Middlemen and Umbrellas

Disclaimer: Potential unraveling rant coming.

We try so hard or pretend that we are trying when the evidence says we are hardly trying and doing a crappy job of pretending. “If we continue to manage social issues, social issues manage to continue”. Yet we continue to duplicate, modify, and stretch bandaids over gaping wounds, so we don’t need to look at the exposed flaws in our systems.

I have worked and/or volunteered in the community service sector for almost 50 years. I have fed kids, taught reading, donated money, cleaned rivers and pathways, carried water, scrubbed and washed, and swept. I have planned and presented, and raised money. There are hundreds of thousands of us plodding along, substituting for authorities in a broken system who are either oblivious or don’t care that their common sense is nonsense.

Big government and big business, and big charity imagine that they can pave over the real issues of inequity by building more soup kitchens and doling out nickels. All the while, the system churns out poisonous waste and toxic ideas about how our bootstraps will save us. Those who have, want way more, and they don’t want any restrictions on how they obtain it or any criticism of the amount of effort or lack of effort that is required.

The big issues are polarized by posturing that looks like politics but is really personal profiteering. Hyperbole abounds from all sides, and nothing really changes. The world is being destroyed, humanity is dissolving, and we are appeased by entertainers on fields and pitches or arenas and stages, so we don’t see the strings and levers that are being pulled.

My outrageous conclusion is that we are 40 years away from extinction because we are indifferent to the chaos, crisis, and clash of community. There won’t be a second big bang that ends it all; it will sound more like a gull over a garbage dump crying, “mine, mine, mine”.

Rant over