House of Eratosthenes

When I was a young-adult type of guy, it was…what? About twenty years ago. So fifteen years ago I was a medium-youngish adult type of guy, and twenty-five years ago I was a teenager-type kid. About that time, I knew my share of ninety-year-olds. There was a consensus among them that while things in “the world” might look a little bit on the dark side, no challenge in insurmountable, and if we keep our heads about us “it will all work out.”

Ninety years is long enough to learn a thing or two. I found that reassuring.

I dunno if Kirk Douglas agrees with all my opinions about how to solve things, but he’s certainly achieved the easy part which is to agree with me about what’s busted. And as far as this 90-year-old is concerned, the “will all work out” stuff is history.

This is the first time, I daresay, that I’ve seen an old guy announce in a public forum — you’d better pull your heads out of your asses and fix some stuff, or this ship’s going down. I’ve never seen that before. Well…not from a sane, literate old person. I’m almost halfway to the 90-year-mark myself, so since the words of Spartacus represent a paradigm shift, they carry weight with me.

Let’s face it: THE WORLD IS IN A MESS and you are inheriting it. Generation Y, you are on the cusp. You are the group facing many problems: abject poverty, global warming, genocide, AIDS, and suicide bombers to name a few. These problems exist, and the world is silent. We have done very little to solve these problems. Now, we leave it to you. You have to fix it because the situation is intolerable.

No, I don’t agree about the global warming and AIDS; one is a proven scam, and the other has received so much money that it is plagued more by black markets, and scandal, than by indifference. But the numero-uno among his concens, it seems, is that we have a tendency to identify problems and then not do anything about them. Or…to invoke solutions to the stated problem, that have very little to do with mitigating it or solving it.

Mr. Douglas, this forty-year-old is on-board with that concern, if none other. One hundred percent.

Look at it this way. President Bush identified terrorism as a problem. In response to this, he did a bunch of things: Pass the PATRIOT Act, re-invoke the legal definition of Enemy Combatant, invade Afghanistan, invade Iraq. Not a week goes by, wherein as an interconnected people, we are invited to re-examine whether his solutions are suitably connected with the identified problem. And in using the verb “re-examine” I’m being exceedingly generous. Most of this stuff isn’t examination or scrutiny at all, it’s just liberal propaganda masquerading as legitimate criticism. And most of it has to do with that last one, Iraq.

The “average” American conducts this “scrutiny” by announcing the tired old cliche (and falsehood), “No W.M.D.s have been found in Iraq!” Or…”Saddam Hussein was not a threat to America!” And puffing out his chest, strutting around, peacock-like, before receding back into the world of Starbuck’s, Netflix, iPods and PS3 consoles. Like an ostrich. We’ve become a curious peacock-ostrich hybrid. Postriches. Ostcocks. Whatever. Point is, by-and-large this is our method for solving problems. Our “leaders” have been reduced in stature to the point where we don’t expect leadership out of them. We want lightning-rods, and nothing else.

AIDS is still a problem. Hey, you know what? We’ve been fighting AIDS longer than we’ve had a Global War on Terror. Do our solutions have something to do with the identified problem? Like the liberation of Iraq versus the terrorism problem? Perhaps there are some issues there; it isn’t politically correct to call them out, or to try to. After twenty-three years, with millions of lives on the line, why do we have this taboo? Why so many words and so much heat spent, instead, to invoke a bunch of foolish nonsense from a Michael Moore movie? Nonsensical slander about our efforts to rid the world of terrorism, which we’ve only just begun?

Poverty is an even better example. Sam Kinison, trying to be funny, might have had a good point — what are all these people doing, in place where you can’t grow food? It’s certainly related to family planning. And yet, we only connect with each other to solve the crisis, when we’re presented with a plan to prune the leafy part off the weed…adopt this kid or that kid, not a peep about solving the overpopulation problem. Or when there’s an ulterior motive involved. Bono gets some P.R. out of it. Why is that? Why can’t Bono quietly work at this thing? There are a lot of Hollywood celebrities donating their money and time to help good causes, quietly. Why have we become so accustomed to seeing this guy’s face when he talks about poverty? And where are the damned condoms?

I’m venturing into territory where my knowledge falls short of all-encompassing. Forgive me. I’m trying to figure out why a ninety-year-old is gloom-and-doom now, and in years past, this was not the case. I find it alarming. It could just be Mr. Douglas’ personality; I don’t find this likely. I don’t know the man personally, but there are some movie stars who have a “rep” for seeing the darker side of everything, and he is not among them. And I must say, if I was ninety instead of forty, my comments would be very much the same. Throughout those four decades — and, I expect, in the five ahead, assuming I’m lucky enough to have them — my most wonderful plans are doomed to failure when I don’t take a step back and say, “okay…this solves the problem I identified, HOW?” It’s a simple question. Asking it, sincerely, is tougher than it might seem at first. And if you can manage to pull that off, I’ve learned you get surprised more often than you might expect.

But if I ask that question, with a genuine desire to make sure I’m sticking to my knitting, success is almost always mine. And we haven’t been doing that. Since 2001, what we do, for the most part, is find reasons to blame things on George W. Bush. I don’t want to put words in Mr. Douglas’ mouth, but it seems he has some criticism for us, and it appears to be heading somewhere in that direction. We can disagree about the smaller details, but if I’ve gleaned the overall spirit of his message correctly, I can certainly see where he’s coming from.

[…] I have To Catch A Spy, and it’s one of my favorite stupid old spy-spoof flicks. Momma acted circles around Kirk Douglas, no mean feat that. Share This Article With Others:These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 01/26/2007 @ 07:12

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Happy Birthday Kirk DouglasMonday, December 11th, 2006

Happy Birthday Kirk Douglas
Monday, December 11th, 2006