Thing is, though, that the riots lasted more than 4 days.  Four days is a long time to be fighting against riot-geared police (Riot cops are just the regular cops in different uniforms, the distinction is made so you don’t connect the brutality of riot actions with the actions of every day police officers), flipping cars, and torching buildings just so you could get your hands on the latest Nikes.  Four days is plenty if you’re mad as hell and don’t want to take it anymore, however.

There’s an article in the Montreal Gazette online ( http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/London+rioters+resent+media+image+hooded+teen+thug/5233682/story.html ) that states that a lot of the rioters were from housing projects who are now incensed that the image of the London riots is teenagers stealing shoes.  They say that the riots were about class warfare and community unity more than anything else, about the disrespect paid to them by authorities of all stripes and the disregard paid them by the same.  I’m inclined to believe them, and not just because I have anarchist leanings, but because these are the people who were actually there as opposed to the handful of reporters that got nearby and filmed as much as they could before they got scared off.

There’s a funny thing about violence and mass destruction.  When you’re doing it in your own region, it’s unilaterally declared to be asinine and criminal.  However, if you put on a uniform and do it in someone else’s region, it’s the most noble thing anyone could do and god help anyone that criticizes those heroic men and women.

Let me start with some explanation.  Cena came to the WWE during a really long hiatus I took from wrestling because I couldn’t find myself caring about it enough to watch.  I’d play the games every now and then, and I’d have no fucking idea who half the characters in it were or how their relationships and stories fit together, but I didn’t give too much of a shit because I always made create-a-wrestlers.  I didn’t have those years to buy into or be converted to Cenationalism, I only had a few weeks over at my friend Rhi’s monday night gatherings to figure out what was what in these weird days of wrestling.  Also, as a guy that leans heavily towards anarchist ideals, anti-corporate sentiment, and anti-heroes, John Cena is the last person you’d think I’d be supportive of in the squared circle.  That’s analogous to Mac users talking up the good points of Windows 7.

So, what is it about Cena that makes me cheer?  His character is simple, really.  He’s a regular guy into hip hop that lives life by a simple credo and earnestly wishes to do his best at everything he does.  He’s the face of the WWE, the one guy they will always go to the well to drag up whenever there’s a major plot they want to push.  He’s got great mic skills, a good sense of humor, and enough charisma to hold up pretty much anyone he shows up with.  His wrestling style is horrible, however, relying entirely on power moves interspersed between staggering around like he’s in a walking coma all as a set up to his patented 5 moves of doom so he can come back from behind and win it in the clinch, which may have worked a lot better when he was newer and more underdoggy, but nowadays it just looks silly.  So, in real life, I’d make fun of his values, his sincerity, his support of mainstream culture, and his selling out to the man.  I’d laugh at his simplistic worldview and mock his trust in the system.  As a wrestler, I absolutely hate watching him work because it’s boring and predictable.  But every week, I just light up when I see him show up with a mic, and I find myself rooting for him as he works through plots and heels every arc.  So what’s the deal?

The only thing I keep coming back to is that wrestling is a fantasy world.  While I spend most of my spare time in fantasy worlds, they’re all worlds I interact with — video games, roleplaying games, LARPs, etc. — with a set of mechanics and rules that I have to keep in mind and work with every second.  Everything in these worlds, from other personalities to walls and objects, has a certain set of rules that I’m familiar with and work with.  Wrestling, and by extension TV shows and movies, is a bit different, because the entire fantasy is not that I’m there and doing things.  The fantasy is that what I’m watching is real, even though I know for a fact that none of it is real, not even “reality” TV.  I know that most wrestling spots and moves are mostly clever acrobatics and illusion to make them seem more damaging and destructive than they are.  I know that the story arcs aren’t anything more than character development, padding, and interest generation.  And I know that I’ve got nothing invested in these shows other than my desire to watch them for a while.

