Perswayzon - It's the new Grunt!

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Perhaps this is a bit of middle aged gripes and sour grapes. The aging generation laments the simplicity and or the golden age of the past. I do not. The past was simpler in some ways and in others it sucked. In a way, back then, the population in general were on the same page. One or two local television and radio stations and one or two local newspapers delivered the news, fashions and norms, politically correct speak (PC for short) and everybody knew their place in the general scheme of things.

Having taken some business psychology courses in college that were geared to improving communication and sales I look at everything with perhaps too critical an eye.

What this old fart would say about the discommunication in America today is that too many bubbles of intelligence exist that do not touch or interface elsewhere on the planet. I would say the best example of this is Doctors. They talk and think anatomy and chemistry all day long. That if you interface with them, they want you to describe your pain or ailment which they translate into their own little medical correct speak.

When I try to explain to a doctor how mail order prescriptions work and the various international laws involved and my need for a new prescription, I get the same blank stare as from the teenager in the mall behind the counter who doesn’t have a clue about what I am speaking about when asking about some retail items - hello - you sell this? - what kind of warranty etc do I get - excuse me - could you turn down your earphones - I would like to purchase - no never mind - I guess I didn‘t need or want the item that much from you - let me find a store that caters to human beings and not texters on the other side of your blackberry ---.

The doctor and the nurse and pharmaceutical giants all communicate correctly with each other but ME? - I am out of the loop. It seems that the disease of discommuncation in America is an acceptable disease and probably treated by some newly invented drug. This is not miscommunication.

Miscommunication connotes an effort to communicate. Discommunication is talking and understanding within the bubble and egnoring everybody else. A very old concept had to do with thinking outside of the box. That has to be retranslated in case anybody in today’s world is listening or cares. The bubble is the new box. How do you find a corner on a bubble to estimate or leverage yourself out of a bubble? To think? Differently? Duh! - It is a conundrum of sorts.

The girl at the mall, her lack of manners and or good customer skills is perhaps a local matter of the culture. I have traveled and the local thing is all over and perhaps global. The public schools in America do not teach manners or courtesy or things like acceptable social interface that once got drilled into the heads of us fools from the past that were on the same page concerning these matters and related to one or two radio, televisions stations, newspapers. In the old days, it was the religious institutions, the parochial schools, Sunday schools that put the polish on a child’s civilized life skills education.

But going back to doctors and the college educated, their educations do not touch upon manners, courtesy, customer skills or interface with the rest of the planet.

It used to be the totally uneducated who grunted a lot. Now with the advent of cookie-cutter bureaucratic education systems, a grunt is all that is needed to get through a day. The cookie-cutter tests of our youth get measured to satisfy the cookie-cutter bureaucratic requirements of state and national employed for life cookie cutter education authorities.

What came first? Education or the Student Loan Industrial Complex?

Anyway, without going on about what irks and gripes me. I must say this. That the more one is educated in America, the more degrees added to your name, the narrower the range of communication possible with the outside world. Outside World? Me. Perhaps with you as well.

Get a MBA in business and you can destroy business. Cookie-cutter education sense is no sense - nonsense - for many in this world these days. How do we reach out to the new ignorants - ignorance - of this dying nuclear age?

That perhaps the only communication the young or the highly educated do is in a day of taking grueling scaled down cookie-cutter tests is to order a number one or two off Mickey D’s cookie cutter menu.

Like the fingers on one hand is the flow of possible avenues of communication between our new modern educated elites and us mere obsolete humans down here on the ground.

Grunt. Fart. That’s two avenues explained.

You figure out the other three. Have a good day discommunicating with the planet and with the new perswayzon methods of the next generations.

Farm Sense = Common Sense

Part of what I am trying to communicate here is that despite the abundance and luxury and seeming opportunities, America seems to have grown stupid.

I say stupid not as a put down, but the younger generations do not know the same things that their parents or grandparents knew. I in fact do not know many of the things my parents and or grandparents knew through life experience.

Every generation has it advances, and laments the traditions that seem to have died with parents, friends and others.

Sometimes I try to say to people something strange sounding as a means to convey what common sense used to mean. I want to convey something perhaps visual in describing a time when 95% of America was involved in farming.

With that I say something like “common sense” used to mean “farm sense”. Meaning that if you lived on a farm, you tilled the soil, planted crops and harvested them. You also fed your chickens and cows and pigs. Otherwise, you die with your unfed farm livestock.

I make that allegory in order to illustrate just how far away we all are from the source of food and the need to follow through and maintain the food cycle. Working on a farm is hard work but there is a closeness to the rhythms and cycles of nature that we also do not touch upon or even understand anymore.

The west sometimes more now than anytime in the past century or before seems to be lost in a box made in a factory somewhere else.

How do I describe a factory to somebody who has never seen or heard or smelled one or where half your relatives have had a job there or are working in that factory?

I mention these things because I think it might be every two generations that sees a more dramatic turning of time and manners and culture. This is such a time.

Two generations ago or forty years ago, America still made things. America not only made things but fixed things. How many modern washer-less faucets are in our houses? My father for ten or fifteen cents would buy replacement washers for a leaky faucet. Part of the cult of adult males, from the turn of the last century to less than a generation ago, was being able to fix your own plumbing. Now if the faucet leaks, you replace it and at great expense. Is it expensive or is it charged on a credit card?

What does an obsolete word like husbandry mean? Is the meaning of that word worth reviving?

There is so much in the way of a disconnect that has happened in a mere generation and probably owing to the power of computers. Does anybody know what a typewriter is or how to use one? I might as well describe some weird science fiction object than be able to pass on any useful information to my children regarding archaic machinery.

So too as I stated in the previous article, economics or its understanding is something of a sham or a scam if the tenured people talking economics are only dealing with spreadsheets and are wrapped in a bubble that does not necessary see or touch the real ever changing economy.

Human beings seem to have been factored out of a lot of economic formulas worldwide. Outsourcing talents or skills may save money and inspire paper profit but where is the balance? In life, for thousands of years, has been a concept of balance. If you change the workplace, do you know where you and your neighbors are going down the road.

If you spend more money than was allocated in the government budget, then the budget must be balanced by cutting back somewhere else in the budget or raise taxes.

Classical economics will never go out of style and is much more practical than the mess now masquerading as professional economic theory.

The current financial meltdown seems to suggest that not all the answers in life are found in our universities or in corrupt and or delusional political or corporate bubbles.

It is time for America to symbolically and in a real sense to start building and fixing things again.

Feed the pigs or starve!