I have a friend who rants against entitlements. I have heard him do so while buying a senior citizen's ticket at the local cinema and purchasing a senior discount train ticket on Metro North. This is a fellow of some means.
I have another friend, who hates the way that the country has, not so much gone to the dogs, as it has gone to the lobbyists. She is a member of AARP and AAA and practices real estate sales. She is assisted in these by a small army of lobbyists in Washington and state capitals. Even when she buys her corn flakes at the grocers, she is assisted by the corn, cereal, packaging, advertising, marketing, food manufacturing, farmer, trucking, road building, fertilizer, tractor, cash register, and grocery lobbies. Just to name a few.
Both, of course, hate other people's debt and their own taxes.
This morning, while contemplating the course of my day and making my plan of attack to bring organization and fiscal sanity to the world of municipal parking meter management, my concentration was broken by the mating calls of two very loud leaf-blowers. These things are to rakes what ipods were to stereo systems. Apparently, we must continue to be more productive and efficient in ridding our grounds of leaves, even in summer, at the high cost of our hearing and having even a semblance of quiet in the morning.
I have little doubt that the leaf-blower lobby is a mighty one, although I have a lot of doubt about whether many of those who wield these weapons will form their own associations, which would require the filling out of forms and the presentation of certain documents regarding identity.
Our two political "parties," assisted by an upstart third, largely a media invention, are pretenders. They have allowed themselves to become not much more than extremely large lobbying machines for every citizen and especially for large organizations all the time, and for themselves.
The great zen teacher and, at least by my calculation, humorist, Alan Watts has written:
"...If you discover yourself in a blind alley, or even a cul-de-sac, the fact that you found yourself there will invariably tell you something."
What he meant, I think, was that this moment or any moment has its own possibilities beyond what may seem to be the obvious ones. Instead of torturing ourselves with these versions of what we might do to avoid fiscal calamity, to pull one more rabbit out of a hat whose bottom has finally worn through, we should stick with what we know for sure...
...something has come to an end.
Then, we should probably call Steve Jobs and an even Higher Power for an immediate re-design.
We have a no-party system; the two party system, as we've known it, is over. At least for now. When this whole charade is over next week, we will be told "the system worked" in a hundred different ways and they will all be lies.
It is better to know the real problem and not know exactly what to do about it yet, then to have manufactured one (debt ceiling) and created fool-proof solutions, which by definition are made by fools.
If we're looking for a savior: Godot, the Good Witch, Lincoln, Churchill, or Joan of Arc, we will need to look in a mirror this time around.
If you make $200,000 and get taxed at 30%, it's easy to see why'd you'd like someone who made $2Billion to pay more than their current 15%. Actually, I'd rather you both paid the 15% and got no deductions. I't also easy to see why we would all expect GE and Exxon to contribute something in taxes, or at least to have the decency to no longer fly our flag at their respective HQ's. But, this is the easy part.
The rest is harder, but so much better than all of this waaaaaiiiiitttttiiiiinnnnngggggg.
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