America and the Tractor Pull

It’s a cold, rainy spring morning, and in an effort to wake up and get some kind of motivation, I am thinking about the local fair, and the tractor pull. Don’t ask me why…maybe because a tractor rolled by the house here this morning and made it rumble like thunder. Kind of like the tractor pull.

Marian Dolan, 1931

You see, I’m a farm girl at heart. I was raised in the city, but my Grandma was the 4-H Queen of her day, and that’s apparently where my genetics come from. I ran our own little hobby farm for nearly ten years. Had lots of help, but it was getting as close to self-sufficient as you can be if you still have bills to pay.  When my marriage ended, working on a dairy farm that included housing was the best way to deal with raising 8 kids single handedly. By far the most fulfilling job I’ve ever had, working with the animals and the land was as grueling as it was beautiful. Immersed in life and the earth every day – does wonders for your constitution and outlook on life!

But the most impressive part of farming is the machinery! It’s huge, and strong and unyielding and impenetrable. It’s cold and unforgiving. It is raw power. I remember the first time I sat on the fender of a small John Deere tractor pulling a plow. I watched as the teeth sunk into the earth and as we were pulled forward by the power of this machine, the blades turned over the earth like black butter, folding the grass under and making the familiar furrows in the landscape. It was awe inspiring at the time, and over the course of the next few years it never ceased to amaze me, although becoming commonplace in the spring.

And going to the fair became something you did not just for the rides and the midway and funnel cakes. First of all, it was a day off!  It was for the farm machinery on display. It was for the vendors showing off the latest, greatest dairy chemicals. And in the evening, it was for the tractor pull!

Now, if you’ve never been to a tractor pull, think of it as a drag race for transformers weighed down by megaliths. It’s somewhat surreal, the noise, the roar, the smoke, and the visual power pulling a stone boat down the track until its front tires lift into the air, and the gears are whining. And then the front end drops to the ground, the engine slows and the back wheels stop churning up the sandy track. The track hands run out and check the official measure, unhitch the stone boat and the tractor drives away to the cheers of the crowd.

And in the case of the unmodified tractors, after the festivities, they are loaded back up and taken back to the farm where they will once again spread manure, rip up soil, rake it smooth, pull the planters and the harvest equipment…just like always.

For the modifieds, well…these are the spoiled brats of tractors. They will just go back into the shop to be fine-tuned with very expensive parts and be primed for the next competition. They are tractors, all right – but they have never turned a wheel in the earth. They are a caricature of a tractor. The show and tell of all the flattering parts of a tractor: The power, the size, the weight, the roar, the tires…like a body building competition for machines. They don’t really DO anything but look pretty and show off.

Now my morning musings of fairs and tractor pulls is rudely interrupted by the news. Yes – it’s my fault for turning on my computer and reading my e-mail, but I clicked on the news link to read of the Presidents unintended “on-mic harsh words of criticism”  toward his Republican opponents.  If it weren’t so tragic I would have smiled, since in my opinion, I wished they would talk that way all the time, because then we would really know what they think, instead of cloaking everything in bullshit. I’m a writer, and I know how to do that, too.

But the part of me who is not bound by this planet; the part of me that will live on long after my body decides it’s all funned out, looks at this and all of the other world headlines and just  shakes its head. Silly people. What have you done? What are you doing? There are so many of you – and your leaders have made such foolish errors.

You are like a stone boat, being pulled along by the motor and muscle of a machine. Oh, you started out strong! You charged into the American landscape, roaring and growling, racing at speeds that gave that old stone boat quite a thrill ride. It’s not accustomed to going so fast! But the weights are shifting. The hydraulics are tilting, and the weight is getting heavier, and heavier. And instead of realizing we are near the end of the run, you step on the gas, pop the clutch again, stress every moving part in the engine. Ugly sounds emanate from the inside. Smoke begins to pour from crevices that are not supposed to smoke. The American Stone Boat has now hooked itself up to weights that are not ours – pulling the wars of other countries onto our weight stack. Our engine whines and groans, and we proudly sit in the cab and slam back the throttle once again. And the stones look about…have we stopped? There is a lot of noise coming from the front, but we don’t seem to be moving anymore.

What happens next?

You tell me, America.

Nobody’s happy anymore. The money is gone. All we do it bitch and whine at each other, divided into more than two parties politically, there is an animosity that precludes debate, because the problems in this nation have all become personal. And a debate is about issues – not the person defending an issue. We are full up with laws because we live in fear – of EVERYTHING! We fear each other, we fear our government, we fear our food for pete’s sake! I’m not sure why, because any one of the offending parties can be sued now and you could possible reap a tidy sum. We insure our insurance. The only solution we have to anything anymore is money, and we don’t have any.

No one wants to give up any of their comforts, but the hard cold fact is we can’t even afford our comforts anymore. I could go on, but suffice it to say it’s out of control and it cannot be fixed. That’s wishful thinking. It doesn’t matter if we have Republicans or Democrats in any office, it will just be a different way to screw it up some more. Somebody is going to get hurt no matter what. No one will be happy.

At some point, however, the show will be over. It will have to end. Time goes on, the world still turns, the sun will continue to rise and set – on this we can depend. But in another analogy, one could say we have reached terminal velocity. We’ve reached the end of the rainbow, and yes, it’s just a prismatic illusion. How will it end? No…the globe we ride on is plenty stable. Unless cosmic forces start lobbing stones at her, or she implodes from the inside, she’s a lot more stable than the inhabitants who are nobly trying to “save” her. She doesn’t need saving. Doubt that? Ask the residents of Louisiana, Japan or Australia if Mother Nature seems to be fatiguing with age or in need of our nursing services.

