revelers and reeks and wrecks

I don't think we are ever going to eliminate poverty, there are always going to be some poor people around.  I just want to make it a little better for them.  Maybe give the unfortunate some means to climb out of the hole, make the nutsos a little more comfortable in their pitiful states, and the lazy, well it's hard to tell them from the unfortunate and nutsos, so I guess they get to skate a little. 

I kind of don't want to give anything at all to the lazies, I mean doesn't that make me a sucker?  Nobody wants to be a sucker.  But then you know, they go ahead and have kids, and then what about the kids, should they suffer for the shortcomings of the parents?  But then all kids suffer from the shortcomings of their parents, but in the case of the poor, the suffering is pretty brutal, so maybe slipping a few bucks to their shiftless parents is not such a waste.

Well you know I read a science fiction book once, The Star Seekers by Milton Lesser.  It was one of those books from the science fiction book club which were meant for preteens, but then I was a preteen.  Anyway in the book they are all traveling to some distant star in a hollowed out meteor.  This has taken many generations and they have all forgotten what their mission is.  The meteor is divided into four levels.  On the outside are the engineers who maintain the machines but clearly they don't know what those machines are for anymore.  The next level in is the jungle where they grow all their food.  The next level down is the revelers, and at the center are the scientist philosophers, who it turns out really do know what is going on, and at the end they alert the farmers and the revelers and the engineers just as they are approaching a nice little planet and they land there and everything is hunky dory, and the young kid who was at the center of the story, gets the girl.

What a strange word, revelers.  Anyway in the book what they were supposed to be doing was entertaining everybody else on the long trip through the gloom of space.  As it turned out, once everybody forgot the purpose of the mission the revelers were just entertaining themselves, but that was in the book.

Here's my barely thought through idea.  There are never going to be enough jobs for everybody.  The government should do make work.  Actually there is another science fiction book, Vonnegut's Player Piano, where they have the reeks and wrecks which is where the people not smart enough to run the machines go.  Well something like that, they serenade us at the bus stop, and sweep the streets and they get paid moderately well for it.  That is all the deeper I am going to think about it this morning.

As I was watching the news last night, a difference occurred to me between right wingers and left wingers.  You know how sometimes you have a problem with say, your car door?  It doesn't open quite right, you have to give it an extra push or something.  You can still get in and out of the car, but that extra push is a pain in the ass.  So do you put up with it, or do you get a new door?  Do you muddle through or do you fix the problem for once and for all?

I think the left wingers (not all the left wingers, just the liberals, not the commies, who like the right wingers, think they have an answer for everything) are more like the muddlers, let's just do something to make the problem better.  Let's make a deal with Iran to make things better for both of us as opposed to the right wingers who want to bomb them off the map and solve that problem for once and for all.

Well I haven't thought this one out either.  I will put it through the crucible in the fullness of time.

Just one other thing.  They were talking about Baltimore on the news last night, the politicos were droning on, and they really had no programs or anything, and so they trailed off mumbling about education.  You know we Americans love education, it is like the solution to everything.  But whenever a bill comes to spend more on education it is always voted down.