While we should aspire for the ideal of perfection, we must also be prepared for the reality of fault and failure. When we make mistakes, it is important to not be beaten down, which will encourage us to give up our aspirations for betterment. It is crucial that we look at ourselves in the generational perspective. Yes, we live in an age succumb to greed, but we don't let people own other people, and hitting women with sticks is no longer encouraged or excused. On a generational scale we have shown marked improvement. We have to understand, that in Biblical times, the moral scholars of the day had to pick their battles. It was hard enough trying to get people to not kill one another.
Now that you feel better having not murdered anyone, we can shorten the time scale to within our own lifetime. We all probably have some half-represses memory of being an absolute horror of a child. Everyone has ruined a waitresses day by pouring all the salt and pepper into their water in the name of science.
And here we must confront an unpleasant side-effect of striving for betterment: The more improvement we experience, the more we reflect upon our past with a greater relative sense of dissatisfaction with our choices, actions and motivations. Not only do we see our past selves in a more negative light, but we perceive the actions of those around us as more negative as well.
The farther along the road we traverse, the greater the effect, and it is this line of self-reflection and re-observation of the world as it is and has been, we are brought back to the question of absurdity, anxiety, isolation and ultimately the issue of suicide. But we are getting too far ahead for the moment.
There is an inherent amount of madness in wanting to become a better person beyond the caliber of what is expected by law and social dictum. As stated before, there was a point in American history, when the abolition movement was a minority opinion, thought to be carried only by the soft-hearted idealists. How alienating it must have been, to be a progressive minded youth in the deep south, perhaps even the child of a plantation owner; knowing from the heart and from examples of places abroad, that there was an alternative way of life.
Given the context of time, belief in some greater potential good is indeed madness in the respect that it requires belief in an non-actualized reality. However, this is a type of madness that is logically achievable. It would be one thing to believe in a reality in which people never aged or died, but in choosing to believe that mankind can be better, we have historical evidence that it is not only possible, but that it has been done repeatedly and constantly in the past. By allocating this belief within the realms of human society, we put it in the realm of possibility. We have complete control over our own societies. There is no outside agent. We and our government representatives are not being controlled by corporate overlords. We are just very susceptible to bribery.
It's insane, but it isn't. As noted before, as we make progress in self-improvement, a natural side-effect of that betterment, is that previous states of our being are made to seem worse. Furthermore, actions of our closest friends are re-examined from our new found soap box, and the world at large is revealed to be a much worse, corrupt place than we could have ever hoped to imagine.
This brings us to the primary anxiety of this journey. It is assumed that for most individuals who seek out a higher moral livelihood, it was done in some sense out of a desire to make the world a better place for those around us. It is not done for self-gratification or to nurture a "mightier than thou" complex, but because an individual wishes to bring goodness into the world around them. However, as they improve morally, they are confronted with the relativity issue, of perceiving not only mankind as a whole, but their friends and family as being more morally corrupt than they had at the outset of their journey. The question then runs through our mind: Was humanity worth the trouble?
It is so easy to question whether or not those around us are "deserving" of the kind acts of others, especially when they don't seem to want help, or are completely oblivious to the fact that they are indeed doing wrong. For, on a moral level, is it not essentially wrong to aid or be charitable and kind to a "wrong-doer?" The number of people who have no moral stances can seem overwhelming, and it may seem like that number is growing as well. It may seem like the great nation of America has become nothing more than a large number of large people, enthralled in petty, superficial standards of overconsumption. It may seem as though people have deeply invested themselves in the notion that they should just look out for themselves, and that people are mere stepping stones on the path to the top. It may seem as though any try to cultivate goodness and charity will be swept up by the eternally selfish, who will just demand more until there is nothing left to give.
Farther down the road the question then becomes: If this is the state of the world, and it seems improbable if not impossible for one individual or even a group of individuals to make a positive change, is this a world worth living in?