I’ve read with interest many different ideas on how the show will conclude, but none of them strike me as “the answer”. As if we could actually know. Hypotheses – that’s all they are. No matter what happens, it’s a death – an ending – and those tend to be painful.  I’ve had to ask myself, “How then shall we live?” 

What are people to do when the world they know disappears from underneath them? A part of Japan is understanding this in what is, globally speaking, a small way. How can I call that much devastation “small”? Because it’s not even in the news daily anymore. It’s been trumped by Libya’s problems and the American political process. It’s old news – yesterday’s newspaper in the bottom of the birdcage. The thrill is gone. The shock and awe is over. We are used to all major issues taking no longer to solve than the two-hour Hollywood version. My goodness, we tackled a global killer asteroid already in under two hours – what’s a little earthquake and Tsunami? Nope. We are like the rubber-neckers at a traffic accident. “Move along, people, there’s nothing to see here…”, as we get our glimpse of twisted metal and maybe even a blood-spattered car or limp body, and shake our head as we face the road again and head home. “Bummer, man.”

I like my denial as much as the next person, though. I sit here at my computer today, taking full advantage of things like weekend relaxing time, electricity, gasoline, the internet, my coffee maker, my cigarettes, the heat pouring out of the vent on my feet while the cold rain pelts the window. I’m looking forward to my warm shower, with store-bought soaps and shampoos and lotions. Warm food will be served when everyone awakens, and we will no doubt enjoy a movie sometime this weekend with our feet up on the ottoman and our butts comfy on the couch. I worked hard all week, and I’m tired, and I’m takin’ it easy today. This is my reality, and I’d certainly rather no one fuck with that.

Normal Rockwell - "Freedom from Fear"

But there is another parallel reality going on all around you. And it’s not nearly as rosy, but it’s just as real. And today I’m thinking about it. What to do? Now, I’m no fear monger – in fact, I would hope that anything that comes out of me would be the polar opposite of fear – because that’s what is killing us as I mentioned earlier. And fear is a global killer if ever there was one. Fear is what holds people hostage. It is freedom that I seek, and not the “American” kind of freedom, but the freedom of empowerment that I would seek to spread. The fact that we have the ability to reframe anything life throws at us in a different light.

Like the more humble – but still powerful –farm tractor, we could unhitch from the boat, and make our way back to the farm, and begin to do that which we were built to do: Cooperate with the land to bring forth that which sustains our families. Back to basics. One day, we may just find ourselves there – stripped of modern convenience, with money devoid of value. It has happened before. What do people do? They turn their eyes toward home. Suddenly, their family is all that matters. Their people. Their companions. Their pets. Their food and water and shelter and clothing. And that’s pretty much it.

But I’m afraid this time around, we are being pulled by a modified tractor. It just doesn’t know when to quit. It’s never spent a day in the hot sun, or the blowing snow, or the driving rain. It actually has no job at all but to look good at show time, and demonstrate for the crowd it’s oodles of useless and rather impractical power. It’s reminiscent of Buzz Lightyear before he realized he was just a toy. The flag has been waved, and the pull is over, but how long will it be before the big rig even notices? Once it realizes the show is over, where does it go? What does it do? It gets put in the shop for some very, very expensive repairs, in hopes of pulling again.

But I remember the first tractor pull I ever attended. It was just a little local affair in our small Wisconsin town, June Dairy Days to be precise. The local farmers each brought in their biggest toy, and hooked them up to a literal stone boat – not some hydraulic contraption. This was just a concrete drag, upon which the men of the town would hop on, one by one, as the tractor dragged it down the street. Pretty soon, there were more men than the Massey could pull. The men would laugh and shake hands and head back to their place lining the street for the neighbors Ford. This was the beginning of the Tractor Pulls.

For you see people, the show is over. Despite the rumblings and smoke coming from the front, we are now standing still. In the true spirit of the tractor pull, the power, though being manifest through the volume and roar of the tractors, actually lies within the men on the boat. Because while the tractor has the power to pull a stone boat just so far – it’s the men that ultimately stop it. And stopped it, we have.

Our lives will soon change, one way or the other; either we will be imprisoned on the stone boat, hostages to the crisis of who wants to fix the tractor here and now, who will pay for it and you “stones” aren’t going anywhere, because we need you for our redemption! Or we will hop off the boat.

Now that we are stopped, it would be a good time to dismount, shake hands and head back home to our families and our neighbors, risking a return to more primitive living conditions, with a chance for a government do-over of some sort. The Goliath in the street will be trailered up and shipped off for an overhaul – if anyone even finds it to be worth it.

I suppose the choice will be ours.

The Facebook Diaries

No doubt, the advent of Facebook has brought many previously unheard of  issues to the forefront. From being just a “Hi, howdy-do” site, to the virtual reality of some people, it has also opened up whole cans of legal worms here and there. Yes, perhaps most of the folks in my age group who frequent Facebook use it as just what it was meant to be: A social network. In worlds that are filled with kids and jobs and the stresses of keeping it together in a faltering world economy, few of us have time for the real deal of friendship and camaraderie unless we work together. And those of us with unique situations have found support groups in the flesh to be too much to include – so we put together Groups on Facebook and get a wealth of friendships, information, advice and support all without having to travel away from our computer screens. Plain and simple, in this capacity…it works.

And then there are those who take social networking to a higher level and utilize it as a place to vent their spleen, to cry the blues, to boast of what their children did in school and to share what they are having for dinner. This is to say nothing of the pictures that are posted! We are treated to everything from our friends’ vacation photos, to their tattoos, to their weddings and funerals, and just plain old silly pictures. We have gamers who want us to play with them, and poets who want to share music and videos. Facebook seems to be  the one place where it's okay to talk about religion and politics, posting and forwarding articles that reflect our opinions on candidates and issues, and join Groups that feel the same way. And while this approach can be a turn-off to those who keep their personal lives personal, for those who are more...well, social in this capacity, it works. 

