Murphy’s Bye-Laws

This weekend is Memorial Day, the federal adulteration of Decoration Day.  Decoration Day is thought to have started as the decoration of Union graves by freed slaves in Charleston after the Civil War, the graves of men perceived to have actually died for the freedom of the slaves.  Today the holiday is a day for picnics, pool openings, retail sales, and big auto races.  Lip service is paid with all the conviction of a forwarded email with waving flag gifs to the armed forces and pretty much anybody who wears an official-looking uniform from police officers to dog catchers.  Luckily the shorthand phrase of “heroes” has been created for all such folks, without whom we may have the liberty to destory our own lives in our “own particular um… idiom, sir?…yes, our own idiom” (hail to the Python).

Maybe it is just me with my highly-developed cynicism, but all of this homage and pageantry rings very empty.  If these hollow declarations from the milquetoast patriots were said with conviction by stalwarts, then I’d really worry.  As much as the patriots of the American Revolution are hailed and revered, they would be in danger of “preemptive detention” today.  These men were radicals.  The ideas they espoused and risked death for were revolutionary.  This weekend we should memorialize these ideas by reading the Voltairine de Cleyre essay Anarchism and American Traditions explaining what the “American Way” was and, consequently, how it died.

To the men of that time, who voiced the spirit of that time, the battles that they fought were the least of the Revolution Read the rest of this entry »

As the holiday season prepares to go out with a bang this evening, I’d like to reflect on thoughts I’ve had while catching up with old friends and acquaintances.  This year has found me with a full social schedule over the past two weeks meeting with prodigal friends returning home temporarily or carving out some time to catch up.  At one time, all of the people I visited with shared some aspect of their lives with me before separating to pursue individual purposes.  I’ve thought much about the divergence in our lives and geography and how much one has had an effect on the other.  Read the rest of this entry »

I experienced major disillusion yesterday.  Part of the illusion I was holding was borne of supreme confidence and hopeful expectation (and probably logic not encountered in the structured corporate environment).  How foolish of me!  The hope of a great leap ahead in compensation and professional expansion was just too much to not latch on to, I guess.  The position laid out, and the process of actually creating the position, was so compartmentalized that one would need to already hold the same job to fit, like a good cog in a machine.  Of course carried to an absurd conclusion, those cogs in the corporate mechanism have no ability to expand or evolve, but only to fit in their rightful place as they were manufactured to.

After viewing the situation from a new distance, am I disappointed that I don’t get the opportunity to be a cog?  Surprisingly, yes.  There were many benefits to occupying the cog slot.  Read the rest of this entry »

Somehow someone has acquired some information about your finances and runs amok, dragging your name and good credit through the mud. Sometimes this involves a social security number (our quaint national barcode) among the various account numbers and such that may be tied to it allowing the thief to spend credit and maybe real money that doesn’t belong to them. This is what is considered identity theft, as if the whole of our identity can be distilled into various sets of numbers. The term “identity theft” somehow invokes a feeling of invasion stronger than just theft; something more akin to demonic possession, rendition, or the complete erasure of any evidence of your existence on Earth. (Sounds bad, doesn’t it?) The truth is they only get your money, the same as any thief, and the feelings of invasion and hurt are the same as having physical property stolen.

If someone tried to steal my identity and only came away with my money, I would think that they would be sorely disappointed. They would have missed my sense of humor, my friends and family, my intellect, my moods, my sense of self – in short, my identity. My identity is hard to steal due to its kinetic nature and constant metamorphosis (also being intangible helps).

The notion of being wholly composed of serial numbers, account balances, and credit history is as big of an affront to my identity as having these things hijacked for nefarious purposes. Any sane society would rightly consider the taking away of these things more of a liberation than theft. In fact, the real identity theft is as systematic as an assembly line and starts mere hours after your birth when you are tagged with your barcode. This is followed by at least 12 years of identity-snuffing “education” to make you like everyone else and then categorizing you in voting blocks and tax brackets, making the looting of your identity complete. At this point you become American, citizen, tax-payer, Democrat, employee, consumer, …. a number.