This kind of thinking is a trap. It is an unnecessary division of mankind into right and wrong, good and evil. We set out on a mission to save the environment, create a higher moral standard, or whatever the altruistic cause may be because we realize that there is only a "we." There is one planet, shared by one people. "All men were created equal." Remember? It is a trap to think of this nation in terms of reds and blues. This is 'Merica. We are 'Mericans. And we are all 'Rthlings.
One way we can resolve our issues with our brethren is recalling those moments in our hellish childhood when we thought it would be a good idea to open the car door on the freeway. We are all the same. One way we can resolve our issues with our lesser past, is to look at our generational moral gains. We are all improving. The way out of the suicide issue, at least for a twenty-something year old moralist, is that humanity needs your genes in the pool. You must survive, and procreate such that the next generation will have the genetic tendency towards altruistic endeavors. You must realize that you are already highly outnumbered by a sea of mindless, nihilistic breeders who will spawn unit after unit of Doritos munching, Miller High Life chugging, reality tv watching, Fuck-Monkeys. They are already going to outbreed you, but that is no excuse to give up on natural selection. Good people everywhere need you. They need a parent that won't debate between school supplies and a fifth of vodka. They need a grandparent that won't yell racist remarks at the neighbors, and throw rocks at dogs. You need to stay alive because as hard of an existence as it may be, you must prove to the world that people like you still exist.
But at the same time keep in mind, we are all one people. We are all flawed on some level. We are all Doritos munching Fuck-Monkeys.
God Bless 'Merica.
***
And now, hidden amongst the rabble, a personal story from events in my life. There may be a few repeated points, but only because they seem important to me. There is also a lot of optometry mumbo-jumbo. Why is it in the third-person for parts of it? No idea. I do genuinely fear for my sanity at times, especially when placed in a business environment. Here's why...
-E.I
***
Eric has been unemployed for two months now, but has consciously been avoiding the unemployment office, because he has a good amount of savings, and he feels that due to his privileged upbringing, there are probably some low income families who could use tax money more. Good for you, Eric. Your mom must be proud.
Eric quit his last job after becoming downtrodden, depressed and beaten down over the overwhelming sense that his employer was taking advantage of his patients/customers. This is indicative of the problem. At a certain point in these pseudo-medical fields - optometry, dentistry, orthodontics and chiropractics - the patient became referred to more and more as a customer. While this isn't quite as offensive as it is in actual medical practice, although probably just as common according to the latest Time magazine, it still seems as though the general public hasn't quite caught onto the fact that when they walk into a medical office where they call the person across the counter "doctor," that they are being treated much in the same way as if they had just walked onto a used car lot.
There is an implicit amount of trust we place in people in white coats with fancy placards strewn across their walls. This is a trust that my previous employer and the one I just came from, seem to abuse. A lot of optometrists do this (although not all. My dad doesn't. My dad is the best): they will give you an exam, and make superficial changes to your prescription. They might shift the cylinder axis by a few degrees, they might add one quarter of a diopter to the sphere power, while deducting one or two from the cylinder. In simple terms, they make minute changes that are more apparent on a paper prescription as opposed to what the visible difference is when you put the glasses on. Then with your "brand new prescription," they take you out into the frame room, and sell you a two thousand dollar pair of glasses. No one needs a two thousand dollar pair of glasses.
I understand that these kinds of practices are common in the business world. No one ever heard a person say, "Thank God we got the undercoat, honey." My issue comes with the fact that these people are called "doctor," when they are acting like sales associates.
The gross part comes when realizing that these people are also guilty of abusing Medicare to a certain extent. Medicare will pay an optometrist or an ophthalmologist for one pair of glasses after a cataract surgery to the order of about 90-100 dollars total. (76 for a frame and another 20 or so for plastic lenses) In their guidelines they say that this is for a basic frame and a cr-39 basic plastic pair of lenses. I'm not entirely sure they understand that the cost of a true basic frame is about four dollars, and that basic lenses usually cost about two-fifty. Those are the wholesale costs. That doesn't factor in whatever markup is applied to the materials to get it up to six-fifty. The amount of metal or plastic material is takes to make that one pair of glasses is probably around one dollar for the lot, yet the government ends up paying nearly one hundred dollars for a pair of reading glasses. If you go to Walgreens and look at the readers there, that is the kind of quality you can expect to get and what the government to pay for.
