Lessons And Lesions

I have said it before, and I will say it again – Covid, among the many things it has been, has been a lesson that the U.S. and world should have been keen to learn but which we still seem unable to comprehend. 

We are not ready for the worst. 

At all. 

In any way. 

Whether it should be a disease, a catastrophe, an insurrection, an attack, or something else, we are not prepared. I will be fair in saying some things there’s no real preparation for how devastating it can be. That doesn’t mean we don’t plan for it just the same. They have put stores of seeds in a remote place so that if the worst ever did come to pass and humanity was put at risk then we could at least have a chance to reboot things…if the survivors find out where this place is and can reach it, that is. 

Whoops!

From education, to the service industry, to supply chain issues we have been taught SO many lessons during Covid but we can’t even seem to learn the most obvious one – 

That’s it’s not always about you. 

People learned of Covid and immediately called it the China virus. The first thing they did was to place blame and racism. 

Then when it came to masking up they insisted that it was their body and their choice (all while rubbing their hands together to plot the death of Roe v. Wade). 

Then vaccines, oh, well, that’s the government trying to fill you full of robots and trackers and things that’ll change your DNA. 

They forget that the people in charge, awful as they are DO need us since they don’t wanna flip their own burgers. 

It’s not like they are literally trying to kill us off. 

Good grief. 

Fueled by the ego of one man, this weird conspiracy syndrome swept America and over and over we saw protests and screaming and flouting of the rules. We saw people refusing to just do the bare minimum to keep themselves AND us safe. 

Why?

Because, that’s why. 

Because they didn’t wanna. 

WAH!

And yet we think that if something bigger or worse happens we’ll join together, hold hands, and find a way through it?

Please. 

That’s not America. 

Not anymore.

People would grab their guns and turn tribal as they protect vague things they say they believe in as they just really look for a legal way to kill people. 

That’s who we’ve become. 

You would think that we’d all be able to agree that education is important, for the person and the nation. Right? That seems pretty non-controversial. AH, but is it?

INDOCTRINATION!

GAH!

Suddenly kids who are trying to come to terms with their bodies, their feelings, and their growing responsibilities also have to deal with parents who are interested not in making sure their kid is successful in school but instead how they are taught. Parents care about sports, proms, yearbooks, and suddenly if their kids are taught about slavery or that gay people exist. 

This is where we’re at. 

Kids need support, not crazy. 

One of the simple lessons we should have learned during Covid was that education has to do better to connect to kids and to adapt to the changing landscape. Instead of working on that we’re mired in the same nonsense we were in the ‘50’s. Sex education is evil. Talking about anything concerning people of color is wrong. Not teaching about God is sinful. Not teaching that America is a holy land of God is Communist. Books that are not written for babies is wrong. 

UGH!

We aren’t trying to help kids be successful so much as trying to make them into robots who shake their fists at anything not white and proud. 

It’s like these parents don’t think their kids will go into a world where people of color or of different religions or of different orientation exist. 

It’s crazy. 

We should be focusing on how to make learning more impactful and lasting and not a chore. Nope. We want to sit in our own pee and threaten administrators. 

There isn’t even an opportunity to find a middle ground where the focus is on bettering kids. 

Nope. 

It’s all or nothing and the kids lose out no matter what. 

But then why should I think education matters to people who willfully plug their fingers in their ears and close their eyes to the world they don’t understand? Education isn’t a real priority for them ’cause they gots the teevee to tell ’em what tuh thunk.

Something else you would think we would have figured out is that without jobs and without goods there is no society. Listen to what Max Brooks says and it’s horrifying. Brooks is an author that also happens to know his stuff about history and he advises Washington on possible things to look for such as what we see happening in the Ukraine – our food supply is held hostage, essentially, during a war not on our shores. Or you have companies patenting new versions of corn or wheat and breeding out other varieties so that we have to get THAT company’s product or nothing at all. 

Yikes. 

