At the Portland Saturday Market somebody came in my booth today and asked me if I would consider putting the weight of the catnip jerked chicken in grams as well as ounces. I come to the market to sell product. It’s part of how I do this thing called paying my bills, so the intensity of his request was rubbing me the wrong way. It didn’t help that he was wearing an Obama Jacket, which has fallen to almost nobody lately willing to advertise their support even in the market. Having spent the last 9 months agonizing on whether I could proceed with my planned expansion and finally deciding the economic uncertainty caused by the political upheaval makes it too risky, this was really rubbing salt in my wounds. Then he proceeded to tell me that there were only three other countries in the world who hadn’t gone metric. This caused me to come unglued as he listed them.
At the moment I couldn’t put my finger on it, but I remember being told that we were the only western nation without nationalized health care, etc… and I was thinking how much I really don’t want to be like anybody else. I never wanted to be like anybody else. I always liked being me. I always liked being American. And so I told him I didn’t care. I told him I didn’t want to be like Europe. I have friends in Europe. I love Europe, but my friends think I’m a crazy American. What was it I didn’t want to do he asked. I told him it was the soft socialism, the governments going bankrupt like Greece, all of it. I told him I like the way we do things here.
That’s when it got interesting, because I realized it was not like me to unload and I was trying to soften it, but then we both talked about our travel around the world and how America was by far the best place to live. I did mention Belgian beer. Anyway it was funny because now instead of talking how America was in the same league as some backwater nations we were agreeing that it was the best place to live. I told him next time I worked on the packaging I would probably dual label. He bought a toy for his cat. He had a nice family.
At the end of the day I was thinking about it and wondering why it set me off. Then it hit me. This was a message from childhood. I remember telling my parents that I wanted such and such a toy and my justification was everybody else is getting it to which my parents said if everybody else was jumping off a bridge would you follow them? Yeah, did your parents ever say that to you? I remember reading about an oil company spending $10M on nuclear research and when asked why the board of directors said because a competitor spent $5M. It turned out to all be wasted money. I actually became so individualistic and have seen so much stupidity that for me the idea that everybody is doing it is my reason to do a double take. Seemed like everybody was buying iPods and then spending lots of money on music. I bought an Archos and people always said wow, bigger screen, expandable, etc…
So this is the thing now. Mob sucker peer pressure. It doesn’t matter if an idea is good or bad, or if you managed to sucker enough Germans to vote for Hitler, it’s all about how many people are doing it and if everybody else is doing it we don’t want to be left out. We’re insecure unoriginal followers needing direction. We’re America. I remember my European friends having a hard time doing a bank transfer to reimburse travel expenses because I didn’t have the “universal” bank transfer number. I had to look it up and finally replied back that the reason my bank didn’t have a number is that American banks started the transfer number system over 50 years before Eurpoean banks and while many other banks around the world had adopted the European bank number system it was silly for the US to scrap theirs.
When has America ever followed? We beat the British not just in our revolution but again in the war of 1812 where we would have been put under British ownership had we lost. We should have lost both by all rights, but we didn’t. Every country in the world has emulated our system of economics to some degree… well except for Cuba but as Castro is now one of the richest men in the world while his people suffer I suspect he doesn’t care that everyone else has a more humane more capitalist government.
There are two disturbing things I heard today. A vendor near us has a small flag in his booth and someone asked him if that meant he was a conservative. He replied that he has the flag there because he is American. This is troubling. Did the questioner think only conservatives would have a flag or did they think it was strange to have one so he must be one of them? Maybe he thought it was like the Christian fish symbol, a secret sign for an underground belief system. The other thing was in a speech today by representative Mike Pence who said that he had heard confidentially that within the administration that they saw themselves as managing the decline of America. This is distressing because I believe that many believe America is largely over, that Obama is the first post-American president. Pence followed with saying that if we get government out of the way America will come roaring back.
This really completes my thought on America being a nation needing the consensus of the rest of the world. Horse crap! We are the richest most powerful nation on earth and that is because in the modern world we are the first nation founded on an idea… the idea of liberty. The American idea is that you can pursue happiness, that you can endeavor to follow your dreams and realize wealth previously only possible through being born into the right family. Being so much bigger than life to the rest of the world is certain to provoke jealousy. If you have led the world why should you start following it? If you have been the innovator why should you start adopting other ideas? If everybody else is less successful, less secure and less happy should we be like them instead?
At least when I was a child it was only some toy company looking for my money. Toys come and go, but governments stick around sucking money out of the economy until they die a bloated failure like Rome or get overthrown. Thankfully we can have a revolution by voting. Most importantly… It doesn’t matter who is doing what. You do what you know is right and what you believe in. Let everybody else jump off a bridge.
This entry was posted
on Sunday, April 11th, 2010 at 4:07 AM and is filed under social commentary.
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Both comments and pings are currently closed.
