According to Investor\’s Business Daily, U.S. intelligence officials may soon begin actively tracking blogs.
I encourage everyone to go Anonymous. I don\’t work for them, and I don\’t have a referer ID — I just think that these days, most of us are better off doing it for a number of reasons. Tell me your reasons. The best will receive a free one year subscription to Anonymizer 2004 simply because I feel this issue is so important.
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Doing laundry just now in our old building, as for some reason I decided I did not want to bring dirty laundry with us. In the laundry room I was approached by a man I had never seen before. Much older than most of the people living here, the man was definitely past retirement age, but I am not sure by how much. Likely hs is an original resident of this building — they exist here and then, occasionally walking the hallways past the George Washington international studies grad students whose parents have keys to their apartments because they pay for their offspring\’s life (sometimes in more ways than one). Seeing the older people walk around here, I usually feel a little sad, a little wistful; my thoughts are immediately turned toward my own grandparents and how they live. For some reason I tend to think that the older residents in this building are lonely — they live alone, don\’t go out much, rarely have visitors, and well, isn\’t that a lonely lifestyle, especially at that age?
Why the hell do I think that, especially when considering that is the sort of lifestyle that I gravitate toward myself because I choose to — because I prefer it? Cultural brainwashing about single life and older age aside, why would I think these things about people when I am most likely going to end up with that sort of lifestyle if I ever make it to those years myself? Is it because deep down I am actually lonely and refuse to acknowledge this for fear of rejection and the deflation of my tiny dreams? No, actually, it is not. It is because I am afraid to be perceived as being alone — in nature, most predators and no lower food chain species that I can think of tend to survive for long while being alone, because to be alone in the wild and not have anyone watching your back leaves you much more vulnerable. If we are lucky enough to reach older age, we almost always become more frail, and therefore these days (and arguably, in older age before we \’evolved\’ into western homosapien culture) are more likely to be left behind by the pack to fend for ourselves. Dump the burden in the nursing home, the retirement home, whatever, just don\’t be held back. I fear old age, too.
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The older man in the laundry room immediately started talking to me as I was unloading my laundry into a washer. This, perhaps, is one reason why I may have, perhaps erroneously, assumed he was lonely. People in this building do not approach one another, particularly to have a conversation. Most residents rarely even acknowledge anyone else\’s presence. Does everyone here have a holier than thou complex, or is everyone as shy and afraid of other people as I am?
In today\’s society, it is essentially a faux pas to attempt to engage a stranger in conversation. Generally it is seen as a hostile move of some sort. \”Maybe the initiator wants something. Money, hand outs. My phone number for Friday night. Maybe the initator is a street solicitor who wants my name and number for some sort of commercial solicitation. Or perhaps s/he is an evangelisist, or working for someone who is running for office. Or even worse, maybe is running for office himself. Whatever it is, I don\’t want to give it to this person; they are invading my privacy, violating my personal space, and destroying the sanctity of my solitary reverie.\” Yes, we all think everybody is out to get theirs, particularly from us. We all have persecution complexes, and sometimes even severe problems with paranoia. As my friend jokingly states whenever he hears sirens, \”They\’re on to me!\” Why can it not be that instead of people being out to get us, or to get something from us, that people are, instead, trying to give a wonderful and rare gift — the gift of themselves? The gift of friendliness.
Why do we no longer welcome friendly day to day chatter? Why do we selfishly guard ourselves against all intrusions into our personal spheres? We know the answers to these questions, and some of the answers are horror stories that have wound their way into our subconscious, inhibiting our actions as inherently social creatures. Look at the Latin roots for inherent, inhibit, intrusion, and trust: inhaerere (to stick), intruden (to thrust in), credens (to believe or trust), and habitum (to hold with accordance). Different roots, but so close to similar meanings.
A true story that is not about me: a woman sees a man every day at a nearby store. After several months of seeing him there, she slips into very small talk with him. He asks her where she lives, and she vaguely mentions the neighborhood. The man then goes to the neighborhood and starts to watch for her car. Seeing it, he finds where in the development she lives. He waits for her to come home one day. When she does, he violently and sexually assaults her during daylight hours. She screams and screams and screams. She can hear her neighbors nearby, often on the other side of the wall. The neighbors do nothing. They do not call the police, they do not come to her help. They ignore her cries for help. To intervene would be unacceptable — maybe they would endanger themselves, or perhaps the persistent screams they hear are coming from a kinky girl and to intrude might anger her and call attention to an embarassing situation (sex). Or maybe they just recognize her voice, think the girl was drunk/a slut/whatever and deserved it. Whatever they think, they leave the man to his devices, and the girl to her fate.
I saw them take away the Jews, and I said and did nothing… Are we coming to that as a whole society once more?
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I originally started writing this because I simply wanted to say that the man in the laundry room, whom I had never seen before, suddenly started talking to me about politics and war. Perhaps he has seen me get of my car with my anti-Bush stickers, who knows? In this day and age, however — and perhaps I am wrong, seeing as I don\’t mix much these days with people other than my financially poor brethern and our shared over-stressed doctors — I don\’t think people approach complete strangers in private situations (I was unloading dirty underwear) and automatically start talking about how wrong the war is and has been. If I had disagreed, I can see where we could have spent the next few hours hotly debating the issue over our mutual dirty laundry, but I do not. I cannot.
But lordy, to discuss that in this forum is to only add my unimpressive alto to this mostly inactive choir, and I am sick of beating a dead and therefore unresponsive dead horse, particularly when the beatings are about the issues I hold the most dear or interesting. I did, however, want to share this next part.
The man I was speaking with said that he shares a tailor with the President and his cabinet, and by the look of the man and considering the neighborhood this apartment building is in, I believe him. He said that his tailor told him that the President\’s suits cost $2500 each, but that the suits do not fit. (I failed to query why, for $2500 a suit, that none of them fit, as to do so would have greatly ruined the man\’s point.) If you look at Bush\’s suits, the man said, all the shoulders are too wide, the chests too baggy, and the length of the body and the sleeves too long. Cheney\’s suits, on the other hand, fit perfectly all the time, even when his weight fluctuates. But Bush\’s suits are always too large. If the suit fits…
The guy also mentioned that Bush has lost 18 pounds since the beginning of his Presidency. Apparently our leader is positively fanatical about his physical image now — he is weighed by his personal doctor three times a week. Three! He also runs on the indoor track in the White House every day, and unlike his daddy, he is sure to eat his vegetables. The President now has a 34\” waist line, unlike the rest of his cabinet, who also share the same tailor. In particular, Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham has a 46\” waist line. The President, it may be worth noting, is 57, and the Secretary of Engery is 44. Kofi Annan (the Secretary General of the United Nations, duh), who occasionally also uses the same tailor, is 66, and has a 32\” waist line. Infer what you like, as I have to go finish my laundry.
