I feel sorry for you. It must be lonely and disheartening to view human nature and our country in this manner.
I have often told those around me that I don't like the bitter views I have come to recognize. I know that the post I wrote earlier is difficult and pointed, but I do think it gets to the heart of the matter.
I am actually not a lonely person, I have a wife and 2 children, and believe it or not, we spend most of our days with a smile on our faces. Despite the ugly rhetoric of my earlier post, I am not allowing myself to be defined by this society of bastardized morality nor will I let my children follow our country's mindless materialistic trajectory.
Want to rebel against this inhumane insanity? Treat the next person you run into as a real human being that actually matters, not a social security number, not a co-worker/associate/colleague, not a future health claim to be denied. Don't sycophantically sell yourself out to this nightmare industrial machination that views all of us as nothing more than profit creating fodder to be discarded when our costs exceed the business model. Remember Darth Vader? How easy is it for us to give into the 'dark side', that is to sell ourselves out to a system that puts no value on our humanity and promotes a cannibalistic mentality towards one another as we attempt to achieve our own materialistic ends? It is quite easy to find oneself more machine than man (like Vader) and yet if one were to peel away our mechanized exterior we would be the pale, insignificant, worm of a man that the Vader character actually was. For all of our apparent haughty and self-achieved status we are actually dead on the inside, lifeless.
Sadly, there are many who embrace this 'dog eat dog' world we have created. They are what you would call a sociopath. Then of course there are the rest of us who abide by "well, that's the way it's always been and that's the way it will ever be." Which is worse? Hateful or hopeless?
Don't mindlessly follow the employee handbook when you see a fellow crew member in need and you have to go beyond the call of duty to help them, don't drop bombs on other people for the sake of keeping yourself in your big military jet and maintaining your hero image. Am I doing the right thing for humanities sake or for a companies? Think for yourself. We have allowed a large, corrupted machine to think for us for far too long. We are the enemy that we have feared for these past many years. America can truly be a beautiful country again, or perhaps for the first time, but a new humanism must be instilled and a reclaiming of our society from the market dictated corporatocracy (or corporate dictatorship) must occur also.
Just some thoughts, and rants. Not typical FI stuff but I thought this topic, or the inanity of it, provided us with a forum to express some ideas that perhaps we need to revisit or visit for the first time.
I need to follow my own advice really; I need to stop fearing United pilots (being I am CAL and am fearful of a merger: I am also ex-TWA) and see them for what they are, family with a potential difficulty ahead of them.
Peace.