Everybody’s Doing It
At the Portland Saturday Market somebody came in my booth today and asked me if I would consider putting the weight of the catnip jerked chicken in grams as well as ounces. I come to the market to sell product. It’s part of how I do this thing called paying my bills, so the intensity of his request was rubbing me the wrong way. It didn’t help that he was wearing an Obama Jacket, which has fallen to almost nobody lately willing to advertise their support even in the market. Having spent the last 9 months agonizing on whether I could proceed with my planned expansion and finally deciding the economic uncertainty caused by the political upheaval makes it too risky, this was really rubbing salt in my wounds. Then he proceeded to tell me that there were only three other countries in the world who hadn’t gone metric. This caused me to come unglued as he listed them.
At the moment I couldn’t put my finger on it, but I remember being told that we were the only western nation without nationalized health care, etc… and I was thinking how much I really don’t want to be like anybody else. I never wanted to be like anybody else. I always liked being me. I always liked being American. And so I told him I didn’t care. I told him I didn’t want to be like Europe. I have friends in Europe. I love Europe, but my friends think I’m a crazy American. What was it I didn’t want to do he asked. I told him it was the soft socialism, the governments going bankrupt like Greece, all of it. I told him I like the way we do things here.
That’s when it got interesting, because I realized it was not like me to unload and I was trying to soften it, but then we both talked about our travel around the world and how America was by far the best place to live. I did mention Belgian beer. Anyway it was funny because now instead of talking how America was in the same league as some backwater nations we were agreeing that it was the best place to live. I told him next time I worked on the packaging I would probably dual label. He bought a toy for his cat. He had a nice family.
At the end of the day I was thinking about it and wondering why it set me off. Then it hit me. This was a message from childhood. I remember telling my parents that I wanted such and such a toy and my justification was everybody else is getting it to which my parents said if everybody else was jumping off a bridge would you follow them? Yeah, did your parents ever say that to you? I remember reading about an oil company spending $10M on nuclear research and when asked why the board of directors said because a competitor spent $5M. It turned out to all be wasted money. I actually became so individualistic and have seen so much stupidity that for me the idea that everybody is doing it is my reason to do a double take. Seemed like everybody was buying iPods and then spending lots of money on music. I bought an Archos and people always said wow, bigger screen, expandable, etc…
So this is the thing now. Mob sucker peer pressure. It doesn’t matter if an idea is good or bad, or if you managed to sucker enough Germans to vote for Hitler, it’s all about how many people are doing it and if everybody else is doing it we don’t want to be left out. We’re insecure unoriginal followers needing direction. We’re America. I remember my European friends having a hard time doing a bank transfer to reimburse travel expenses because I didn’t have the “universal” bank transfer number. I had to look it up and finally replied back that the reason my bank didn’t have a number is that American banks started the transfer number system over 50 years before Eurpoean banks and while many other banks around the world had adopted the European bank number system it was silly for the US to scrap theirs.
When has America ever followed? We beat the British not just in our revolution but again in the war of 1812 where we would have been put under British ownership had we lost. We should have lost both by all rights, but we didn’t. Every country in the world has emulated our system of economics to some degree… well except for Cuba but as Castro is now one of the richest men in the world while his people suffer I suspect he doesn’t care that everyone else has a more humane more capitalist government.
There are two disturbing things I heard today. A vendor near us has a small flag in his booth and someone asked him if that meant he was a conservative. He replied that he has the flag there because he is American. This is troubling. Did the questioner think only conservatives would have a flag or did they think it was strange to have one so he must be one of them? Maybe he thought it was like the Christian fish symbol, a secret sign for an underground belief system. The other thing was in a speech today by representative Mike Pence who said that he had heard confidentially that within the administration that they saw themselves as managing the decline of America. This is distressing because I believe that many believe America is largely over, that Obama is the first post-American president. Pence followed with saying that if we get government out of the way America will come roaring back.
This really completes my thought on America being a nation needing the consensus of the rest of the world. Horse crap! We are the richest most powerful nation on earth and that is because in the modern world we are the first nation founded on an idea… the idea of liberty. The American idea is that you can pursue happiness, that you can endeavor to follow your dreams and realize wealth previously only possible through being born into the right family. Being so much bigger than life to the rest of the world is certain to provoke jealousy. If you have led the world why should you start following it? If you have been the innovator why should you start adopting other ideas? If everybody else is less successful, less secure and less happy should we be like them instead?
At least when I was a child it was only some toy company looking for my money. Toys come and go, but governments stick around sucking money out of the economy until they die a bloated failure like Rome or get overthrown. Thankfully we can have a revolution by voting. Most importantly… It doesn’t matter who is doing what. You do what you know is right and what you believe in. Let everybody else jump off a bridge.
This entry was posted on Sunday, April 11th, 2010 at 4:07 AM and is filed under social commentary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.