Observations From the Spectrum

Horses wear blinders so they don’t see what’s in their peripheral vision when racing along the track.  We wear blinders so we don’t see what’s in our peripheral vision as we race through life.  The narrower your vision, the less empathy you possess.  It’s only natural.  If you don’t see it, it doesn’t exist for you.  Out of site, out of mind.

Those who understand this about us, know how to benefit from our lack of vision and succeed beyond measure.  In many ways, our field of vision is strewn only with our interests, and outside of our interests, we’ve been taught, do not matter.

In many ways, this is how we’ve always been.  The cobbler fixes the shoes.  The baker bakes the bread.  The shepherd tends to the sheep.  The farmer farms the fields. Thousands of years of conditioning with blindered explotiations occuring from time to time.

Then wham! The industrial revolution and Henry Ford, the man who perfected the assembly line and blindered exploitations.  His ambition was to sell a car to every family which he has now done.

This morning over coffee I explained to my Turkish girlfriend that America doesn’t really have sidewalks.  Why? She asked.  Because Ford built the Model T before the country really developed and figured out how to make a car, a necessity.  If there are no sidewalks and the distance is far to get bread and milk, people will drive. No other nation is so dependent on the car for day to day use.

Then Phillip Morris asked the question, ‘What can we get all drivers to do as they drive?’ Smoke.  McDonalds was next.  These corporations designed and then exploited us, the consumer, to be lifelong customers of what we were conditioned to think, convenience and modernization.

Today, it is ever present.  The ads we see are designed based on our blinded view of the world.  We have diverged as a communal creature to one of self interest and pleasure.  If we don’t rip off the blinders soon, our kids kids will be collateral damage.

I’ll tell you one thing.  Very rarely does the perfect moment hit.  For some like Michael Jordan, it happens more often, but for most of us, winning a race is a once in a lifetime achievement.  It means that on that day all that you had done led you to a perfect moment.

2020 is not a perfect moment, but it may indeed be the Perfect Storm.  We have an opportunity to move forward with THE systemic changes we need or humanity, and at the very least, America as we know, will fail.  If we don’t figure out how to converge and instead continue to accept that our lives are controlled by capitalism and being exploited, then what will be is on us.  I don’t want that.   Do you?

• All works at Observations from the Spectrum written by Dylan Netter
• Observationsfromthespectrum.org
• OFTS.blog 
• On? a third point of view – book of Essays
• Marinehippie.com podcast w/ Docstodden.com – dialogue exploring politics and musings of life 
• Horizoncoaching.org – English Tutor and Guide
• beehiveplus1.org