This Carbon Based Life

By David Glenn Cox

I woke from a deep sleep from a nightmare this morning. It was unusual and not something which happens to me often. I was back in my old job in Atlanta. I was buried in the minutia of the job, like always. I was doing 35% of the billing in a four-person parts department. I was selling industrial engines all over the United States. Delta, Disney, the Navy, the Army, Six flags, Hollywood and the usual mundane customer coming in through the door.

I was trying to track down two Motorcraft spark plugs, which I had bought outside the company for $6.00. The phone was ringing and customers were walking in and I just couldn’t get down to figuring out where those two damn spark plugs came in. Then my ex-wife showed up with one of her crazy stories. I didn’t need to be Carl Jung to figure this dream out. It was about frustration. A panoramic tour through the night terrors of Dave. It was all things frustrating. Billing fifty or sixty thousand dollars a month in sales and spending two hours trying to chase down two wayward $3.00 spark plugs.

The ex-wife was just the cherry on top. Some sort of no-win situation where whatever answer I gave was wrong, which only infuriated her more. That was all thirty years ago. Resurrected by my sub conscience to explain to me my current frustration. I feel certain that I’m not alone in that frustration. A mad man and despotic ruler driving the ship of state into the whirlpool. In one-month, Republicans blithely give away a trillion dollars to America’s wealthiest individuals and the most prosperous companies without a second thought.

But then digs in its heels and fights like hell, shutting down the government for forty days to avoid giving the sick and the most vulnerable Americans insurance subsidies to save their lives and the lives of their loved ones. Like something out of the French Revolution, the despotic dictator cuts off food assistance to the poor. Cuts off food to the poor and then attends a decadent party with ice sculptures and the sumptuous food the people like you and I have never tasted. All that was missing was Marie Antoinette.

The news of the corrupt eight hit me hard. It was shameful and deplorable. We were winning, and we were about to break the back of this criminal misadministration. And they sold us out. They sold out every government worker and every air traffic controller. Every American looking for some good island in this sea of fate and frustration. Most of the eight ran away and hid. Only two that I heard gave sugar coated explanations which weren’t justifications but just lame ass excuses.

As a student of twentieth century history. I had always wondered what I would have done in Hitler’s Germany. Now I know. I would have been bitterly frustrated. Watching the world go to hell. Watching Wall Street as blind as earthworms immune and deaf to the cries of the poor and the needy. But knowing their day of judgement is coming. There is another sub-prime crisis on the horizon. If I had any money, I would play the market short. Home prices are starting to fall as the doofus in chief proposes 50-year mortgages. The same half-hearted Herbert Hoover help schemes all over again.

Always ready to help the banks in your name. You save a couple of hundred dollars a month and the bank makes double the interest. Trillions for the banks and billionaires and nickels and dimes for you and I. A rat race where the outcome is always predetermined from the start. Ten million used cars will be repossessed this year even more than in 2009. And yet, the market just keeps going up, up, up. Millions of struggling American families dealing with health insurance, inflationary tariffs, job insecurities and a corrupt, lawless government which doesn’t give a damn about them.

Let them eat cake sounds almost quaint when compared with our concentration camps and our Gestapo. Fascism has a course it must run, becoming progressively more and more sinister and corrupt. What will happen to the Gestapo when they begin to run short of brown people to deport? Will the government lay them all off and shut down the concentration camps? Not hardly.

A government actively and consistently working against the interests of the people as a whole. And not giving a damn. A government by the rich and for the rich with freedom for some and liberty for none.

Once upon a time, I too was affluent. Not rich, but comfortable with a nice big home and a new car. And in the rush to save the banks, they labeled me as the problem. I spent four years homeless and had my life changed forever. I was on a sojourn of hunger and cold, but my eyes were opened as to who I really was and what I was really doing with my life. Like the Buddha, I saw the world anew. I saw hunger and misery all around me and people and marriages and families crushed and no one giving a damn.

From a business executive in a fine home with a new car to a homeless man living in a garage. It was the greatest experience of my life, because it was my life. Because It was a real life and it changed me forever and I can never go back. Being around affluent people now makes me feel uncomfortable. I had a boss in Colorado who was a rich man. He wasn’t a bad man, but he made me nervous just the same. He played with expensive toys and went on fancy vacations, and I couldn’t tell him why he was all wrong. He lived inside of a bubble with toys and trinkets like a child in a play pen only eating ice cream and unwilling to ever stop, never seeing the real world going on all around him.

I saw an ad once for a famous but now dying publication. They were looking for someone to write stories about homelessness. Here’s my chance, I thought. I’m homeless and I wrote stories about being homeless almost every day. But it was another educational experience.  What they wanted was a recent college graduate from a big ten or Ivy League school to write about homelessness. What would a homeless person know about homelessness? What insights could he or she know that couldn’t be taught in a classroom?

It was my introduction to modern media. The last person in the world they would ever want to write about homelessness was a homeless person. They might write about uncomfortable truths. They might say things the boss up in corporate wouldn’t like. They wanted someone to write about homelessness from an affluent person’s point of view. Someone who could explain it all away without making anyone feel guilty or uncomfortable. I began to understand they weren’t looking for experience, but conformity.

That is what has brought me here. Writing every day for my people. Writing about the world the corporate media isn’t allowed to talk about. Fifteen years and counting. I know I’ll never get rich, never have a fine home or a new car again. Never hold another prestige job. But knowing I’m on the right side of truth and life. Of knowing I lived the life of my heroes. A Woody Guthrie existence unbowed and unbroken and only becoming frustrated sometimes. That telling truth in a time of lies is the greatest job you could ever have.

It’s better to deserve honors and not have them than to have them and not deserve them. – Mark Twain

“All of this talking about what’s up in the sky, or down in hell, for that matter, isn’t half as important as what’s right here, right now, right in front of your eyes. Things are tough. Folks broke. Kids hungry. Sick. Everything. And people has got to have more faith in one another, believe in each other. There’s a spirit of some kind we’ve all got. That’s got to draw us all together.” ― Woody Guthrie