So, the reason the fantasy angle matters is because it seems that when I’m unengaged from the fantasy in question, I’ve got a perverse desire to see justice being done and white hats trumping black hats.  Cena is very definitely a white hat and often a force of justice in a world gone mad.  He lives and breathes “doing the right thing” and has and will martyr himself to follow his ideals and to keep his word as good as it can be.  And I think it’s that, coupled with his charisma and mic skills that really makes me come back every time.  However, the question now on my mind is, “Am I missing virtue and justice in my regular life and that’s why I support it in my fantasy life?”

Let’s start with basic civics and political science.  Governments can only stay governments through use of power.  Governmental power comes from two sources:  Authority and Sovereignty.  Sovereignty is the power wielded by governments to enforce their rule, be it through force or works.  Authority is power given to the government by it’s citizenry, voluntarily or not.  Governments cannot maintain their rule without power from both sectors, but can use power from either sector to enhance the power in the other.  A government that uses its sovereignty to force authority through fear of reprisal would be totalitarian in nature, while a government that gains it’s sovereignty through the authority bequeathed it by the populace would be democratic in nature.  This is all incredibly simplified to make my points, and is missing lots of variables and gradients.

In the US, the federal government gains most of its sovereignty from its authority.  Decisions are made by groups of people who are elected to those positions by the citizenry, the military is made entirely from volunteers from all parts of the citizenry, and much of its operating budget is created through taxes paid for by the citizens.  Citizens are free to travel and choose whether or not they wish to live in the US.  Again, this is incredibly simplified to make my points and is missing lots of variables and gradients.  However, the majority of the problems and created crises facing America today seem to show that most of these facts are not actually true, and this comes down to how the politics in the US have been handled for well over the last century.

What we have in the US to handle our politics is a two-party system, the Democrats and the Republicans.  The goal of these organizations is actually very simple, and all the complexity of the parties comes from attempting to achieve this goal, which is to have as much political power as possible at any given moment.  Political power in this system is used to determine who gets to be in charge of the government and therefore the people of the nation, and can be gathered in many different ways which can be boiled down to just a handful of generalities.  Primarily, it’s done through gathering votes and public opinion since not everyone votes.  Reaching out to the public in order to collect their votes requires media, which can be bought with money and also paid for by getting agreeable personalities and programming to do that work for you.  Money is trickier to get, since the vast majority of the populace won’t pitch in much to the coffers, which forces the parties to court the monied interests here and abroad, but it’s still one of the primary actions of the political parties.  Once you’ve got the media locked in, you can start proselytizing and maintaining your core base amongst the core of your support, which would be the voters and opinion-holders of the US.  And all this would be just fine and dandy if the entire purpose was to win this election, but elections happen every two years and sometimes more and therefore the campaign must be kept up year-round, because the battle for political power is never actually won, the line just moves every couple of years.

What this means and how this relates to what’s actually going on nowadays is that no one decisively wins the political struggle, neither party ever gets to the point where doing what they believe is the best method of governing the state is all that they’re doing.  Instead, the parties have developed into a us vs. them mentality where every movement by either party is part propaganda, part war, and part appeasement.  The parties can’t and don’t care what is good for their constituencies other than grandiose gestures that guarantee votes.  Their long-term partners are the monied interests here and abroad that continue to funnel money into their media campaigns, meaning that the first groups that get attacked and appeased are these interests.  Viable third parties with enough support to be dangerous to this dynamic are immediately seized upon and absorbed by the major parties or completely discredited in due course while the parties take the most popular stances of these parties and add them to the platforms they’re already running.  Major decisions and laws enacted by the parties in control are made to provide votes and appease partners, and stands against them are not done for the sake of ideology or concerns about progress, they’re done in an effort to stop the momentum of the controlling party and to cause failure, which will reflect back to the controlling party’s base.  The parties are not composed of thinkers and actors who fervently believe in the platforms of the party, they’re composed of professional politicians and strategists who’s only concern is the continued success of the party.  They do not care about you because they only care about your vote, and anything they can do to get your vote is fair play.  Propaganda, lies, grandstanding, and sensationalism is much more important in politics than doing what’s right for the state at any given moment.  And thus, they’ve spent most of your life deceiving you into thinking that they’ve got your best interests at heart and manipulating you into thinking that your best interests directly line up with party lines.  They’ve managed to take a multi-dimensional ideology platform and reduce it to a one-dimensional line measuring every person as either liberal or conservative and bundling every other dimension possible into those categories.  And as they’ve predicted, the nation has taken the banners provided and run through the streets declaring war on each other, decrying Them as assholes and idiots and Us as the only ones that are capable of truly representing the USA.

