Conspiracy RANT

Over my lifetime, I can definitely tell you this, if they don’t like something, they’ll get rid of it. Sometimes it doesn't seem like that because, they move slowly. It takes them  two or three years sometimes it takes them 15, I've seen them get rid of stuff slowly over 3 years. And then the question becomes, who’s “they”?

I don’t know. I can certainly say that, in my experience, it doesn’t really seem to be a left right situation. It seems more like the right and left are scapegoats for one another. One scapegoats the other, then the other scapegoats the first, back and forth it goes.

I don’t think what’s going on is some grand scheme. I don’t think organizations can hold together like that for very long. No matter how big the conspiracy, there’s probably not one grand conspiracy sitting at the top, because somebody always wants to be at the top. Somebody eventually says, “Why am I taking instructions from this guy? He's an idiot.” It breaks down.

But I’ll tell you this. Somehow, slowly, institutions do get hollowed out. Whoever “they” are. Again, I don’t know. In my state, for example, it almost seems like they’re trying to get rid of public schools, or high schools, or something. I’m not entirely sure what’s happening, but it definitely feels like there’s this constant push against schools. I mean, can you just imagine how much of our American culture is wrapped up in high school? I mean, just for an example, Teen Wolf, The Breakfast Club,  Greece, Mean Girls, 21 Jump Street, ect... Those movie. All those high school movies. High school football. Yeah, I was never really a part of the Texas high school football scene. It's just not my thing. But it's huge, and a lot of people appreciated that. And to get rid of that over some, like, tax voucher situation? Strange. High school itself. It’s a huge part of American culture.

And to get rid of it? Replace it with what? I don’t know. That’s the part that seems suspicious to me. What do you replace it with? And what happens to all of that culture wrapped around it? All of those stories, all of those traditions, all of that stuff that’s been part of American life forever?

I mean, what happens to all of that? And it starts with, “What are they teaching your kids?” and “You need to defend your children,” and you’re sitting there thinking, what the hell is going on here?

It does seem like,  somebody could put material which some would consider questionable, knowing that later somebody else can point at it and say, “What is this doing here?” and use that as another reason to tear the whole thing down. Of course this would be happening over several years 5 maybe, 7 years   I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe not.

Usually, though, there’s no grand conspiracy. Usually it’s just money and sheer incompetence. Institutions die from incompetence all the time. And it seems like what really happens is they just suck the money out of them. That’s what it looks like to me. At first it gets dressed up as some moral argument, some ideological argument, this or that, but eventually it seems to come back to the same thing. Suck the money straight out.

It’s crazy.

Government and business have been eating the economy from the inside for a long time. We stopped manufacturing things and started saying, “We’ll just buy everything. We’re rich. America’s rich.” And it’s like, what? You don’t get rich by buying things. You get rich by making things and selling things.

It’s crazy watching leadership do whatever it wants with almost no thought about planning. City planning, long term planning, any kind of planning. Should this business go here? Should this school go here? Should an oil change place really sit right next to a bakery? Nobody seems to think about any of it.

It just feels like suck as much money out as humanly possible.

No statesmen. No understanding of the future. No thought about what happens twenty or thirty years from now. Just suck it dry, and if something gets in the way, destroy it.Maximize the profit for somebody.

Loot, loot, loot.

And look, there have always been bad politicians. This was never some perfectly egalitarian situation. People talk about getting back to some better time, and I’m like, dude, back to where?

The government has been hosing people since the beginning. We all know “We the People” didn’t mean all the people. From the very start, the government wasn’t sitting there trying to treat everybody fairly.

Come on.

The government has always had corruption. The last president had corruption. The president before that was a total monster. The president before was unbelievably corrupt . You can keep going.

What are the odds that we lived through all this history and suddenly, five years ago, one guy finally got everything right, and then immediately afterward everything became corrupt again?

Come on.

It’s always been bad. So when people say they want to “go back,” I always wonder, back to where? A lot of the places they’re imagining were worse. Things can absolutely get worse than they are now, but that doesn’t mean the past was some golden age either.

I think a huge amount of it is sheer incompetence. People want to run your life while having no idea what they’re doing. And increasingly, I don’t even think they want to run your life that much. I think they mostly want you to shut the fuck up while they loot shit.

It’s nuts.