The Left Column

Politics for Poets

This heedless generation

Calling someone heedless is a pretty hard accusation. Doing such shows great disrespect and disdain. I've learned over the years that one form of caring is the pretense that things aren't getting to someone. In other words folks care but they do not want the person for whom they care to know about the concern. Why? Because a lot of folks are all about the drama. Everything is a big show. They go about their day trying to collide with other people for the effect of maximum drama. "I'm the log in the river for the heedless river-boat pilot to hit." And so the response to that is to say to them "Oh, don't worry. I'm used to you being in the river. You're a log. I'm a boat that doesn't crack up just because there is a log that I can pilot around. I give you no response because the response only encourages you to keep up with your log-in-the-river ways."

A friend of mine was explaining to me about this thing that short little women will sometimes do. They imagine that the tall guy is a mountain of lumbering heedlessness. And so they put themself as an obsticle near the tall guy, pretend to some hardship of life, maybe they are clutching their heart like Red Fox used to do on Samford and Son. So my friend was at the store and a woman started acting like she was having some kind of major problem. It was drama is what my friend figured. She's seeing if the tall guy is going to help, or is he a beast as she suspects? So suddenly my bud alerts this woman to his concern. "Oh, I see you are in distress. You see me here with my two children? I can't help you, not trained as an EMT. But let me get the manager and he can summon the EMT's." Suddenly the woman was OK. She was looking for a response from him. He was calling her bluff. She had expected indifference.

Well, my friend tells that story, but I've never had it happen to me. There was once, in the dessert, when an old Indian clutched his cheast and then fell to the ground as I was driving by. There were a lot of things wrong with what he did. Mostly I could tell what he did was faking, trying to lure me to stop and help and then get mugged. Why? Because Navajos never meet your eyes. This guy met my eyes, made sure I was looking at him, and then clutched his chest and fell down. Chances are that if I stopped there would have been some kind of unhappy surprise for me. It was the middle of the day. It was 100 degrees. This was in the dessert in Arizona outside of the Hopi reservation. He was at the end of the drive way hundreds of yards from where the houses or domiciles.

It is hard to understand the motivations of strangers who we meet out in the world. What I've learned to do is to see if there is anyone watching me, anyone who is diverting their path, their stroll through the grocery store, so that they will intersect with me. They want to talk to someone and I'm as good as the next one. Maybe they have assumptions about life and they want to lay them on me and have me verify them. Whatever it is, the best is to present them with kindness. But if I'm busy maybe I forget this? I hope not. In some cases it is someone who is not wanting my attention for pleasant purposes. They maybe want me to verify their ideas about other people. Maybe they expect other people to be mean, tall people to be lording, thin people to be snobby, old people to be . . . whatever their hangup is.

How can we ever know what other people have as hang-ups? And not knowing that we can only guess as to what their problems may be if they suddenly explode with anti-social acqusations of you violating their space or their rights or whatever it is that they make up. I've seem people who bully strangers around them. They must do it regularly. I wonder why they do it. What is the modivation? How can we know the modivations of other people? We must face them first with some under-lying assumptions. I try to err in favor of kindness.

And so when you encounter people who imagine that you think that you are better than them . . . they can stand in the way and be a problem as if they are saying "You think your so tall and powerful and rich, and I'm just a poor undocumented immigrant, so you can wait while I stand here in your way and pretend to not understand what you have to say." There is something that people often do when they think that you are of a different class than them: they pretend that they don't speak the language. Someone ought to tell them that we are all friends here. Americans were taught that class is meaningless. Unfortunately that was progressive nonesense. The progressive class and their collective denial about life has allowed for some strange tyrranies to be implemented as social-programs with benifits based upon percieved or imagined ethnicity, race, immigrant status, or aledged minority-ness. These programs can devolve into degenerate explotations of governmental largesse by people who know how to game the welfare system. Most people who need assistance aren't like this. They are to be pittied and helped. That is why we have the programs: for them. The need the help. It is only a small-percentage of folks who understand that welfare can be a cash cow and that welfare can be milked to the point of the death of the cow so they do it. Too much is never enough for those kinds of people.

When we kill the cow we get no more milk. Allowing social programs to balloon without any way to do fraud monitoring is killing the cow! And now, we can take the cliche to the farthest level. Stuff that should be edited from the final version (Oh, the perils of an over active mind!): Can we then get the dead cow to jump the shark over the moon?

Often time the need to be a different culture is really just an excuse to pretend that people are better than other people. Some will claim that this is the sign of an inferiority complex. There are no multicultures. Culture is merely the current aspect of civilization that seems important to people on the spur of the moment. In reality there is only civilization and cultures are limited views of that. That is why we can say 'the culture of dirtbike racing' or The New Yorker can do a piece on the culture of the East Village.

