I have never been big on touring. Not that I don’t like the sensation of travel, and peering over a ridge into a new valley, but there must be a greater goal. In my younger day the “greater goal” that budged me was usually a woman who I thought might be my “unmet friend”, or, (more rarely), a writer, editor or publisher who I thought might be my “unmet friend”, yet, looking back, I have always preferred people to places. Even during my days as a drifter, when I traveled the United States top to bottom and coast to coast, and touched Europe and Asia as well, I tended to bog down once I arrived at a certain place, and got to know the people.
This perhaps is demonstrated by the mileage of my first car, a 1973 Toyota with a miniscule 1200 cc engine, which I brought brand new in May 1974 for a sale price of $2390.00; (it was literally the cheapest new car in the market back then; I couldn’t afford a Volkswagen “bug” at $2800.00 or a Fiat at $2600.00). Fourteen years later its amazingly rusted body and frame was about finished, and its little engine reincarnated as the engine for a rustic Navajo sawmill. At that time the vehicle, which had served me well as I lived in Massachusetts; New Hampshire; Maine; New Jersey; Ohio; Myrtle Beach, South Carolina; briefly in Galveston, Texas; Santa Cruz, California (all the salty places-by-the-sea helped rust away the body); and finally at many locals in and near the Navajo Reservation in New Mexico and Arizona, was a vehicle which had accumulated a pathetic total of only 89,900 miles. I have friends (salesmen/deliverymen) who have driven more than that in a single year.
The fact of the matter is that once I arrived at a place I had to do what tourists don’t. I had to get a job. Even when I was a young artist and abhorred jobs, I had to mooch, and one reason I started working Real Jobs was because mooching involves more work than working does. But in either case I found work close to where I lived. My longest “commute” was five miles, and often I found it possible to walk to work. This allowed me to understand the people I lived midst in ways tourists can’t.
Furthermore, I was not studying the “other” culture like an anthropologist does, from a podium, peering down a long nose. Usually I was down and out, and desperate. One finds it hard to be high and mighty when desperate for work. And this turns out to be a good thing, when it comes to getting to know a so-called “people”, whether they be an official “people” like the Zuni tribe, or an unofficial “people” like the rednecks of South Carolina. What one gets to know is that, even if the particular “people” can never get past seeing you yourself as an “alien”, you yourself can learn to see we are all created equal, and are all brothers and sisters under our skin.
In a sense I agree with Will Rogers, who once said, ““I joked about every prominent man of my time, but I never met a man I didn’t like.”
When younger I disapproved of joking about others, always seeing the better side of people and expecting the best, but, after learning the hard way that people are not always the saints they could be, I learned to joke.
Few of us achieve Perfection, and, perhaps after a few drinks, most of us can confess we have succumbed to temptations in our time, though we prefer to call our moral failures “foibles” to admitting they are “sins.” Hand in hand with our growing awareness of our own ineptitude at achieving sainthood, comes a growing awareness that most others are not so hot at being saints, either. Then, as our songs slip from what William Blake called “Songs of Innocence” to “Songs of Experience”, we perhaps stop optimistically seeing only the better side of people, and instead see good and bad is in every man. At this point a choice must be made. It is this: Can you still meet a man and like him, despite his imperfections?
(I sure hope so, for otherwise no one will ever like me.)
At this point a sad side of human nature can rear up. Some develop a superiority complex, and fail to see all are brothers and sisters under the skin. They are repelled by unity, and cannot follow the Christ’s example of washing the feet of a leper. They instead want their own feet washed, preferably by beautiful servants and never by a leper.
A superiority complex is a nasty ailment, for it causes the afflicted to divide, utilizing a variety of incisors to separate people in terms of skin color, sex, religion, fame, accumulated income, political power, military might, physical and emotional attractiveness, occult ability, or what-have-you, with the aim being to keep themselves “on top”. It is due to such division that some Americans refer to others as “bitter clingers” and “deplorables”, rather than correctly: As brothers and sisters within an union which is “indivisible”.
