Wednesday, July 02, 2008

Crazy Consumption

Sometimes when I want to get my point across really bad I try to consider what it must be like to say something without who I am getting in the way. Maybe that's not very realistic. There aren't many ways that who anyone is won't speak louder than what they say based on most hierarchical methods people use to evaluate what someone has to offer. Few people seem to feel that there is time to look past their swift and often superficial evaluation of anyone.

It often seems that many people choose their sources of information similar to the ways they choose their clothes and the other outward symbols they use to define who they are. Whatever we see or hear that doesn't serve what we can foresee to be our immediate future is often seen as a bad investment.

We invest our time and our money in what we see as valuable. When our values get twisted it can prompt us to view some people as being not much more than a product to buy, sell, or trade and too much of how those people ARE valuable can gets lost in how they may translate their thoughts in less typical ways. It seems to me that too much of what we all can learn from gets contained within the minds and thoughts of those people whom too many people never listen to. The unique expression of those thoughts and the development of the thoughts, expressions, and people who have them are too often discouraged.

No one is without having original ideas and creative thoughts at any age or in any other ways people are categorized. The belief to the contrary makes a consumer driven society impractical and wasteful of many expressions, and ultimately it makes every evaluating member of that society a disposable product.

If all we see ourselves as being nothing more than what we can commercially and politically acquire or manipulate, it can make others with less means of this acquisition or manipulative ability seem less valuable as being someone worthy of us knowing.

While 100 years ago there was less congestion and less sophisticated forms of weaponry, I really don't believe that people were any less crazy (as in people choosing inappropriate pathological means for solving problems) or were any less impaired in cognitive ways.

In whatever ways technology or sophisticated speech has aided our impaired abilities in these areas, I believe we have also done as much harm with them as well.

What seems to be our insatiable appetite for the best of products and services has also made all services of all people a product that can then be what I see as a tool to create wide division between what is worshiped and what is disposable. Following the path of wanting to become someone that is commercially and politically worshiped can also lead people to offering themselves as sacrifices to the development of an unworthy hierarchical view of these gods.

When the lights go out a person who's blind may be the most valuable resource to site oriented people because they have had to use resources that we haven't and that are now needed.

The senses that some people with these restrictions have developed from having lived life in a very different way is sometimes a valuable resource that others can learn from. The ways that they have had to adapt to a world that was less designed for their capabilities can also aid them in developing other senses that teach them valuable life lessons that they would likely not learn otherwise.

These lessons won't have an immediate commercial price tag for those who want to learn them. Instead it can only be valued by the worth that each person places on their own time and efforts, and what they really wish to gain from how they spend those resources.

I wish this were the way that all such people with what are described as impairments were initially considered to be useful or that it was at least considered that this may at least be something uniquely valuable about them and what they may have to offer.

Unfortunately, I don't believe that's the case often enough. This is not so these people would be classified as more worthy of understanding and respect than average but at this point I see the scales dramatically tilted in the other direction.

Angels and receptacles of pity aren't respected either. That's just another method people use to avoid the entire configuration of who people are and what they have to offer without having to confront their maladjusted prejudices of the so-called defects that people have that make them (the viewer/evaluator) uncomfortable.

What people experience based on sensing life in different ways can be a valuable resource for the development of everyone's senses that can make us all more sensitive and caring for all life. These views that some so-called impaired people have developed are too often not explored and this can encourage all such others with these impairments to be seen as disposable people.

If craziness as it is seen as an impairment is more prevalent today I believe that it has more to do with the campaigns to market crazy healing and promote the careers of crazy healers. This hardly stimulates the economy when so many are left in the path of it's destruction because the ideal is used to make too many harsh and critical judgments that devalue and exclude them.

What I see as being the best way to produce better humans is to encourage more humanity within ourselves as that relates to caring about others and to learn to delay our initial commercial and political evaluation of their worth. Our sophistication can best be evaluated based on how we develop the aspects of who we are that are really important. The means we use to encourage better relationship skills and more socially acceptable behaviors (that are often nothing more than how they are defined at any given time and place) need a lot further evaluation as to what our priorities really are. This is a key ingredient to our sanity and our preservation.

2 Comments:

At 6:57 PM , Blogger Amber DBTD said...

hi there, I'm enjoying your blog. You might also like mine: http://dontbitethedog.blogspot.com

I'd love it if you would add a link to mine, and I'd be happy to return the favor ( :

 
At 3:54 PM , Blogger Ed said...

O.K. Thanks Amber. I added your link.

I do like your blog and reading about your family. Don't Bite the Dog is a great title.

 

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