Fifth Thought

It's beautiful isn't it? All you ever wanted? A good two story home, with car out in front, and a nice green lawn. That's all we need to be happy. No, wait. We need to get a nicer car and then we'll be happy. After we get that, we'll just need to pay off the loan on the car and then we'll be happy. Then pay off the mortgage, or have kids, or see them out of infancy, out of school, see them married, see them have kids of their own - that's what will make us happy? No... Maybe it's the right job... Well here's the basic formula. Think of what you want. Pick something nice and far off into the future. Now work really hard to get it for years and years. Sacrifice time, become really stressed out and worried. Once you have obtained what you worked so hard for, pick a new goal. Repeat. There is so much pressure to be productive that no one has time to stop and smell the roses they put so much work into growing. Go to elementary school, and work real hard to prepare you for middle school, and work real hard to prepare yourself for high school, and work even harder to get into a good college, and work hard for four years so you can get an O.K. job. After doing this for 17 years some would argue the security and comfort it brings into their lives is well worth the toil. I can see that. What I don't see is why barely 5 years later people decide exactly what they need in their life right now is a kid. Now they have an extra mouth to feed and another future to worry about. They went to 17 years of school, to earn the wonder of a good job and a nice place to live, and then spend only a couple of years enjoying it before galumphing off into parenthood and buckets of more stress and taking it out on their children. Spanking and/or giving a kid the belt is probably one of the worst and most readily accepted ways of taking out your own anger on someone else. People get so wrapped up in getting places that all they ever do is pass through. And if you don't like this way of living, you're lazy. Trust me, you have no work ethic and your not a proper adult if you don't plow blindly into the world. Now not everyone is like this obviously. Some people pick jobs they really love, some wait a while to have kids, and when they have them they use their brains and not the broad side of their hand to discipline their children. I love these people and the world benefits greatly from them. However they are too few.
What I think of right now, are the stir crazy wives of the fifties. That plastic fake as hell happiness that was dripping out of every advertisement and TV show from the era. People really still buy into cookie cutter happiness, and if you fit into that mold, then power to you. The most frightening part is when people will cut away parts of them self to fit the mold. "At least we're not starving!" some will say. "I like our relative peace, we don't have a war in our backyards!" say others. No, we aren't dying of starvation, or large scale disease. But there is a difference between living and existing, and there are many, many ways to die.

All hail suburbia.