CULTURAL ACQUIRED IMMUNE DEFICIENCY SYNDROME (AIDS)

WHO AM I?

     I am 1-billion Facebook users, 5.5 million Twitter users whose Tweets or posts flow through our Technological Social Media arteries. My virtual friends “share” items that flow through my Social Media accounts. Because my “friends” are “friends” to others who are “friends” to others, and so on to others; I imagine the sense of “self” of this largest group is a giant cultural bloodstream of real-time, unedited, and uncontrolled messaging. After all, the theory of “3-degrees of separation” might be in play here.  Friend-to-friend, post-by-post we “share” with one another good things and bad things: nice celebrations, reports of wrongs by governmental agencies, pictures of my vacation, death by cops, violence and corporate greed; incidents which none of us individually, our family, or friends, can control in any way. We are really sharing cultural powerlessness. We are powerless over what technology reports, and in some cases causes to happen in and to our culture.

     In many ways, we are powerless over our own bodies as well. In the physical disease of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) the body’s capacity to resist “foreign” cells or “infection” fails because the number of white (defensive) blood cells is diminished. The white blood cells defend the overall system by going to all of the cells in the body and determining which are “me” and which are “not me” (foreign). The white blood cells destroy the “not me” cells (the infection) and protect the integrity of the body.

     What plays out day-to-day in Technological Social Media are reports of political gridlocks, terrorist attacks, protests, fear over anger, and hatred which go against our personal values, ideals or morals which once we shared with genuine friends before “virtual friends”. That’s what made them friends. We shared values and priorities. Once it was genuine and real. Now it is pretense.

There is no technological “white blood cell” mechanism (no Technological Immune System) to test whether or not the things flowing along via Social Media are “me” (my values) and they go unfiltered and unchecked directly into my consciousness. Many are false posts. Some are real ads. Some are lies consciously planted by provocateurs who wish we would buy their “remedy” to the fear they promote, support their “cause” so they can “save” us, or work for someone else.

     This media stream is overloading my heart. Sometimes I feel revulsion, sometimes my “friends” say they are going out to buy guns, sometimes I get a dose of fear, my heart grows hard, my capacity to know my community as genuine “Friends” is compromised, my life is gerrymandered away by foreign (“not me”) forces. I am losing my strength. Am I suffering from technological Social Media AIDS?

WHY AM I HERE?

     The French Revolution happened within a society when one sub-culture within that country was overwhelmed by the values and priorities of another, more dominant culture. The peasants got out their technology – the guillotine - in order to eliminate the overly pernicious, fiercely greedy, aristocracy. They performed “Cultural Surgery”. It was a revolution that instituted the “rights of men.” “All the Kings horses and all the Kings men could not put Humpty-French-Monarchy together again.”

We don’t have Monarchy – we have Corporatism. Technological Social Media serves Corporations and the message flow down the technological arteries show that the “old order” of “me” values like citizenship, brotherhood, equality, and civic power is being swamped or infected by economic priorities, partisan values, and sectarianism. Regardless of which cultural values you treasure, you probably rarely see yours reflected on technological Social Media.  We are unraveling.

     When you treat actual AIDS you may find that the amount of medicine and its power may kill the patient. Treating technological Social Media AIDS, if such a thing were possible, maybe so painful and require such sacrifices many citizens would object, the same way “loyalists” defend the “crown” in previous revolutions.

     Those in control, sometimes called “tyrants”, never want to lose control, and so respond, gain strength and push back against any attempt to curtail their power. The AIDS virus actually degenerates all parts of the body to feed itself. The Social Media AIDS will do the same.

WHAT DO I WANT?

     Resist the urge to blame: we are not the only “Social” who have chosen to use “Social Media”. The Media serves multiple corporations, governmental agencies, international states, and their paid provocateurs, who are your and my friends and relatives.  Data gathering, based on words we use is shared to marketers and Governmental Security agencies. So, there are very large, powerful entities who value technological Social Media and they arise from multiple directions at once. But, this is only technology. You control all technologies by using the “off” switch. Or, you can change the dynamics in the technological stream by flooding social media with messages of other principles and values. You as an individual choose to change the message.

The U.S. was founded on universal spiritual principles: religious liberty, economic brotherhood, and equal rights. If we, each of us as individuals, reclaim these principles in our own non-technological, human lives; our own personal actions with one another, we can, from the inside, build a new Human Social Media which will create Cultural White Blood Cells and our renewed Culture will reject the forces of greed, fear and hatred, the “not me” forces of the oligarchy and their supporters which flow through the Technological Social Media.

© Copyright 2015, Jean W. Yeager

All Rights Reserved

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SIGHTS

It sounds impossible or childish to speak of virtues. And, then to ask how we might SEE or SIGHT a virtue?  Really? Seeing a virtue in the world? Is this Sunday School question? Seeing a virtue in action is not something an adult in this day and age might even seriously consider in my neighborhood.

