Look on the Bright Side!

“”‘’—
Heaven knows, I’ve never been accused of being a Polyanna.  (If you don’t know the reference, you should see the Hayley Mills / Disney movie of that name.)  Nevertheless, there are a whole lot of bright sides to practically anything we could want to complain about.

We are in rather a bad recession, we’re just emerging from two expensive wars, the economy is in bad shape, and Congress has succeeded in doing almost nothing except prevent President Obama from dealing with the problems that face the country and its people.  But, for those who care, the so called National Debt is actually said to be shrinking.  I wish I could tell you more, but I think this is one of those things that is difficult to get a handle on, because the fabulous National Debt could mean different things.  It could be (A) the amount by which actual government expenditure exceeded the revenue (money the government made from taxes and other levies).  This should actually be called the amount by which the National Debt is Growing.  [The National Debt] could also be (B) the difference between Government expense and revenue as a fraction of the Gross Domestic Product.  It could be (C) any of the earlier quantities adjusted for inflation.  It could be (D) any of the earlier quantities, together with the interest we owe on it.  In any case, some authors insist that it is growing faster than ever before, and others insist that in the past year and a half, it has shrunk.

We certainly are fighting wars, but to some extent the personnel deployed in the battle zones are outsourced to companies like Halliburton, some are security companies that have been hired to protect various parts of the operation, which is both an advantage, and a disadvantage, because the conduct of those personnel does not fall under US martial law, and their position under various conventions might be open to question.  For instance, if they are caught behind enemy lines without uniform, can they be considered spies?  The US taxpayer does indirectly pay for them (and they are quite expensive), but at least they are not the young people who sign up for the army, and I can’t bring myself to care about them as much as I do about the enlisted troops.

The rate at which unemployment has fallen since October 2008 is much faster than the rate at which jobs increased in all previous major economic crises.  (Again, I don’t know where to look for this data, and I’m relying on White House information.)  In addition, by next year, even the unemployed will have the opportunity to sign on to medical insurance, which the unemployed in years gone by did not have.  The Republican Congress has been busy with a massive campaign to discourage the people from taking advantage of buying health insurance when offered, which would make the insurance higher for those who do, because the insurance companies must make a profit, and they will only make a profit on those who buy insurance.  (This is the contradiction in the position of the Republicans.  They insisted that the Insurance Industry must be a player in Health Reform, but they don’t want to work with the Health Reform plan they insisted upon, for political reasons.  They worked with the Insurance Lobby when writing the law, but continue to subvert the intent of the law.  To be honest, it was a different set of Republicans who cooperated with the Democratic majority in 2009, when the law was put together.)

Today, we have a crisis in education, with kids doing badly in US schools.  But remember: (A) they are only doing badly compared with the rest of the world, which is trying very hard to be better than the US.  But, let’s face it: it isn’t too difficult.  Also, (B) our kids have to deal with parents who are spending more time at work than they did in the fifties, for instance.  Women are out working, too, which means they are not at home, helping kids with their homework, etc.  But think: the parents of our kids today are far more likely to have a high-school education than their parents were.  Unfortunately, parents today are probably more likely to have forgotten practically everything they learned in school.  (C): most kids are finishing school today; the dropout rates are low.  (D) kids have instant access to factual information on the Internet, if only they know enough to see though fake information.

Look at TV.  We’re seeing a ton of junk on practically every channel, in contrast to the highly predictable junk we used to see in the seventies, for instance.  TV executives are not the smartest fries in the Happy Meal, but  they’re beginning to figure out how to make money without delivering the real goods, which is what people learn in Business School.  So there is a lot of junk, and a lot of people mindlessly watching the junk.  But I see several silver linings in this particular cloud.

Some of the programs available today are really good.  I wish I could steer you to them, but I’m not at a TV long enough to learn where to look.  All I know is that I do see amazingly good shows, usually when they’re on YouTube.  Just the other day, my wife showed me a really funny program that used to air on MTV in the bad old Beavis and Butthead days; it was called Daria.  I think there was even a live-action movie based on that animated series, but I only saw the trailer.  So, the take-away: there is good stuff on Cable TV, but you have to look hard for it.  If your idiot friends (or spouses) have control of the remote, you’re out of luck.  There is no bright side to having stupid friends.

There have been two appallingly bad Presidents of recent times: the Bushes, pater and fils.  But, on the bright side, we have elected not only an African American for the first time in US History to be the President, but an articulate, elegant and persuasive man.  Furthermore, we’re very very likely to elect a truly effective woman President in 2016, though we may have to endure a vituperative and vicious election season.  If Chris Christie wins the Republican nomination, and if he and Hilary Clinton run a civil race, despite the disgusting rhetoric that certain segments of the population are wont to indulge in, I will be happy, and I will say: I am ready to die; Swing low, sweet chariot.

We have learned, painfully, that it is not the extramarital sex enjoyed in the White House, but the state of the country and the laws that are passed, and the way they are enforced, how programs are funded, and the quality of judges that are appointed that reflect on the quality of a particular Presidential administration.  Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter were two of the greatest presidents that this country has known, but Republicans work day and night to denigrate their records.  We do not know, but as far as we can tell, the Republican presidents have had far less exciting private lives in the White House than the Democrats.  One wonders why, though, all this furious Republican continence has not accompanied real gains for the country!  A White House Conduct versus National Progress chart, if one could make such a thing, would look very confusing.

