SAVED BY A BIKER

 

 

For an unknown reason, I decided to re-read Future Shock by Alvin Toffler.  I recall it being a big deal when it came out in 1970. Reading it now, the first thing I noticed was the complete absence of women. The only mention of the female variety was one teen who gets pregnant to do something different (I suppose that has happened somewhere) and one secretary who gets demoted to typing pool (because what other job would we have?).  He died in 2016 so he saw much of what he predicted come to pass. What didn’t was because he ignored women and the corporate greed that drove us backward.

To my surprise, it was the best book I have read to explain the christian nationalists and supporters of #45.  I read several books to try and understand them and didn’t get any closer.  With Future Shock I did.  “It is impossible to produce future shock in large numbers of a society without affecting the rationality of the society as a whole.”  In 1970, Daniel Moynihan thought the U.S. was going through a nervous breakdown.  He cited that many people cannot distinguish between an illusion and reality.  Many think it’s a “madhouse” or the U.S. has gone crazy.  He says extreme subjectivism, attacks on science, and the failure of reason indicates that people can no longer cope with change. The failure to prepare for and direct the speed of massive change has resulted in this inability to cope. He mentions the widespread use of mood-altering drugs both legal and illegal as an indication of the inability to cope with change.  That is what is happening today – delusions, attacks on science, refusal to listen to reason, widespread drug use i.e. the nationwide oxycontin scandal called the drug of despair.

The trouble with future shock is that the new paradigm for the changed society is not here so it’s hard to prepare for it.  It’s developing as science and technology race ever faster with new findings and applications. What used to take centuries then took decades then years and now a new vaccine comes out in 10 months, a new I Phone comes out every six months. The adaptation to the speed of change or failure to do so is what is causing the societal “nervous breakdown.”

Toffler poses that the answer to future shock is not stopping change, which is unstoppable, but managing a different kind of change. We need personal and social change regulators and creative strategies for dealing with the change. Those regulators should be the people i.e. elected government. We see some of this happening now. The calls for breaking up the tech giants and regulating the internet as a public good illustrate those regulators. China’s recent decision to regulate the internet because the companies have too much power is another example albeit not from “the people.”

Toffler suggests starting at the person level with learning how to deal more effectively with stress.  All of us have heard about deep breathing, time outs, exercise to deal with stress. We have been urged to turn off the phone, turn off the television, don’t read the newspaper, limit daily screen time, plant a garden and dig in the dirt (it’s that time of year in AZ) to deal with overstimulation. “Don’t bother me with new facts” may be a joke to some of us, but it’s a serious attempt by others to manage the rate of change that they are unable to cope with.  Thus you see those trying to stem the flow of immigrants into the U.S., to reverse the changing demographics, to install a belief system from their youth or what they imagine it to be, as their coping mechanism.  The left has its own method of protecting itself from change – don’t let anyone challenge my beliefs because it might hurt my feelings.

Decision overload can result in refusing to make decisions at all.  We see the maga-crowd operating only on received information and only on instructions from a “higher source.”  Just do what you are told. Another personal way to deal with rapid change is to maintain the same patterns as a stability zone, stay in the same house, drive the same car, keep the same friends, follow the same rituals – stay in our bubbles.

What change we choose will make a big different in what the future is. Toffler outlines possible scenarios. Should we use DNA to manipulate intelligence i.e. to raise the highest or the lowest or the middle?  Should we develop nuclear power or solar power?  Should we have supersonic jets or cheap artificial hearts?  Should we put anti-aggression medication in breakfast cereal or microchips in vaccines?  (That last was a joke.) Inventions thought wonderous when first produced turned out to be disasters – DDT, plastics that now smother the globe, use of lead pipes in water systems resulted in lead poisoning which reduces the IQ and increases aggression and even the introduction of detergents resulted in massive water pollution. The choices made will result in a very different future. We are seeing that today in the refusal to deal with climate change caused by fossil fuels that was known at least since 1928. The refusal to invest in infrastructure since 1980 has left the U.S. decades behind other countries in transportation and communication systems.

We need systemic social control over technology, and we should not be afraid to say so.  Toffler does not suggest control over the “discovery” portion of science but the technological implementation of it. Resistance to self-driving cars is an example of controlling its implementation. The proliferation of pornography and sex-trafficking on the internet is an example of what happens when we lack social control. The problem in the U.S. is that these decisions are monetary based – if it makes money for the big corporation, then it’s a go. That is not and should not be the sole criteria of importance and not even the major one.  Many other factors of societal good should go into that decision.  That is why the Citizens United case is considered one of the Supreme Court’s worst ever decisions resulting now in decades of political corruption. Initially corporations had a public charter and a requirement to do public good. That no longer exists in reality or the law. When decisions are made only for the benefit of the corporation, only they receive the reward (mining e.g.) but the society reaps the costs (environmental pollution, health hazards, destruction of animal habitat etc.).

Shortly after finishing the book, I had an immediate opportunity to apply it. Coming back from Prescott, I ran into a horrific traffic jam. I got off at Sunset Point rest area. I figured I could more profitably spend a couple hours working on my computer than I could stewing in traffic.

Many others had the same idea, and the place was packed. After parking illegally, I wanted to sit in a shaded spot where I could see my car. I found an empty table, but it had a pile of half-eaten food sitting at one end. Potato chips, Doritos, candy, the usual junk from the vending machine. I figured someone would be back. He soon was carrying two bottles of a drink and offered me one. I took it. Maybe that was my mistake.

