Sunday Thoughts: Ode To Corvallis

The mister picked up the Gazette Times today.

Why did you do that? I asked.

I mean, it isn't like the GT even makes any real effort to pass itself as a legitimate piece of journalism. If you want regurgitated crap with local fluff fillers, well then this is your rag.

On the front page was a brilliant piece about our beloved college students. Oh yes, it is that time of year again when 20,000 bright eyed, eager students fill our streets and our stores. When they aren't studying, they're usually filling their bodies with alcohol, seeing how loud that stereo really does go and staying up all night, their place of preference for drunken yells seemingly to be in our quiet residential streets.

According to the paper, well let me be more specific, according to our own Mayor Tomlinson, such students are quite rare. Overall, there isn't really any real problem with noise coming from our college students.

He must never have lived in a college kid-filled neighborhood.

Oh but wait, I am mistaken. He says he once did live "close to" the University. According to our politically correct Mayor, he claims the students provided a great energy and weren't any trouble. And when likely was this? Twenty years ago when the student population was half of what it is today? When instead of a neighborhood consisting of 50% students, you had perhaps 20%?

My my, how our memory eludes us as we age. If Mayor Tomlinson has that positive of a memory and is that enthusiastic about including our beloved college students in our neighborhoods, perhaps he would like to swap houses with the mister and I. Perhaps after being woken up every night for one week between the hours of 1-4am would have him singing a different tune. Doubtful though. I say doubtful because people in this community are great at putting on a happy face rather than dive into anything of REAL substance. It's easier, or so it seems, to carry signs and write letters to the editor--all using words only--than it is to show any REAL emotional truth to pressing issues.

Imagine our Mayor speaking the truth: There are noise issues with our students and we need to enforce the local laws. Let us make the message clear to the students: you are welcome to reside in this community as long as you abide by said laws. Imagine the shocks and surprised guffaws over such a thing. And also imagine the silent (or vocal) cheers of those who have lived this.

The truth spoken. Sigh. One can dream...

Also of note in this amazing hit piece of journalism was the concern expressed about Corvallis turning into an Elitist/Gated Community.

Newsflash: It already is.

Corvallis Government, Big Business and the like cater and I mean cater to the money makers in this town. Passing itself off as some progressive, enlightened community, Corvallis is simply a reflection, albeit it a smaller one, of our current society where we give a lot of lip service to ideas such as ending homelessness and poverty, dealing with drug and alcohol abuse, creating affordable housing for all, establishing health care for all and alternative, clean energy and yet continue to shake our heads in confusion as to what to do about our social ills while we go about building riverfront condos around homeless individuals and kissing the asses of the big wigs at our University and places like HP. THOSE behaviors, now that's easy to do. It is when your pockets are being lined. But being the elite and their talking puppets, even those who ARE NOT elite and are still under their illusional spell, well they don't want to share. To share money is "unamerican". They think that the term "redistributing the wealth" is a communist sin. Equality and freedom: two values we chant in our western world, two values your typical human knows nothing of. Ask a child though. They will usually offer up a more truthful definition than most adults.

Problems are easy to fix. And yet what slows this fixing down? It isn't necessarily government gridlock. It's deeper than that. It's people's emotional and mental blocks. Emotional and Mental Gridlock. That may be THE disease behind all of our current difficulties and struggles. Our chants we tell ourselves. Staunch convervatives chant the do it on your own speech. Liberals chant the buddist/new age/zen philosophy of the only one having any effect on your life is YOU. (That philosophy is like saying the only person on the highway is me. Simplistic and grossly naive.)

Yep, problems are easy to fix once we remove the chokeholds of political correctiveness AND System influences of who we are and how we SHOULD be.

For instance, when have any of you heard ANY of the System puppets talk about establishing a sliding scale fee on all goods and services?

When have any of them talked about the EMOTIONAL scars that lead people to abuse drugs and alcohol? Oh wait, I forgot. Yes, some do. And yet even after treatment, loving support followed by living wage employment is simply not offered. Although, if you happen to go through certain treatment centers that focus on Jesus Christ, well as long as you convert, you're loved. If you're rich or an elitist, well you can abuse whatever substance you want. The System doesn't care. Oh sure, now and then the System will feign concern by offering up some drunken celebrity or political or business figure as a scape goat. See, we care. We really do, the System monkey's chant.

Lie.

When have ANY of them once admitted this little truth: We could have had clean, sustainable and even affordable if not free energy over 50 years ago.

Will we ever hear these words: Housing for all? No problemo. Remove the banks. Embrace the part of love that says housing is a right. Same for health care (remove the insurance companies). How about opening up the markets so that they are TRULY free to let the small investor launch his clean, cheap energy idea?

Do not let the guises of professional titles, political parties, academic credentials and the like fool you. Do not let flowery phrases fool you, especially phrases and words used repeatedly by the System monkeys. They love doing that one. And it works. (We have a band wagon of Americans who now love Sarah Palin because she can say "John McCain is a MAVERICK.")

Underneath all of this garbage of chants is a human being who has been brainwashed since birth to crush, forget about and deny those idealistic traits of love. The result? A puppet. Nothing more, nothing less.

Until we remove the sticks the System and others, whom, through the System, have shoved up our asses, we'll continue to walk around asleep or even half awake.

It's time for the labels to be removed. The signs to be put down. The letters to the editor to cease. It's time to do the real work. It's time to remember again who we really are. And along with that, to stop the bullshit excuses, the chants, the quoting of others and the phony smiles. Metaphorically speaking, it is time to tell that little obnoxious, loud youngster that there is such a thing as courtesy and respect and while certain people (ahem) may deny this small but blatant problem staring us right in the face, I see it. And smiling at it does not make it go away.