Last night I was (obviously from my last post) very drunk - and this is the best story I've had in quite a while. I locked myself out of my dorm room! I wandered around the building for a while, tried to force the door open, but ended up finding a stash of extra blankets and passing out on a couch in the lounge area. Very funny, and a great introduction to a science meeting!
I've been reading Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States" lately. It's a pretty biased book, but I think rightly so. We are fed a ton of information growing up that gives us a ridiculously heroic, rosy view of anyone leading to the development of America, and only much later are we given a (cursory, wholly inadequate) treatment of how exploitive those founding fathers/settlers/whatever actually were. I'm not entirely qualified to ponder these things, given that I'm not much of a historian, but it seems like throughout time, government has served little purpose other than to ensure the continued ability of the wealthy to remain wealthy or increase their wealth, while pacifying the poor just enough to keep them quiet. Yes, there are success stories, but the American Dream is little more than an instrument of control (an anti-riot idea) to keep the poor from revolting against the upper class that has absolutely no intent of sharing its exorbitant wealth. How is it in any way true that hard work will see you through, when single mothers are working 4 jobs just to get by, and investment bankers are driving Ferrari's between multimillion dollar estates just for shuffling other people's money around? It's a farce. CEO's in Fortune 500 companies make nearly 500 times the average worker in their company. The wealthiest people in the nation probably do the least productive work of anyone in the nation. Now Obama is promising hope and change. I really want to believe him, but the evidence is strongly stacked against him. This is a nation that belongs to the wealthy and their corporations, and I really think it's beyond any president to change that. The people of the nation must collectively refuse to continue to be manipulated and claim the fair existence that rightfully belongs to all humans.
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