Every action taken by the parties recently can be full explained by this.  The take-down of Acorn and the unions reduces money and votes for the democrats while appeasing voters and partners of the republicans.  Fights on health care and pretty much every other legislation were done on ideological basis (loud enough to keep citizens from noticing bits of the bills that were directed at appeasing party partners) in order to make Them fail and to rally Us to the platform.  It didn’t much matter if the measures passed or not in the long term because they can be turned around or nullified later if the political power shifts, the important thing was that the battles happened.  Conservative politicians could easily and truthfully say that not enacting the legislation to raise the debt ceiling would cause the US to default because they knew that the Liberals could not let that happen unless they could count on the Conservatives getting the blame for it, which is harder to do convincingly when your party controls the presidency.  In fact, that there was a deal struck at all smacks of some backroom blackmailing where both sides had a decent-sized gun to point at the other.

To sum up, the entire political process that you’ve believed in since you were first taught about it in school is almost entirely opposite what you believed it was, and it’s not likely to change any time soon.  Why?  Because we’ve all allowed it to happen and no one seems to be willing to see anything wrong with it.

Agree?  Disagree?  Want to just give me a picture of two bears high-fiving?  I’m only as good as my feedback and criticism, post yours below

In your campaign, you made statements and promises that you’d be bringing all the troops home at the earliest time possible.  We’re now two years into your term as President and all we’ve managed to do is reduce the number of troops there and start an air war in Libya.  In that time period, we’ve also seen dramatic surges in the extent that the Federal Government will go to promote security at the cost of liberty, with the introduction of backscatter scanners at airports and the insistence that entering the security area of those airports is voluntary relinquishing your rights against search and seizure and free speech.  Key provisions in the Patriot Act have been extended to 2015, Guantanamo Bay remains open, despite your promises to close it, and through all of this, the major issues taken up by pundits have been a war on unions, a fight on abortion, and whether or not Common is an appropriate guest at the White House.

What I’m getting at, Mr. President, is that the past decade has taken us as a nation into two horrifying quagmires of wars and a myriad of extra security and suspension of freedom in this country with no seeming purpose other than to fulfill the horrifying vision of the future that George Orwell had when confronted with the realities of Soviet socialism.  We’ve got self-perpetuating wars on enemy ideologies, a loss of rights disguised as being for our own good, and definite class chasms starting to form between the haves, the have-somes, and the have-nots.  All that’s necessary on that front is to declare the haves to be the party leadership and the have-somes to be the party members, then move all the have-nots into ghettos to do the menial tasks.  Then simply eliminate all those who are too smart for their station through force or coercion.  The perpetual state of war will ensure maximum patriotism from the party members as well as keep industry going through war-time production.  It will allow you to ration resources to all the party members and plebeians.  Combined with convinced your populace to accept security theater over personal liberty, you might not even need to develop individual surveillance to keep your state in check because you can rely on them rolling over on anyone they think is being less than perfect and therefore a potential terrorist.

The only thing that could really use some work is removing the faces and identities from the fighting forces so that no one in the state can have any emotion towards them that you have not already dictated and scripted.  Oh, wait, Predator Drones.

So my question, Mr. President, is “When do I get to find out what’s inside Room 101?”