Or does it? I have seen no less than five articles in the last week or so that have warned – if even briefly – about the “dangers” of Facebook. Identity theft. Cyber stalking. Cyber bullying. Pedophiles on the hunt. Job discrimination and loss as a result of less than flattering things posted on Facebook. Can you be fired from your job for grumbling about it on Facebook – or is it protected speech? What happens if you don’t name names? What happens if you do? Can a prospective employer not hire you based upon the video you posted when you were drunk at your cousins wedding? (Technically, no…but I’m sure they’ll find something about your resume to pan you for.)

I’ve got a whole bunch of kids that introduced me to Facebook, and it’s become something of a friend to me, and I have had to step back and take a good, hard look at what this new dynamic, this “Social Network” has done and is doing to our new and improved human society. 

Like ANY technology today, it is not good or evil in and of itself. It’s kind of like Tofu – not real meat – takes on the flavor of whatever you mix it with. So for me and a host of others, it tastes just like our plain-chicken lives. For the teenagers, however, it’s a smorgasbord of everything from hot and spicy, to exotic, to just plain awful. And for kids in particular, they have not been taught cyber etiquette – if there even is such a thing. 

I was raised in a world where there were things you did and did not talk about, and you found out the difference fairly early in life, when you were soundly scolded for spilling family secrets, exposing dirty laundry, or swearing (at home or in public). The things you could not or did not say out loud, you confined to the pages of your diary. Here, you could cuss out the unfair teacher, rip your enemies to ribbons, say whatever you pleased, and close the cover and put it back between your mattresses, vented and satisfied that you had recorded this colossal event in your diary, to be immortalized forever. No one ever knew how much you hated this or that; no one knew how happy or depressed you were – just your “Dear Diary”. 

Not so much anymore. It has come to my attention in large ways lately how powerful Facebook has become, and how scary many people, especially parents, perceive it to be. If you read the list of done-me-wrongs above, yes – I guess I get that. I’ve been dismayed on more than one occasion when a child of mine has cyber-vomited up some computer phlegm all over their status and wall. More than one post was aimed right at me!! How dare they!

I came to most of my decisions about the use of Facebook in my teenage-dominated home by default, playing it as we go. (Is there any other way to parent??) All of my kids have a Facebook account and all but one use it daily. We have come to some understandings about our family’s personal etiquette. First, if you live at home, I have access to your wall. You block me, I block your computer. Second – I don’t hang out on your page, lurk on your wall or snoop. Fair is fair. If I think you are suicidal, I’m going to come looking at what’s going on there – but I have a real respect for the right to privacy, and for the establishment of trust. So far, so good. Also, you are not required to be friends with your siblings – and in fact, this has become a real barometer of relationships – but you do have to be a part of our personal family page, so notices that go out there are subject only to family, and have become a means of family communication over everything from new babies, to career changes, to clean-the-house day notices. The family page also has served as a place to have that argument without the volume and the knee-jerk hurtful comments that might happen if someone didn’t have the chance to think and write out their ire before hitting the “send” button. 

So over the past year or so that Facebook has risen up the priority list of peoples’ lives, I have heard on so many occasions what has become the official beginning and end of many relationships. “I’ve been deleted as so-and-so’s friend.”  “I’ve blocked him from my wall.”  “I had to delete her, she’s such a pain,” etc. etc. etc.  Statuses of relationship declarations have become the plumb line of all romances: “It’s Facebook Official!” “Oh dear…she’s single again?” “But WHO is he in a relationship with?” Even saw a cute version of Mary and Joseph and their Facebook relationship, premarital pregnancy and all! 

So, in the case of Facebook Appropriate, what’s the deal with all of this? Is it okay for teens and young adults to post anything and everything on their walls and statuses? Should some of it be kept private? What should you be shouting from the Facebook housetop, and what should you just keep confined to the pages of a private diary? 

I’ve come to the conclusion that there is no wrong answer to that. It depends on YOU. What do you want the world to know? Or in the case of the teenage angst, do they even care who knows? In the midst of their myopic world, the heat of anger and emotion seems to far outweigh the self-consciousness and apparently prevents them from pressing delete instead of send. But after reading yet another disturbing post from a child that got them deleted from several adult friend lists, I had to wonder about it all. What is okay to post, and what is not? I sat down and talked with the currently offended child, and came to still more conclusions. 

After hashing out the issue, I sat down and perused her wall. And while I was mildly shocked, somewhat dismayed, partially bored, and feeling like I had nothing in common with this giant group of “friends”, I realized that I was, in fact, just reading a great big collective diary. I took a moment to head back to my teen years and visit with some of the shit I went through when I was there. It was a long time ago, and it took some doing to generate the feelings of love, lust, betrayal, loyalty, fun and games, war and peace of that era. Times have changed, but people really have not. Just the frame the picture sits in is now digital. 

I was hardly thrilled with some of the comments that were there – but the fact that they exist at all is not such a bad thing. Diaries and journals have always been therapeutic. The written word is a powerful cathartic for that which ails you. We just used to hide it under the bed and hope our brother didn’t read it. But now we not only want him to read it, we want him to know that he’s the reason we are pissed off! 