We have allowed the small farms to all but dry up and die so that all we have are giant, industrial farms that only focus on whatever the want to focus on. We have to get it from them. The thing though is that they aren’t producing enough to feed all of us. We still need grains and other things from overseas which, again, means we have to hope there’s no war or poor weather. 

Yeah, as we destroy the planet we have to trust that the weather will behave enough so we can be fed. 

Great. 

One would THINK that we’d work harder to make sure that the smaller, regional farms survive and can offer alternatives to the industrial farms who care only about profits and nothing else. 

Profits. 

Sure, Covid screwed everyone when we all had to stay at home to hide from the virus. Some of us got to work from home. Some of us lost our jobs. While all of this was happening companies were standing with their hands out for government money, claiming poverty while they thought of ways to cut labor. 

We are at a time where people need jobs but mysteriously, people don’t want to work. 

Do you really believe that?

Sure, for a while there people didn’t want to risk their health, not for minimum wage. 

But once the government money ran out you have no choice. 

And while I get that a lot of people think that most of us out here are lazy and unwilling to work, the fact is that we do want to work because we don’t want to live on the street. 

Besides, we’re all addicted to ‘stuff’ too much to just not have money for that stuff. 

We have watched as companies treat their workers like replaceable parts, only to then cry out to the heavens when they realize that they can’t run everything with robots. 

They need people. 

IT’S PEOPLE!

But that isn’t the only problem, it’s the corporate greed that’s gotten so out of hand that we have billionaires, bored and full of ego, deciding that they want to take over companies because they can and have some sort of vision they think is genius. 

That ‘genius’ then led to firings. 

Whoops. 

Or you get a company that decides being big isn’t enough, they have to be everything so they eat another big company because what else do you do with all that money you have? Certainly not pay workers more. HA! So they gobble each other up and every ‘merger’ means that the snake sheds its old skin and people are ‘laid off’, which is just a bloodless and cowardly way to say fired. 

So now there are more people out looking for jobs at places who want years and years of experience for minimum pay. 

Or they want no one at all. 

We let them create these pseudo monoplies then watch helplessly as they fail to meet demands during crisis times because they are suddenly the only game in town.

We don’t encourage competition anymore with big business so we are left looking overseas when we’re in a bind, and then we’re at someone else’s mercy and whims.

It’s madness.

OH, but by god the thing to get upset over in America is MASKS!

RARRR!

And the lessons go on and on and on. We have watched tyranny from afar but still feel like we want a bully who shouts down anyone who questions them to lead us. We still don’t see that democracy doesn’t work at the end of a loaded gun. We still won’t get that there is no reasonable reason people need weapons of war for their homes. 

We are a country where some thing Pro God, Pro Guns, Pro Life somehow isn’t a viewpoint that makes no sense. 

They love god, they are pro life, and they want to make sure they have the right to kill you if they think you’re doing something they deem illegal. 

Er…

Uh…

OK. 

This is where we are though. 

And I get it, I am no better because I should save money for the future and should not buy the silly things I do because I need to be responsible. I think that sort of thing though is a little different from someone thinking that a woman’s right not to have a child she needs to take care of for the rest of their lives is illegal. 

Instead of getting ourselves together for a world that is getting more and more dangerous we’re inching towards another civil war just because some people want to live in fear of everything not themselves. 

We can build better systems to protect cities from flooding.

We can plan for war and what it would do to our country. 

We can work to make it so people can’t get away with insurrection. 

We can protect workers and their rights and stop allowing giant companies to just swallow everything and become monopolies. 

We can encourage small business more. 

We can focus on the education of kids and not the politics of educating them. 

We can work to get people the mental help they need.

We can work to get the weapons of war out of stores and into gun shops for shooing on the range only.

We can change a little to save the planet we cannot live without. 

Or we can stay the same and put our hands on our hips, and stick our lower lip out and know that in the back of our waistbands is a gun and you’ll have to kill us before we’ll give that up. 

…c…

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