-think playbook includes: No job security--nobody is important enough to keep; forced early retirement without full pension to keep salaries and commitments low enough to ensure that, in general, workers are desperate, hungry, and scared; shuffle management between companies to lessen accountability and better implement cold, detached, textbook business ideals rather than allegiance to the original business statement or mantra of the company, and rather than promoting from within those who might be blinkered by compassion for an American company's heart and soul and dreams; promote some form of "international business ideal" that includes exploitation of third world labour and resources in a twisting of "efficiency" into oppression; let our own management fall through the cracks, quit, or be marginalised and demoralised; Encourage investing in junk bonds and predatory lending schemes--that's where the quick money and bonuses are; don't think about what you are doing to others--it's dog eat dog (isn't it?); rely on government programs for worker health insurance (meanwhile lobbying politically that government is a BAD thing, so that we can avoid taxes and restriction); he who dies with the most toys wins.

This is just business as usual now, but this change has been in my lifetime. Just when I joined the workforce is when the idea of "The Company Man" was being set afire.  Being a visionary of equality, my voice and methods are lost on most companies, and their environment of embezzlement was antithetical to long-term stability no matter what I did.  Seeing the strident lobby of business trying desperately to maintain a grip on the throat of government lapdogs as well as their own managers, fed into grinding mills of employee turnover, trying to steamroller them even as it completely bombs out our own society, the very houses we live in, our mainstreets and playgrounds, leaving ghost towns, and and even ghost cities in its wake (Detroit, MI), and shredded nerves, has been my misfortune and disappointment to live through. Seeing both of my parents who worked hard all their lives in the face of daunting odds with dauntless courage, and who struggled to raise happy children being forced into early retirement without full pensions as their reward, and seeing friends and relatives succumb to stress illnesses and substance abuse brought on by injustice and degradation, has left its own mark on my outlook.  These are scars that I can only overcome by lobbying for a better world.  I've seen a better world, and I've seen it pulled down by people who don't understand freedom of the mind.