Scott Weible
July 21, 2017
Thank You Mr. King
A Testament.
I have always seen things that others cannot. Trends. Facts. Mainly consequences of the present leading into the history we are going to make. I didn’t practice. It - whatever it is - is not a skill. It cannot be taught or learned. But, it can be honed, developed. The latter — the honing — however is pretty much just being willing to accept, believe, see. And, you have to be willing to imagine the truth, instead of "find" it.
The first time I was acutely aware of knowing something that everyone else seemed to be unable to know, was the day that John Kennedy was murdered in Dallas, Texas. In front of God and everybody. If you want to know the true definition of a ‘terrorist’, the man (or men, if you believe the conspiracy theorists) who took JFK from us was the very first terrorist. He was even worse than Hitler. Hitler at least played by the rules until he did not have to any more. He played the game of pretending to be something you are not, distracting us with one hand, whilst the other hand drew out the dagger.
But, the man who killed Kennedy, and I really do think it was that fellow (I don’t remember his name, and I’m too lazy to look it up on the marvel we now call the “internet”) who had been found to be in the library building with the rifle and such (interesting, isn’t it that Kennedy’s murderer had stayed, for a time in Germany?) who murdered our President, simply rose up one day, with some kind of design in his soul and (some say) singlehandedly destroyed the world.
"Destroyed the world" is a bit dramatic, I suppose. But, that is how it seemed to me, at 10 years old, at the time. Sitting there on the wooden gym floor of my grade school (I think it was called Longfellow Elementary -- so named for a man (Henry Wadworth Longfellow) of letters, of accomplishment, merit and production, and not, as so many schools are named these days, for the local roads, mountain peaks, valleys, streams or, God Forbid, eventually, a corporate sponsor) listening to events unfolding, uncertainty in the voices of the news announcers (we didn't have video feeds in those days), the terror in their voices, trying to be brave adults ... I thought to myself "Oh, now it starts."
I could see what was going to happen. Not, of course, like the modern 4K UHD cameras can see the detail of each pore and blemish on the actor's skin, illuminate all imperfections so that we do not concentrate on the story, but on the annoying and ultimately unimportant details. More like an imprint, a trend, a world wide disintegration that would be attributed to this financial trend, and that dictator and this loss of that natural resource ... to anything but the promixate causes: Lee Harvey Oswald & The Texas School Book Depository.UIKeyInputDownArrow
America, for since at least about 1940-something had been the model of worldly honesty, freedom and bravery. If you ignore for a moment, anyway, the continuing, nay worsening, racial inequities. And now, however, in an instant, on national TV, America became the model for mayhem, insurrection, (what would come to be called) terrorism and destruction. My God. If THIS could happen in THIS country, then nothing could be held sacred. We're all down the chute.
And, that has come to pass. America, from that day forward, November 22, 1963, from my 10th year, 5th month, and 20th day, has led the people of Earth into hell-fire and damnation and a future in that State of Nature which Hobbes rightly described at 'nasty, brutish and short'. Hurried along by the internet, Steve Jobs' iSpyOnYouPhone, Bill Gates' appallingly conceived and designed "Windows" platform (whether he stole the idea from Steve Jobs, as is often repeated, is really beside the point -- the point being that Bill Gates, mirroring the irresponsibility of Lee Harvey Oswald, has led the computing humanity down the garden path of destruction, destitution and isolation by foisting upon the world a (legally defensible) distant copy of something valuable, thereby wasting our time, wasting our resources, wasting eternal mountains of energy and ingenuity in trying to use his overt product for good and productive things), and Mark Zuckerberg's sinister evisceration of humanity and decency, Facebook, America has run aground on the strength of one 'modern advance' after another ... welfare ... foodstamps ... HB-1 Visas ... "undocumenting" illegal criminal foreign aliens ... elevating the fine art of financial fraud to a high art.
You may think me too harsh in my indictments of Jobs, Gates, Zuckerberg (and for that matter Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson and Elon Musk). But, I'm actually being easy on them. Instead of using their technology to put men and women of letters, of thought, of intellect, or artistic merit into the hearts and minds of the masses, these men have used the lowest possible common denominators appealing to the most stultifying amongst us, to capture and monopolize our money, our time and our souls. We think it’s cute Alexa can render us soft, vapid and incompetent by recording our grocery list for us.
Bill Gates contributed as much to the end of the world as Lee Harvey Oswald, just in a different way. He replaced Steve Jobs consummately valuable product with a piece of shit, apparently realizing that if he could sell his piece of shit (Windows) cheaply enough, the unwashed masses would seize upon their "savings" and ignore the fact that Gates had created a monumental waste or everyone's time and energy.
It does, absolutely does, matter what you do, and how you do it. The ideas, borne of Lee Harvey Oswald's influence over the flower children of the 1960's and 1970's, that 'it doesn't matter what I do' ... 'it's my life and I have a right to live it as I want'. These selfish, self-centered and ultimately ruinous reflections of the timbre of the 1940's and 1950's when the individual was sacrificed (or so it seemed) for the good of the whole, the 'free love' that went along with them, and Timothy O'Leary's "Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out", are a salute and surrender to the statement made by Lee Harvey Oswald the day he murdered John Kennedy: It doesn't matter what you do, it doesn't matter who you are, it doesn't matter how it will affect others, and it doesn't matter what will become of me, it is my right to do any damned thing I want to do, no matter what. No responsibility. No sense of the future. No understanding of what might be worthwhile outside one's own pitiful monadistic existence.
