Replying to Saturday’s rich harvest of Comments: bmo, clearly you do not live in Berkeley or the San Franscisco Bay Area anywhere, where a phrase like “corporate-generated reality” would draw nothing but a yawn or a pang of nostalgia. No, it’s hard going, being a crackpot nowadays. And remember, I teethed on C. Wright Mills; this conversation is old. Come to California (said in the mellifuous tones of whomever, years ago, said, Come to Jamaica.) (Was it Geoffrey Holder?) (See, the corporation lives like a little yammering spider in my head too.)
Though I took a very large leap, in order to finish yesterday’s blog post and not get too womanish, I’m going to fill in today what absolutely no one shall be interesting in reading but which I never tire of saying: We did not go to all that fucking work with Women’s Lib in order for women to abandon their children to the care of the corporation.
Let’s get practical. Who raises your children? bmo also despairs of escaping the infiltration. It isn’t that hard: turn off the TV. Have a shred of nature in which your children may get lost and play. Raise them person-to-person, and make them feel—pay attention—that there is nothing and no one so important in all of the world as they. Fill all possible pockets and hollows in their developing personalities with the sense they are wonderful beyond reason, that their existence brings delight beyond measure. Fill fill fill, for all that you fill when they are young is one less pocket of emptiness that shall not be carried into adulthood, that perilous time when the things that clamor to satisfy will hardly be made of love.
Dear Tom, it’s easy enough to see these things plain when you really look at your child, you know that. We just never dreamt women would go back to work in such droves as to create this crisis in the American family, and don’t tell me it’s all fine. Poll the children. Ask them where they’d rather be, and with whom.
I should have clarified, I meant the necessary love that starts at birth and the needs of the child which, when filled at the appropriate time, results in adults who are not the walking empty. People in possession of their own thoughts, replete with the ability to meaningfully connect. These are the preventives.
California. It’s far too painful to dream if it.
My dream was an island.
These are cola nuts.
Yes, I live in a corptopia. Minion status. Here we live on the buzz. It’s like an electro-magnetic field, feeding, sustaining, driving us. Corp is church. Yawn. Yes, but…
…these kids today, it’s why they react in such great numbers in such odd ways.
It’s a very natural reaction to some very un-natural circumstances and environment.
We are the uncola nuts. From which sprout these odd beasts.
And if they are not filled with love, then what?
The New Baconator looks good. .
What is it with the bacon, anyway … all I know about Canada I learned years ago from Doug and Bob.