Advisory Bullshit
It occurred to me again today how many people there are trying to tell us how to live our lives. Doctor Phil. The Dali Lama. Every inexperienced academic on the planet. The Federal Government. Oprah Winfrey. Fox News. John McCain. (okay, so those last two are telling us the same things) Cereal boxes. New age self-improvement books. Newspaper columns. Talk shows. Organized (and unorganized) religions. The Marketing Machine. Bloggers. The media in general. The “style” section in particular. Movies stars. Athletes. Everybody.
News flash. These people are all wrong.
They all have an ax to grind. They all want to look extra smart, or want some slice of your money, or want to exercise control over you, or just want to convince you that their way is the one true way. All of them are mouthing generalities which have nothing to do with you in particular and very little to do with human beings in general. They all want you to do things that are to their advantage and don’t even bother taking you into consideration.
You are the only one like you that there is. That uniqueness is much more than a platitude. The complexity and fine structure that makes up an individual human being is a truly awesome thing to behold, and is utterly impossible to fully comprehend. The best that the platitudes, old wives tales, and conventional “wisdoms” can do is try to play games with your mind for the advantage of the utterer. Pay them little mind.
There is a nugget of “truth” in all of them, if you are the “average” person. Of course, no one is average and there are no easy answers. If you’d like, have a look at what people have to say. If you have enough grains of salt, there is probably something to take away from everything anybody ever says. But that something is probably too general and too small to be of any real value for the specific you.
It should also be noted that looking endlessly at every platitude that comes into your field of vision is probably not a good thing. If you are looking for and at these things, you are probably trying to learn and improve yourself, which is an excellent objective. But the best that platitudes can do is set you to thinking about someone else’s truth and how it may apply to you, if at all.
The truth is, in order to improve yourself, you have to understand your own fine structure and not someone else’s. You need to study and understand yourself. There will never be time to compare yourself against everything. And even more importantly, you will need to actually do something to improve yourself. Pondering platitudes endlessly is an excellent way to waste the rest of your life. After some reasonable period of reflection, get off your butt and do something. If it’s wrong, learn from it and change what you do next accordingly.
Inaction leads only to more inaction. Only informed action leads to life. So stop reading this, right now, and go out and do something. 
Saccharine Sex
I understand that sex sells. I understand that there is a great deal of interest in the subject generally. But I do not understand why the most popular take on sex appears to be about as sophisticated as the jokes in high school sophomore biology. Please do not get me wrong. I think sex is wonderful. It is one of the closest moments that two or more consenting adults will ever share. But to me, it is a participatory activity rather than a spectator sport, something to be done and not something to be talked about (and snickered about) ad nauseam.
Yet, women with cleavage are used to convince men to buy cars. Men with two day’s growth of beard are used to sell everyone everything. A human adult wearing a minimum of clothing is seemingly worth more than a cure for cancer. We concentrate on pornography at the expense of the important issues of our time. As a race, we seem to prefer the snickering winks and nods of sophomoric innuendo to all else.
This is true wherever people gather, but is especially true where people gather with fewer inhibitions, such as athletic locker rooms, large women’s rest rooms, and the World Wide Web. In a chat room, or in any such conversational site , the second best way to draw a lot of responses is the use of sexual innuendo. The best way is also via sexual innuendo, but the same innuendo uttered by a woman.
In all of those venues, the sophomoric wit may be amusing the first time, but the same people tend to repeat the same tired lines, time after time. I don’t know what it is that drives otherwise seemingly reasonable people to such conversational depths. I do hope that these mindless repetitions are not carried out by these same people during the actual act, if they do indeed ever participate in the actual act.
Fortunately, one will occasionally find a bit of witty double entendre, or even a few words of stimulating erotic conversation, though these are rarely free of stereotype. Such exchanges can be fascinating, though they are rare. Most of what passes for talk about sex in these venues is dreary and repetitive in the extreme. It is sad that such a fascinating and basically human subject is cheapened so often by so many, rather than cherished.
