This is a true story.
It exaggerates the word “terrorist” but what else is new?
It is a second hand story, told to me by a couple of hotel employees in separate interviews. I prefer not to name the hotel or the town.
It is about parents, fortyish.
It is about their twelve year old children.
It is about wild, uncontrolled, senseless and selfish behavior.
It is about annual sports team outings.
It is about trashing hotel swimming pool areas - bathing suits flung on rafters, alcoholic beverages and smashed glass on tiled pool floors where rules prohibit the drinking of alcohol and the use of glass containers.
It is about twelve year old kids standing around a swimming pool and ordering another twelve year old to suck their dick.
Is this the pre-college training for college sports teams that gang rape women?
It's about the American culture and it’s creed: FREEDOM!
(Freedom to own, brandish and use lethal weapons?
Freedom to disrespect and disregard others?
Freedom to trash hotels?)
"Live Free or Die"
The motto of New Hampshire.
(Don’t get me wrong. We love New Hampshire and just returned from a fall foliage visit there. That’s when I found out about the joys of running a hotel these days).
A few years back during a visit to lovely New Hampshire to check out the possibility of moving there, a reckless driver with squealing tires just barely missed crashing into another driver whose path we were about to cross. I nervously asked the real estate agent if perhaps it should be “Live Free and Die")....
This sports team “attitude” can’t only be happening in New Hampshire.
I guess it’s the new “us".
We all crave liberation - but from what?
Is liberation really trashing a hotel?
Or is this cultural spin on “freedom" really a con, a scam, a deception?
I’d like to think that trashing hotel rooms does not represent freedom. I’d like to think that freedom means living in a culture where one feels free to think openly and clearly, free of self-censorship because of fear imposed by a power structure obsessed with power and control over the cultural focus.
So, are we fooled into a mindless violence and a perception that we are acting freely in order to distract us from what real freedom means?
Has the ability to be thoughtful and to think rationally become forbidden fruit?
While violence, aggression, brutality is promoted as the norm. No?
Think about hockey and football.
A retired(?) professional football player, whose name I cannot remember said recently he would not let a young child play football - too much danger of injury.
We’re bombarded with delusions about what freedom means.
Lies abound - such as, the Second Amendment means it’s an unconstitutional restraint to be denied the right to own a machine gun. ....""A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State......”
Here in Houston, open carry will be legal early next year. Restaurants will have an option to not allow open carry and already a group of restaurants have said they will not allow open carry.
The Koch Brothers' American Legislative Exchange Council- ALEC - was on a mission to get state legislators to insert "Stand your ground” into State Law. They succeeded in Florida and like-minded sister states around the country. That “liberated” George Zimmerman and others in Florida to murder innocent brown people; to create institutional terror in Florida for people of color.
Has the meaning of freedom been turned on its head by right wing profiteers and sanctioned by so-called moderate Republicans, like Jeb Bush? Even pappy Bush was not offended to allow his campaign to use the Willie Horton racially based threats to violate his political opponent, Governor Dukakis. It may have won him the election. The press mocked Dukakis for looking small headed in a helmut in a tank, and Dukakis himself wanted to look manly and presidential sitting in the turret of a big instrument of war.
What is wrong with us?
Participating in a sports team outing means some 40 year old parent is “free” to smash glass at a hotel indoor pool where the rules are no alcohol no glass allowed at the indoor pool. And their twelve year old son is “free” to grab buckets of ice from the ice machine and hurl their contents down hallways and stairwells.
It’s a perplexing process, this mass indoctrination. I don’t understand it. It seems to rely on the imposition and acceptance of superficial group think: small groups of people who look and act the same but may not really feel the same inside. The suppression of those feelings. Instead, the violence they perpetrate seems to bind them together, perhaps making them defensive and even dangerous when they are confronted for their behavior, becoming even more resistant to having any hope of recognizing the cultural dynamic that shapes them?
