Thoughts for the day

Yesterday's Mark Morford column Why are you so terribly disappointing? really made me think. Do we expect too much? We are so disappointed in everything.

As a society, we are so miserable lately that nothing is going to please us. I always wonder where is it written that we are supposed to be pleased all of the time? Even when something not bad happens, our collective whining goes into full gear and when something bad is happening and it's not as bad as we envisioned or was predicted, we whine that it was supposed to be worse.

H1N1 didn't devastate the world. (We worried about it for nothing.) Obama didn't fix the thousands and thousands of problems our country faces in his first year. (But we also elected the congresscritters that have the power to defy everything he suggests for the country.) Where's the mini ice age that's supposed to happen because of global warming? (We don't believe in global warming so much anymore because we don't see proof and if it's cold in our neighborhood, it must not be real.) The Apple iPad isn't mind blowing enough. Let's whine about that too because we just like to whine about everything. I like to whine about the corporate media. Of course if we had a society made up of more people who think critically the corporate media wouldn't be such a threat.

Are we just spoiled or are we just so fucked over by the powers that be that we're deep in the hole of despair? Or both? We're turning on each other. Is this part of the plan or is this just what happens when the shit keeps hitting the fan?

Morford concludes:

Maybe this, then, is the ultimate upshot of our endless, self-wrought swirl of sour disappointment, of never having our impossible needs fully met, of constantly being thwarted in our desire to have the world revolve around our exact set of specifications and desires.

Our disappointment begins to curdle, to turn back on itself, poison the heart, turn us nasty and low. It shifts from merely being a national mood or general temperament, into a way of being. A wiring, deep and harmful and permanent. It's all very disappointing, really.

I want to know how and why we got to this. Why do we have impossible needs anyway? Was it always this way (and I wasn't paying attention)? What gives?

We need jobs! We need to be paid living wages. Where is the national outrage about that?