[Part IV] Damaged Intelligentsia v. Sane Stevedores

Earlier, we covered the fact that school's out for summer and kids and skateboards need a place.

Later we went moving right along with a little juxtaposition of cognitive dissonance of single moms in poverty (PDF) and suburban singles bars and why I don't date, but dance as if I do.

Then I decided that -- as is proper form in all good Rhetoric -- I should Digress, with an actual schizothemia, no less, that being "digression by means of a long reminiscence". Yet bracketing that schizothemia, I did stop to mention that nearly ubiquitous functional illiteracy even among college graduates makes it difficult for me to communicate at my own level with others. Yet it was not always this way here in America. Our schools used to produce graduates of high-school who were in the majority literate; and in the modern day, the majority of collage graduates are not deeply literate.

Yet despite their illiteracy, yet these people seem to think that their college degree -- in physical education, I suppose, perhaps with a minor in marching band or cheerleading -- confers upon the an infallible right to judge other people, and abuse them with surreptitiously administered doses of dangerous drugs.

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Although my parents' upbringing and general lack of skill -- all combined with too many other things to do to -- meant that we as a family did not much play cards, I had an aunt who had led a rather adventurous life abroad with her husband, following along with his military and diplomatic career.

She could play cards.

She could make 'em walk across the table and do tricks, and she could deal 'em off of the bottom of the deck and sort 'em out from the middle. If you've ever seen those stage shows of prestidigitation and "magic" you've seen about half of what my aunt could do.

My hands aren't much good for that, being more the sort that are meant to hold large tool handles, but between watching my aunt like a hawk anytime she was in town, my eyes got pretty good at not merely watching my aunt's hands, but to seeing what she actually did with them. She noticed that I noticed, and tried to teach me, but as I said, my hands aren't much good for that.

But what did come out in the wash, so to speak, was that while the hands are quicker than the eye, you had to have hands as fast as hers, for your hands to be quicker than my eyes. And how fast were her hands? How fast can a cat swat you if you annoy it? A cat could not swat my aunt, and it can't swat me, either. I'm just no good at cards.

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On the other side of the family, they say that my dad's mom was one of the best musicians in Kansas until she got religion and decided that it was sinful to play except at worship. They also say that she could pick a house-fly out of the hot summer air faster than you could blink. She pretty much gave up playing guitar and banjo, so they say, but didn't seem to think it was sinful to let the flies pile up on the porch and then sweep them off at the end of the day.

I'm kind of clumsy, and can't do that. But that isn't to say that I can't see the fly coming.

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When I was a kid, testing in the schools turned up something interesting.

It would be very easy to discount my early test scores as an expected result of being taught how to read before I arrived in first grade. Yet the gap between me and the unprepared kids didn't narrow once they learned to read. Of course, I wasn't the only one, and we "smart" kids often wound up hanging out with each other more than we did with the other kids.

A lot of the other "smart" kids fit a stereotype of being scrawny or wearing thick glasses, etc. Not me! I still got picked on a lot, though.

"Smart" kids, as anyone would expect (who bothered to think about it) learn rather quickly. As fast as the bullies learned a new technique, we figured out ways to defeat it. What I am trying to carry to the Astute Reader is the understanding that we all know how to spot this sort of stuff. What we can do to stop it generally depends on two things, our own moral restraints -- which, curiously, we have, though obviously the bullies do not -- and our willingness to take advantage of the same loopholes in either the law or its enforcement, which bullies like to exploit.

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"... I have sworn upon the altar of god, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man." Thomas Jefferson, one of our great Founding Fathers of both our Constitution and the ideology of personal liberty, wrote that.

I rather suspect that Mr Jefferson might object to people trying to assume control of the minds and lives of their fellow citizens who have committed no crime, but are merely said to be "crazy".

If calling someone crazy grants legitimacy to trying to drug someone into slavery, there's a lot of incentive to call people crazy.

Can we thus logically suggest that some people just want slaves? And their intended victims' sanity has little to do with it, because the imputation is easy to make, and difficult to disprove... especially if you've already got the drugs into them.

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Personally, I think this sort of thing is morally insupportable and cannot be allowed.

It's because I like to take the moral high ground -- and I will do as I will if it causes no harm, under my own moral system, but clearly this is deeply harmful! -- that I don't simply reciprocate in kind. Yet under both law, and morality, that would be me making myself only another criminal, with the issue in question no longer being a question of kind -- criminal, or noncriminal -- but of degree, meaner and more successful, or less so.

A lot of my fellow intelligentsia, many of them successful enough to afford any remedy they can imagine, find themselves in the same moral bind. Why? Mostly it's because most of us understand that it's not the fault of stupid people that they are stupid, though you may certainly blame those who are both ignorant and proud of their ignorance as well as being unwilling to become non-ignorant.

Part of our moral bind is this: before we may consider a course of action, it is necessary to discern whether we are dealing with ignorance, or stupidity, when people bother us. And in the time between when first notice a problem and when we make our decisions on how to proceed, a great deal of suffering may have to be endured.

And often, we have observed that many of our fellow intelligentsia don't tolerate suffering well, and tend to get... a little crazy.

But we've also noticed that they come right back to normal pretty quickly -- and we need them, and need them normal if we are to get our work done -- once the suffering ends.

And because we do need our intelligentsia -- and need them more every day, and need them to be on as even a keel as is possible without applying undue interference -- what can we do to ease their suffering?

Sometimes there are fairly direct methods.

Sometimes all you have to do is give them an interesting job.

Sometimes you have to apply many heads being better than one to help them solve problems that reach out from their neighborhoods or home life that come into their careers and keep them from being able to stay on task.

And sometimes, exceptionally misguided people try to apply bizarre street theater and twisted psychodrama and a little bit of manipulation of their mindset with peptides such as oxytocin and other things such as pemoline or others substances generally not discussed on InterNet to try to induce Focus...

And occasionally those misguided people discover that this is rarely a good idea.

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