Jack Burns Lives!

We have an epidemic of profound and appalling ignorance in this country, one that’s reached levels hard for me to comprehend.

Our so-called liberal President is doling out billions to the crooks at Skank of America and General Motors and has apparently forgotten about a few other issues that badly need attention, like national health care.

This one came barreling through my life like a runaway train yesterday, when Blue Cross Blue Shield (another quasi-criminal organization) informed me that my 24 year old daughter would be kicked off my health insurance on July 1. Some might say, “she’s a college grad, old enough to be on her own,” and yes, to some degree that is true. Except for a few important facts, mitigating circumstances I’m certain are shared by thousands of others.

One, she’s still a student, preparing to enter a PhD program and probably only eligible for part time work with no benefits. Two, the university will provide coverage, but that coverage has a ridiculously low annual drug benefit which won’t cover her for one month.

My daughter was recently diagnosed with Rheumatoid arthritis, a nasty little autoimmune disease that fortunately does have some effective treatment options. Well, that is if you have about $3000 per month lying around or decent health insurance. For those that don’t, they end up in real pain and wheelchairs.

Fortunately for her, I’m in a position to get her coverage elsewhere, so she can focus on becoming a historian and not worry about her health day in and day out. But most people aren’t as lucky and simply suffer, thanks to the insurance company lobby and the powerful few that seemingly run affairs in the United States.

And speaking of trains, I noticed where Obama announced a plan for nationwide high-speed rail. Sounds great, don’t it? Well, not so fast.

I checked with a friend in Colorado that’s a huge train aficionado and he says it’s a bunch of political hooey. According to Bruce, and he’s generally right, there are a host of flaws. There’s no connection from either Buffalo or Pittsburgh to Cleveland, or from St. Louis to Little Rock to connect with the Texas system. There is a route from DFW to Oklahoma City and Tulsa but none to Houston. No connection between Jacksonville and Orlando. There are, however, two routes from LA to San Francisco.

Bruce informs me that it was “cobbled together from local interest groups and stuck on a national map by bureaucrats with no clue, and I’m sorry to see that so far at least this administration is only marginally more interested in doing it right than any of its predecessors.” He went on to state that “Biden may love Amtrak, but I’d really like to know if he’s ever been on a long-distance train, or spent any time in France or Japan on their real high-speed trains.”

But wait, there’s more.

We’re getting ready to spend nearly $100 billion more on Afghanistan and Iraq. The war machine marches onward.

And last but not least, the politicos and the economic intelligentsia are still talking about “getting the growth economy going again,” which means more unsustainable growth and all predicated upon drilling for a substance that’s getting increasingly harder to find and turn into a usual product. Yet, we’re drilling like crazy and trying to jump-start the party.

As I ponder this, I keep seeing an image in my mind of a party gone badly awry. Drunks are scattered all over the floor, some conscious, others out like a light, beer cans and whiskey bottles litter the floor and the smell of vomit punctuates the air. Nonetheless, the host and a few other louts are starting the car and heading back out to get more liquor, figuring the inebriated will wake up about mid-afternoon and want to start all over again. After all, isn’t the best way to cure a hangover another drink?

And of course there’s the usual spattering of ignorance and stupidity, millions of people duped, drunk and addicted to bad television, NASCAR, fast food and religion. As my compadre Hayduke says, how can we ever make any progress toward building a sensible society when 80% of the population believes in something that’s logically analogous to the Easter Bunny, eats Cheetos and watches cars go around in circles for 500 miles?

All of it makes me want to get to the trail and hide. Get away from it all, because it’s apparently pointless to hope for any real change. Oh, I stay slightly encouraged by the occasional “good” story. A small piece of land or species afforded protection. The expansion of gardening, cycling and reuse. But these are little more than little islands of respite, tinajas’ in a vast desert devoid of intelligent life.

Another concerned friend, Eric, and I regularly gather to discuss such things, to throw “solutions” out on the table and try and make sense of the world around us. The conversations are predictable. One of us will say “education is the answer!” The other will answer “yes, but what if the kids are getting no support in a home plagued by poverty and drug abuse?”

This is the stark reality in cities like Memphis, where the population of impoverished, poorly educated, angry adults grows exponentially each year. Teachers won’t stay in the city schools because they’re war zones. Parents increasingly feel a sense of hopelessness in what is quickly becoming a two class society.

The results are easy to see. There’s a palpable tension that permeates cities like Memphis, cities that suffer from inner city blight and poor political and community leadership. I become increasingly despondent as I watch the handful of really bright lights in our community swallowed up by a vast ocean of anger, apathy and just plain old stupidity.

Want an example? How about several?

You can now carry a loaded, concealed pistol into bars in Tennessee as long as you don’t drink. Wink, wink. But you can’t buy wine at a grocery store (thanks to the Christian lobby) or beer before noon on Sunday’s. And in neighboring Mississippi, it’s illegal to own a dildo. Truncheons are fine, of course.

Which brings me to a solution that Abbey often discussed. The need for wilderness. The need for a place where, as Ed said, a man “can go crazy in peace.” Ed believed that “for every pair of feet and legs” we need “about ten leagues of naked nature, crags to leap from, mountains to measure by, deserts to finally die in when the heart fails.”

The cities, our hapless government and Wall Street can’t be saved, so the best advice I can give is to save yourself. Get out of the cities and “run to the sanctuary of the hills.” Find a forest to get lost in and stay lost.