Plus que ca change, plus que c'est le meme chose

"The more things change, the more they stay the same"

Over dinner tonite, my friend and I were talking about some of the expectations we had regarding our retirements and moving to a new state.

I suddenly had a flash-back to something I had read in either junior high school or my first year of high school. I was reading a publication of the best writing of high school students of some time in the late 1960's.

There was one story that dealt with guys riding in box cars, looking for work, and telling some kid to jump off on a curve near a certain town. The curve was too fast for a person to jump off and not receive serious injury. The "old-timers" were setting a possible death sentence for the rookie.

Another story, which was recalled to my memory immediately, dealt with a young man moving from the south to the north. The man's race was never mentioned. The northern city was never mentioned. The theme was that the same term was addressed to the young man in both cities. He had move north, hoping for a better life, and found that he was still called by the same term.

My friend and I are hetro-sexual, anglo-saxons. We are NOT any type of minority, any type of 'oppressed' group. We both thougt life would be different here. Somehow, we both thought that HERE, there would be more people who thought before they spoke, who valued knowledge over degrees, who would ENCOURAGE independent thought rather than embracing sameness.

Tonight, we laughed over our naivite. No place is any different than any other. Walden II does not exist. People ARE people the world over. In China, in Antartica, we would find people who think they are better than we are (perhaps because they REFUSE to think) Some of them (probably the ones in Antartica) WOULD be better (or at least smarter) than us. Some of them would not be smarter or better, and some of them would be the same, yet different.

I need to embrace a world in which there are people I believe are absolute f**king morons. And I need to accept their right to exist in this world, even if I think they are wasting valuable atoms of oxygen.