The Days of Our Lives

The Days of Our Lives
By David Glenn Cox


Each of us, on average, will live for about twenty-five thousand days. The first six thousand days we are too young to have any impact on the world other than soiling diapers, being cute or shouting "Watch me!" We can parse through our lives allocating days for romance, education and work while leaving little time for what is really important in life.

We have been sold a soothing syrup of television and radio where men are portrayed as fat, stupid and inept and women are portrayed as sharp-tongued, knowing and appearance-obsessed. The main topic of conversation around the home is sex and their children are all little smart asses. This is what is portrayed as normal. These people are always doctors, lawyers or Indian chiefs but never butchers, bakers or candlestick makers. You are being dosed with soma, induced to believe that rich people have problems, too, but lead exciting and interesting lives while the problems of working people are totally unimportant.

When was the last time you saw a foreclosure on a television show that wasn’t the news? Cable channels earn their bread and butter by dramatizing real stories of crime, infidelity, teen sex, rape and murder. Those subjects are scintillating and titillating, or a little tear-jerking, but stories of real tragedy that might make you think or feel just won’t do. Now, war stories of flag-waving heroes and super heroes and even super, super heroes fighting Nazis and super evil bad guy villains, that’s where Hollywood puts their money. Plots are aimed at a 12 to 15-year-old male audience and theater seats filled by non-thinking grownups looking for big screen, Dolby, 3D entertainment because their lives are empty and devoid of purpose.

Maybe if you closed your eyes to it you could see more of the real world. The city lights are bright and they blind us to what is going on up in the night sky. Perhaps we can’t see the real world because of the phony light of this lie that is being shined in our eyes. It doesn’t have to be this way; you can get off the Goebbels propaganda merry-go-round.

I recently read an article about a demonstration on Wall Street. Labor activists were singing and dancing with signs calling for more jobs and better regulation of Wall Street. Singing and dancing? Are you serious? Why not a trained seal playing bicycle horns? Why not a giant jerk off for jobs? Did the Greeks in Athens look like they were in a singing and dancing mood? Whom do you think police or the government took more seriously?

No matter what you’ve been told, no matter how much money you’ve got in your pocket, this is your country. You came into it the same way as Lloyd Blankfein and you’ll go out of it the same way. What matters is what you do in between those two dates.

If you use government power and military might to unlawfully take over another country it is called an unlawful military invasion. If you use finance and economic power to destabilize a country and then offer them loans to stop doing it, then it is called a bailout. The Greek Prime Minister has called them predators and carnivores and speculators. At this weekend’s meeting of the European Union, leaders called them a “Wolfpack.” Our Congress calls them sir, as in thank you, Mr. Blankfein, sir.

The use of the word “Wolfpack” by European Union leaders is a very interesting choice of language because the last time Europe’s politicians used the word Wolfpack it was to describe German U-boats gathering together to follow convoys and strike down the stragglers. Really no different from today where the speculators in wolfpacks target straggling economies to strike them down and to impose the new economic order.

In ancient Rome, when her legions would conquer a new province or country, the leaders of the conquered peoples would be brought to Rome to see all of its splendor. The hosts would explain to the vanquished that you, too, could live like this! Rome conquering your lands is really a good thing for you because we will control your money and your taxes but you will still be in charge. As long as we get our tax money and you do as you’re told you may live as kings and do whatever else you wish.

The first financial solution proposed by the Greek government called for taxes on bank profits and the wealthy, but that plan didn’t pass muster for some reason. The bailout enacted calls for higher sales taxes and wage cuts for working people and the elderly despite obviously not being what the Greek people want. Just because you don’t see storm troopers with Panzers in the streets doesn’t mean that it wasn’t a fascist take over. They just don’t goose step in uniforms anymore; they wear expensive three-piece suits and smile a lot.

The credit collapse in the American mortgage market in 2008 prompted the federal government to initiate a massive bailout of the banks and prompted the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates for the banks to virtually zero! The banks in turn deducted their losses from their taxes as millions of American homeowners were turned out into the street. Then the FDIC buys up these troubled assets and begins to auction them off with no-money-down terms to the banks. The same people who wouldn’t give homeowners a one or two percent interest rate break to keep their homes are now buying the foreclosed houses back for forty cents on the dollar with no money down! Then, just to sweeten the deal, the FDIC promises that if for any reason the banks don’t make money on the deal, the FDIC will give them a rebate on the purchase price!

Still feel like singing and dancing about jobs? Still feel like watching TV? Another dose of soothing syrup for you? The partisan media, millionaire hacks, who are left of center or right of center but really never leave the center at all, if they even implied what I’m saying directly to you now, would be fired so fast they’d be out the door before you could say Rockefeller Center. They won’t talk about fascist takeovers but only about financial regulations. It’s not that they don’t love you but that they love their money more. They’ve been to Rome and seen its splendor.

Andrea Mitchell is the wife of Alan Greenspan; I’m sure she will tell us the truth about financial regulation. Anderson Cooper is the son of Gloria Vanderbilt and the great-great grandson of Cornelius Vanderbilt. He’s just plain folks, just like you and me! He understands how tough it is in middle America these days. Before Arianna Huffington started the Huffington Post she started Resignation.com, a conservative darling website calling for the resignation of Bill Clinton. She was a supporter of Newt and Bob Dole and back when she was still Arianna Stassinopoulos she met her husband, lifelong Bush family friend Michael Huffington, at a party given by oil heiress Ann Getty.

Arianna has been on the left and then on the right and then on the left again but now her politics are centrist; they center on Arianna making money. That’s why even though the Huffington Post is one of the most successful websites around, they are always looking for interns to work on the site for free. I don’t mean to pick out these people to rip on, only to make the point that if you think that you have friends in the media then you need to change the channel to the Cartoon Network. These people are just dogs sniffing out their supper and looking to feed themselves, not you.

Like millions of you out there, I’ve been kicked a few times in my life. I’ve lost homes and seen the industry that I once worked in gutted by unfair foreign competition. I’ve watched it dry up and disappear so it's hard for me to take seriously someone whose wedding was paid for by an oil heiress, or someone who grew up in one of the richest families in America telling me what it's like to be kicked a time or two.

These days of your life are yours and yours alone; you can spend them watching TV or listening to overpaid experts steering the arguments. Or you can begin to think for yourself and figure out why it is that working people always get the short end of the stick while the wealthy keep getting more and more. These things are not privileges to be handed out, but your birthright to be claimed.

There is no higher purpose of government than the protection and wellbeing of the people. So let me ask, is your wellbeing protected? Is your future protected? Are your children’s futures being protected? Are your schools being protected? Fascist governments maintain control of the populace through fear. In America that fear is delivered through your television set. Turn off your television and you turn off the fear. When you stop fearing them they will begin to fear you and then things will begin to change. It’s television that chains you to the plantation and no one ever lays on their deathbed saying, “I didn’t watch enough TV.” Instead they lament the things they should have done instead of watching TV.

Kick!

I remember just a moment of a day in the summer of '81 for no particular reason. Perched on the open end of a mini pick-ups tailgate in the blinding shine of the afternoon sun which caught my hair with a fiery glow as I watched it dance in the wind, rather than squint up at the sky. Don't know why I can envision it so clearly now or the reason it stands out as nothing super significant happened that day. I've had better days since, certainly worse ones too. I've tried to live a hearty life, and on the days I question if I should question all the questionable things that go on around me, I seek comfort from the art of music for validation and verification. Maybe it doesn't help, but I don't see how it can hurt.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGTr6mJRvDw>

If only it were as simple as a song.