Culturally, it will appear to most Baby Boomers as though the music available today is terrible compared to the music that was being played in the earlier part of the last century.  Certainly the popular dances of the old days seem more graceful and fun to watch than the jerky Hip-Hop dances we see on YouTube.  Perhaps Hip-Hop is fun to dance; I wouldn’t know.  But Ballet is alive and well, but not a lot of people attend the Ballet.  Ballet companies across the country are in trouble, as are the big orchestras.  We have to do something about this.  There is no lack of rich individuals and corporations who would support such things as Ballet and Opera and Classical Music, if only they were confident that people wanted them to continue to exist.

The big problem is with the lack of leisure time, and the energy to enjoy it when we finally  have a free moment.  Unless we turn to solving the problem of lack of leisure very soon, our society will unravel.  On the other hand, the things most people do to unwind after work are uninteresting, uncreative and dull.  This is a big problem.  Our culture consists now mostly of playing complex electronic games, and watching reality TV, and we need to be saved from this.  There is no lack of creative talent out there; we know that.  But it isn’t being managed and promoted in a way calculated to improve and develop leisure time activity.  The almighty dollar is skewing things a lot more destructively than it did in the previous century.  Why is this?  Perhaps because there are a lot of no-talent businessmen with insatiable appetites for money, who have got a lock on all sort of businesses.  Business today is good for nothing but business itself.

Young kids today are definitely brighter than any previous generation, but they do seem to degenerate into boring teenagers far more rapidly, even if the rates of degeneration vary wildly from family to family and locality to locality.  Admittedly, any given person has less insight into what any other person is doing than ever before, because there is such diversity in our modern society, so a lot of what I’m commenting on is based on very incomplete information indeed.  (This increase in diversity is another manifestation of Entropy, the increase in randomness, which in Physics serves to describe the phenomenon that extremes in temperature gradually give way to a uniform warmth, and ultimately at the end of time all matter will be at a uniform temperature, and all processes will come to a halt.  You ask: is it temperature differences that drive processes?  The answer is: Yes.)  Undoubtedly, there is a lot of wonderful stuff going on in various backwaters of America, but there is just too much going on for anyone to recognize enough of it.  TV, which in the past showed us ourselves, has stopped portraying the typical family or community, and focuses on portraying what they deem to be the most interesting to watch, which of course are the most outlandish.  Someone must tell them to stop this.  PBS, arguably, shows the least exciting, but the most heartening material.

Ultimately, we’re in a position of having to take on faith that good things are happening out there.  We know some things are better: homosexuals and minorities have a larger say in what happens; even the highly conservative Supreme Court has come out in support of certain progressive reforms.  The Democratic Party is still in business, and its supporters are a lot less complacent now than they were a decade ago.  Still, the expenses of getting decent people elected to public office are totally unreasonable.  Lobbying reform, campaign reform are all desperately needed.  The tendency to get lobbyists to write laws on behalf of Congress is very distressing indeed.  There are numerous accusations that the Insurance Lobby wrote large portions of the Affordable (Health) Care Act.  This could be taken to mean that members of Congress simply do not have the expertise to write effective legislation.  On the other hand, the accusations might simply stem from the fact that Congress permitted the Insurance Industry to participate in writing the proposed legislation to lessen the suspicion of the Insurance Industry that it would be hugely negatively impacted by it.  Why they need to be reassured, I don’t know; they have surely fleeced the population for long enough.  I would not be surprised if there have to be further reforms in Health Care in the coming years; this first step was, in my own mind, an experiment.  It might not have been intended that way, but it will certainly show the Conservatives just how little the Insurance Industry can be trusted with the common good.

One thing I’m not in favor of is the Democrat insistence on maintaining the looseness of voter identification requirements.  True, lots of blacks and senior citizens don’t have photo ID.  But look, what century is this?  How hard is it to get a photo ID?  If you have no way of establishing who you are, how are we to deal with your dead body if it shows up in a morgue?  Our whole society depends on getting things to the right people.  Be it food stamps, or a package in the mail, we need to know that you are who you say you are.  I’m with the GOP on this one.  I know it is a matter of politics to be against voter ID reform, but I believe it is better to spend some money in getting everybody dependable photo ID than to keep the laws allowing anyone to vote without satisfactory proof of who they are.  It is probably worth the money spent to get ID for people who can’t afford to do it themselves, than to spend it on TV spots for some loser Democrat who will probably turn conservative once he or she gets into Congress.

It is very difficult to get intelligent, cooperative, energetic people who can think on their feet to run for office as Democrats.  All those who are interested in running for office seem to be conservatives.  This is a major problem.  But the youngest generation, those just out of college and those going into college right now are far more liberal than they have been for many years.  We have to keep our message out there: the Democrats have a lot to offer, and this is their time.

[2013/8/14]
My older relatives deplore the spread of e-books.  (To be honest, it isn’t the very young who read e-books, but folks in their fifties or forties who buy these devices; we can only hope that the younger people will read more eventually.)  But look on the bright side: literally millions of public domain books are being put online by public service projects.  Since these books are out of copyright, their authors (or their representatives) are no longer interested in publishing them, so they do not get printed, for the most part, except for really hugely popular books such as Treasure Island.  Some of these books are not worth reading, but many of them are.  They would not be available conveniently if not for e-books. I urge my readers to save up, and buy these e-readers, and read these public domain books!

[To be continued.]