He sat down, an average looking pudgy white man in his late 40s or early 50s and started talking.  I saw my idea of actually working disappear. He was at the rest stop from Phoenix because he had painted a garage for a customer that morning and he wanted to get out of the heat.  He told me about other jobs he had done for “the richest people in America” and dropped a couple names I hadn’t heard of.  Mostly it was construction, repair, painting – handyman type of things.  Then he said this world was going the wrong way and we were losing our freedoms and we need to get back to the world our forefathers intended.

Recalling that we have been told to try and engage the other side to understand them, I responded, “Well I agree with you that we have been going the wrong way for a while now.”  I was pretty sure we meant different directions. But then he said since they shot Kennedy things have gone downhill.  So perhaps I got this guy wrong.

He then goes into a rant about corporations most of which I agreed with.  How they were greedy and didn’t care about people and were destroying the environment. That led him to Teddy Roosevelt and the founding of the national parks.  Again a point of agreement that national parks were great things and should be kept.

Then he told me they, not sure who “they” is, are planning to close them all. They claim that women are being abducted from national parks (yes that has happened) and so they want to close all the national parks to prevent that but it’s really about using the resources.  I agreed they want to drill and mine and log, and they do not care about preserving the environment or sacred sites or anything else but money.

But then he went on to explain to me that Clinton had put so many police on the streets to prevent abduction of women so why are they now saying women are being abducted from the national parks?  Forgetting the rest of the problem with this statement, I could have reminded him that streets are not parks and if you chased bad guys off the streets, parks make sense as the next place to go. I didn’t. Especially as he kept repeating every few minutes, “that is the klux of the problem.” I didn’t correct that either.

Then he went on a rant about dictators – you know Lenin, Stalin, and the Nazi’s.  “Well, I think the Nazi’s were bad. They had a lot of mass graves.”  I had decided by this time that trying to educate him was not happening.  He claimed that in the past we would have one big dictator, now we have a 100 or so.

He had ranted on and off about how “we” can’t even speak out anymore.  When we do, we are threatened with our jobs and pensions and VA benefits so no one says anything. But he has decided it’s time to stand up and speaks up in his blog.  He is sure we are headed for civil war and he’s trying to prevent that by running for President. “I wish someone would give me a million dollars so I could run.”  If those are the conditions, I expect we are unlikely to see him on the ballot.  His platform?  “When I win, we are going to start executing people.”  At my startled look, he said we have to start executing people “so those in their 30s get away from their liberal ways.  If we do some public executions, that will scare them into behaving.”  I responded that I didn’t think that was a very good way to do that.

But he assured me that when he’s president, he’s going to execute all 535 of them (Congress) and then the President and Vice-President too.  When he was president, we would go back to the way the founders intended and live like them.

I said that I rather like my air conditioning, and my car, and my phone, and my internet, and airplanes.  I’ve lived without electricity and plumbing and working vehicles and it’s not much fun.  Oh he didn’t mean that he assured me.  I didn’t really want to know what he did mean.

“Harris is our new Deborah,” he exclaimed.  While I was searching in my head for what he could possibly be talking about, he continued, “It’s in the Bible.

I stupidly said, “Well you can’t believe anything you read in there.”  He informed me how wrong I was and then went on to tell me that Deborah had been an Israeli King.  A KING – can you believe it.  She was bad and executed people, so they got rid of her.

I responded, “Well, you just said you were going to execute people if you were elected president.”

“But she executed the wrong people.”  And there you have it.

I still hadn’t figured out who “Harris” was until he said, “After we execute Biden, she’ll be our Deborah.”  I got it.

“You know there are far too many people in prison in this country.” Another point of agreement.  I wondered if this meant he was going to say something about Black people and wrongful imprisonment.  He went on to inform me that a certain number (380,000 or something like that) of Christian White Men were in prison – just because they tried to speak out. When he is president, he is going to release them all.  He then took his food to his car.

When he was gone, I was saved by an aged biker, looking a lot like the picture at the beginning of this blog, who came by and said, “Can I sit here?”

“Sure. I don’t own the table. Sit down.”

He said, “Well, I scare some people.”

“Because you’re a biker?” I laughed.  “Well, you don’t scare me. The guy sitting there (I pointed) scares me a lot more. Wait till he returns, and you’ll see why.”

He sat down and immediately called his wife on his flip phone to explain why he would be late.  He then commented that his friends laugh at him for still having a flip phone. I opened my fanny pack and pulled out my flip phone. It does the job and doesn’t cost a thousand dollars!  We hit it off.

When the christian nationalist returned, the biker remained seated and said, “Hope you don’t mind me sitting here, she said it was OK.” The man nodded, sat down for about five minutes, got up and walked away without even saying goodbye. The biker and I looked at each other, burst out in laugher, and high-fived.

Toffler’s words did explain the man’s behavior. He had lost what he valued – a good paying steady job.  He was unable to adapt to the rapid change and longed to return to what he perceived as a simpler time where white men like him would be in charge.  The stress of all the changes and losses certainly impacted his rationality. I agreed with some of his ideas, and he wasn’t stupid but the direction he took to resolve the problem was extreme and dangerous.

The other takeaway was that it was impossible to actually talk to him as I have found out in other attempted conversations.  First, he wouldn’t listen to me.  If I said more than a short sentence, he interrupted and started talking again. I was just a woman and what did I know. He had no idea I was an attorney nor did he care. Second, he was impervious to facts. As Toffler suggested, he had his own “facts” and don’t bother him with other facts that differed from his own subjective experience. Reason had left the room completely.  His suggestion that we murder the president, vice president and all of Congress is no doubt why an officer of the law was on his blog, so he said.  Given the January 6 insurrection that involved police and military, maybe the officer agreed with him – which is scary because this guy didn’t strike me as someone who had any idea what to do with a gun. That’s probably why the biker scared him.

Future shock may explain what we are going through, but it doesn’t give me any path on how we get back to sanity.