Their schools, from a very young age value top down instruction and mindless testing. Instead of being a place that is receptive to a child’s natural curiosity about the world and each individual in it - self, others, animals, plants. and the possibility of other worlds that may exist, these schools reinforce the dynamic and don’t give kids a chance to grow up as thoughtful human beings.
They are well prepared to become xenophobic. Ready and willing to support mindless wars that serve a few and punish many.
We live in a top down autocratic, fear driven reality that drives us to wars we don’t understand, that ravages the planet, robs the poor, financially rewards those who help perpetrate the hoax in order to enrich themselves.
And without having it in mind when I started this diary, I find myself asking - Maybe Bernie’s “socialism" is just trying to find a way to help us cope with this dynamic? To help himself and us develop an awareness that we are victims of a mindset that has persuaded us to accept a path that is unsustainable and that serves just a few? Of course, Bernie has had this awareness during his whole political career. He isn’t perfect, no one is, but he is willing to listen and learn, which is so dangerous to the Koch brothers and their ilk who take no responsibility for the pain they inflict to increase their billions that, if they were sane, they would know that they don’t need and won’t be able to use.
I was disappointed that Secretary Clinton, during the debate, tried to attack Bernie as a scary “socialist” by saying she valued how Capitalism helps small businesses, implying that Bernie, as a “socialist", does not understand that, does not support small businesses.
If that is true, Secretary Clinton, why did Bernie vote against a gun law that he thought would unfairly punish a small gun shop owner if someone who they had sold a gun to, at some point in the past, went nuts and used it to commit a crime? Maybe Bernie’s campaign advisor, Andy Devine, thought that up as a political excuse for Bernie’s vote. But maybe that really was why Bernie voted the way he did......
In any event, I am discouraged that Senator Clinton would play the “communist” card, as though she was Angela Lansbury in the Manchurian Candidate. Grrrrrrr........
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One thing, that I have taken the “liberty” to ponder about our current reality, is this: As robotic machines replace more and more service and manufacturing jobs, further threatening the stability of working families, should each American receive ownership shares of future economic output of the robots who will inevitably replace workers so that the distribution of wealth is more fairly allotted, as one way to achieve a sustainable economically just world? This sword of Damocles is looming over the heads of working people and will only unfairly reward the owners of capital. Maybe it’s time to consider that it is unfair for a very small group to control all the capital. Why shouldn’t workers be vested in a large enough share of the capital so that they have a comfortable standard of living?
And then this morning the CEO of twitter, Jack Dorsey, a visionary! announced he was sharing a portion of his shares of stock with his employees!!!!! wowhttp://www.usatoday.com/...
I studied economics (and political science) at the undergraduate level about 45 years ago. I have never understood how the value of anything is measured. Ricardo, I think, said value is determined by the amount of labor it takes to get something to market. Labor is the common denominator. Too bad Ricardo (who I loved when I was in school for his comparative advantage arguments on trade) is not around today to update his work?; because I think that there is a huge shift developing as robots are becoming more and more integrated into the work place. That’s why I think that the old three legged stool - labor, capital and rent is no longer sufficient. I think that labor needs a share of capital to compensate for when physical labor and even services are no longer performed by human beings.
It is wrong, IMO, for Goldman Sachs and Bank of America to own for example 30% of the San Francisco docks, skimming this off the backs of labor. (The sold their interest in the docks within the last couple of years, but this is the dynamic that plays out in our economy. I do believe in Capitalism to the extent that no one person or group of persons is smart enough to micromanage markets. I believe in Adam Smith’s invisible hand. But Adam Smith would roll over in his grave is he saw what was being done in his name. He was, I think, a man who valued ethics, honesty and hard work. He would not have valued an uneven playing field or market information that was available only to a select few.
The robotic revolution will eventually make most kinds of work obsolete and there needs to be a fair way for everyone to receive the fruits of robotic labor.