I’ve been watching the struggles taking place in South and North Korea lately, and I find myself becoming very frustrated by the whole thing. But I’m not frustrated because they’re moving towards potential war (which happens ever decade or so), but because I often feel like I have potential answers to the problems that plague these people, and I also realize that there’s no chance whatsoever I’d ever get anyone to listen to me even if I had the definitive answers they needed.
What concerns me is not just that I find myself frustrated in life because I always seem to have a different perspective on things, a nuance that I often think might actually break through some of the problems that occur, but that I also realize that there are so many others out there who have to be just as frustrated as I am. This might be different if we lived in the 1600s where people generally were limited to their own surroundings, but today, we have the ability to travel pretty much anywhere, and we also have so much more liberal education than we’ve ever had before. It’s like we’ve been given the tools to do so much more with our lives, but we’re still limited to chiseling marketing messages on stone tablets to sell to our neighbors.
As someone who actually teaches college students in both communication and political science, I’m even more burdened by this because I often feel that I’m selling a box of false goods that empower people to do absolutely nothing because they’re never going to have the ability to influence anything beyond local issues. Yet, so many of them are probably growing up to do so many unique things that will never be given ground, so they will end up just as frustrated as the rest of us.
Yet, we keep seeing this group of people who do have access to the higher echelons of power, and they’re completely fucking everything up because their only claim to their station is that they knew someone, scratched the right back or were lucky enough to be born rich and/or entered into the right school.
The sad thing is, I’m sure this complaint is made on a daily basis by so many other people as well. Yet, I keep wondering what sort of compensation is being paid intellectually to keep so many people happy with their limited access to the pedastals of power. Sadly, I don’t think anyone who is in power really cares, other than making sure that those who are registered to vote continue to come out and continue voting them into power longer so they can continue to do mediocre services while enriching themselves, their stations and their offspring to continue the nepotistic process.
What worries me even further is my belief that an enlightened society cannot survive with more and more enlightened societal members realizing that the whole thing is somewhat of a joke where so few benefit at the expense of so many. There’s only so much one can believe in a system of “anyone can be one of the elite if one works hard enough” before realizing that it’s really a crock of shit. When that brass ring consists of 99 percent luck and 1 percent skill, that doesn’t leave a lot of very skilled people very happy with their lot in life. In the 1900s, you could laugh it off by believing that there weren’t enough people to cause problems, but nowadays, I’m not so sure.
Anyway, not much more to say. Must go back to the trenches and continue pounding on my tablet with my chisel as I make other people wealthier. Well, I work for a nonprofit, so I’m not sure how that fits into the picture, but I’m sure you get the picture. I guess we all pound on our tablets with chisels and then no one gets any wealthier. Hmm, might have to look for a better metaphor/allusion than that one.