Random Thoughts

I have nothing significant today, just a few stray brain waves.

Affluence

Yesterday I spent almost $600 having my car worked on. There was nothing wrong with it; this was just for maintenance. A VW New Beetle is very expensive to maintain properly, but worth it, and I have no complaints. Like most Americans, I love my car. It's nearly nine years old now, and buying it when I did, in the summer of 2000, and in the way I did, paying off the $20,000 purchase in two years, was one of the best things I ever did for myself.

The yellow bug's odometer reads over 162 thousand now, and it runs perfectly, almost like a brand new car. Even considering how much it costs to maintain and run, preserving the bug is much cheaper than buying a new vehicle every three or four years as many do, including lots of people who can't afford it, and who carelessly fall deep into debt indulging in such foolish behavior. I tell myself that, and note the excesses "Most People," or most Americans anyway allow themselves in order to justify my living at a level I consider affluent, in spite of my shepherding of resources and habits of thrift.

I've moved out of Southern California, but I'm still living in an exurban setting, where a car is a daily necessity. Up until now I always assumed I'd move to a city at the first opportunity, but my resolve is weakening. Life in a Western Washington exurb is just too pleasant to give up, despite the inconvenience of having to drive significant distances to get anywhere. It's a fat way of living, in a fat land. Americans tend to use an unfair proportion to the world's resources because we can afford it. I'm an American, and no exception.

Violence

Yesterday there were two major incidents involving muckers, one in Alabama where nine people were shot and killed before the gunman did the world a favor and killed himself, and one in Germany where a kid in black, in the manner of Centennial High School shooters, shot or wounded an as-yet undetermined number of people. Then the police brought him down.

"As above, so below," the philosopher once observed. And violence among the proles mirrors that of their rulers. Bloody Dick Cheney, the closest thing to Hitler or Stalin the U.S. has yet produced, wanted to nuke the Iranians, and we'll never know how close he came to actually doing so. His accusation that Iran was a "nuclear threat" makes this psychotic interlude such a classic example of psychological projection, in which one's own violent impulses are imputed to the victims of one's own homicidal intentions, that it could serve as the poster example of this frightening principle.

For a long time, I've felt that slaughterhouses, cattle feedlots, pig farms, and broilerhouse egg ranches are major components of the endemic violence which plagues our modern industrial society. The conviction has not led to changed behavior, however; I still eat meat, just as I still use more than my share of gasoline.

It's possible though, to cut back by degrees, to eat more fish, to spend the extra money for grass-fed beef and cage-free eggs, and to make an effort to eat more vegetarian meals. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has said that most real change is incremental, and that little is accomplished by revolutions. I'll take that as my ration of wisdom for the day, and run with it.