I’ve seen that Facebook has a feature that will compile all your statuses for a year, so you can read all that you wrote. In other words, they will publish a copy of your Facebook diary for you to read. Yes – that’s all it really is: A diary of your thoughts and feelings, which you deemed important enough to want to share, even if it’s behind the façade of Facebook. It’s actually a safe place to do so. You are in control of your friend list, and even then, it’s very impersonal. The most you will ever get from a Facebook friend is a {{HUG}}, and the worst you can be punished with is a nasty comment that can easily be deleted, or deleted from someone’s friend list altogether. (Of course I realize that the love of drama keeps even the ugliest of “friendships” alive on here, but that just might be the nature of the beast these days. If I delete you, I won’t know if you spread any more trash talk about me to my other friends!) 

But in the face of all this, what you are getting is reality. When you read some of the posts, you don’t find yourself asking, “Tell me how you REALLY feel…”. No…it’s plain enough! So, I had to ask myself, do I want my kids posting things that curl your hair? What is the alternative? Keep it to themselves? Hide who they are, what they think, what they do? Surely there is the ever-present TMI (too much information), which you certainly won’t find on my page, but if you look back through the journals I kept through that time in my life, it reads much the same. It just wasn’t open to commentary. And I’ve kept these journals for posterity – and I know that when I walk the next world at least some of my kids will be glad to know the childhood version of their mother they never met. 

And I think about my journals of old, and know that my mother never knew a thing about them. She did not know when I was so mad at her I risked the displeasure of God himself by announcing in one entry that I would spit on her grave! (She had our dog put to sleep, for reasons I did not understand at the time.) She did not know when I smoked my first cigarette, started taking drugs, or lost my virginity. She had no idea how much I hated myself, and how much validation I was seeking. She was clueless to my suicidal thoughts. She would never know just how infatuated I was with my first boyfriend, or how devastated I was when we broke up. My quiet sullenness was a mystery, which only my diary had the answers to. And this was hidden in the depths of my room, smoldering between my mattresses – everything that made me tick. And that’s just the way it was. 

But it’s not like that anymore. I want to know why my kids are quiet – why they are crying. Why they slammed the door, why they don’t want to come home, and why they don’t want to leave home. I would much rather know where they were all weekend and what they were doing, and know that they were safe in their choices – poor or otherwise. And if they weren’t – I want to know that, too. I can’t address what I don’t know. And I have decided that I don’t want the sanitized version, either. I don’t want them to have to lie to me. I realize what "the experts" mean when they say you can’t be your childrens friend – but one surely needs to define “friend”. Because looking at my older kids, I’m glad that I am their friend – it’s all we can hope for at the end of the parent/child relationship road; to go from loving, guiding parent to trusted friend and adviser. I will always be able to pull rank, if necessary – but if you have no idea who this person you have raised really is, how will you effectively do that? 

I have found that I can take every “questionable” comment and picture that they post and use it to my parental advantage. Yes, even the proverbial drunk wedding videos. However inappropriate they may seem, there are a few things to remember. Number one is the DELETE option. Oh, I realize the well-meaning-ness of “once on-line, forever viewable” warning – but that’s not necessarily the case. Go ahead and try to find the picture you deleted of yourself with the lampshade on your head at the party. You can’t find the adorable one of your granddaughter that you accidentally deleted, either. You are going to have to REALLY want them to actually find them. And yes – if your boss sees a compromising picture of you on Facebook, your job might be at risk – but the boss might as well know who he hired, too. If he can’t see that Conservative Connie only breaks out of her business suit once a year on Christmas and forgive her – well, here comes the lawsuit. On the other hand, if seeing Harry the Hippie doing bongs every time he boots up his page, he should have the option of letting him go, or at least drug testing him one more time. The beauty of it is that it’s up to Connie and Harry – the individual who “owns” the page – to decide what they choose to share, and what they choose to keep private. 

And what a great opportunity to talk to my kids about relationships – and the drama – and the bad apples – and the keepers. Parenting at the coming-of-age is, in my life, primarily a spectator sport. I sit in the stands and watch – and I cheer, and I grimace, and I wince, and I shout…but it’s not my game anymore. It’s theirs. I get to come out on the field at half-time and mop up the blood, bandage the boo-boo, and replace their mouth guard before I head back to the stands and watch them continue on in their lives. I shout out the potential consequences of that move – flail my arms and shout when they are headed for a wall at full speed, but realize that few things on the field are fatal. The older they get, the less and less I get to be in the huddle as they develop their own team. But I do hope to maintain my position on the sidelines as the special teams coach – and the trust that has been built or destroyed will have everything to do with whether or not they want me as part of their adult team. 

When I look at some of the immaturity on display, I can’t help but re-frame my dismay by realizing that at that age I was doing the same, if not worse – and that in 18 months I had pulled my head out of my ass and become a responsible, married young mother. I’ve come to see that growing up – maturing – does not have to mean we no longer have fun, or do crazy things, or become silent, stoic, and stuffy. I am who I am – I have grown through every experience I’ve ever had to live a crazy, wonderful life. And so will they – if they are allowed. 

So, like the judge in the courtroom, testimony has come up that the prosecution objects to…but in my case, I’ll allow it. It’s part of a world we 40+ aged people did not have. We had our own version of immaturity and growing up – and our children have theirs. We are all just part of the grand anthropological experiment called being human – “The comparative study of human societies and cultures and their development.”  For all its components, the world of Facebook is, in fact, the world they live in – and I’d rather have the full version – not the Cliff notes. 

In our “hurry-up” world, I am choosing to look at Facebook as more of a Reality show, where the players are my own kids, and I am reading their diaries, live on the news feed, rather than waiting for a day where I pine for their presence, and read their diary only to find myself face to face with a child I never knew. I’d much rather talk about the good and bad in life with them now, while there is still a sporting chance to capitalize on the good and evade the consequences of the bad. 

