Another rant. I shoulda had breakfast first –

Last night, after G had yielded to the hour and the mandate of a working man’s weariness, Chaz and I sat up a bit late over our computers, watching re-runs of Stargate.  It’s strange what you hear when your mind isn’t really focused anywhere.  Maybe not strange, considering the stupor of the hour and the volume at which TV commercial sound is produced.  I was struck by one particularly obnoxious car insurance ad—some monster-truck-expo voice growling “GENERAL”, then shooting words at me like I was some dang clay pidgeon: “Call us for an INSTANT quote which WILL include LOW RATES.  Don’t worry about your tickets and your accidents – “

It’s like there’s this force in the universe—I am not going to say entropy, because I’m fond of entropy – but something like that, something that is the opposite of creation, but with attitude.  With gleeful malevolence.  Some force that keeps pushing people off cliffs, willing little lemmings shoved along by this force field.  It fueled this stupid mortgage mess—don’t worry about your bad credit (again, it’s that voice saying “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.”  That same, same voice.  Allusion?  Does anybody remember that voice?).  Don’t worry about proving employment!  COME GET SOMETHING FOR NOOOOOTHINGGGGG.  And it won’t cost you ANYTHING – but the safety of your family, your soul and your sucked out brain.

This force lost its beachhead on the mortgage thing.  So here it is cropping up again all over the place – car insurance.  Lousy, soulless food – at least it’s fast and cheap.  Like the arms of a hydra.

And immediately on the heels of that ad came some other commercial – I don’t even know for what – that ended in this very loud and gleeful imperative: CHOOSE****EASY**** !!!!! 

Easy what?  Easy everything, evidently.  Was it a Payday Loans ad?  Was it a twist off bottle top?  Was it a nice do-it-all-for-you fly vacation at the very center of a rhinestone web?

Can we really be this stupid?

Some months ago, I read a column that addressed something I’d been thinking about for a long time now.  In my head, the concept was the new, inalienable Right to Win.  But this guy had put a different spin on it (wish I knew where the column was – I’d link you to it); he held that people now firmly believe in the right Not to Lose.

Rights are dicey things.  In the Declaration there is that statement of basic human rights:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

And okay, we of the American breed are willing to take – no, almost must take – these words as gospel truth.  Because a system, when it is not based on immutable laws like physics – the laws that have kept the world turning and evolving and surviving all these million millennia—laws not made by human minds, opinions, desires—laws beyond our ability to muck them up, in other words—such a system is based on assumptions, assumptions held in common.

But not all assumptions are created equal.  Some are based in a good deal of wisdom, some (I believe) in inspiration, but many more are based on slant, perspective and the ultimate need for self-preservation.  Thus, some systems last only as long as the mighty arm of interested parties can maintain its control.  The closer the base system comes to truth, the more stable it is—as long as the people within the system are still willing to buy the assumptions it’s based on.

Horses have a weird digestive system, by the way.  It’s not a stomach that fills up with caustic chemicals aimed at breaking down the chemistry of the food eaten.  Instead, it’s this long, softly pleated organ, warm and dark and home to billions of microbes.  The food comes in, and the little microbes pounce on it and tear it into blood-transportable fragments.  If the microbes begin to go bad – if they start to die, the bi-products of their passing poison the system, and the horse dies.  Within hours.

(I’m milking a complicated and not altogether antiseptic and workable metaphor, here.)  When a healthy and stable political system begins to be attacked by microbes – each individual citizen determined to have his own pursuit of happiness defined in his own self-serving manner – the mass that feeds the system will go down, picked to tiny pieces until it is unrecognizable as a mass.  The problem is in the self-serving part, because here is another horse metaphor: if your hungry horse is determined enough to break down his stall gate and serve himself from that mound of hay (potential wealth, comfort, great car, fabulous toys – power, power, freedom, freedom), he will eat until he kills himself.  Happens all the time.  He hasn’t got a sense of when he’s had enough, of when he’s crossed into too much.  He just keeps indulging, and keeps indulging, and then he dies – and it’s a terrible, terrible death.  If microbes eat too much, or eat material they aren’t meant to eat, they die just that same way.

Then the dying microbes take down the system that has sustained them.  A system so big, so complex—thousands of times the size of the individual microbes it houses—so seemingly powerful and evident and eternal that it never once occurred to the microbes that home wasn’t simply eternal reality.

People have to live in an interlaced community.  And that only happens when we can think about each other just as much, if not more, than we think about our own little me, Me, ME.  And that means losing sometimes.  Which may mean not getting what you want.  Not even what you really, really, really want. 

Myself?  I hate races; I hate unnecessary competition.  I think we all just need to be competing with some Plutonian ideal.  But races are human.  And only one person “wins,” which means that everybody else loses.  It’s actually better for the losers, because they then have to realize that there’s more work to be done, and that life, when it doesn’t fit you exactly, has to be met with grace and selflessness.  That’s the only way you can be happy as a loser.  The winners are the ones in most peril of striking the very dangerous, very perilous and ultimately self destructive state of self-congratulation.

In order for us to survive here on spaceship earth, most of us have to lose – at least something – most of the time.  And winners need to understand that they haven’t really won until they take that further step of sharing the winnings.  Because that’s where happiness lies.  Don’t mistake me—I’m not talking about socialism here, or taxes – because I see all that, ultimately, as deeply unhealthy.  This is an inner orientation I’m talking about, an inner imperative that allows us to give up what we might imagine as our destiny, our heart’s desire – our right to happiness – for the sake of the system as an abstract, but also for the sake of the health and safety of other human beings in specific.

I will never understand deaf pride.  I will never understand why I cling to short term, unstable things with the grim grip when there are probably life boats all around me.  The word “pride” now suggests some virtue, where it once was a stamp of dislocation and the isolation of self-congratulation.

I suppose my point here (wait- there’s a point?) is that we do not have a right to win any more than we have a right to self-destruct.  And much less than we have to right to destroy others.  We are not going to win most of the time.  And that may mean that each and every one of us does not get to live the Ideal Life.  We all have a right to a good marriage?  Ha.  We all have a right to – what?  Name anything.  A right to be published????  In your dreams.  A right to buy a flat screen TV?  When you get right down to it, explain your rights to the guy who jumps you in some dark parking lot – “I have a right to privacy, to walk in America without fear, to decide to be in a dangerous place but be protected by God, government and social security.  Oh, and I have a right to own and keep my own property—which includes my purse, the contents of my pockets and the sanctity of my body.  So just get your hands off me and run along home now.”

It’s like stop signs.  ALL THEY ARE is a stick with a flat piece of board attached.  ALL THEY ARE is the word “stop.”  They cannot stop anybody who doesn’t ascribe meaning to them.  They cannot actually stop cars.  And so it is with all human law.

“Rights,” then are really chimerical.  And interesting how the rights of one may compromise the rights of another.

Choose easy.  Hmmmm.  That’s what the guy in the dark parking lot was doing – not the talking one, the one with the tire-iron and the skeptical glint in his eye.  The one who walked away with the wallet.  Easy.  Grunt.  Take what you want.  To hell with what happens to the rest of the world.  And yet, look all around us – it’s spelled out in great big neon balloon shaped letters all over the plate glass of our world.  The new assumption.  The great consumption.  The dying system.  And who’s gonna stop it?  You, maybe.  Me. In tiny little moments that could, if there were enough of them, dam the flow?  Let’s hope so.

I should never, never stay up that late.  Look how I wake up after.