vibinc

Over the course of the past several months I’ve been reading and thinking and reading and listening and thinking some more about stuff. I haven’t written much because, quite frankly, I haven’t had much to say and I’m growing more and more frustrated at not only the way things are but the manner in which people try to effect outcomes to change things.

Maybe it’s my personal transition from a solidly middle-class income to poor college student. Maybe it’s the culmination of many things, but I’ve come to a conclusion…a truism if you will, that goes something like this:

Nothing you want to happen to you happens overnight.

Now let’s think about this for a moment. What events happen suddenly, or seem to happen suddenly? Car wrecks, deaths in the family, job losses, terrorist attacks…the list goes on. Short of winning the lottery, there is nothing I can think of that happens suddenly that you would wish upon yourself.

The truth is, even most things that seem to happen suddenly don’t necessarily REALLY happen that suddenly. It’s a perception thing. So if neither the majority of good or bad things that happen to people, or groups of people, or situations, happen suddenly, then what the hell am I talking about?

Imagine this. You roll a marble on a hardwood floor. That marble will likely travel in one general direction until something affects its travel. If the floor is slightly unlevel, it will drift if one direction or the other gradually, gaining speed as momentum takes it left or right. If there is an obstruction, it will stop suddenly or bounce off the obstruction, and likely turn left or right, depending on the conditions of the momentum that was carrying it forward. Sometimes, due to momentum, obstruction or conditions of the hardwood floor, it will just stop.

If you take the example of the marble traveling across the floor as a metaphor for anything: your life, your causes, etc., etc., then you want to make sure that your roll your marble on the flattest, least obstructed hardwood floor you can find to ensure that; 1. You get where you want to go. And 2. You get there in the shortest time/distance possible. That, at the very least, would be the smart thing to do.

But people often aren’t always very smart, and instead of looking at the lay of the land and rolling their marble in a direction or towards a goal using the least obstructed path, most people just hurl the marble out there, in the same way they always have, relying on the hope, or emotionally driven belief that because the desired destination of their marble is right and pure and true, that their marble will defy the odds and get where they want it to go.

Rarely does this ever happen.

By the same token, rarely is the floor a wide-open, unobstructed, flat hardwood floor. More often than not, for the more complicated things in life, it’s a bumpy ever-changing maze filled with all kinds of obstructions and conflicts and things that you never imagined. And more often than not, full well knowing this condition exists; we roll our marbles out there emotionally, instead of rationally, expecting some guiding hand, or the supernatural force of our righteousness or the righteousness of our cause to carry us to our destination. And more often than not, we fail.

Think about it in terms of something just about everyone has tried to do at one point or another…weight loss. You can do a crash diet, you can do the fad diet of the week, you can buy an exercise video or ridiculous device off of an infomercial, and all sorts of other things to lose weight, but in the end, most of us don’t keep that weight off because we emotionally took some kind of short cut to our destination and never REALLY arrived at the place we were really trying to get to, just a place that looked an awful lot like it. Then, a month, or six months later, we’re right back where we were, in the first place, and we feel bad about ourselves or whatever, and we give up, or lash out at circumstance, or any other number of emotionally driven reactions that really don’t get us one damn inch closer to our goal.

So what’s the problem? The real problem is two-fold: First, we’ve taken an abbreviated path to our “goal”, whatever that goal is. Second, the goal we’ve chosen is a shortsighted, temporary goal that ignores the reality that we should be working toward a maintaining a healthy lifestyle, rather than some ridiculous and largely meaningless “weight target”.

The truth of the matter is that whether we’re talking about marbles or whatever, we have to recognize and focus ourselves on REAL goals rather than the shortcuts, and there is a process involved in getting to our REAL goal. That process, even though it’s tried and true, is more often than not, rejected by people because it’s too hard or inconvenient or whatever it is to them. Every time we reject that process we put ourselves further and further, deeper and deeper on an island of delusion that we have created for ourselves, grounded in the belief that if we just believe hard enough, the hard work it takes to actually get shit done will fade away and we’ll get what we want.

So when I look at people, regardless of education, ideology, or any other of the human conditions that we live in, who are doing things to get things done by doing them in the way THEY want to, as if to enforce their will on the rest of us, rather than respecting the process, a tried and true process, of getting shit done, and they’re frustrated, or emotional or whatever they are because if people would just listen to them the whole world would be a better place, I find myself wondering just what the fuck they expected?