Yet, despite the apparent ridiculous nature of the idea of seeing random acts of virtue, I have just set up a blog for a Calendar of Virtues. It is a monthly exercise aimed at getting people to stop by, get the monthly  virtue transition, then look around and see if it appears in the world or in our lives. 

Here is what happens if you set aside your quite natural and quite intellectually correct assumptions about how the world works – and how things appear.

First, visit the blog between now  and August 20 and you’ll see:

 www.calendarofvirtues.blogspot.com

The Virtue for July 21 – August 20 is:  THE VIRTUE OF  COMPASSION LEADS TO FREEDOM

OPPOSITE: HEARTLESSNESS

The virtues change on the 21^st of each month.

Here’s what happened to me: I was thinking that it is impossible for this virtue – COMPASSION -  (or ANY virtue) to appear at all. How can a virtue appear?

Then a flyer came through the mail about a summer, local, free lunch program for kids 18 – years and younger – because school lunch programs are done for the school year – none for summer.

Bingo, bango, bongo – right on cue – Compassion.  Interesting. How did life do that?

Did it lead to freedom? Well, yeah! Freedom from want. Freedom from hunger. Parents working three jobs got a little freedom.

               But, doesn’t a virtue sometimes not work out so well?

I thought about people who have great compassion and care for someone; show GREAT compassion, so much compassion that they have to sacrifice their personal freedom.

The people who care for someone many times sacrifice their freedom;  through compassion. But, many times the  sacrifice of one leads to freedom for the other for whom they care – freedom from pain, maybe; freedom from loneliness, certainly; freedom to focus on recovery.

An example from nature:  momma birds have compassion (or duty), built in by Mother Nature.

In the birdie’s case, Momma’s compassion, getting the worms, day-after-day eventually leads to a nest full of fledglings and then…

Bingo-Bango-Bongo – flight! Yeah! Freedom!

I – n – t – e - r-  e – s – t – I – n – g!

How about the opposite? Heartlessness?  No prob! I got a whole election season and TV news for that. And that leads to freedom to use the off button on that baby!

(c) Copyright 2019, Jean W. Yeager

All Rights Reserved

HUMANITY ATTENTION DEFICIT DISORDER

WHO AM I?

     “What does it mean to be human?”

     The capacity to speak about humanity and to see humanity as a topic reflected in public conversation has disappeared. We have a hole in our consciousness when it comes to thinking about our humanity.

     If you are incapable of having a conversation about what it means to be human, does that make you inhuman? After all, one of the qualities which is essential for being a human, is to talk to one another and tell stories. Humans are the only beings which tell stories. The richest stories which have most meaning for us are about what it means to be human.

     Rarely do the stories which are reported these days talk about how “news” affects someone’s humanity.  Parents never have a conversation with their children, or one another, about their humanity. How our humanity is being changed by actions reported in the press is what the news shows never report. Humanity and the human question is the last thing that politicians want to talk about. How to protect humanity is something which cannot find its way into laws. How Corporate actions enhance our humanity certainly is not on the Fortune 50 Board agendas.

     Caring for the humanity of customers is not discussed in sales meetings. The health of the patient’s Humanity is not taught in medical schools. Is the Humanity of students  discussed enough in a majority of high schools? Are Teachers held to a humanity proficiency scale?

     Does the military give Humanity training? Are elected officials ever elected because they talk about and demonstrate their capacity for humanity?

WHY AM I HERE?

     The reason we don’t talk about our humanity is because we now have a gap in our thinking and in our culture regarding humanity. We cannot think about how our humanity is nurtured or sustained in the American culture today, because only very small groups or individuals in our broader American culture today, pay any attention at all to humanity. So, if our broader “sense of self” pays little or no attention to our humanity – or actually works against it - then we have an attention deficit regarding humanity.

     Our view of the human being is not based on general conversations about humanity or understanding of what makes us human because in order to gain power and control, the general view of the human have been reduced to viewing humanity through specific lenses – genetics, behavioral psychological, physiological, chemical / pharmaceutical, economic, culturally specific, dogmatically religiously views, or others. All valid. All important. But the specificity has left a gap in our thinking – our capacity to think about humanity is now a negative or worse – laughed at.

     We now do not want to see our humanity or the humanity of each other because if we indeed strove for this, we would have to treat one another differently. We would have to give up our specialist thinking, our professional status, our positions of power and control. If we treat one another as objects, if I am able to label you, things are so much easier.

WHAT DO I WANT?

Is our public life so one-sided in our thinking that we are unable to think about our humanity? I want Humanity to re-emerge in our public thoughts. Because some of us have lost the ready, facile ways to think about humanity – the generally human – let me put my 2-cents on the table.

