Liberal Arts

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 21^st 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? 

Rudeness

When did it become fashionable to be rude? I grew up in a small town in Wyoming and although there were many things not so right with the morals of the people I grew up around, at least they were friendly and didn’t act like they had a huge corncob stuck up their respective asses. When I walked down the street people looked at me and smiled and said hi and acted like they were genuinely concerned about me and glad that they had seen me that day. My father used to tip his hat at every woman he passed, whether he had a hat on or not. I never figured out if that was him just being nice, or his womanizing disability. Nowadays, you’re lucky if you get someone to look up from the screen that they are texting on. Yet, that has only happened recently.

Three or four years ago when everyone wasn’t texting, they might have been talking on their phone, but they were still usually looking down at their feet. And, even before cell phones became so popular, people still looked at their feet. I used to wonder what the fascination was with everyone’s feet. I’ve seen my feet hundreds of times, I can walk on a sidewalk without looking down, why do people stare at their feet when you encounter them? Not to mention that there used to be these booths on corners and in front of stores all over the country that contained phones in them. They were in booths for two reasons, one, for privacy, and two, so I didn’t have to stand there and listen to your conversation because it’s rude. But, I digress.

I went back to college in my late thirties to finish my bachelor’s degree and had firsthand experience with how the younger generations treated each other and the people around them. For the most part, they were still respectful to most authority figures. They would call their professors by their appropriate titles when they addressed them. Not so much when they were talking about them with each other. And, well, they had some manors, but it could have just as well been a big front. I certainly didn’t get deep into the belly of the college beast. I wasn’t allowed because of my age. Most everyone was nice to me and I made quite a few friends. Friends I’m sad to say, lost touch all too quickly after graduation. Which makes me think that they behaved differently around me than they did amongst themselves. But, back to my point. Even though they acted nice for the most part, there wasn’t a day that went by where I wasn’t appalled at what someone did or said. And many times, these were the people that I just referred to as my friends. These were my cohorts, too.

I wonder where manors went? When did they become extinct? Because, really, when I pass you on the street and you completely ignore me as if I’m not even there, I want to tell you to go fuck yourself. I want to ask you, “who made you so special that you think you can just completely ignore another member of the human race?” Of course, I know all about the fundamental attribution error. That person could have any number of things going on with their lives. Perhaps, their mother just died or their spouse just asked them for a divorce. I know that some people have bona fide excuses for being rude, but you can’t tell me that 95% of all people I meet on the street have the same kind of excuse for their sad actions.

I suppose the problem has hundreds of different contributing factors, and I could spend a lifetime trying to research and dissect the problem. I just want people to understand that the planet is getting smaller and smaller every day. As long as the birth rate is higher than the death rate, there is going to be less and less space for all of us to live. We are all going to be forced to see more and more of each other on a daily basis. So, I ask you to please make eye contact with the people you pass on the street and smile at them. Pay it forward. It’s the only way that this planet is going to be a place worth living on. We all simply have to be nice to each other. We all have to take care of each other. We all have to step back and decide which is more important; selfishness, or the environment in which our kids are going to grow up in? Our kids, their kids, their kids’ kids, and so on. No one, not even the people that actually own land, have the right to treat it any which way they want to. It’s the same with public spaces. No one has the right to be an ass when they are present in a public space. I’m trying to raise my kids right. I don’t know about your problems, but I bet they aren’t much different than mine. So, get over yourself.

Maybe it’s just me. I don’t know. To be honest, I don’t like too many people, as you may have guessed, but I do care about other people. I think that everyone has certain inalienable rights and since everyone’s space is starting to overlap everyone else’s, you have to be a bit more careful what you do, because you just might be treading on someone else’s rights. It’s not tolerance we should be striving for, it’s cohesiveness. Humanity must eventually come together and act as one. I believe that we can all have one set of morals. That we can all treat each other as we would like to be treated. With respect, with courtesy, with kindness, with care. I believe that there are certain human attributes ingrained in all of us that would allow this to happen. We all know what to do, we just choose not to because we are all so busy ignoring each other, that we don’t see outside of our living rooms anymore, or in this case, the tops of our shoes. Ignorance is not bliss, it is downright criminal. Be nice, people. I guarantee you’ll feel better because you will be making a difference.