RUMINATING ON INDIVIDUALITY

Sometimes it is difficult to appreciate how America is changing. The changes are deep, pervasive, and taking place at lightening speed. The changes are not physically but cultural. We are building these things on a genetic framework or foundation, which makes me wonder if we will be capable of coping with them in the not to distant future.

In the last 24 hours, a number of events happened in my life. Nothing unusual or startling, just normal everyday events. I attended a “family” gathering at an upscale restaurant. Several of my children, grand children, and great grand children attended. Think about that. As a child, our family did these kinds of gatherings at home or at a picnic grounds. The food would have been “potluck”, with everyone chipping in to make there favorite dishes. I can never remember when I attended a gathering as a child when there were great grand children in attendance; in contrast, this time it was a wonderful thing that my wife and I had five of them there. We were active participants in the conversation and not just setting with nodding heads and drool running out of the corner of our mouths and a rare great grandchild placed on our lap for a picture.

We ordered food. The amount of food served made the plates look small; ridiculous amounts and generated comments about how good they looked. The drinks were varied and, except for beer, were bottomless. Each dinner was different and had an exotic name—and taste. Everything was perfect; the food, the service, and the servers provided bags and multi compartmented Styrofoam containers provided for us to take home the excess; obviously, this was expected because they were so readily available without question. Everyone agreed, “This is a great restaurant!” The crowd in the place verified the fact that this is what the people want. In addition, the fact that there was hardly a person in sight that was not overweight to some degree.

I have a friend who is a veterinarian and owns a clinic but us retired. When I asked how many veterinarian she has working for her in the clinic, she answered four. Then she added that none of them worked full time. They are all females and have families. Of course, they could work fulltime but this is the new option, the new flexibility. When I went through veterinary college there was only one female in my class, none in the class before mine and none in the class after mine, now veterinary classes are 80% females.

Earlier in the day, I had received a very disturbing e-mail from a friend who described what he saw as the demise of “his company”. The nature of his disappointment related to pride of workmanship. As a boy, I can clearly remember craftsmen, who took serious pride in the quality of their work and the reputation of the businesses where they worked. My friend, as a long retired manager of that company, he spoke with the personal pride of his association with the company and the pride he had in the products of that company. That company downsized and had recently “expanded” into a state where corporate taxes were cut to zero—stockholders are supposed to ignore the conflict between the words ‘expanding” and ‘downsizing’. The company transferred the jobs but not the employees. The new “enlightened” company operators offered midcareer employees, who had worked their way into high paying jobs, the opportunity to reapply for their old jobs—at starting level—of course they would have to pay for a move across the country. Management were willing to exchange years of experience for low salaries by sending the jobs were sent overseas; the cost of correcting mistakes in engineering would be recovered by repeating the work until they got it right.

When I was a small boy, the people in this country were proud to be Americans and proud of our democracy. We took pride in our civility and respect for the law. There was a true belief in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and one-man one-vote; we believed our representatives represented us and if they didn’t, we could vote them out of office. Of course, there were bitter political divides but they were all respected government. The slavery issue divided this country but that was one government against another government, not scattered individual rebelling against the concept of authority of any kind—that can only lead to absolute anarchy or chaos. A rancher in Nevada is herald as a hero for not paying for pasturing his cattle on federal lands; he denies the authority of the federal government. He is a theft and a criminal. People with guns have showed up to support him; however, his supporters depend on the law and order as he does in their daily lives.

We function on greed, yet realize we must share; we are a gregarious species but have great pride in our independence; and we as individual have self esteem but relies on others for their admiration. We are living longer but are clinging on to an inherent life pattern. We are biological male and females but refuse to recognize the social reality of that fact. We know about “pecking order” but seem to think that we can all be at the top, which perhaps explains why we demand to be individuals because that is the only each one of us can be at the top. 

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