I was talking with a good friend of mine the other evening for several hours. I’d almost forgotten what it’s like to have the kind of in depth conversation that whiles away the hours and challenges the brain cells. If you haven’t tried it, I highly recommend that you find someone with shared interests and divergent knowledge.
Conversing is a skill that’s quickly losing ground to the amazing skill set of the common couch potato (Homo Tuberosum)and that’s a sad commentary on the way the world works these days.
Anyway, this conversation was pretty thorough beginning with environmental impact and the fossil fuel economy and marching through education, politics, evolution, literature, education reform and Stargate. There were stops at international development, american and world history, the thinking behind thinking, and the problems with everything today.
My feeling is that it was so broad because I haven’t talked with any of my old friends about these things for a few months, and to be honest it all sort of builds up if you don’t have any outlets. The other issue is that I am actually informed about what’s going on in the world, instead of buffered in my cocoon of ignorance. I don’t know why but knowing the state of the world is an unhealthy compulsion for me, especially if I can’t bum off to the bar for a few beers and at least bitch about it to someone who’s willing to commiserate with me.
The thing is, I have a lot of criticisms, but no ideas. Or rather my ideas are so radical that they’d require a complete restructuring of society and political thought. In my opinion, for example, the education system we have is completely broken and should be taken out back and shot, then we can build a new one that focuses on helping children to learn in comfortable environments. They’d learn t think for themselves rather than to be a collection of meaningless facts. They would learn in small groups of similarly tempered children. We could start this with less than 1/600th of what we’ve spent in Iraq.
We, as citizens, have the power to effect these changes in our country, but no one seems to know it. Our government has been quietly implanting within us the idea that they have some power not directly derived from us. They’ve strived to become a sort of monarchy where their right to govern stems from some intangible power that only they can commune with. This is probably the best lie they’ve ever told, and also the most widely believed.
The founders of our nation were a bunch of disreputable hicks to the British empire, and yet they stood up and said you do not have the right to do this to us. When they framed the Constitution subsequent to struggling fiercely to defend that very principle, they made it very clear with the first words where the power lay “We the People…” Our government is only legitimate as long as we so deem.
Oh crap, now I sound like a revolutionary. That’s not my meaning, I just think that it’s worthwhile to remember these things, because they aren’t abstract ideals, they are the very center of how we define our nation.
Whatever
