Sunday, June 20, 2010

My Patience With The Industrialists

My truce may be succeeding perfectly, or it may be a bust. A smashing success or a complete bust. Only time will tell.

Time does tend to tell a lot. I was spending some of my "time off," my truce time, last night walking through a cemetery. I took the opportunity to reflect quite a bit on the beginning dates of people's lives, then the ending date. Many of the stones revealed both dates.

I saw a few that I couldn't understand at all, like with no dates. Just their stinking name, that's it. Making me think, If you just have a generic name and don't bother to put your dates, no one's ever going to care about you. It's like looking for your friend John Smith on Facebook. You see so many without a picture or any other information, so old John's always hiding right in plain sight!

Some stones were more up my alley, not only the beginning and ending dates exactly spelled out, but they even figured up how many days that would've given them of earthly life. And as for information, they're the son of so-and-so and the father of so-and-so, and according to the pictures in the corner, he was a carpenter who did a lot of water skiing in his spare time. Probably died on skis or in a power nailer accident.

When you have a beginning and ending date, it tells a lot about you, such as the era in which you lived. Since the world always gets progressively worse, each generation thinking that the days before it were more innocent, it pays to get it over with as soon as possible. Just walking around the graveyard, I saw very many who had the foresight to die early in time and spare themselves the guilt of more modern days.

Of course looking at the stones, with plenty of people having lived about the same amount of time as me so far, then dying, it made me start thinking about my own impending death, likely to happen within the next hundred years. It really puts everything in a context of some sort to think about your mortality, not as something simply theoretical but as something real, right under your feet.

So ... time will tell, how things will work out with this truce with the industrial powers. Like I was saying yesterday, maybe they'll reward my good faith effort by canceling a few shifts. I'd love it to see a few industries completely shut down. If they'd just tell the people, "Our company is going to do the right thing and close down, so we thank you for your service," that would be the ideal solution. If I could get a few of those as a reward for my good faith effort, I'd be happy. Not entirely, though, of course, because that would leave a lot of industry still running. And I sincerely think that most of them need to go.

We see these big places out there and it just makes you sick. Take the big smokestacks they always seem to have. I saw one yesterday. I guess they're stupid enough to think if they make the smokestack a thousand feet high that it gets rid of the smoke. But of course the smoke takes the path of least resistance, going patiently up the stack until it gets to the inevitable hole, at which point it spills out. They don't know this is going to happen? Then they put big sparkling light bulbs on the smokestack. Or maybe they paint it with red and white stripes. It's still the same thing, people! It's a source of pollution, no matter how many layers of red and white you layer it with! Sheesh!

But please, don't get me started, or my truce will never hold. As it is, just driving by the place tried my patience. I was thinking, Why couldn't this place have rewarded me for my good faith effort? But no, they were still churning away. It was along a river. The light bulbs on the stack were blinking, making a perfect reflection in the water, spoiled and deformed only by the swirling of the water. That's pollution!

Anyway, my patience can't hold forever. It might already be almost at the breaking point. Time will tell.

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