Here are some basics of humanity: kindness, tenderness, goodwill, sympathy, openness, modesty and benevolence?

We don’t see these much today discussed in our outer culture. What has hardened the hearts of the outer culture and made these appear so rarely in our public thoughts today?

Or, do the do-gooders simply do the good in the private human-to-human culture without calling attention to themselves? This means, as Vaclav Havel points out, we have a “parallel polis”.  An official culture in which humanity is disappeared and a human-based culture where humanity is alive and well – but silent.

I’m afraid the outer polis has Humanity Attention Deficit Disorder. If this continues, it will be catastrophic.

© Copyright 2015, Jean W. Yeager

All rights Reserved

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THE GIFT OF THE MAGI OF CARPET

Long before I ever heard of the Ouberufer Shepherds Plays, I realized there were two general “streams” of people in the world, the Kings and the Shepherds. Each of these two streams view life in their own unique way.  
     Kings are the kind of people who have the lofty mental capacity to look into the starry sky, see the shapes of the constellations, see the movement of the planets and divine or predict when very lofty and highly spiritual events would take place, like the birth in Bethlehem of the King of Kings. No one tells Kings, they knew.
     The Shepherds, on the other hand, are the ones who are busy with day-to-day life, tending their flocks, living rough in the fields, marveling in awe at the starry heavens, sleeping around a campfire, singing, cavorting, having a nip or two, and sleeping only to be told or inspired by an Angel to know that they must to go to Bethlehem and take gifts to the Great Shepherd. Everybody tells the shepherds.
     I am a Shepherd.
     Right out of college in the Vietnam War era, the only job an English major like me could find was something like selling carpet at a company named Carpet Kings in Dallas, TX. It was a “bait and switch” operation run by two guys named Bob and Tony, “sharpies” from New Jersey, and a money guy, their Uncle Bernie, sellin’ to “hicks” (as they thought of us). 
     Like I said, this was the 1970s and Bob and Tony both wore way too much English Leather cologne, way too many gold neck chains, way too colorful polyester shirts, way too tight hip-riding crotch hugging bell-bottom, and had way too heavily greased DA hair styles. They drove big, impressively girl-magnet cars, I’m talking boat-sized cars, like Lincoln Continentals. Not new, but close enough for real comfort and back-seat foreplay.
     They definitely saw themselves as Capitalistic Kings come down south to help us out of our oil money. They hired me, a Shepherd, and stuck me in a showroom at Casa Linda Shopping Center and, after training on how to “bait and switch”, sent me out on sales calls. 
     I took one sample set of cheap, I’m talking really cheap carpet and really cheap vinyl flooring, so cheap nobody would ever buy the stuff (a/k/a “the bait”) and one luxury set. Carpet people will feel the goods. Next time you’re in a showroom, ask he salesperson to show you some samples, and they’ll flip the sample book onto a table and run their a hand over the sample to feel the goods. If you invite ‘em over to your house, they’ll sit in an easy chair, look at your carpet, then slide down to feel your goods. They’re mentally calculating how much per square foot you paid. (We can’t help ourselves.)
     Nobody in their right mind would buy the really cheap stuff I was selling: the carpet was so cheap you could see the jute backing through the “shag-like” yarn.  The vinyl was so thin it was just a little thicker than an opaque, slightly textured Saran Wrap (no offense to the Saran Wrap company, but this stuff was thin.)

CHRISTMAS TIME IS COMING
The State Fair of Texas is held in late October. Companies like Carpet Kings take booths to hawk their products by offering things like drawings for a whole house full of carpet free!  All you gotta do is leave name, address and phone number. That entry form goes to a telemarketing phone room which calls and offers another opportunity to win a free room full of carpet or vinyl if you allow a salesperson to call - no obligation to buy - a “special promotion”.
     It was just before Christmas and I got sent to a “sure sale” in a very poor part of town. When I went in, I met the family: mom and dad and a pregnant teenage daughter and the teenage father, a snarly looking guy who fidgeted, a lot. The daughter was very pregnant, I’m talking uncomfortable, any day now pregnant.
     Mom wanted carpet and vinyl. They had been saving their money and wanted it installed before Christmas so that when the baby was born that the kid could crawl around on something clean. That clearly would be a first.
     If this had been the Oberufer Shepherd’s Play, this would have been the stable. The house was so small that either Mary and Joseph were sleeping on the hide-a-bed or Mom and Dad let the young couple have the bedroom. 
     There were no “goods” on the floor, only “bads”. The kitchen, for example, was a dirt floor. The living room was just old, cheap, splintery plywood that had been painted  brown a long, long time before.
     I drew my little “map” of the rooms. Dad helped me measure with my tape measure. I showed them my “bait and switch” samples of really cheap stuff and Mom got excited. Excited by this? This? This was not “bait and switch”, this was “bait and catch.” The only question from Mom was, “Can it be installed by Christmas?” 
     They had seen the “come on” ads offering the cheap stuff which I was showing. They had calculated the square yards. They had the money in cash.
     I actually tried to talk them out of the cheap stuff. I told them the vinyl could not be laid over a dirt floor. Dad asked that if he and the boy could put down some plywood, would that work?
What did I know about installation? Nothing. I was doubtful. I hemmed, I hawed, in the end, I pointed out every flaw in the carpet and vinyl I could think of, every problem conceivable, and even some inconceivable ones in a very transparent to attempt to save them from their awful fate. 
     And, I didn’t know about the remote possibility of installation before Christmas. We were busy, real busy. But, they were used to companies treating them poorly. They were used to being sent to the end of the line. They were used to only being able to afford the really cheap stuff. So what? By God, it was that mother’s love for that unborn child which outweighed anything I could say or do. Nothing negative was possible. There would be a way.
     Then I started feeling bad because I was judging them, like the mean Innkeeper in the Shepherd’s Play who turned away Mary and Joseph: 

