Unforeseen by most of us a decade ago, but predicted by many of us six years ago, the invasion of government into our lives is almost complete. The use of the IRS to not only invade your financial affairs, but to also trespass on the process of your very personal health care, appears to have become an acceptable undertaking by 40% of the population, given the continuing level of support for this Administration. This tyrannical and despotic stance is only one symptom of the disease eating at the fabric of the Republic.
From the top down, the current Administration’s ideological mindsets is being dispersed to affect all corners of our society, including the minds of our children and grandchildren, through enforcement of such nonsense as Common Core to manufacture millions of ideologically correct drones. Some large corporations, particularly banks, are on-board with ‘big brother’, although in the case of banks, it isn’t so much out of fear or coercion from the Administration, as it is from their seeing value in a market inhabited by a society of uneducated and uninformed zombies.
So what’s transpired to the long positively held notion of “Employee Of The Month”? It is no longer the employee which served customers with respect, or managed others effectively, inspiring them to become better than they were. Employee Of The Month has transformed into recognition of employees who can “Inform” on other employees who are not of the socialist mindset, or not towing the bureaucratic self-righteous statist line, or in the case of your bank, reporting on you the customer.
For example, it’s almost as if you should not have access to your own cash. In fact, in this long depression we have suffered, you should have no cash at all. Where are you going with that whole $2,000 or $4,000? Perhaps you’re financing terrorists with it, so we have the right to invade your privacy. “No”, you say, “I’m just going to negotiate a better deal for a used car if I have hard cash with me. Checks don’t work.” No matter, only a few of the elite are supposed to have access to cash and only if they support this statist Administration, and you certainly don’t look like the elite, plus your picture hasn’t appeared on the cover of, or on the pages of, People magazine, so you look suspicious.
We now live in an age when the likes of a deplorable character such as Lois Lerner is the Employee Of The Month and the MSM led by the NYT defends the practice, while humour such as the following from a not-so-distant past, isn’t so humorous when it reigns on our streets.
Two former schoolmates met in the street.
“Where do you work?”
“I am a school teacher. And what about you?”
“I work for the KGB.”
“Oh, and what are you doing at the KGB?”
“We unearth those who are dissatisfied.”
“You mean, there are also some who are satisfied?”
“Those who are satisfied are dealt with by the Division for the Fight Against the Embezzlements of the Socialist Property.”
A constituent of the vast baby boomer generation with a career which has been fortunate to know the ponderous corporate worlds, as well as the intimately pressurized, and invigorating entrepreneurial domains of high tech and venture capital, I have harvested my share of mistakes meandering through corridors of enterprise from Silicon Valley, to London and endless, colourful, sometimes praetorian points in between. The voyage has provided an abundance of fodder for a pen yielding to an inquisitive keyboard, a foraging mind, and a passionate spirit.
Whether political or business or social or economic or personal, is it not all political? It is a privilege to write, and an even greater privilege to be read by anyone, and sometimes with the wind at my back the writing may occasionally be legible. I do not write to invite scorn, nor to invite respect, but if I get really lucky the writing can stimulate thinking. I also write for the very selfish purpose of animating my own processes, and engaging the best of what life offers. Above all, whether biting fire or swatting shadows, I am grateful to be gifted the freedom to write and publish whatever flows down to the keyboard. To all those who enabled this freedom, and to all those standing guard to preserve it, I am indebted.