I feel heavy, and all of my decisions are now based on the amount of work required to accomplish any goals.  going to the bathroom and smoking require very little work, but making a sandwich doesn’t have instant-enough gratification at the moment, so I’ll pass on eating until my stomach begins to revolt against my brain and starts telling me that I’m dying.  I’m only writing this right now because I somehow feel it’s important for people to know what’s going on with me when I’m going through things they don’t seem to understand.  Everyone says they understand, but everyone seems to be able to function just fine most of the time.  They get a day or two in the dumps, grit their teeth and go forth and do their routines.  If it’s really bad, like a breakup or a death, then they take a week off then work through it over the next month.  70% of the time I’m perfectly fine, sometimes better than just fine.  That 30% that remains is a struggle to remain active and to do simple things like spend less than 12 hours of the day asleep and get enough food in me to survive and to interact with people without becoming too irritated to be in their presence before the social obligations are over.  It seems weird after the fact, but everything about even my closest friends and family and girlfriend will piss me off to no end when I’m depressed and isolationist.  The way you drink might just make enough irritating noise that I just want to slap the cup out of your hand.  Your trademarked and predictable reactions and speech patterns will drive me up the wall.  Your quirky urges will transform in my head to unbearable compulsions that I just want to shake you out of.  My brain translates everything you do into a reason to distance myself from you.  And then I sit in my room, alone, wishing I wasn’t so lonely and wishing people weren’t so hard to get.  Or, more correctly, wishing people would just throw themselves into my life.  Perfect people.  People who won’t irritate me.  People that essentially don’t exist.

And yet, this time, I’m not sad.  I don’t have a catalyst for the depression.  I’m just depressed, and incapable of fighting it.  Even this little bit of writing I’m doing isn’t much help.  It should feel good to get some of this out, but it’s just a chore.

Our first meeting was an hour-long showcase of his computer illiteracy, as the first meeting is always data entry.  I’d expected that it would be nothing but filling out forms where he’d ask the question on the form then try to match my answer to the best on the program he was using.  I just didn’t expect that he’d have a typing speed of 1 – 3 seconds per keystroke and an occasional reminder from his AV program that it wants an upgrade.  I really wasn’t expecting that a full 40 minutes of the first meeting would be me staring at him while he typed, and the other 20 minutes would be me asking him what he said so I could answer the questions.

The next two meetings, he asked me to identify 4 symptoms of depression and 3 coping measures for each, then entreated me to go out for walks as a coping measure because “it will bring joy to the heart, and to the eyes, when you see the birds in the sky (accompanied by flying bird motions with his hands) and the squirrels running across the ground (accompanied by what were supposed to be squirrel motions with his hands but kinda looked like morse code tapped out on his knee by someone with severe arthritis)”.  He also told me that the air outside is better because the air inside is contained and the air outside is spread out.  He demonstrated his point by turning on his oscillating fan.  When the subject of playing games with my friends as a coping method against isolationism, he insisted that I should play dominoes or checkers.  He asked me what my living situation was and whether or not I had a girlfriend both meetings, as if he couldn’t be bothered to remember or take notes on these things.  Then he told me McDonald’s was hiring and that no matter how shitty a job is, money in the pocket will bring me pride which will help me defeat depression.  Seriously, he ran through the exact same script both times with little to no change between the meetings.

Also, I was supposed to have an appointment to see if I needed meds.  It was scheduled February 26th originally, which was the first open date after I was officially accepted into the program the second week of January.  However, the doctor I was scheduled with came down with something that week and ended up pushing me back to the first open date after that, which was July 12th.  Francis has made it his sworn duty to try to get them to push my appointment forward so that we can actually do a full treatment plan as he intends to.  However, I get the feeling that there’s not much followup on that, as every meeting since that point, he keeps asking me how the meds are going then expressing absolute shock that no one has called me to schedule earlier.

