KISS of nature

 

11/24/2008

 

It amazes me how winter dropped on us out of nowhere.

I’ve become out of touch with the seasons since I stopped jogging. I miss the river, and jogging in Jersey City or even Bayonne, doesn’t feel quite the same.

The old Passaic River fit me just right, even though the state has done much to crowd it out of existence with on and off ramps for local highways.

Morning felt like morning when I got out into the crisp air, and I could tell the change of season from the way the trees and water acted.

Now, I rush out to my car and drive south, seeing only the bumpers of the cars in front of me and the ruthless masses behind me urging me to hurry when traffic keeps me from moving more than an inch.

I miss Passaic, and how simple life was on the edge of extinction. I worried more about making my rent than about global warming or whether or not my government was spying on me.

I even miss hating Reagan, since evil in the White House grew worse since his leaving it.

While I have hopes for the new president, they aren’t high hopes.

Too many of the wrong people adore Obama – he is a president for the new generation.

My generation betrayed everything we believed in, turning from the path of wisdom to greed, and so I find little or no connection to this new entity, this new society, and for the first time in my life I understand how the Old Left – those wonderful communistic union people from the 1930s – felt when they saw us hippies arrive on the seem.

While the new boss – as The Who once told us – is the same as the old boss, the new new left isn’t what we were or what those of us before us were.

How can we have confidence in any of the new institutions, when even our radio shows such as WNYC starts resembling Orwell’s police state, asking listeners to turn in other listeners who have not pledged, the whole time being sponsored by our eras Gestapo (U.S. Homeland Security).

I liked those times better when I knew who my enemies were, even if I felt helpless to stop them from plundering the planet.

I think the greatest crime isn’t man’s inhumanity to man or even the rape of the natural world, but our insistence on making things so complex that we can’t tell these things are happening.

I’m of the KISS school of thought: keep it simple, stupid.