Bob They may be Gone Forever (6/2/15)

I wish you could have been there to see this. I was walking through the parking lot to the grocery store when I was nearly hit by a car that was trying to do a 173 point turn so as to save 500 yards of distance traveled by driving up a one way lane the wrong direction. The driver disregarded all of the clearly displayed ONE-WAY indicators. To hell with the inconvenience to the other drivers, the rules of law and public safety for that matter. For this grocery store patron life is all about him, everyone else be damned.

I hated witnessing that event because it forced me to do the one thing I absolutely despise, eat crow. Two weeks prior my friend Bob asked me a question that in a rare moment of brazen optimism I affirmed with a resounding, “YES IT’S POSSIBLE.” Bob’s a Navy Vet in his 70’s and he asked me, “Do you think we’ll ever make it back to those good ol’ days?” Bob was referring to the 1940’s through the early part of the 1960’s, a period of time when hard work, ethics and morality were cultural norms. He was talking about a time when family values, pride and people were more important than just the bottom line. He was talking about a point in time where it appeared we were growing closer together socially and economically.

Well I have to reverse my ground with my crow in hand to that yes or no junction and say, “Bob I haven’t got a clue, but I’m leaning towards NO.” In the past 60 days I’ve called one of the best hospitals in the world on three separate occasions just to get them to simply send me my bill. It only took me two customer service representatives and one supervisor to have my bill dispatched. I was assured by the customer service reps on two separate occasions that the bill was going out that day, and I later discovered from the supervisor on day 50 that the invoice was not sent out on either occasion. When I finally received my hospital bill I found out that it wasn’t processed properly and as a result the claims were denied by my health insurance provider. This was an issue I dealt with in the past with this hospital. I did the job of my insurance providers and hospital billing department to get that previous issue resolved and the hospital still illegally sent my bill to a collection agency for lack of payment because someone in the hospital billing department neglected to apply insurance adjustments. I only found this out when I was denied emergency care for “lack of payment”.

So Bob I lean towards no because 125 years of progressivism has made it impossible to reverse the damage. Discipline is treated as child abuse making it impossible to teach accountability and responsibility during the formative years, which has a crippling effect on society as a whole. Family values have eroded with the basic model of what a family is, two loving parents who help raise well rounded children who then have the opportunity to become productive members of society; as indicated by the over 25 million children that were in single parent households in 2013 in the United States. You can’t talk about someone’s performance even if the facts and statistics validate their ineffectiveness because you’ll be labeled a bigot. You can’t talk about reforming the welfare system because only people who hate the poor and disenfranchised want to reform the entitlement system we have in place. I could sit here for hours typing up all the reasons we are never going to see those good ol’ days again Bob, but I’d rather take a minute to look at what it might take to see them.

The apathy to life in general that has infected society like the Bubonic Plague has to go. Society as a whole needs to reengage. The empowerment of the one man can move mountains attitude has to replace this debilitating notion that I’m just one person and I’m not that important philosophy.
We have to begin to truly communicate. That means you can’t shy away from expressing yourself on controversial issues where your opposition’s only line of defense when confronted by the facts is to resort to name calling. Real communication is at the heart of conflict resolution, but as a society we are shamed into silence.
We have to begin thinking again. This idea that someone else is right just because he has a position of authority in our lives is ludicrous. A shared background and life experience doesn’t mean that someone is correct or even has your best interests at heart. If you aren’t willing to think for yourself and ask questions you might as well go back to the days when the Earth was flat and the Sun and every other astral body revolved around the Earth.
The notions of immediate gratification and entitlement need to be eradicated from existence. Just because an 80 inch TV is on the market doesn’t mean you have to go out and get it just because you want it, especially if you are using credit it to get it. All credit really means is you can’t afford this. However, we’ve been conditioned to live outside of our means by commercialism. Commercialism has taught us to believe that if your friend Billy down the street got the new pair of Nikes you are entitled to them as well, even when you can’t afford them.

Will those four points get us back to the good ol’ days? No that is just the foundation to get us moving in the right direction. We need that foundation to build upon if we ever hope to get back to a brighter tomorrow. We have advanced so far a species. We have traveled into space and are on the verge of colonizing new planets. We have learned to harness the destructive power of the Universe to power our world. We have accomplished amazing feats in a short period of time, but we can’t muster the strength or the courage required to overcome our own self-destructive nature that has been permitted to infect society like a Biblical plague. Bob I don’t think there are enough people or enough diversity amongst those people to ever reclaim the good ol’ days, but if we are lucky perhaps life will offer to serve me up a second helping of crow.

© Christopher L. Hedges and AverageJoesStory.com, 2015. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Christopher L. Hedges and AverageJoesStory.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.