This most recent meeting, the fourth I’ve had, was somewhat surreal.  I’d had the sleepless day that I outlined in my previous post, and i managed to get a whole hour of sleep before going off to the meeting.  So, there I was, tired and surly and not really in the mood for a lot of bullshit, and Francis decided today was Talk About Getting A Job Day.  It might have been a fun and interesting time if I’d been awake and feeling combative, but I wasn’t.  Apparently Francis wasn’t either, since he dozed off at least four times.  Suddenly, my meeting with Francis had turned into a Family Guy sketch, where someone does something annoying once and it’s funny, then they keep doing it through the “not funny anymore” stage, right past the “murderous rage” stage, and straight to “ok, i guess it’s funny again”.  He’d start a topic, pause to make his point, then doze off.  A minute or two later, he’d come back, look vaguely confused, and then reorganize himself and try to start a new topic.  Through this, we did the “how’s the meds?  Haven’t seen the doctor yet.  What, how can that be?!” conversation, and he even remembered that I live with roommates.  He finally bothered to ask if my girlfriend was one of my roommates, but forgot that I’m on food stamps.  Then, when it was all done, he marched me over to Wellness to get a dentist, where we were informed that the dentist program was being dropped, but I could get a general practitioner and we set up an appointment for that.  After that, I was supposed to go by Mazio’s (a local pizza place) and McDonalds to apply for jobs, but I was too tired to do any of that and I just really really don’t want to spend my days smelling of grease and failure anymore.  I suppose I should, since he set my next meeting for the 18th and that’s the first thing he’s going to ask about.

To sum up, my case worker at the COCMHC is really kind of unintentionally funny and not at all helpful, and he kinda looks like a baboon.

So, there I am, sliding back into consciousness and my brain decides that since it’s got nothing better to do, it’s going to replay every nagging lost scenario it can get its hands on at me.  Well, not every one, it usually works them back in chronological order, tangenting itself along the way.  Nagging lost scenarios are those little battles you have in life that you lost, but you totally shouldn’t have, and it’s irritating that you didn’t.  I replay them and rework them the way they should’ve gone, adding actions and dialogue on either side for the rest of the night.  It’s a lot like talking to yourself, except without any of the vocalization.

Today started with a dickhead healer we had in one of the new heroic instances on WoW.  Actually, I should probably state that if a mere mention of WoW or any of the other dorky things I do causes you to cease reading out of anger, you should probably stop reading my blog.  So, this healer spent the entire instance halfassing his way around the place while demanding that we all step up to his elite level of play.  Even after he got his ass waxed repeatedly on a boss that he claimed that wiping on would be sad and that if we couldn’t beat that boss we should just quit.  I chuckled, and apparently my brain wasn’t happy about it so we tangented over to an old nagging loss from around three months ago.

I was playing my pally, which I’d spent the week grinding from 20 to nearly 60 by just doing dungeons, due to the instant queues in the dungeon finder — which not only puts together a group for you in specific or random dungeons with players in your entire battlegroup, but also teleports you directly to the dungeon when the group’s together and ready — and the fact that grinding two toons to 85 through questing made me never want to questgrind ever again for at least a month.  So, at the tender level of 56, I was queueing into BRD for the 3rd time that day when the healer of the party had a shitfit over my gear.  My gear which was completely cultivated out of doing dungeons all day every day for a week by then.  Of course, the game’s changed a lot since BRD came out in Vanilla, so now there’s new stats and things to put on armor than just armor and attributes.  Not that anyone under the level of 60 needs or uses any of those stats, since the gear in that level range just wouldn’t put enough secondary stats on to make a bigger difference than attributes and armor would.  But the healer, Pizzatime, took one look at my gear and declared me too squishy to be a decent tank and summarily came to the conclusion that I was a DPS primary using DPS gear and trying to tank for the faster queues.  I’ve been having that argument in my head for three months now.  And usually when I should be asleep.

