On the Cusp of a Frustration Plantation (Thanks Rasputina for the Title)

I often times wonder what could possibly make someone care so little about others. I may never know. I was talking to a friend late last week about how I have this perception that life is meaningless, and that all the suffering we put ourselves through is all for nothing; however, I work diligently to protect others from feeling the weight of that meaninglessness.

If I died tomorrow, I would just disappear and it would be a matter of, likely, a decade or less before I was never spoken of again, and far less time than that before people stopped caring to discuss anything about me with anything beyond a conversation revolving around, "hey, remember that guy?"

And so living with the weight of that constantly has really made me feel like the only thing that really matters is that I am somehow working towards a better tomorrow for the majority.

One of the things I have had to realize recently is that most people are so self involved that they never see that far out there. They care about their own end and that is it, if someone else doesn't fit neatly into their expectations then they are a problem.

While I would definitely argue that the ways I have treated myself within relationships - especially within relationship - really does me no favors in terms of self worth or esteem, I do, at the same time, believe that if more people cared more about others that the world would be a better place. And I don't mean caring when it is easy. Anyone can say, "if you need anything, I am here for you," but very few would say, "I canceled work for the rest of the day so you don't have to sit alone tonight while you go through this hard thing."

But stretching even further than that, I firmly believe that a society is only as good as what the poorest group of humans within that society are treated like. From there, one can say stretch that into also saying that the society is only as good as what the minorities are treated like - minority of ethnic background, sexual orientation, religion, take your pick.

I know that I have said it before, but it has always been so beneficial to me to go to the poorest area of whatever city I would visit to see what it was like. That is fundamentally the core of what that city is.

Let me elaborate - if a city can justify treating their poorest, or their minorities, a certain way then they can justify treating anyone that same way. And if a society can treat those people so horribly as to make them all huddle up in homeless encampments, make laws that make it exponentially harder to feed and house those homeless people, then they can justify treating anyone that way.

On the reverse of that, if a city utilizes their resources to help people get housed, find jobs, help them seek medical attention if need be, and genuinely try to improve the poorest people's lives then it hurts no one, and gives the populace within the city's limits comfort with knowing they, too, would benefit from that help.

The worst part of all this is, we pay enough in taxes to alleviate every fucking societal woe in this country that there is. I don't know why cutting funds for military spending is such a taboo topic when $872 billion dollars of our federal taxes go directly into the military. I am positive universal healthcare could be had for an astronomical amount less than that, especially if the entire healthcare system was reworked instead of using the antiquated systems in place now, and that would benefit every single fucking person in this country.

I just had to quickly do a bit of research in how much of the military spending is unaccounted for. It is two and a half trillion dollars. $2.5 TRILLION. That would cover universal healthcare for a decade.

This just boils down to priorities within this country, and the priorities most people have is to ignore politics until it is time to vote on a president. It is what has allowed this country to turn into this conglomerate of war mongering, fear mongering, racist bigots that are systemically making the country one giant profiteering machine for the ultra wealthy.

I recently read somewhere that South Korea has a tax incentive program in which the money generated from the taxes collected gets funneled back to the employees within the country. I have no idea whether or not this is true as when I tried to research it, all that populates is unrelated things, but the concept was this - if the government gained income off of the taxes collected, then full time employees would get 10% back from what was gained, and it ended up being over $150,000 USD per employee that was being redistributed. The thing about this isn't whether or not it is true, though, but rather, once you start digging into taxation within major countries and how they allocate the funds, it would be possible to do just that.

Well, until the next time that frustration creates a plantation within my brain, enjoy your lives out there.

-Dustin S. Stover