Each kid who plasters all that they are on Facebook today is simply writing their biography – to be read now, in the present, and not saved for a day when there is nothing we can do about it but look back wistfully on what was. In a world where kids are lacking purpose and validation, despite a school system that has leveled the playing field and taught Even-Stevenism for all, they stand with their fists in the air and bodies on display, crying “SEE ME!!” And I want them to know I see them – I acknowledge them – I value them – I love them. They are, indeed, my friends. 

It's 2011...Do you Know Where Your Consciousness Is?

And this week the world has been rocked by Japan’s latest and greatest unfortunate disaster. I sit and watch the clips and news feeds from my computer. eBay pack and ship process gets suspended while I sit riveted to the screen. There is a certain feeling that runs through you when you are witnessing something truly historical – and it seems right and natural to suspend ones activities and pay attention – pay respect – this is one for the books. Like the first lunar landing. The assassination of a president. The Challenger explosion. 9/11…

I’ve lived long enough to see the virtual entirety of monumental events that have been televised – which is a far faster means of transmission of information than we had during the Revolutionary, Civil, World, or Korean War periods here.

One of my earliest memories, in fact, was in Kindergarten, and the teacher wheeled in…(gasp!)…a television set!! She then proceeded to tell us about men going to the moon, and space travel and adventure – and we watched Apollo 13 launch. This was truly of national significance, and deemed something even the smallest of citizens should be aware of.

And for the first time, we had the visual media to instantly convey this information to the citizens of this country. We didn’t have to huddle around a radio and imagine it – we could see it with our own eyes! We did not have to wait for the papers to write the articles about it – we watched it happen live! Considering that the television in my home took a few minutes to warm up, and only came in black and white – well, this was just frickin’ amazing!

The technology of television was an awesome addition to the human consciousness. And that’s what this is all about: Consciousness. Stop for just a moment, and think long and hard about what that is. To some it sounds like a spiritually fluffy word used by the "2012" crowd – to others it just means the difference between awake and asleep. But what does it really mean, without the bias?

I love the freedictionary.com definition:

“A sense of one’s personal or collective identity, including the attitudes, beliefs, and sensitivities held by or considered characteristic of an individual or group.

Alertness to or concern for a particular issue or situation.”

I read this, and I can only think…oops. We’ve collectively and selectively put ourselves to sleep.

Let me explain. But first of all, please know this is not even remotely to be construed as a political piece about the evils of the media. Please. This is just a few statements of fact, with my ideas sprinkled over the top, designed to get people to think, and nothing more.

When we look over the definition of consciousness, there is something more there than simple awareness – it is both personal and collective: Who I am, and who I am in relation to all the other life on the planet. Seems we’ve lost some substance here, and it’s starting to show up in spades all over the planet.

Who are you? Think back to a time when things were not quite as complicated. That question had a pat, standard, inarguable and quite stable answer. I am me, from the tribe of US, part of the greater OUR nation.  If you look at some of the indigenous tribes still scattered throughout the remote areas of the world, you don’t find major psychological issues, depression, or teenagers wandering around in angst over their hairstyle being ripped off by the other girls in school. No, you were born on this plot of land to this lineage, as soon as you were able, you were expected to work and contribute in some meaningful way to the survival of your “family”. There you have it, a personal and collective consciousness. Pretty limited in scope, because it took a while for news to travel, but the bottom line is that they did not really need much of the news they got anyway. It did not concern them or the day to day function of their families.

But surely on many occasions it may have been threatening – to hear of people or animals moving into your territory, and threatening your food supply. This would require the elders to put a plan together, and the clan pretty much trusted them to do right by the rest of them – because they needed each other. In a mutual, need-meeting energy system, the leaders took care of the people, and the people took care of the leaders – everyone benefited, and thereby the bonds remained, and remained strong. (At least up until the more “advanced” people came and wiped the less “advanced” people out, pick a genocide, any genocide – the story reads the same. Another blog.)

So, back to consciousness – our ancestors did not have all that much to be conscious of – and therefore they were focused, and efficient, and productive, and by and large, successful. (Exhibit A: America, et. al.) But what makes us uniquely human is the very way that we choose to expand our consciousness. It’s not enough to know that we put a seed in the ground and in a few months we’ve got food from the ground. No – at some point in time, people began to ask things like “why” and “how” – and our consciousness grew to include not just the daily grind, but the reason behind the daily grind. And then someone thought up nifty ways to make the daily grind less grinding. And all this forward thinking has been brought into the consciousness of US – and we are now seldom satisfied with simply what is – we have dined on a bushel full of fruit from the good old Tree of Knowledge, and with every bite of delicious fruit, we discover a little rotten spot on the inside: 

We built a city! We can work together for good! Where do we put all the poop and how do we keep it out of the water?

We invent artificial food! No one will ever go hungry! Why is everyone so fat, and where did that tumor come from?

We’ve discovered antibiotics and immunizations! No more senseless deaths! Where did MRSA come from, and how come our own immune systems are so shitty? Guess we better keep inventing more drugs to replace the human defense system.

We’ve invented convenience EVERYTHING! You can go faster with your single-serve, pre-cooked, plastic-wrapped, disposable boxed lunch-to-go than if you took the time to make a sandwich! No more clunky glass bottles for us! We’re the plastic generation! Any ideas on what to do with all the garbage we’re producing? Anyone?

The list of our advancements that have actually caused more problems than they solved is - well  - google. But that’s the nature of the Knowledge from the Tree – Good? Or Evil? You are the one who has to plug whatever the issues are into your consciousness and decide which it is.

