driving off the cliff

So my alma mater is closing.  Not just closing but graduation is today (pretty much as I post this even) and the lights get turned off, by the power company for lack of payment, tomorrow.  And those lights were left on only because it would really have been bad form for the city to have turned them off with students in the dorms.

Talk about a cliff and driving over it, that has been one.  The thing is that it hasn't been like the cartoons where they are rafting down the river and only hear the roar of the falls once they are going too quickly toward it to paddle to the shore.  Nope.  In fact, they already circumnavigated the falls several times that I know of -- when they became a four year school instead of a finishing school, when they went co-ed -- and who knows before then.  Possibly when they moved the school and when they renamed it, perhaps those weren't from going gangbusters but as means of not going out of business even then.

The thing is this time people have had the cliff in their sights and have driven straight toward it like Thelma and Louise and if anyone said, "Hey, excuse me, you are heading toward a cliff and you are gonna die," that person was told, "Sit down and shut up, we do NOT want to hear it if it isn't positive.  Why in the world can't you say something positive?"  Ok, here are the positives:  boy, isn't it a nice day, and wow, what a view there will be on the way down, and you know that thrill on a roller coaster, that is nothing compared to what this is going to feel like.

And so at the same time I'm thinking about that and trying to figure out why people think that I delight in the implosion because I did not refuse to see that it was coming, even more rudely because I pointed out that it was coming, I am met with an individual telling me that there is plenty of oil (in Texas no less -- it would be Pennsylvania if she knew there had once been gushers there but her sense of history is limited to whatever Glenn Beck has covered) and if I don't think the tar sands and the pipeline and offshore drilling are the answer, what IS the answer and when I say, use less, she says, well, only you are going to do that and I say, when gas was $4/gallon people pulled back and it deteriorates from there to where I eventually find out she knows who George Soros is but not who the Koch brothers are.

And that is the thing, is it not?  I bet there is a whole group of people who can tell you everything that is wrong with George Soros but who have never heard of the Koch brothers.  And another group who can list the evil doings of the Koch's who don't know who George Soros is.  That is the division where people do not understand that we are all in this together and yet fight with each other to distraction (and death) anyway.

So that cliff thing?  Because that is really what I am thinking about.  It reminds me of that one car accident another homeschooler's children were involved in some time ago.  The boy was driving, the girl got pretty badly cut up, and the mother said to me, "He didn't do anything wrong; the truck just flipped over (several times)."  Yeah, right.  Trucks do that.  Not.  At the very least he was going too fast.  The real problem was mostly that she was supposed to go pick her daughter up and didn't feel like messing up her hair in the rain so sent her inexperienced son out in a very bad storm and then it wasn't HIS fault because she didn't want it to be HER fault.  When I said to her, "The general inference in one car accidents is operator error," (full disclosure, I might have phrased that differently), she never spoke to me again.

Surprise surprise.

Well, it IS our faults.  All of it. 

So go ahead.  Keep complaining.  Keep doing things that seem different to you but are really the same.  Keep nursing the wounds.  Keep taking the drugs.  Keep not doing that thing that makes your heart really sing.  Be the Koch brothers side of the Soros problem you see, or Soros side of the Koch brothers problem you see.  Because as long as you do that you won't actually DO anything, and you won't actually change and move and go in a direction and be happy in the here and now.

You will, however, go over that cliff.