It’s been a pretty uneventful week. I haven’t had an epiphany about what I wanted to write about. I haven’t been pissed off enough by somebody doing something completely idiotic to want to write about it. There is nothing pressing on my mind. Perhaps I have reached some sort of Zen. I know I have been much calmer this week than I have in a long time. But that doesn’t mean I ignore what’s going on in the world around me.
Politics in general always piss me off, but I don’t want to go there. At least in the traditional sense. Too many people are too misinformed about everything to actually have a productive conversation about democrats and republicans. I believe it has to go much deeper than that in the 21st century. There aren’t just two sides anymore. There is only one. Humanity. It makes me sick to see what is being printed and what comments are being posted in reply to those articles. I know it comes down to a lack of education, but even then, people learn only what they are taught.
I look back at my life and where I grew up and it’s not much of a stretch to see where racism comes from, and discrimination comes from, and how things escalate from just one person talking to another and that person believing what the other person is saying and taking it as truth without any kind of research on their own to find out if it is really the truth. Many people are just too lazy. They go to work, see the same people every day. These people have opinions they talk about with each other around the water cooler and quite honestly the stronger personality intimidates the weaker personality into believing what they are preaching. Even if the weaker personality knows better, the more they are around the stronger personality, the more they tend to follow their opinions.
It’s been happening for tens of thousands of years. It’s not going to end anytime soon. I really believe the only way things are going to change is by educating people about the truth. I believe it is possible, it’s just not probable with the way the press prints whatever they want to, truth or not, and the way the educators are lowering the bar, producing graduates who haven’t really learned how to think for themselves, only to parrot what someone has taught them.
Even within the same college, there are two extremes of the political spectrum. You study something in the arts and sciences, you deal with a lot of democrats. You study something in business and you deal with a lot of republicans. The thing I don’t understand is a college is supposed to be a liberal, free-thinking institution where they educate people in the ways of analytical and philosophical thought. After all, it’s called a liberal arts college for a reason. It’s not called conservative design. I don’t think the two should be allowed to coexist on the same campus. A business college is a glorified trade school. I know. I graduated from one. The only claim I have to know what I’ve been talking about is I also have a degree in social sciences and a minor in psychology, so, at least I’ve taken the courses necessary for free thinking individuals to actually think freely.
I basically have two bachelor’s degrees, just not on paper. I hold an associate of arts in social science and a bachelors of science in accounting with a minor in psychology. I’ve taken the prerequisites in the college of arts and sciences and the college of business. My opinion is they should be the same. If you give a student in the college of business a liberal arts education, s/he won’t grow into some money-hungry, selfish, nonsensical individual running some multi-conglomerate corporation trying to figure out how their company can screw the masses out of their money while personally pocketing as much as they possibly can. Instead, we might find a person who actually cares about the masses and wants to invest in the people who work for them and to give everyone the chance for a piece of the American dream. I know, I know, I’m not going there.
My point is there are thousands of student in the United States getting a streamlined education in various college of businesses around the county and they aren’t learning philosophy, psychology, sociology, theology, classical literature, arts, theatre, dance, music, all of the things which are necessary to sculpt a free-thinking individual who could actually do some good for this country and the people in it. Instead, we get narrow-minded accountants, marketers, and administrators that know only one thing and live by only one thing, how to be the most profitable without concern or care for the people who work for you, the people who live in the community in which you operate, or the people who simply purchase your products or services.
I don’t want to be a rich man. I don’t think anybody needs to have more money than they could possibly spend in a lifetime. I know, you need a summer home in the Hamptons, a winter home in Florida, a nice little flat in London and perhaps a chalet in France. And the expense of keeping all of those houses, come on, right? You need more money. Um, no you don’t. You need to see the true meaning of life through humane eyes and realize no matter how much money you make, you can’t take it with you, so you might as well leave something significant behind. If you’ve got lots of money, help everybody you can. If you don’t have much money, help a few. Every person you affect in your lifetime in a positive way will remember you long after you are dead. Nobody gives a crap how much money you had. We want to know what you did for the survival of our species. Did you give, or did you just take, take, take?