And with each and every human advancement – technological or otherwise -  we have brought another thing into our consciousness. One more thing to think about. One more thing to consider when living your life from day to day. You no longer have to think about whether the flour you bought last winter has worms in it – today you must decide whether you will purchase white or whole wheat, this brand or that brand, from this store or that store, with this coupon or that club card. Before you go to the market, you have to remember where your credit card is, your ID, your wallet, your keys, check your bank balance, plan your trip on your GPS to make the most time, so you can get it all done in under two hours. Which is a whole other gig compared to getting the egg money out of the cookie jar and taking the wagon into town for the day, now isn’t it? Consciousness feeling a bit crowded?

And now enter the television. And the media. And the internet. The World Wide Web. Cable. Satellite. Pod casts. YouTube. Video games. The noise of it all! How much can you really be conscious of and do it any mental justice? Well, not that much. Some folks can handle more input than others to be sure – but no one can grasp it all. And so – in our wonderfully adaptive way – we simply don’t. We engage in what I would call selective assimilation, allowing into our consciousness only that which we choose, and discarding the rest. When you are driving down the road, you focus on the patch of asphalt in front of you, fairly ignoring the far larger expanse of green grass on either side of you. And, well, woe to you if you don’t…

But herein lies the “evil” part of all of this – with so many, many, many, many choices of things to be aware of, how do we choose which ones to spend quality time in our consciousness? How do we choose to act upon the ones we esteem worth entertaining? What, if any, laws govern this?

As I see it, there really are none. Certainly, we are told what is and is not important every day on the news. But there are as many news sources as news subjects, we are still left adrift in a virtual sea of information, all vying for top spot in our consciousness.

Now, this is all very entertaining, mind you. Just get a Facebook account, and add about 100 random people, and read the posts every day. Why, just today my “friends” wanted me to put as top priority in my consciousness 100 things, from the fact that Tina was having a bad hair day to the devastation in Japan. My friends also wanted me to be aware of a herd of Farmville requests, 17 music videos, 10 Hollywood happenings, seven altruistic Causes, five status-report requests, three baby pictures, and one obituary. And that’s just in four hours alone.

Now, come on…that is just too much information coming at you. You have to put your brain on warp drive and filter through all of it one by one, quickly, sorting them out, keeping this one, discarding that one, ignore that one, share that one, support that cause and offer a condolence. And that’s just Facebook – a completely unnecessary application for anyone’s life. Fun – handy – useful – but completely and totally unnecessary. Like most of the stuff we have crammed our lives and brains full of. How many more apps are taking up our brain’s hard-drive that we really don’t need?

Again – none of the knowledge is good or bad in and of itself – it’s what we choose to do with any of it – and whether or not it really has anything to do with our life, or has any business in the top ten things in our consciousness, either personally or collectively.

How many of us have sacrificed our time or energy for Hollywood consciousness? Does what Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie do have anything to do with you? Or your life?  Despite the whole 6-degrees of separation thing, most of us will have to answer an honest, “No”. Then why do we spend an hour reading People magazine? Well, I don’t know about you, but I think it’s actually much easier to spend that hour reading about who wore what to the Oscars and how much they spent on their outfits than paying the electric bill or writing a note of thanks to my sisters for the housecleaning. And I can hide for months behind all the clutter in my consciousness.

And so my kids came home from school today, and I asked them if they had heard about what had happened in Japan.

“Yeah. They showed us the video. Is there anything to eat?”

“Did they tell you about the severity of it?”

“What? The earthquake? Yeah. Can I have the last brownie?”

“You don’t get it, do you?” I ask.

“Get what? It’s just an earthquake and a tidal wave. What’s the big deal?”

Now, these are the same kids who came home last week all in a rage over the proposed budget of Governor Walker here in Wisconsin. When queried about their knowledge of this, I heard a loosely translated, disgruntled teacher’s utterings on a topic that my video-gaming kid clearly has no real grasp on. But he sure thought this was serious stuff. So much for “Johnny, what did you learn in school today?”. They didn’t really learn anything except the opinion of one vocal teacher. Their heads were filled with meme upon meme (look it up...) of useless (to them at this juncture) information. Not because it was not important to this teacher – but it is not important to them. It has no place in the top 100 things these kids should be conscious of. It may well be someone’s mission in life to try and overthrow a government, but it’s not theirs. They would be far better served being conscious of the fact that the dishes need to be done, the dogs need to be fed, their homework needs to be done and they need to help out with their brother.

Certainly on a broader scale, they should be made aware of the political process, and the application of it that we are seeing in our state these past few weeks, and it’s place in their collective consciousness. But to try and shove it into the top spot of their personal consciousness – well – where is the difference between informing and rabble-rousing? Where is the line between communication of information and just plain old gossip? How much of the information that we take in each day do we actually NEED to define our reality, both personally and collectively, and how much is just useless information distracting us from what is truly important?

It’s been my observation that we are teaching our people that picking and choosing our consciousness is something best handled by the media. You no longer have to experience something for yourself – you get to see it on TV and depending on the spin, get mad, or get happy over what you see. You are never really asked to DO anything about so much of this – because you don’t need to. It’s all being taken care of by the people who are actually involved. Whether you love something or hate it, all the media really wants is ratings. There is nothing you can do about 99% of what you are exposed to every day – just like the lawn you drive by on the way to work that needs to be mowed. You can see it, you can notice it, you can be reminded that your own grass needs to be cut – but you really can’t do anything about your neighbors lawn.

Ah! But the media might just start a campaign – an awareness campaign – a consciousness appeal – to all the un-mown, unsightly lawns in the neighborhood. Yes, let’s have a meeting now, and piss and moan about people who don’t mow their lawns religiously. Let’s crucify the Widow Tate and Charlie the Drunk! Let’s kick them out of the community! Let’s make a law, and threaten them with fines and legal action if they do not keep the grass mowed to our standard (which we shall spend hours determining) of proper grass length. We need these laws to help make the world a better place! And we go home justified. We spoke our peace. We make our voice heard! Yay for us!

