Hunter-Gatherers

Riding to and from every day is a mixed blessing.  I am freed from slavery to a machine and I don't have to drive on an roadway system which is grossly undersized for the volume of traffic that it carries.  I don't waste fossil fuels, but I have to view both kindnesses and strangeness more frequently than I care to.

Homeless folks here use the Max to get around.  I bitch a little bit when they are in the cripple seats, but I really can't say too much because my crippleyness is going away as I lose weight and exercise, and truth be told, they have a shitty life and I certainly won't go out of my way to make it worse.  They probably need the warmth and sleep.

But what fascinates me is how they are busting ass to get by, just on a much-diminished scale.  It appears that one of the sub-specialties is the collection and return of bottles/cans for deposit.  Good on them.  Like it or not, I kind of look upon this activity as a hunter-gatherer sort of deal.  But the homeless folks do tend to use the Max for the hauling of large, smelly trash bags of empties, so my fascination is tempered.

But one thing that homeless folks have is their cell phones.  Cheap cell phones abound.  I am OK with this, this is in no way a negative comment, I just find the idea of spending money on a what used to be considered a luxury kind of ... well  ..weird.  But then I had an epiphany, that the cell phone is a no longer a luxury, it is an accepted and necessary part of our society.

Which, on further thought, made me even sadder.  I guess that the idea that in Africa more people have access to cell phones than running water carries true here.

Scandalous

I feel that, when I talk to some of my friends, that they are judging me constantly in my unwillingness to vilify Trumpolino.  To them, Trump is the personification of all evil.  I get the impression that they just can't hear me when I say that we should not consider "moral judgement" at all.  Simply put, in evaluating the performance of a man in the seat of power for the project of running a rapacious empire which they profit from, morality is simply not an applicable criteria.

I would probably be willing to accept such criticism by a person who has not profited from the empire, but, truth be told, they appear to be pretty scarce on the ground.  The empire's wealth pump brings goodies to most of our society.  Our poor would be considered pretty well off in other countries.  Our welfare is problemmatic in the sense that it has a rather large proportion of obesity.

The Trumpster, and his motley crew of Randian followers are simply following the rules set down over the past thirty years by the corporate oligarchy.  You know, the ones from which folks draw their swollen paychecks.  In my lifetime I have watched the corporate power swollen to bursting and transitioning from making and building a business to unfettered short-term greed and worship of stock price and shareholder profit.

Did you think for a minute that they would allow Trumpolino to look at it any other way?  Did you imagine that Trumpster looks at in a way not sanctioned by the Wharton Business School?

But it is easier for us to think of me as an evil Machiavelli than someone who has decided that good and evil do not come into it.