Sometimes, the argument in my head is what I should’ve said to Moose to avoid him telling me to fuck off permanently.  That sort of thing tends to lead to what I like to call A Bad Week.  A week with such depression that I don’t even have the desire to masturbate or make sure I’m eating when I’m hungry.  Bad Weeks happen, and I’m trying to get help to make them stop, but so far I’m just treading water in bad cognitive behavior therapy while waiting for a psychiatrist’s appointment to get a mood stabilizer or something.  Such is life.

Seriously, though, who set the DeLorean?  We went through the 90′s, which I recall being an uplifting boom economy and an enlightenment period to the 00′s, which were so bland and fast that people are calling them the lost decade, to now, which is a lot like the 80′s all over again.  As I remember to do so, I’ll give my take on the issues I’ve seen lately, and I promise not to go out of my way to find an opposing viewpoint unless it’s actually relevant.

It’s like an aging domino effect.  Every year, the people I look up to get older, which makes the younger people I respect get older, which pushes my clock just a little farther.  Except nowadays, I’m looking at time in the terms of 5 years or 10 years and milestones so when the domino falls, it seems like I’m suddenly getting yanked farther and farther from where I thought I was.

Henry Rollins is 50.  I’m no longer in my 20′s.

The other thing I’d been thinking about lately is discrimination laws applied to businesses. The free capitalists will defend to the death the right of any business to set its own policies, even as far as excluding people due to race, creed, religion, and national origin, which butts right up against our discrimination laws.  Ideally, it would work.  Ideally, if one is barred from patronizing a business, one can simply take their money elsewhere and economics would dictate that the business that accepts the most customers is the one that will survive.  The problem I’ve always had with this is that it’s just wrong to exclude people over stupid things like this, but there was something deeper and unspoken in my opposition to discriminatory business practices that I hadn’t noticed until I really started thinking about it.

I grew up in small rural towns in Nebraska, where the economy was so small that the only businesses that could possibly support real competition were restaurants, banks, bars, and antique shops.  Two or three hardware stores, doctor’s offices, pharmacies, grocery stores, etc. would split the possible incomes too thinly to be successful enough to stay in business, so there was really no use in attempting to compete unless you could immediately pull far enough ahead that the other business closed.  What this means is that if any of these singular businesses in a small town like this decide to start discriminating against part of its possible customer base, those customers don’t have anywhere to take their business to instead.  If enough of these businesses start declaring that certain groups can’t be customers, then those groups can be entirely shut out of a town.  Ideally, that would still be fine, because those groups could simply pick up and move somewhere more accommodating.

And here’s where we get into weird territory.  Americans believe in a set of unalienable rights, most of which are so normal that we don’t even have terms for them.  The right to pursue a family life, the right to have consensual sex with a partner of our choosing, the right to a sense of humor, the list goes on.  Most of them could be found as unenumerated rights within the 9th amendment, which is one of the least-mentioned amendments in the entire bill of rights.  The unenumerated right I’d like to discuss is the right to live wherever we choose.  Now, I’m not talking about living in Bill Gates’ house or in the middle of a playground, but living in the community and region of your choosing.  As long as you can support yourself and afford your living arrangements, it’s assumed that you have every right to live wherever you want.  And discriminatory practices by businesses in small economies threatens that basic right.

You see, if you live in a community that will not cater to your kind, you’re effectively being driven out of it due to lack of economic choice.  If you can’t buy groceries or keep doctor’s appointments or provide upkeep to your house and vehicle, and the closest places to get these kinds of necessities causes your cost of living to increase to a point where you’re in danger of living beyond your means, then you really have no choice but to move somewhere more accommodating.  And since this move is being forced upon you by other people, it’s a violation of your right to live where you choose.  You are not choosing these economic hardships for yourself and they’re not being forced upon you by those to whom you’ve given control over your income.

Essentially, while discriminatory practices might be economically harmful to businesses, it would be devastatingly harmful to populaces in smaller economic areas while the businesses would likely do just as well as they would have before deregulation.