Voting Critically
It is getting harder every day to discuss politics, simply because the electorate is too polarized. I believe that to be on purpose, a ruse to keep people from talking about the things that matter. Politicians want this situation to be commonplace, in order that we stay disgusted with the process and don’t look at it too closely, or begin to think that we can repair the current abysmal state of government. The mainstream media is certainly complicit. They talk about what the politicians want to talk about, which has nothing to do with meaningful issues. It’s all fluff.
We are kept focused on non-issues; the age, color, or sex of candidates, not what they believe about critical issues. We don’t even talk about critical issues. We talk about the difference between pro-life and pro-choice, two meaningless word-sets if I ever heard any, and not about the deeper societal issues around sex and birth. All issues are polarized, all have buzz-words, while most mean nothing. They are words and phrases meant to confuse, sound bites meant to divide us into ever smaller groups.
As long as we let it be about Republican vs. Democrat, conservative vs. liberal, man vs. woman, and so on down a long list, the politicians and the monied elite that have bought and paid for them them will have their way with us. Thay will have the control; we will be subservient. We will not talk about the important things that could make our lives better, could alleviate the suffering of citizens, and stop the bleeding of our institutions. We vote instead on buzzwords, wardrobe, and haircuts, not substantive matters. This ludicrous process is killing our citizenry and our country.
You can help to alleviate this critical problem. Pick an issue that means something to you. Figure out why it means something to you, exactly how you feel about it, and why. Then find out how the candidates feel about it. Read their position papers, the long versions. Dig into it. See if what they say changes your mind. Look at their records and see if it matches their words. Finally, decide which candidate is closest to your position, and is likely to stick to it.
Then select another issue. Repeat. Do until done.
Islands
When you are young and free of care, sometimes you see something especially shiny. You stop and pick it up, and look at it, and play with it. Usually, the shine goes away and you get bored with it. Sooner or later, you lose the shiny thing and usually don’t even care. Once in a great while, you find something good enough to keep, and so you do. Life progresses quite nicely in that fashion until you begin to understand concepts such as responsibility, and ethics, and compassion (that is, if you ever do.)
These concepts are good things, but they tend to gum up the works. Although you may continue to pick up shiny things, and even keep a few of them, it does not happen nearly so often. Instead, you tend to notice things that are broken. So you pick up those things and try to fix them, and to make them shiny. That sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t.
Occasionally, you will run across a broken part of the society in which you exist, and you will work to fix that. That almost never occurs, at least to the extent that you will see the change that you believe to be best for society. That, of course, should not stop you from trying. A lot of things are so big, and so broken, that it takes a very long time and a lot of people to fix them.
If your tendencies are social at all, you will often find a broken person, and you will try to make them shiny, too. This happens especially if you feel you have a debt to pay, or if you believe in paying it forward. The problem is, most people don’t really want to be fixed, no matter what they say. The other problem is that unless you really know how to fix people, you won’t. The best you can hope for is an occasional success.
If you’re especially lucky, you may run across interesting and attractive people that are not very broken at all, although they may have a lot of questions, just like you do. Those people can be like magnets. One of the hardest parts of all is understanding that these people are on their own journey. You may get to walk alongside them for a while, but that is as good as it is going to get. They are as intent on their journey as you are on yours.
Sometimes all those things and people and causes that you have picked up get heavy. You want to just put them down, and start over. Sometimes you can do that, and sometimes you can’t. It would be especially good to find a like mind to walk with for a personal forever and share part of the load. In my experience, that doesn’t happen. With a new load, or an old load, you’re on your own. That is as good as it is going to get.
John Donne was wrong, in the end. Some people are islands, not because they want to be, but because it’s so hard to find someone that is going where you are going, at the same time you’re going there. You’re very lucky if you ever bump into someone like that. I’ve been lucky a couple of times, but just on the destination and not on the timing. That’s life, and that’s often as good as it’s going to get.
Islands are, by their nature, lonely places, and the walk seems longer when you’re alone. The periods just after the close brushes with people going to the same place, but at different times, are the hardest times to be alone. The island seems very small and the ocean seems very large. It probably is not good to stop, though. You just have to keep traveling.
