Another Sleepless Night?

I tried to sleep last night but I didn't fall asleep until 5 this morning.  Tonight, it appears I'll have the same trouble getting a full night's sleep.  It should only matter to me why, but it doesn't.

I am bothered because I do not see enough leadership in concert with itself - where are those who should be talking over and converting the naysayers to show we will get through this economic downturn?

In communities that have lost their major source of employment, where are the leaders who are putting the idle to work on local problems, assigning projects to able bodied/minded citizens without waiting for government handouts?

My friends, we are at war with apathy and despondency!

Fill your thoughts with plans for action!

Let's pick up hammers and sewing needles to repair one another's lives!

Let's pool our pennies and plant community gardens!

We do not need talk show hosts and government administrators to tell us what to do.  We already know what we need to do.  If a community loses its livelihood, then why not consider a mass refusal to pay for mortgages no one can afford anymore - save the community and sacrifice the bank.  Call it the bailout plan for the rest of us.  Revive the pioneer spirit and show we have the resolve, the fortitude and the initiative to start over on our own terms.

I'm tired of empty government promises.  I'm tired of paying taxes for things I don't need.  I don't want to hear another word from another politician telling me what s/he's going to do with the government debt being accumulated for me.  Stop doing me a favour by borrowing against the future!

I'm a law-abiding citizen but I refuse the idea that I have to buy mandatory health insurance.  I don't force people to buy lottery tickets twice a week, exercise three times a week or smoke cigarettes every day.  If health care coverage is bankrupting companies, then as company owners let's band together and force medical providers to find creative solutions to provide us affordable products and services we choose to purchase.

You are my people.  We belong to the same species.  We have no rights at birth because we did not choose to be born.  We are born free and we die free.  Our families choose how to treat our freedom until (or if) we can live on our own and make personal choices about freedom.  Our families come in different shapes and sizes - genetic, village/community/subculture, state/culture, world.

I am a middle-aged man who has grown tired of social dogma, including the remnants of previous civilisations dragging muck into this moment.  I have a last name, history says, because monarchies wanted to collect poll taxes from the people.

Taxes, tributes, call them what you want, but somewhere along the way the rich and powerful decided it was a good idea to take from others to build stable networks of small families so the rich and powerful could stay that way without fear of peasant uprisings.

I am tired and I will not sleep tonight.  I am an old man in some ways and a small child in other ways.  In all ways, I am tired of listening to the whining and complaining, including my own.  Thousands of years of positive solutions to choose from and we keep repeating the bad habits of old.

Irrational exuberance - perhaps too much display of that habit should land one in jail for life.  The same for the opposite - doom-and-gloomers get a life sentence for seeing the worst and not offering a rational solution for getting us to a better state of existence.  Google, Apple and Dr. Doom - you've been warned!  LOL

A society that requires a solution too complex for all but a few of us to understand is a society that may have reached the end of its usefulness.  Perhaps.  I don't know.  I am too tired to see clearly right now and will not rush to judgment about what tiredness makes me think of our species at this moment.

I am tired and in my tiredness I worry.  I see many examples of positive behaviour but I don't know if it's enough to overcome a strengthening undercurrent of discontent and malaise.  Our subcultures come and go, expanding and contracting, and although we know how to use mass media to build and shrink popular movements, sometimes mob mentality takes over and overwhelms the ability of local scene setters to maintain control.

The world will not come to an end tomorrow or anytime soon, as we know, but uncomfortable situations can make us wish for an end or a new beginning.

Tomorrow, I will consult the Book of the Future and see where we're headed.  I'm tired of all the noise and confusion the general news media is broadcasting.  It's time I take the reins in this imaginary parallel universe and show us where we'd be headed if this blog was our real world.  I have no vested interests to protect other than our species and getting some of our eggs out of this basket called Earth.

Yes, to copy a beaten-down quote, I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore but I'm too tired to tell you tonight what it is we need to do to get us to the next moment.  Our society's not as complex as we think, especially if we break it down to subcultures for which we can identify problems and leaders to coach or mentor us to find solutions to satisfy us in most if not all walks of life (because we know that subcultures have sub-subcultures and families within families and individuals within families).  Generic, generalised problem solvers and their convoluted platitudes I don't need!

Time to throw this body in bed, stare at the ceiling for a few hours, and watch the light of the moon pass tree shadows across the window until sunrise finds me looking at pencil shavings.