I could go on about my last boss for ages; how he semi-illegally wrote prescriptions for one year instead of two; how he would literally salivate when he was close to making a sale; how he made me send out collection bills for ten dollars to about twenty people over the summer. The list goes on and on.
But Eric was getting antsy. Eric wanted to get a job. So, he hesitantly took another job at an optometry office, under the pretense of a trial week to see how things would fit. They did not fit well.
What irked me about this most recent venture involved their "warranty policy." There is a moderately useless product called anti-reflective coating that will give lenses a scratch warranty. If you scratch a lens, you get a new one. Good deal. The older generations gave a one year scratch warranty, the newer ones give a two year. One particular brand offers unlimited scratch re-do's in a two year period, which is a pretty good offer. However, this office I just came from decided that the warranty was too good, and perceiving the threat of time wasted doing re-do's, created an "office warranty policy" of giving all lenses a one year, one time only re-do. This seemed massively dishonest to me, and I was made quite distraught in learning of this to the point where my manager asked why I looked so sad, distant and torn. My thinking was this: It was not their product. They are just licensed distributors. If they don't want to use that product because of the inconvenient warranty, then they shouldn't use it, instead of perverting the terms of the manufacturer's promise to the consumer. Simply put: If you buy an iPod at Best Buy, you still go by Apple's warranty. There may be an additional warranty available through Best Buy, but that should serve as an added convenience, if anything.
It just seemed like a strange justification: If a bunch of people kept coming in for scratch warranties, it would waste staff time that could be used making sales. Firstly, if the people do their jobs right, and talk to the patients and deduce that they are tough on their glasses by asking, I don't know... "are you tough on your glasses?" then they can give them a stronger material and skirt the issue altogether. The second, less common scenario, is that a person finds out they can have an unlimited number of re-do's, and then psychotically takes a screwdriver to their lenses every few months. In having spent my whole life in optometry offices, I've seen maybe one instance in which a person deliberately scratched their lenses. And it was only once. And her warranty had actually expired, so she didn't get them anyway. Point being: Even if this office had three or four of these individuals in their midst, it seems like a radical and unnecessary precaution to lie to every single person who walks through the door and tell them the warranty isn't as good as it actually is.
Furthermore, the manager tried to justify the warranty lie by saying that if a person came back with a scratch after the one year had passed, but they actually had the two year warranty, the office would "see what they could do," and replace the lenses like they were supposed to in the first place. This created the deception that the office was doing a favor in a predicament that not only shouldn't have existed, but that they manufactured completely.
And now I am left wondering if I am going crazy for not wanting to subject myself to this kind of perceived greed. Whenever I hear people say, "it's just business," it feels like a by-way of saying, "yeah this shit is evil and wrong, but I am getting lots of money for gas, food, plastic bullshit, sex, rent for an apartment that's nicer than my [least favorite family member's] and the admiration of my peers." When I hear people say, "competitive pricing"or "competitive salary," I hear, "I'm gonna fuck your asshole a little more gently than the guy down the block."
I feel crazy because the more I interact with the world, the more I'm realizing that there are fewer and fewer people out there who feel that there is a better way. There is my grandfather and my dad of course, who do things in a fair and honest way because they enjoy sleeping at night, and there are some truly wonderful friends of mine who share the same thoughts, but on a greater scale, when I try to make a list of people I know who believe that we are one people, struggling through life together; that we should be kind, generous and altruistic towards everyone we meet, and that as the dominate species on this, we have a responsibility to take care of it, it's inhabitants, and each other; that list is comprised of mostly murder victims.
***
These two writings were put together because they seemed to be speaking to one another.
The beliefs purported in this blog are difficult to believe in. Let it be known that the author frequently struggles with this faith in moral betterment.
If you made it all the way down here, thanks. I love you too.
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