But maybe – just maybe – if Mrs. Tate’s and Charlie’s neighbors actually took the time to talk to them, and find out that she cannot handle a lawn mower any more and can’t afford a lawn service, and Charlie needs to check into rehab but has no support system, maybe we could actually become involved and offer to mow their lawns for them. Maybe we could make the world a better place by simply meeting a need, instead of needing a meeting. Maybe if instead of just blustering and pontificating about the problem we just applied our consciousness to the reality of the problem, we wouldn’t need to export our lawn-mowing issues beyond this neighborhood block, and people could apply their consciousnesses to something more profitable in the long run.

Unfortunately, we just don’t choose to do this much anymore. No  - it’s just way too easy to be conscious of the latest American Idol than it is about the Japanese disaster. After all, we can’t do much to help them in Japan – but I can call in my vote for Susie Starlet!  This is what we are, inadvertently or not, teaching the younger generations to be conscious of.

We don’t have much at all anymore in the way of a substantive, collective consciousness. Hell, I don’t even know my neighbors names – and I’m not alone in that. We keep to ourselves – our personal consciousness is all that matters here: My bills, my money, my job, my family, my TV, my stuff, my car, my dog, my lawn.  We don’t know where we belong in our communities – most of us could up and move away and no one would notice but the postman.

We have substituted the media’s rendition of the collective consciousness as our reality.  We won’t bother finding out that our neighbor has a need – instead we look to the media to find where to spend our money “helping” others. We will happily “get involved” spreading awareness, as long as it can be done from the safety of our Lazy Boy recliner, or behind the screen of our computer. Our community is now on-line. We don’t reach out and touch someone – we offer them a {{BIG HUG}} via IM that it is doubtful we would ever give them should we meet them in the supermarket. We are long on sentiment, and very, very short on personal application.

We have, as I said, put ourselves to sleep. We stopped at some point thinking for ourselves. We no longer looked around to see what we need to allow into our consciousness, for us to do something about, live our lives by, and carry on our tasks for. We have our personal consciousness – which trumps anyone else’s, because the media tells us that we need to coddle our fragile egos and put ourselves first. And the media tells us that our collective conscious is that which we behold on television. Events that happen at Degrassi are much more important than the kid next door who is struggling with finding friends in the real world. Contributing to breast cancer research is just way, way more important that offering to clean house for the woman in your community struggling with her chemo treatments, and buying a Shamrock at the gas station is infinitely more valuable than taking a Saturday and building a ramp with the rest of the neighborhood men for a kid with muscular dystrophy.

We are positively robotic in our acceptance of what we should and shouldn’t be conscious of. And today I am simply suggesting that it would be a good idea if we all just stopped for a brief moment, and took a little more responsibility in choosing what we shall be conscious of, both personally and collectively. What really matters? What is truly worthy of space within your marvelously complex brain? What will play a bigger role in making you a better human being, and this world a better place? 

It's 2011....do you know where your consciousness is? 

Dear Wisconsin,

Enough is enough. All we needed to learn to solve this problem in Madison we learned in our childhood in the sanctity of the homes we sit in at night; the homes we are all trying desperately to stay in, maintain, decorate, relax in, entertain in, raise our families in, pay our taxes on, and prevent from going into foreclosure.

Let me share with you a scene from the living room of a Wisconsin home: Mine.

I sit looking at a pile of bills I cannot pay. I managed to get the land taxes paid, including the late water bill which was tacked on. I’m only a month behind on the mortgage. The next largest bill is the cell phone, which supports 5 lines, mine and my four oldest children, who are 18, 16, 15, and 14. My youngest is 12, but Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy has rendered him a quadriplegic for all intents and purposes, so he doesn’t have one. I own a small business on the verge of closing, because I have to be at home 24/7 to care for my son and it cannot support more than one employee. To supplement, I sell stuff on eBay. We have a serious budget deficit here. So I call a family meeting.

I text them all the time and place. One kid is a no-show. I call him up to find he is at a friend’s house and does not want to talk about this now. I tell him to get his ass home NOW, that he has a responsibility here, as he is part of the family, one of the consumers, part of the problem and needs to be involved in the solution. If he does not show up now, he will lose his cell phone, and a few other privileges.  

He complies. We sit down and I show the kids the ledger I am figuring things on. I explain that $200, the balance left in my account, will not pay the $3500 worth of bills that I have in my hand. They stare at me with a deer-in-the-headlights look. And so I proceed to tell them some of the possible solutions to this. One of their phones goes off, and I confiscate it. We will not be interrupted.

Solution #1: Martial law. Forget this. I need a phone – you guys don’t. If I simply disconnect, and get a plan for me with everything I want and need, I will still be a lot of dollars ahead. You guys, on the other hand are screwed. One reason that you have the social lives you have is because I can contact you at any time, and I know where you are. If I can’t get a hold of you, your activities will all be severely curtailed, especially the new teenage driver. I pay for it – I get the benefits from it. Done.

Solution #2: We all contribute. The first question from the floor is legitimate, “How can we get money to pay you?” asks the 15-year-old. “There are no jobs for teenagers in this town.” And he is correct. Other than an odd babysitting job or two, there are more teens than there are jobs in this small village. So I ask back, “If there was a job for you to do, would you be willing to do it and pay your portion of the bill?”  They all very sincerely agree.