"It's our culture." is a mantra that people use when they are making excuses about themselves. The supposition that all people from a place are the same and of the same culture is a very close-minded view. Unfortunately we make public policy based upon the flawed assumption that this closed-minded world view is a correct world view. In that script everyone who speaks Mexican is a down-on-there-luck wet-back and none of them have any means at all. It is so brain-dead a point of view (and a prevailing one in 'progrssive' circles) that we set up rules for bid procurement that allow for someone who is of specific groups, regardless of their wealth and income, to get a better chance to win wireless spectrum actions or a better chance to get a government contract. So wealthy people have a couple of children who they alledge to be born in Mexico city and claim them to be 'latino'. Who knows where these people were really born. No one asks if they are well-healed and related to London-based bankers. We have these racist rules and the cleaver use them against us. These rules are based upon false views about 'culture' and racist views that people are so racist that we need to violate the logical and well-thought out rules of procurement and scew them to aide people who government policies suppose are 'descriminated against'. As if anyone Mexican is poor and destitute. We all know that some of the richest people in the world are Mexicans. And we make it our problem that those very-wealthy rulling class Mexican's do not share enough of their over-whelming wealth with the rest of their country-mates.

The culture of privledge, a class of people who can live in an almost spoon fed way has been created as an excuse to keep the largesse of the welfare culture politically viable. Real problems, such as racial inequality between Americans, and programs that helpped, like ones designed for Black Americans, get expanded to suddenly include anyone from anywhere who pretends to some other culture and presents themself as a victim. Suddenly illegal aliens are 'undocumented guests.' And if you make the joke that they are 'undocumented criminals' you are called a hater. Each person on welfare, everyperson in public housing, is a profit center for someone. And so to keep the game going, when poverty was mostly conquored for Americans, the welfare-mavens who get rich pretending to help the poor (but really need the poor to be poor) started to import 'poor' people from all over the world. We brought over a lot of hot-headed folks and put them up and these people got a full-boat of welfare. And if we talk about it, if we ask for numbers, a list of these people, where are they? Why did we bring over an army of folks from a country in a civil war who hate America? It is the delusions of the hypnotized liberal mind-set (not the classical-liberal mindset, that is actually the conservative mindset) that brought all of these freak-show haters here. Why? Because running a welfare building is very lucrative.

So when will the masses of liberal voters finally wake up and face the monster that their liberal view has allowed? When will they realize that the idea of over-loading the system is a plan of people to take down our civil institutions? It is a culture of hand-outs. It is a culture of constant expectation for free things. It is a culture that does not keep a tally of who has been helped and by whom.

I have never heard about a national audit of all of these monies. We don't have a way of knowing who profiteers from these monies. In the case of medicare/medicade, the problem is so severe that we have people coming from overseas and setting up clinics just to defraud the system. (I don't have a reference for this).

Yes, we need to help the poor. But we can't help those in need if we have no means of our own. People who get public assistance are never taxed for all of their benefits. They get all of the best of free healthcare and don't pay for any of it. They get free scripts which they can sell to their friends. And if they want to be a junkie they can find a situation with a free place to stay as long as they pretend to rehab. If someone is just plain homeless we don't provide this for them. You gotta be a junkie first. Oh, I'm homeless. So now let me be a junkie so I can get a place to say. I've heard that some people actually like shooting drugs. There is a whole culture of it. The people involved don't often share it with those on the outside of it all. You won't learn the drug lingo for the lasted snortible pharmacuitcle. But if you want it, you can become a junkie, join a program, and a doctor will perscribe it for you! Pretty sick in a lot of ways.

So the culture of the poor has devolved. It is assumed that they vote a specific way. They are claimed as the constituancy of very many progressive and Left-leaning people. Most of the drug-addicts on public assistance probably don't even vote. So how do they get to be a constituancy?

I'll say it again: Yes, we need to help people. But we should at least know who these people are. And we ought to be able to know that the person being helped isn't criminally getting helped over and over to the point of being a pig. For example it is typical to hear the story (maybe it is just a story) of someone foriegn born welfare queen who has multiple id cards, free health care card, multiple welfare cards, under different names. It sounds pretty anecdotal to me. I think that level of criminality ought to be reason enough to declare someone a menace to society. Send her back to Brazil.

You think that as a society we could come up with some kind of a verification system? We could know that people are being helped or not being helped. The thing that we really need is to have a system to help those who are too crazy to know that they are crazy. I guess we do. It is called Church, Mosque, and Synogouge. Followoing that we have various social agencies, Like the Red Cross. We need them for their disaster relief. There are people who make a very good living off of helping the poor and disaster victims. And then we have fire, police, and emergency responders. There is a level of welfare therer too. As they help you they don't ask (or they shouldn't ask) did you pay for the service. We don't say "You can only get justice if you paid your taxes." Some people might feel that way but that is not the prevailing additude of public service-folk.