“I keep my house for those 

who have money in purse!  

I keep for tramps, 

a kick, and a curse!” 

     Here I was trying to force my middle-class judgments and values on these good folks. Yeah, the place was like a stall, but it was their stall and it was going to be a stall with wall-to-wall carpet and vinyl in the kitchen and by Christmas! Cheap carpet is better for a kid to crawl on than splintery plywood. Vinyl, even cheap vinyl, was a dream if you lived on a dirt floor. 
    I was the one who had any chance of making that happen.  All I needed to do was go talk with Tony, yeah right. 
The daughter smiled beatifically. The young father-to-be fidgeted. I left them in freedom with samples to look at for the evening. 

IT’S BEGINNING TO SMELL A LOT LIKE ENGLISH LEATHER
Tony’s Lincoln was parked out front with a giggly young woman squirming on the front seat. He was there to get the day’s contracts and deposits.
     “How’d ya do?” he grinned.
So, I told him. I described the house. The family. The mom and dad, the son and daughter. Gave him my little floor map which he closely scrutinized. I gave him the cash which he recalculated. (”Can’t trust an English major!” he winked.)
     “You didn’t make no promises?” he asked.
     “Only to go back and get the samples.” I said.
     “Good boy.” He said.
     All he said was, “Boy oh boy, you say you left the samples?”
     “She’s gonna pick out a color that goes with poverty.”
     “This the address?” he asked. I nodded. “Lemme see what I can do. I’ll pick up the samples.”
     And then he took our other sales forms and left. 
     I didn’t see Tony again for a few days. Things were winding down after Thanksgiving and we knew we were going to be out of work by Christmas. It was okay. 
     The Mother called: “Aren’t you going to come and see how it looks?”
     “Oh, you got it installed?”
     “Oh yes! I thought you knew. Your boss Tony came. He’s nice. Too much cologne, but he’s nice.”
     “The baby?”
     “Very soon.”
     “Oh, Good.” I said, “You happy with the installation?”
     “Yes, very.”
     “Okay, I’ll come take a look.” I said.
     Tony came by that afternoon. I told him the mother called me. He said he recalculated my sales order and I had made a mistake. But he fixed it.
     “What mistake?” I asked.
     “You didn’t order good.”
     “I ordered the goods. I filled out the sales order correctly.” I said.
     “Yeah, well, there’s ordering goods, and then there’s ordering good. You’ll see. Go take a look.” 
     I had no clue what he was talking about. Sometimes Carpet Kings talk in a funny lingo about mark-up, profit margins, goods, thread count, and other stuff.
     Then he laid me off, but not because of the mistake. He handed me an envelope. “Here’s a Christmas bonus. Maybe we’ll see ya sometime.” He took my keys, watched me gather my personal stuff, and then we left.
     I knew it was coming. Sales were slow. I wasn’t earning my draw. There was $50 in the envelope so I was happy.
     I drove over to the family’s house. 
     I knocked on the door and the Mother answered. She opened the door and I was shocked. The floor was covered with some of the finest carpet we sold. And, the kitchen had a real sub-flooring beneath the vinyl. My mouth was agog.
     “Wow.” I said.
     “I think Tony said you ordered the wrong goods.”
     “Yeah, that’s what he said. This looks good!” I said. 
     “Baby’s gonna like it.” Dad said.
     “Yeah. It’s good.” I said.
     Tony never mentioned the Golden Rule, but there it was -- "He who has the gold, makes the rules." Sometimes that's good.

(C)Copyright 2016, Jean W. Yeager / All Rights Reserved
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