I have done a lot of thinking about that word, “indivisible”. After all, it is in the United States Pledge of Allegiance I recited several thousand times as a boy. “…One nation, under God, indivisible…” Even if Atheists remove the words, “under God”, it is still,”…one nation, indivisible…”. And what does this suggest? It suggests that any who divide are breaking the pledge.
Sadly, there are people to whom a pledge means nothing. They place their hand on the Bible and promise, but it means nothing. At the alter they promise to be faithful to their spouse, but they find excuses to break their word. They can marry ten times. The word marriage becomes meaningless. Their word means nothing. Yet they feel they are the “elite”.
It seems odd that the “elite” think they are so high and mighty, when they can’t even keep their word, whereas those who they deem “deplorables” and “bitter clingers” keep their word, even at great cost.
This is borne out by a simple statistical analysis of who donates a higher percentage of their income to charity, the rich or the poor. The working poor are far more generous than the rich are. (People reduced to leeching off welfare are not included in such analysis, although they too can be generous with their welfare checks.)
To envision the generosity of the working poor it is best to see things in terms of so-called “disposable” income. That is the money you have left over after paying for a bare minimum of food; rent and/or mortgage; clothing; and transportation to and from work. For the fellow and gal working to pay a mortgage on a trailer in a trailer park, with two children to feed and clothe, the “disposable” income is a small amount. But they may save that small amount, reducing or going-without luxuries such as beer and cigarettes, hoping to save for some special item that means a lot to them (even if not to others), (for example, a ticket to a ball game.) Then, just when they nearly have enough saved, they hear of a neighbor whose trailer burned down. What do they do? Put a ball game ahead of a suffering neighbor? No. Over and over you witness them go without, to help others.
Compare this with the behavior of a fellow who has lucked into a good job that pays big bucks. His paychecks are so big that he pays for a penthouse with ease, and he has a “disposable” income every week which is larger than the poor could accumulate in a year. Therefore every week he is able to donate far more than the poor can, but every week he delays his donation. Every week he faces some “elite necessity”, which argues it must come first. For example, he “needs” to buy a thousand dollar suit, to fit in with the other elites. He “needs” to attend a conference in Bali, not that the conference has anything to do with the nuts and bolts of his business, but it is “image enhancement” to jet to Bali and hobnob with others about Global Warming, for that is where the jet-setters decided to hold their conference, regardless of the huge “carbon emissions” involved. (Yes, this has happened on numerous occasions, if not in Bali than in other luxurious places.) As weeks pass the elite “needs” always come first, and, even if they initially had good intentions, those intention to help those in need of help are never realized, until the phenomenon warps into a strange hypocrisy which puts elite “need” so far above what the poor truly need, that the hypocrisy becomes a derangement.
Such hypocrites love to appear sophisticated, without researching the word “sophist”, or understanding the glib logic of sophists is too often specious. At times the elite become as mad as addicts, snarling they “need” the very poison which is destroying their life.
In any case, despite all the “disposable” income the elite have, they have little left to actually donate to the poor, and in fact in many cases the elite wind up deep in debt, which means they haven’t even helped themselves. Then they require pity, and charity.
In my life I’ve had the odd fortune to hobnob with both the rich and the poor, and the best thing to do is to avoid division, and simply say, “good and bad is in everyman.” However it is also said that, “It is easier for a camel to fit through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into heaven”, and, “Blessed are the poor.” This demonstrates division is even in the scriptures that seek to unify us. Therefore, though I’ve met spiritual rich people unlike the “elite” I describe, and have met poor, savage desperados who could have killed me simply because their mood was sour, I have found, as a general rule, the poor are more kind and more giving.
You may scoff, “It is easy to give all you have when you only have a dollar,” but I’ve yet to see a rich person give everything they have. And what is worse, some rich people actually make money from poverty. They cry out we need to help the poor, but rather than their own wallets getting more slender their wallets grow plumper. They have the charity of a fox and offer the honey of a Venus fly trap.
Excluding the occasional spiritual rich-person, and also excluding the worst desperados among the poor, who would you rather associate with? Speaking only for myself, I prefer the working poor. In other words I prefer the exact same people the elite sneer at as being “deplorables” and “bitter clingers.”