Well, there are all kinds of issues about personal Liberty when you start asking for arduous accounting methods concerning social welfare programs. So we don't have things in place to monitor more rigourously. We can't know that so-and-so uses five different healthcare cards and has scripts in five different names. We can't know that someone has 4 welfare cards and gets 800 a month food stamps instead of just 200. We can't know about all of the fraud. We don't have any way to verify. And the methods that are suggested for verification present significant issues about personal Liberty. No one wants to live in a society where people who are legitimately in need have to be treated like criminals just to get meager benefits.

The dream would be if we had a boom of employment and everyone, even drug addicts, could get a working job. And the drug addicts could be functional and still pay their bills and get their scripts and do their dysfunction out of the way of human commerce and leave them to dissipate in their serene way as sad as that seems. Liberty. Liberty to waste your life. And the people who hearing voices and not able to tell the voice to Shut the F up (cause that is what I do when an evil voice comes into my mind) we want these en-spirited people to get the help that they need to. And for all of the fraudsters: we want you to stop being pigs.

Everyone will be employed. No one will need public assitance. OR: we could have a change in the culture of welfare where people take what they need and no more. So they don't try to fill the boat with everything. They get presented options. They can take this, leave that. Another idea, which mirrors the idea of the Alternative Minimum Tax: we could have 'Alternative Maximum Benifits'. Every benifit recieve is giving a cash value and if the benifits go above a threshold level the person is flagged.

Such a program would, of course, have loophole as well. People who need assistance would be 'deemed' in need and then a maximum benifit assigned to them. This seems fair to me. In the case of the system-bleeders who game it for them and there own: if a student is deemed 'ADHD' and then the parents demand a gold-plated education for their privledged little disability (and maybe they are having him fake it, or just getting a false diagnosis, it happens) it descriminaates against the other children in that community by taking resources away from those kids who have a easier time. Isn't it prudent, for each of those alledge disabled children, that we know over a long period of time what they get in relationship to the other kids? Because if not we are not being fair to these others. The one who claims no abnormality is left to struggle much much harder and impoverished by the parents of the one who is alledge to some kind of learning disability. If we look at what we call descrimination, we can come up with many definitions of it.

What are some definitions of descrimination? Someone gets a very unfair advantage. A kid who gets to have hundreds of thousands of dollars a semester spent on him is one who costs the system a lot. We could argue that if person A needs n dollars than, if n dollars is given to person A that n dollars ought to be given to each of the people in the system. So if some kid really needs all that money spent on him . . . the gov would need to spend that much on everyone.

Alas, people have made the welfare system into a cottage industry. Utilizing guilt they have fooled the government into providing an open vein into the coffers of the treasury so that schemers and alledger to disability or descrimination can suck infinite monies from the public trust.

For those who need help: let them get help. Give them the help. But for those who are gaming: let them be stung and exposed. Let's reform these entitlement programs so that we can make sure that we have the finnancial means, in the future, to help (and please pardon the liberal cliche) the truly needy. Some kind of system of verification of benifits and Alternative maximum benefit ought to be instituted. and those who get very large benefits ought to be monitored so that if they suddenly become super wealthy they have a requirement to give back. A requirement to give back! If you make a windfall and got 3 million in welfare monies to go to a special school when were a kid . . . shouldn't you be required to give back? You'd think that they would.

OK, I know I haven't thought all of these things through. This is a spur of the moment blog and does require a lot of effort to reread and edit and take out somethings and add others. I get to a place where I need to stop and ponder. So whatever I have put out here, consider it not a manefesto but just ruminations on things. Only a few are ever the problem, the trouble-starters, the instigaters. most people want to get along. It is when the psycho-paths seem to be in leauge, all reading the same psychotic guidebooks, that we have problems. Some say that is the anarchist handbook. Some say Howrd and Pivot (miss-spelled on purpose). Some say the bible. In any case when people are antisocial the rest of us have to eventually get up and deal with it. We ruminate. We blog. We put our ideas out there. If anyone doesn't think that the welfare system in America doesn't need reform then they don't live amoung the people. An honest discussion is hard to have because those who profiteer off the welfare system, or imagine those on welfare as their constituancy, typically have knee-jerk response. They want no reform because they are living large off the system. They imagine that all people on welfare vote for them and their causes.

Oh, I could go on. but . . .

I think I've blogged enough today.

Life goes on.

~ OK Now.

July 24, 2011

The Susquahanna River, Pennsylvania from
last fall.

When Poems Lack
 I'm selfishly helping
  myself to glory by claiming
   to be helping you  when
       it seems that I've just made things worse.

  Oh, the pain of self-awareness.