Society of Ideology

Things feel bleak in America. People are actually scared about the “government shutdown”. The media stunt political ploy. They are squeezing poor women and people who really need help while mildly annoying the Tea Partiers so they have something to rail against Obama about. 

We are all tired of it, we feel like we have no control over it. But we do. We all need to look around and see what we can do. We need to figure out our contribution to the worlds problems and try and minimize our impact on the negative and learn how we can expand our reach into the positive. Violence will always create more violence. We need to start using our words.

I’ve been void of things to write about. Well that is a huge fucking lie. The world is full of things to write about. My own federal government has been “shut down”. Sort of, they closed all the things we liked and kept up all those necessary defense contracts. 

I’ve got all these ideas swirling in my head. I don’t know what to tell people anymore. 

The first step is to be well educated in history and sociology. It helps to know all the basics of science as well. However none of that will help you make any sense of the world as it is because it isn’t designed to make sense. It is designed to be as confusing and frightening as possible so no one knows what the fuck is going on. Really, that is the goal. If they can keep us all in fear they can keep their lavish lifestyles. While the lower classes pour their blood, sweat, and tears into their work and their lives and barely get by at the end of the day. 

Almost everyone I know is suffering extreme stress, often from lack of money after being done paying all the bills but also from social pressure to conform and just "let it go". We pay more for utilities than we should, we pay more for food than we should, we pay more for transportation than we should, we pay more for shelter than we should. The primary problem is that the owners of those for profit ventures don’t give a damn about their customers or what they have to say because they don’t have to anymore. 

Television and streamlined media has us all fed exactly what we want to see and hear. Just docile enough to control, but still active enough to have productivity up 22%. What do we produce anyway in America? Weapons? Food for other people who are too busy working to feed themselves. 

The world is full of too much stuff and yet we keep creating more. Buying more, thinking of ways we can sell more so we can be in on the profits. That is a part of the game, give everyone a small tastes of the rewards, make us all feel we are slightly privileged, just one step away from that magic moment or that magic idea that puts us on the fast track to fortune. It doesn’t actually work that way. 

There are such wide chasms between each of the classes that it is easy to keep us hating one another. God forbid you are sick mentally and physically because then you are the one bringing society down. Don’t be too rich or we will hate you our of jealousy. Don’t be too poor, why don’t you just work harder and get an education? People have lost the ability to relate to situations that are not our own. Perhaps because we don’t read as much fiction. Sitting around “doing nothing” is a waste of time. God forbid anyone should see the world through someone else’s eyes thanks to an artist. 

Television just sells primarily one vision of the world. The white upper class one. Not the world of the wealthiest, the world below them. The world we are supposed to strive for, the life they sold us with too many Super Sweet 16 and Cribs episodes. What they don’t have at the end of cribs is the statistics of how many new money celebrities wind up broke and bankrupt because they can’t maintain the lifestyle of the wealthy once they aren’t in the spotlight. 

Dynasty families don’t let athletes and musicians in on decisions that sway the world. They have to have some stories of people coming from the slums to become super stars, Snoop Dogg and Jay-Z, Britney and Christina, if you are talented enough we will hand you a pass into the world of the rich and famous. But that is all it is, a pass. It doesn’t come with actual power to effect changes you want to see in the neighborhood you came from. You can save yourself but you can’t save everyone else. 

I don’t know anyone personally who doesn’t worry about paying their bills. Even people with steady incomes couldn’t survive if they suddenly lost their job or even just a few weeks of pay. There is no job security. All the workers rights people remember having are gone. All the rights we have to personal freedom are gone. Google and Facebook can tell you exactly what we like, they have compiled extensive marketing data on all of us, so they can get whatever is left of our paycheck at the end of paying the bills. If you are lucky enough to have anything left. 

No one speaks up in their daily lives. Everyone talks about the weather or major sporting events, or even fantasy sports. Who the fuck decided fantasy sports should be the way ANYONE wastes their life away? I support people’s right to spend their moments of life anyway they choose. I completely support recreation and games that are also fun athletic activities. I will never understand how we got to the point where not only do we worship sports stars as gods and talk about that relentlessly, but now we make up realities for these teams and players and pretend that it matters and effects us. We waste a lot of time and energy on things we were raised with and never question.

Now people talk minimally about politics, “can you believe the government shutdown?” But whatever they say was put in their mind for them. Whatever they already believed Google sent them results that match what they will like and agree with. When it comes to TV we watch what we agree with and then we parrot those talking points when in casual conversation. We don’t live in a society of ideas. We live in a society of ideologies. Set rules we want our realities to abide by. We need to get back to believing in change and possibilities. We do the same things with politics, sciences, and religions that we do with sports. We all have our own teams.