“Then let me offer you this solution. Clearly, you cannot all work. However, I can. I am highly employable, and even have a little retail store. The problem is, I can’t be in two places at once, and I am the only one who can tend to your younger brothers medical needs. So what I am proposing is that I work for you. You, however, will have to work for me…you will have to cover the tasks that I have to do, so that I can make the money you cannot. Right now, I have only 6 hours a day when your brother is in school to work. During those hours, I keep the house clean, do the laundry, run for groceries and to the bank and on miscellaneous errands. I prepare dinner and feed the dogs and clean up their mess. I pack and ship eBay packages, and shoot photos and sort inventory and list things. When your brother gets home, I have to be immediately available should he have to go to the bathroom, drop his game controller or want to play a different game, or his hand should fall off his tray, or he needs his feet readjusted. He will need to be fed his dinner, and helped to do everything from opening his computer to scratching his nose.

All of that takes time. Would you be willing to step in and be me, do my work, so that I can list more items per day? Because more items per day means more sales per day, which means more money in the bank, and more money to pay these bills.

They look at me, and each other and agree, but want to know how this pans out for each one of them individually.

Well, I address the 18-year-old, the only member of the household that currently has a W-2 type job at a grocery store. He agrees to get a cell phone plan of his own. He already pays his own insurance, car payments and dental bills, and this will tax his part-time paycheck, but he looks at the pile of bills and sees that he needs to do something to help. He also agrees to keep the garbage under control so I don’t have to. He further agrees to keep his grades up so that we can maintain the good student discount on the insurance.

The 16-year-old is next. She is in enrolled in a virtual school. This has given her the opportunity to go pretty much anywhere, anytime, with her friends. However, it would also give her the opportunity to work at the store, so that I don’t have to pay as much out in wages. When she is home, there is no reason in between her online classes that she cannot cook dinner on a daily basis. She agrees to continue to look for a part-time job in the area, but her social life will have to take a back seat to the needs of the family at this time.

The 15-year-old has plenty of time on his hands once he gets home from basketball practice. Many of the needs his brother has are things he can do – in fact, when it comes to the video games and electronics, he’s my main man, already. He agrees, there is no reason why I could not be in the basement listing things while he stays in the living room with his brother, tending to those little needs. We do not need ME hearing the need and delegating it – he can deal directly with his brother. He further reluctantly agrees that even though we all enjoy our canine companions, he can take up the responsibility of feeding the dogs and picking up the poop.

The 14-year-old comes to the forefront. Having the most active social life and the most motivation to keep the house clean is a bad combination for her. She agrees to take up the responsibility of the bulk of the cleaning. Least happy with this concession, my straight-A daughter is vehemently protesting having to clean up everyone elses messes. And she has a valid point: We all mess up the common areas with our dishes and muddy shoes and toothpaste residue. Why should she have to clean it all up? I tell her because if they don’t, then I will have to do it, and that’s time I could be earning money to pay her bill. At the same time, I insist that each one must clean up their own personal mess by rinsing their own dishes and putting them in the dishwasher, wiping down the sink and toilet, getting their garbage INTO the can, and cleaning up any serious snow and mud that may get tracked in. Things like vacuuming the stairs or mopping the floor will fall to her. She reluctantly agrees. She doesn’t like it, but she sees the wisdom of it.

We make further group concessions. No more iTunes downloads. No internet over the phone. No more spontaneous plans with friends – they will have to be cleared with the responsibilities of the house.  No more convenience foods – from now on the refrigerator and cupboards have only ingredients that can be converted into a meal. The only microwavable snack in the house is a baked potato. After some debate, we all agree to keep frozen pizza on the menu.

We nipped and tucked our family budget for the better part of an hour. We argued and debated, and I had to shut down more than a few personal insults that were slung around. But in the final analysis, the point was driven home: This is our family. This is our home. This was our communication system. The benefits of having cell phone contact with each other were deemed important enough to work for keeping. The Hotpockets, not so much. The benefit of having a roof over our head was self evident. But the bottom line: We are in this together. Everyone has to contribute something, and everyone has to give a little. Everyone has to tighten their belt a bit for the good of our family.

Is this such a hard concept to grasp? These are hard times – and as much as we may want to escape them or deny them, they are here and they are now. We will either pull together as a family, or we will divide and fall. As much as the older kids think they deserve more, or have earned a greater privilege, I remind them that money is only one standard of measure. Just because we have not placed a monetary value on scrubbing the kitchen sink does not make the job worth nothing. Somebody has to do it, or it will not get done, and we run the risk of living in complete squalor if we wait for someone who has to get paid to do it.

We lament the families who are so dysfunctional – where it’s every person for themselves, and who cares about anyone else? In the end, that is the reason we have prisons. What is the message we are sending to the kids? Fussing and fighting because the recession has hit you, too? We are all in this together. Let’s figure out the solution together. If we all step back and take a look at the bigger picture, objectively, it becomes rather obvious where things need to get trimmed for the good of the whole. If we no longer see ourselves as a whole – a unit, a family, a team – we are no more than a mass of anarchists, destined for war and failure.

I am neither a republican nor a democrat. I have no political affiliation whatsoever. I have enough on my plate just to keep the politics of my family in line. I enjoy a Facebook friends list that has a fairly balanced amount of people, from screaming liberals to rabid conservatives, and I thoroughly enjoy reading each side from their own point of view. I like to see where everybody in that “family” stands on issues. I don’t make political statements, and rarely engage in political debate or commentary. 

But this is embarrassing. Take a lesson from home – from your mother. Knock this shit off and get it together before it all falls apart. Put on your grown-up pants and take some responsibility for the way things are, and do your part to rectify it. Stop whining and playing the victim, here. This is a democracy, and you have a say in the matter. It may not work out just the way you want it to, but  be prepared to negotiate a point with something other than your personal issues.

If I can get a room full of teenagers to agree to come together to solve a financial dilemma, how the hell can the people trusted to run this state not do the same? As in the case of the family – we either have to pull this together, or we will pull it apart. The choice is ours – for the good of us ALL.