Tuesday, January 16, 2007

Job hunting

I’ve been looking for work. Any work. I’m a college graduate. It should be easy, right? I keep my eyes and ears to the media, hoping to find something. Then I see statistics that show more high school graduates are working than college graduates.

How is that? That's easy! College graduates are not supposed to be looking for jobs. They are supposed to be making jobs. So, why are college students complaining about not finding work?

Evidently, it’s a symptom of a bigger problem, the General Requirements Curriculum. The big picture was completely missed. A plan was never formulated. In my case it’s easy because I got an Associate degree somewhere else and transferred credits, so I couldn’t even declare a minor.

My education was fractured by circumstances engineered by a capitalist society with no vision of long-term consequences, only greed at the top.

So now we have a large number of college graduates who don’t know entrepreneurship. They just try to look for work. This has been going on for a long time in the U.S. And guess what.

We have been creating our own terrorists. We have sent far too many foreign-exchange students out into the world without the crucial information needed to actually make work instead of complaining about not finding a job.

It's far too easy for zealots with money to take advantage of so many people who know just enough to make a bomb, but not enough to start a company making better mousetraps.

Here in the U.S. it's manageable because we have such a powerful and intrusive law enforcement system, and the culture is so homogeneous that volatile social cohesion is limited to urban street gangs.

Some high school teachers have caught on to this and are teaching entrepreneurship in the K-12 levels. It's too little too late because of one major obstacle, tenure.

Gee, it took me this long to figure it out? I'm in really bad shape. But at least I can see the candle in the distant window. Now I just have to find my way around the dark fjord of capitalist influence.

Saturday, January 6, 2007

Emotional Entrepreneurs

For too long I silently stood by and watched as religion conscripted followers with threats of damnation, and blamed natural disasters on “sinners” to create a fictitious adversary for the purpose of congregational cohesion. The problem with that method is that the congregation begins to point at outsiders as the cause of natural disasters, and thus begins the intolerance.

In a documentary that aired on the Discovery Channel, a little boy from a village destroyed by a tsunami said that a priest told him it was because of sin that his whole village washed away. This is just one example of how religion works to redirects rage and anger away from natural or accidental causes, toward other people.

One particularly disturbing tactic of religious cohesion and dependence is creating the notion that faith is measured by the number of children you have. A Spanish teacher from El Salvador said his uncle’s family was doing well economically, until his sister who was a Nun told his uncle he should have more children. Consequently they fell deep into poverty.

You shouldn’t take credit for being a good steward of the poor when you’re responsible for telling them that birth control is a sin, and then persuading them to overpopulate and finally become dependent on you for support.

Pointing the finger at strangers and blaming them for your group’s own problems is the work of Emotional Entrepreneurs; people who feed off of your fear to keep you as a follower.

So I can neither concede to, nor placate emotional entrepreneurs and religious dogma that reinforces its own power by taking advantage of uninformed people. Is that intolerant enough for you?

Friday, January 5, 2007

The Illusion of Need

Is Need an illusion? How much do you really need what you have?

I just found out from my mother that as a baby, I was diagnosed as possibly having "celiac" (sometimes spelled coeliac) disorder, which is like an allergic reaction to proteins in cereals and wheat products.

I was never supposed to eat any wheat products because they caused irritation and damage to the small intestine. So I recently stopped eating bread and processed wheat products; that means no cookies, crackers, pretzels, pizza, cake, cereal, etc.

What does this have to do with the illusion of need? The key to discovering what you really need is in self-deprivation. You can see reality when you find yourself deprived of things possessed by other people. Then you begin to rationalize your position by thinking that you don’t need those things, and finally, through research, you discover that you really never needed them.

I began to wonder why I ate bread in the first place. Then I began to wonder why I ate anything that was processed or even cooked. I've been on a semi-vegetarian diet for a while and I began to realize that I don't even use a microwave oven anymore, and I can get a couple of day's worth of meals for myself for less than five dollars at Aldi's.

My first three weeks adjusting to raw vegetables were difficult and it would have been alot easier had I known that all my life I should not have been eating bread. I never felt better in my whole life now that I'm off the bread. I can’t believe how much money I save too.

Do you hate vegetables? Why do you hate vegetables? Nobody told you they were bad for you, but you know that kids hate vegetables. How did you learn that? From someone else’s behavior, perhaps from watching someone’s behavior towards vegetables on television?

The illusion is the assumption that we need something we really don’t need. Like restaurants.

What would we do without restaurants? Would we completely lose our social network? What else is there to do besides go to church? Go to a restaurant? Maybe that explains why western civilization has an obesity crisis; because we are so easily persuaded.

Did you meet your best friends at TGI Friday’s? It would seem that TGI Friday’s is the place to go to meet people, at least that’s what they show in some of their commercials. When was the last time you got up from your table at a restaurant and decided to make friends with a total stranger? Do you know anyone who did?

How about that car stereo with the giant sub-woofers in the trunk? Did it become the magic friend-making box you dreamed it would?