Bowling for Columbine

Greetings good citizen,

I finally got to watch ‘Bowling for Columbine’ last night…naturally, didn’t see the whole thing but I saw enough to get the gist of what Michael Moore was trying to say.

And in the end I was somewhat puzzled why he didn’t arrive at the ‘obvious conclusion’…

Naturally, that conclusion may only be ‘obvious’ to my humble self.

What did you take away from the end of that documentary?

Were you disappointed that Charlton Heston didn’t have any answers as to why our culture is so violent?

Why do you suppose it is that the citizens of the US are so much more likely than the people of other nations to blow your ass away than to look at you?

What makes us Murikans sooo ‘edgy’?

Could it be the ‘fuck you, pay me’ culture?

Make no mistake about it good citizen, 99% of all homicide revolves around money.

A man shoots his cheatin’ spouse, he ain’t even concerned about her ‘giving it up for someone else…he shoots her because he’s the one that’s been paying for it and there she is, giving it away!

It’s all about money and there ain’t a damn thing funny…except the money itself!

Still, this doesn’t explain why kids with their whole lives ahead of them decide to pick up a gun and go on a rampage against a world they have no use for because that world has no use for them…

More than a little disturbing was ‘commentary’ offered on NPR today about how our ‘educational system’ is failing…I’ll paraphrase since focus of the show was on ‘minorities’ but essentially this is so far off the mark as to be laughable.

The ‘linkage’ between education and employment is so spurious as to be beyond comical.

The only thing you need a college degree for is to prove that you can afford one.

Which is to point out what is already obvious to most of us (and you can ask virtually anyone in the ‘real world’ (who isn’t employed in the ‘Sciences’) just how often they actually ‘use’ what they learned in college.


Most people will answer ‘never’.

Yes good citizen, even engineers will tell you they didn’t learn anything ‘practical’ in college…it is impossible to actually produce parts the way they teach you to design them!

Yet our ‘salvation’ (under capitalism) is for 80% of the population to obtain a college degree.

To do what? God only knows…

Do you ‘need’ a college degree to pick up trash? No, but if you don’t have one in the future it is unlikely you will get the job (because the asshole who ‘screens’ the applicants will toss your resume/application the moment they see you left that part of your history blank.)

Worse good citizen, we don’t have to wait until some highly competitive future to see this kind of idiot behavior, they do it today!

Yeah good citizen, if you want to work in the future (at all) you need that sheepskin (if only to prove you’re ‘motivated enough’.)

In case any of you haven’t noticed, this is just one more aspect of our ‘fuck you, pay me!’ economic system that totally pisses me off.

It is useless bullshit and a ‘convenient excuse’ for clueless politicians and insecure educators.

It would be suicidal to admit that capitalism is incapable of providing jobs for even a fraction of the working aged population.

But that’s the truth.

Retracing our steps back to the question of why are citizens of the US so ‘prone to violence’?

If everything you were taught to believe turned out to be a lie, you’d be pretty pissed off too!

The anger we see manifested in the streets (and occasionally in the nation’s workplaces) is the direct result of the lie that is capitalism.

You will NEVER prosper working for somebody else.

Worse, there aren’t enough ‘income streams’ for everyone to have one (never mind a couple or three of ‘em!)
The ‘New Deal’ was based on the concept that you would do your part and the employer would in turn ‘take care’ of you.

Well good citizen, I think it is fair to say the ‘owners’ have ‘reneged’ on their part of the bargain.

So we, in turn, should renege on ours…we need to ‘do away’ with private property. The greedy can’t be trusted to act in the public interest.

We have hundreds of years of experience that proves this is true.

We don’t have another planet to divvy up so we have to ‘share’ this one.

If you don’t want to share, get the hell off!

There’s no ‘I’ in either ‘us’ or ‘we’ and together is the only way our species will survive…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner