What a miserable day.
As usual, I started my morning by a quick fly at Facebook. Apparently
everything that happened in the previous 24 hours was depressing, aside from
Pajamas Wexler posting video of one of the greatest comic scenes in all cinema. But
even that depressed me, when I realized that most people under the age of maybe
40 (and that’s giving most people the benefit of the doubt) wouldn’t know the
Marx Brothers if they were thrown into a stateroom with them. (Which isn’t as
funny as the mirror scene, but it comes close. “Is my Aunt Minnie in here?”
Still, silent comedy trumps, if you pardon the usage.) Comedies nowadays are,
well, mostly stupid, and certainly not very funny. When was the last time
anyone went on the road to work out a routine on the stage first before filming
it? Yeah, vaudeville is dead. Another depressing thought.
Do you realize that 40 times 15 equals 600? If we raise the
minimum wage to $15, and you work 40 hours a week, you’ll make $600, before
taxes (which, admittedly, won’t be much, if that's any consolation). And that’s what we want to raise the minimum wage to, not what it
is now. What is the argument against paying workers wages that allow them to
live decent lives? $600 * 52? $31,200. Average college tuition in the US? “According
to the College Board, the average cost of tuition and fees for the 2015–2016
school year was $32,405 at private colleges, $9,410 for state
residents at public colleges, and $23,893 for out-of-state residents
attending public universities.” Lots of room for advancement there...
Of course, my belief is that the most important thing in
alleviating poverty (also known as establishing economic fairness), is
education. Obviously poor people get poorer education than rich people. But
you know the cycle. It’s not new. There are other benefits to education,
though, other than better jobs. Mostly, we’ve have smarter people, and
stupidity wouldn’t be quite as rampant in the country as it is now.
How did we get so stupid, anyhow? It seems like even the
majority of what we would call the educated people are still as dumb as rocks.
We don’t understand science, and we pick and choose what we wish to believe
about the world for capricious and usually self-serving purposes. We’re so
bigoted that it’s beginning to look instinctive/inherent/incurable.
Jeesh.
That bout of Facebook this morning was mostly folks pushing
causes in aid of making the world something different from what I just
described. Their examples demonstrate the depths of our shared malady. People
get more attuned to these things in an election year, but they can’t really
expect them to change in a country where the legislature refuses to acknowledge
the executive (e.g., appointing a supreme court justice). This is a deep, deep
rift, and inertia is a powerful driver (or lack thereof). Objects don’t move
unless force is applied, and they keep moving with the same speed and in the
same direction when it is. Unless some other force is applied.
I don’t know what that other force is. I used to believe
that we were moving, progressing, learning, growing. Experience has drawn me to
believe that the margin teleology underlying this belief was total nonsense. We
are going nowhere as a culture, despite our continuing creation of better
tools.
I need to watch some cat videos.
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