Wake up to a living nightmare!

Professor Thomas Sowell, the 90-year-old veteran economist and social theorist from Hoover Institute of Stanford University, is still active on social media. He is quick to give his opinion, backed by statistics and historical events, to run down ongoing national policies. He is an opinionated person and at one time was drawn to the idea of communism. His rationalisation for gravitating toward the left is that it is just human nature. He wants to share when one has nothing; conversely, he does not share when he tends to lose his 'hard-earned' possession. Sowell hails from Harlem, working as a postal worker as a young man and pulling himself up by his bootstrap to his current stature.

He often campaigns against affirmative action and minimum wage. He asserts that the Black American community had a better quality of life when the aforementioned policies were pinned upon them. Another recurrent theme in his rhetorics is the importance of the family unit in the upliftment of society. He does not justify the 'Black Life Matters' movement. Instead of blaming mistreatment of the blacks in the hands of a white-centred government, he puts the blame of disparity of the community on the 67% black families that have a single parent to manage their home. Between making ends meet and fulfilling personal needs, the parent has no choice but to leave their kids to the unsupervised influence of members of the neighbourhood. 

On the future of America, he sees a very bleak future. He pinpoints a decline in values like honesty and a sense of entitlement towards this end. To illustrate his point, he compared the black-outs in New York in 1965 and 1977.

During the 1965 power outage,  the incidence of crime was the lowest, whereas, in 1977, it saw plenty of looting and arson. Sowell posits that the 1965 society was one that saw the destruction of WW2 and the hard times that followed. Hence, they had some common decency to protect property and practised traditional morality. The later generation feels that by their existence, they feel entitled. Everybody owes them a living. If they fail, they quickly recoil to blame history, ancestry, and how the earlier society had oppressed them and continue to do so.

That is the mantra of the woke generation - every moment awake is a living nightmare.

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Sentimental fool on the hill!

Back in the 80s, my cousin RR, sister and I all bought similar combs of the same colour and make and promised to keep in forever as a sign of our bond. At that naïve carefree age, we made a pledge that we would keep till end of time as common tool.

During about the same time, over the same holiday period, RR and I used to go crazy over the rock band ‘Cheap Trick’. Over and over again, we found intense joy in croaking in our untrained hoarse vocal cords to the song ‘If you want my love, you got it’ till it hurt and felt so good about it. The song used to be a regular feature on Radio RAAF Butterworth those days.

30 years after that eventful holiday, when I last met up with RR, I happened to mention about the comb and the song to him. And what do you know? RR had absolutely no recollection of the song that we used to sing. In fact, he asked; “Cheap who?” Do not even bother about the comb! And there I was keeping the blue plastic comb in pristine condition. Well, something mean more to some than others. Or maybe I am just a sentimental sensitive fool! Different things mean differently to different people.

Rather confusing, is it not?

I heard a radio interview recently with a motivation consultant. He was advocating that in order for one to achieve his ambitions, he must cling along with company of the same spirited individuals, with go-getter's, amongst people with positive attitudes so that some of the positive vibes will rub off on you. Hey, you do not need a motivation guru to tell you that. Amma told us that 40 years ago and she only had primary school education. Her quotable quote told in a negative sense was 'If a calf (being a divine animal) starts mixing with piglets, they would start eating faeces.' The smart Alecs would argue that Winnie the Pooh's friend Piglet (even though a pig) seems very civilized (or is that why Winnie got the nickname Pooh?) and also that modern pigs are reared in farms and their feeds are controlled and monitored scientifically unlike the hogs in the slums of Tamil Nadu!
If I remember well, the management people have a rule of thumb called 'Peter's Principle'. It essentially states a quotation by a Dr. Laurence J. Peter (an Associate Professor of Education in University of Southern California) which goes like this: "In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence ... in time every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out its duties ... Work is accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence."

Roy Hodgson

An apt example of this is the multilingual football coach Roy Hodgson, who did miracles with smaller teams like Switzerland (last 16 in FIFA World Cup 1994) and Finland (FIFA ranking 33 in 2006/7). In the EPL, he was doing such a great job with smaller teams with not so many prima donna-like footballers like Blackburn Rovers and Fulham. His colourful curriculum vitae came to naught when confronted with the indisputable Champion Club of the Soccer playing nations - Liverpool. Here, he was heckled and jeered by punters, supporters and probably club owners alike for failing to show the star quality that he possessed. Repeated defeats and non flambouyant performance just booted him out. Licking his wounds, he is now doing not a bad job in lowly West Bromwich Albion - no loss in last 5 games! Being amongst the stars did not make him one. [He must have had his sweet revenge yesterday. The icing on the cake must have been when his lowly ranked (in the verge of relegation) team beating his mighty ex-team Liverpool 2-1.]
In the kingdom of the blind, one-eyed Jack does not become blind but rather king! But in primordial nature of things, it seem only logical for propagation and continuity of species, pretty animals (humans included) hanging around the company of other equally pretty and robust animals to ensure equally pretty and strong offspring! In the plant kingdom, it would be pollination of better pollens and ova!
Mmm....If this were to be followed, then half of the people of the world would stay unmarried or live in sin!?
But I grew up learning that the beauty comes from within, not just skin deep.... And everybody has some good traits and bad traits. That was what Charles Darwin was trying to tell the world about natural selection and the survival of the fittest. And Socrates (the brilliant looks-wise challenged Greek philosopher) was telling the beau who wanted to marry him to have a child with his intelligence and her beauty, "what if the child has my ugly face and your brains?"....,
And it gets more confusing... And I am going slightly mad...