un:enslaved

this job/contract-hunting scene drives me nuts. this little voice that has hung around me for 40-odd years tells me i should have been more patient where i was at and taken the woefully lose-lose situation i was in as some sort of challenge to improve myself or some shit.

amazingly, i do manage to refrain from bashing myself in the head.

my best lead right now involves waiting to replace the guy who’s currently fucking up that position right and left. he apparently needs one more major screw-up, then the two people over there i’ve spoken to will push me in front of their senior vp of professional services. i’m not normally one to root for someone else’s failure—not even in sports!—but it’s a dog-eat-dog world, and from where i’m sitting, there just ain’t enough dogs.

that’s a quote from somewhere, i forget where. meh.

i hate being in this kind of hold pattern, but sometimes it’s useful. there’s only so much job/contract-hunting a person can do during the day, and despite some other responsibilities last evening, i managed to watch the president’s address and all the surrounding bullshit. Kind of interesting on several levels. you never know if people are opposed to some things just because the man is black, or because he doesn’t share their specific political ideology, or whatever. it was nutty last night, and even a bit nuttier today. what i don’t understand is how anyone can be opposed to a system that provides more opportunities for all citizens.

which of course led me to wondering about the patterns of thought to which such individuals must be enslaved. what saddens me is how they, like our last president, fight so hard to limit themselves—their own well-being. it’s easy to call them witless dupes, but that’s also a bit disingenuous in this context, because they’re not merely witless dupes to the health care industry. they’re really witless dupes to a political and social ideology that defines everything from their family heritage to the marketplace in which we all compete.

which is, of course, exactly the problem.

i try to be understanding. i tell myself and others that these types of things aren’t their fault, because, after all, they don’t really know any better. they’re simply reacting to the world from the basis of their collective myopia and intellectual repression. but that’s rather disingenuous, too. such observations do nothing to solve the problem, and in fact, simply lend to an environment which facilitates the problem. they don’t make the world any better for my children or myself, and tolerance of their world view simply perpetuates an environment in which our own world view is repeatedly compromised.

i have a deep-seated, honest desire to want to help these people, despite the fact that i know how fruitless and impossible such a task truly is. there are certain minds so full of muck that digging it all out would destroy the person. and there are a lot of those minds around. but, just as pointless as trying to “help” them, is the idea of arguing with them. there’s simply not enough critical thinking going on in those muck-filled little boxes of ultra-conservatism for me or anyone to be successful in helping them change their minds about anything. as disappointing as that is, and even as depressing as it makes me, at least i can be glad they i, and mine, don’t suffer from that particular form of mental slavery.

but that’s a rather hollow victory.

so, where does that leave us? if it’s truly worthless to try to change their minds or reason with them, what do we do? well, in the case of healthcare reform, we have to inflict our worldview on them until it becomes the new status quo. Let’s not forget that in ten years, if the health care system needs some more changes, these same small minds will be the ones STILL opposed to change, but on the premise that the way it will be in ten years is “the way that it is”. their attention span is so short, collectively and individually, that within just a few short years of these changes, they’ll have forgotten how it was, anyway. so, what we need to do today is to encourage our senators and representatives to get this health care reform passed, with a public option. it falls on us to change the focus of what these unfocused minds perceive.

and the sooner, the better.

after all, not all the people living here are liberals, and living where they do, as they do, they need health care, too. they might be too mentally enslaved to truly understand their own dilemma, but they’re not going to fix it on their own by continuing to spout republican rhetoric. they need our help, so let’s make it happen. after all, the benefits apply to all of us.

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