House of Eratosthenes

If you’re like me you’ve been wondering about this for quite awhile. Especially where kids are concerned…you look at the things your family had to enjoy when you were a kid, which in my case were Saturday afternoon chores…you look around at all the ways you can enjoy your leisure time now, how everybody else enjoys their leisure time, what the kids can do with their playtime…especially in those summer months. You think back to days long-gone when work had to get done and yourself & others went day after day without sleep, and you look at what life is like now when you’re under a “crunch” at work…it’s not quite so much like that, is it?

Of course nobody actually reads this blog, but the nobodies who sometimes do, might recall me bitching and bellyaching about people who moan on and on about globular wormening, and then go out and drive big cars…to work. Carrying nothing. Just a laptop computer. To work. Both ways. Five days a week. Twelve miles a gallon. There’s that — and it’s true. But there’s also the carping away about gas prices on top of it.

Trust me on this: This isn’t a gas crisis. A gas crisis is a visible thing. You can look at the cars streaming down the freeway, at the fact that a stout and well-built man who’d been working out, could easily turn any one of ’em over. We don’t have that going on here. A gas crisis isn’t what this looks like, and it isn’t what this is.

Squeeze on the middle class? I was reading about it back when I first started to read newspapers, and that’s probably from a younger age than you might think. We’ve changed everything in our government…and then changed it again…and changed it again and again and again. Throughout all of it, we’ve been hearing how the middle class is getting squeezed out. Now, if there isn’t any shenanigans a-going on, that by itself would be a mighty strange thing wouldn’t it?

Here’s what’s going on in a nutshell. Most if it, anyway. People’s problems are diminishing across time…because over time, said problems have to diminish. The alternative is that all of our problems have to remain exactly as they are, which would mean we’re unready, unwilling or unable to solve them…and that would mean we just don’t care. So if we care about it we’ll fix it, and we are fixing it. We really, really do care about being comfortable. And we are getting more comfortable. That’s where our priorities are. If something is outside our sphere of control, we’ll do what it takes to enlarge the sphere.

So life is improving, and meanwhile our politicians have nothing to gain from pointing it out. Absolutely nothing. Everybody wants to be the Romanov kid swooping in during the Time of Troubles to bring in a new dynasty and start the belated Renaissance. The news channels don’t have anything to gain from pointing it out either. The reality is that others have sacrificed to give you a better life — your parents, your grandparents, the soldiers in the military, and yes, the public servants in government — it’s paid off. You are more comfortable. Life is not a dress rehearsal, and all that…it all boils down to, you really shouldn’t be wasting your time watching the news. We’re just going to tell you about lead in the lipstick, and in three months it’ll be some other damn silly fashionable thing to put in the news…none of it reflecting concerns that should really be foremost in your noggin.

The bottom line is, you ought to be the guy out on the lake enjoying water sports. With your kids. Maybe you think you haven’t the means to do it. Maybe you’re wrong. Maybe there are other ways you can enjoy the time you have with your families. Look forward to the time you’ll be in the ground, pushing up daisies, with your kids poring over whatever memories they have of you. And make the most of The Now. But if you thought about such things, maybe you wouldn’t be watching the news tomorrow, would you? So we can’t have that.

Ours is the very picture of a lifestyle excessively comfortable. Our President gives a speech containing the words “World War Three,” and on that day the top story in the news is a couple of yorkie pups in adorable Halloween costumes.

Grandpa drove a pickup truck to his job as a foreman in the lumber yard when the unions were starting to organize — with a shotgun in the passenger seat. Dad tore cars apart down to their crankshafts, and put ’em all back together again so they’d run perfectly. I designed and wrote the code for document automation systems…and now…we…well, we follow instructions. I’m not going to say nobody does anything amazing anymore. People do. The era of burning the midnight oil, making personal sacrifices to do wonderful things is not over yet. But it’s certainly in a steep decline.

One other thing should be mentioned, I think, even though deep down I think we all understand it anyway. This isn’t something that just happened to us. We’re guilty. We asked for it.

We’ve been putting a constant pressure on ourselves and on each other to take care of one another. Voluntarily, and when we don’t quite feel so charitable, through government so the other guy can be forced to pony up his share. We’ve made the “brother’s keeper” thing into practically its own science, but we forgot to cultivate an environment in which people say “thank you” when they’ve been helped. Think on it — how many times did you say thanks? How many times did someone reach out and lighten your load in some way, whether you requested it or not, or were aware of it at the time or not? The numbers don’t quite match up, do they?

And there’s the spending time with the kids. There’s a certain nobility in not doing this sometimes, you know. Oh it’s a horrifying thought, and nobody says “I wish I spent less time with my kid,” but it’s true. If it weren’t, there wouldn’t be any summer camps — nobody would be sending any kids on them. But we’ve been watching so many of these infernal “family movies” where some adorable little moppet gets that disappointed look on his face because Daddy Isn’t There, that when real-life dad has to work until 6:30 one night everybody asks like he’s been chained down in the salt mines by J.C. Dithers or Scrooge McDuck.

Because that’s one hour less to spend with the tykes.

Until tomorrow-freakin’ night.

Don’t get me wrong. If the dude is still together with the lady who is the Mom, he should make the most of the time he has. But a little perspective, please. A great rule of thumb is if it isn’t worth using up any camera film, stop screeching about it just because an hour and a half of it goes missing. When you work late, it isn’t even flushing the time down the toilet, it’s exchanging it for the livelihood that makes it possible to have the kids in the first place.

We seem to have forgotten that, and as a direct consequence we’ve entered an age of truly excessive comfort — which, in my dictionary, is any kind of comfort beyond our capacity to show gratitude, and genuinely appreciate for what it is. We are unhappy, not because we’ve been deprived of what we need to be that way, but because we’ve suffered a self-inflicted injury on our ability to be happy once we have it.

Rant is over. You may now resume your complaining about the “squeeze” on the middle class, skyrocketing gas prices, globular wormening, that awful war…and your yammering for change, change, change.

Maybe it’s me, but the link to Boortz ain’t workin’, Morgan. I’ve tried it three times and get:

Firefox can’t find the server at http://www.sayanythingblog.com.

Just thought ya might wanna know… OTOH, “sayanything” might be down. Could be all of us nobodies overwhelming the server, ya know.
- Buck | 02/13/2008 @ 18:07
Fourth attempt yields…

MySQL ERROR:

Error Number: 1016

Description: Can’t open file: ‘exp_online_users.MYI’ (errno: 145)

Query: SELECT * FROM exp_online_users WHERE date > 1202968851 AND weblog_id = ‘0’ ORDER BY name

It’s Boortz’ host problem, not yours.
- Buck | 02/13/2008 @ 18:08

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Yeah It’s “Squeeze,” AlrightWednesday, February 13th, 2008

Yeah It’s “Squeeze,” Alright
Wednesday, February 13th, 2008