They are also called the “masses”. Even the “sheeple”. They are deemed easily swayed and controlled, by the adroitly manipulative elite. Nothing could be more dangerous than such disdain, for the rabble you rouse can turn on a dime and come stampeding towards you. Those who live by misleading die mislead.
In actual fact the “sheeple” get that name because they are trusting their shepherd. They are faithful and loyal, as a wise boss understands and greatly appreciates, and he attempts to shower them with kindnesses.
One kindness shown around here involved the soaring price of a ticket to a baseball game. When I was a boy it was a couple dollars, and I could take the subway to Fenway Park and pay my own way, with my spending money. But the salaries of players soared and things reached a point where not only a boy couldn’t afford a game, but an ordinary working man couldn’t afford a game. At that point smart bosses, who could afford far more, bought blocks of seats as “season tickets”, calling it a “tax deductible business expense”, which allowed them to treat potential customers from time to time, but also allowed them to splurge on their hard working employees. Where an employee would have to scrape together weeks worth of “disposable” income for a single ticket, the boss (who wasn’t going to use the season tickets for that particular game) might give them four tickets for free, so an employee could bring his wife and kids. The employee’s gratitude was all out of proportion to what it cost the boss, but he was well aware, (even if he himself thought sports were stupid and a waste of time), that his employees liked him more and became more faithful and loyal.
In some cities it was not the general public paying for the tickets that paid for the player’s huge salaries, but a multitude of small businessmen, who bought blocks of season tickets. Therefore only very stupid players would support mobs that looted and burned such small businesses. However it seems many player have decided they too are members of the elite, removed from the plebian Hoi Polloi. They live on some hoity-toity cloud, divided from the sheeple, rather than seeing themselves as members of a single, unified, indivisible city.
It is not merely the athletes who seem to have forgotten who pays their bills, but all of the elite. Somehow such people seem prone to forgetting that, without people working in the fields, we don’t eat. Clothing does not grow in closets. Lightbulbs don’t glow on their own, and when power returns in a storm some unseen lineman is out working in the wind. All around the elite, the “deplorables” are feeding and clothing and sheltering them, preserving and protecting them like the benevolent and compassionate hands of God. How can they then have the utter audacity to call themselves “elite”, to divide “ordinary” people from themselves, supposedly “on top”????
I assert they are separating and segregating themselves from the very salt of the earth. Even if the rest of us are sheeple, they are unfit to be our shepherds. They have no idea how a herd even works, and remind me of an expert on the mechanics of the old-fashioned, non-electric, ring-a-ding cash registers taking the back off a new and modern cash register, with complex wiring and boards, and exploring with his screwdriver, and promptly producing a bright blue spark and cloud of smoke. (I knew such an old expert, and he told me he left in a hurry.) In like manner, concerning the sheeple, the elite assume the herd is all lambs, with some meek and easily-panicked ewes. Then they see their first ram. Next they notice the ram is not the only ram. Lastly they notice all the rams are lowering their horns and digging at the earth with their right, front hoof.
It is only at this late date does it occur to the elite that maybe the idea we are all of one herd, indivisible, is better than being able to look at others as mere sheep. The sheep don’t look so sheepish when it is a multitude of angry rams between you and the door. Yet so it was in the French Revolution, when the elite began by leading the lambs and ewes to the slaughter of the guillotine, and ended with their own heads thrust and bowed before that plunging blade.
Far better it seems, to me, to tour a land that is indivisible. A land where, like the eyes in our own skulls, we believe two views are better than one, and United We Stand. After all, having two eyes gifts us with depth perception, a gift which a cyclops sorely lacks, and which a cyclops cannot even conceive, because sadly, (like some elitists), you cannot conceive what you have never seen.
But I have seen it. Even in California, which some think is beyond redemption. If you tour this land, getting boots dirty rather than listening to pundits, what you see is the salt of the earth, with good at its core. You might even say we have God in our guts.
Sunrise's Swansong 