The process exists for a reason, and that reason is to protect and respect all of us from the small few of us who would, if we could, unilaterally enforce our will upon the whole of us, because “ if people would just listen to them the whole world would be a better place”, which, I think, is a pretty good definition of fascism, because we all know that as long as it’s OUR will, it’s fine, but if it’s SOMEONE ELSE’S will, it’s not necessarily fine, and that process is not immediate, but a long and winding and a huge pain in the ass, because if it wasn’t, it would actually suck worse for all of us because it would seem like an immediate change, and as I said at the beginning of this screed;

Nothing you want to happen to you happens overnight.

Got it?

See, you can keep doing what you’ve been doing and keep getting what you’ve always got. You can bitch and moan to friends and colleagues, and get nowhere. If you’re a little more industrious, you can go to your favorite locally owned craft store, and build a sandwich board, and bitch and moan publicly on a street corner and get labeled one of those “bitchers and moaners”. If you’re really creative and not a total dick, you can organize yourself into a group of like-minded people forming a “bitch and moan” club that takes comfort in the familiarity of its favorite brand of bitchiness and moaniness, but ultimately gets nothing done. Or, if you KNOW WHAT YOU REALLY WANT, you can educate yourself about the issues and the process, insert yourself into that process, focus your attention on the path most likely to get you where you want to be, and slowly, and patiently build consensus around this idea until it gradually and deliberately becomes the change you wanted in the first place.

This means you don’t just hurl your marble forward and pray you don’t run into any obstacles, but you deliberately direct your marble through the maze of the process an inch at a time, knowing that the path will take you both forward and backwards, left and right, all the while grounding yourself in that ultimate goal. By doing this, keeping your perspective, and most of all, exercising patience, you WILL get to that goal eventually, despite the setbacks, obstacles, trials and tribulations that come with anything in this world that is worth a damn.

You’ve got to stay focused, and that’s hard. You’ve got to be patient, and that’s hard. But most of all, you’ve got to control your marble, and that’s, by far, the hardest part of all of it. If you do, you’ll get the thing you wanted, and if you’re really good, you’ll want something more, because the perspective you gain from the journey will make you better, and in the end, that’s ultimately what it’s all about.

The Labor Department announced today that 651,000 new unemployment claims were filed in February, raising the national unemployment rate to 8.1%. Unemployment has been on a steady rise since December of 2006.

The stock market has lost 53% of it’s value since peaking at over 14000 in October of 2007.

The FDIC reports that 43 banks have failed since February of 2007.

RealtyTrac reports that 1 in every 466 homes nationwide received a foreclosure filing in January of 2009.

Despite this steady decline that has been going on for quite some time, though largely unnoticed until last September, fringe elements in the media are starting to organize themselves to lay blame for the crisis on the 45 day old Obama administration.

Really, it’s ridiculous to even mention the Obama administration in the same breath as the financial crisis in any way other than to address the merits of the plans. A new administration is not like replacing a fuse. The problem didn’t get to this point in a day, and it won’t be fixed in a day.

There are some legitimate points to debate in the current Obama plan. We can argue about the stimulus, or the housing plan, or if the healthcare plan would have any appreciable effect on the economy. We can talk about how TARP funds should be distributed and what rules should apply, or any number of other things, but ultimately we’re not going to see the effects of ANY of these things before September or October, and the truth of the matter is, even then the loss in confidence may not be restored, not to mention the nearly 6 million jobs that have been lost since the end of 2006.

Further, there are some things that have yet to be publicly addressed that desperately need to if confidence is ever to be restored. Regulations regarding the markets, the agencies that provide credit ratings, and lending practices, perhaps the things most responsible for steep decline in September, must be addressed before anyone will feel comfortable investing their money. This problem is deep and wide, and the only solution is to treat the disease, not just the many symptoms.

Of course, that takes time, and doesn’t fit into a 3 second sound bite. Systemic solutions will be picked apart, and a great deal of focus will be given to obscure specifics, with the intention of damning the entire program over the minutiae, rather than looking at the broader impact of the whole. This is the nature of the beast, but if we REALLY want to fix the problem, we have to be ready to swallow the bitter pill.

As uncomfortable, and disturbing as this whole mess is, it’s only going to get more uncomfortable before it gets better. We, as a nation, have to “sweat out” the fever in order to get better. This means we’re also going to have to do some things that we’ve been told by pundits and conventional wisdom are “bad” for us. Of course, these are the same people who said everything was fine and the system was working until the pressure of reality became so great they could no longer feed us their line of bullshit.

In the end, we will continue to suffer from Bush’s economy, until Obama’s plans have time to germinate. This won’t stop the TV talkers from trying to tie Obama to the problem, but until his plans have been proved a failure, they’re far better than the “nothing” being fed us by the right.