Today’s Tuesday, and that means Wound Care at the CHAC (Community Health Access Center) and then my exercise et al at the KADC (Kinsmen Adult Day Center).
Wound Care was routine. This nurse agreed with the others that the wound on my left foot is shrinking, albeit very slowly.
Must remember to move it around more so the blood circulates better.
Then it was off to Kinsmen. Here’s my notes from there.
A few words before exercises begin.
Would have written more, but this time they had a word search and a crossword for me to do and I got sucked in
Oh well. I had fun and even managed to be a little more social and conversational than last week this time.
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Now I am in the bathroom after exercising. Proud of myself for asserting myself enough to tell the attendant that I needed to use the bathroom instead of just suffering in silence and risking an “accident”.
I suppose that the prospect of soiling myself in front of all these people might just have helped me with the assertiveness.
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Third period, after lunch.
Really opened up socially and very happy about. I made a new friend, Judy. We bonded over both being Gen X.
The music system has been playing a lot of the MOR music I strenuously avoided in the Seventies. Even better, the lyrics on screen are clearly auto translated because some of them have been hilariously wrong.
The winner was it transcribing “put your head next to mine, dear” as “put your head next to reindeer”
Well if you insist…
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Waiting for pickup. I am thinking this must be how kids waiting to be picked up by their parents after school feel.
I mean, I assume that’s how it must feel. It’s not like I know from experience. I was left to walk to and from school all alone no matter the weather.
Anyhow, I had way more fun this time. The ice has been broken. I feel more comfortable there now. I was able to be more of my true talkative self.
I can actually be quite charming and charismatic when I don’t have anxiety riding me like I’m some kind of uber for neuroses.
Oh right! And when I got home, I did a video!
That essentially my blueprint for political reform. That’s how I would remake the system if I could. Screw this token democracy, I want the real thing!
There would finally no bottleneck of moneyed interests to whom the politicians are far more beholden than to the people because the people can’t hurt them until the next election but their rich donors could hurt them right now.
Nope. No more politicians. No more capital city either. No more legislature, no more lobbying, no more oligarchy.
I prefer to call it “plutocracy” myself. Oligarchy is a less specific term. But the world is going with oligarchy and I don’t care nearly enough about it to object.
And think of all the insanely popular things like universal daycare and universal basic income and comprehensive environmental reform would finally get passed into law because there’s no more politicians and lobbyists thwarting the will of the people.
And yes, the people would probably make some truly horrible mistakes. They would validate terrible but exciting ideas while ignoring boring ideas that would actually work.
But mistakes are how people learn, and it will be how a people learn as well.
Besides, democracy has never been about being the best way to get the “right” answer. The idea is for it to be the will of the people and therefore for it to be a way for the body politic to make itself own choices and learn its own lessons.
Direct democracy would be a way for politics to finally move out of the house and grow up. People would have to face the fact that they are, in fact, in charge, and that we will suffer the consequences (and reap the benefits) of our choices.
No more politicians means no more people to blame or praise for everything. There will only be we the people in charge.
And we’ll have a lot of growing up to do.
Oh right. And we might keep a token legislature around for administrative purposes, like producing a head of state.
But like the British royal family, they would have no power and be purely ceremonial.
More after the break.
A headless democracy
We might need a head of state and some form of powerless “ruling” class just to make the stupid programming in our lizard brains happy.
It could very well turn out that human beings need to have leaders to focus on or they become restless and chaotic. They need to have people to turn to when they don’t know what to do, even if following their lead is purely optional.
I saw at VFS what happens when there’s no real leadership at the top. People are not happy. They feel lost and unmotivated and hesitant and quite frankly depressed.
So the main job of the token legislature might just be to fill that role on a purely ceremonial level. They could even still generate bills and debate them on the record, with just the actual vote on the bills given over to the people.
There would have to be a way for the people to generate bills and put them to a vote without these bozos too, of course.
This token legislature might be a good middle step between our current phoney baloney democracy and true self-guided government.
Kinda like living in your parents’ basement before moving out on your own.
The transition to not having specific individuals to credit or blame for things would be rough enough. In my system, if you don’t like how a vote went, you have nobody to blame but your fellow citizens.
I won’t lie, that might cause unrest at first.
Ballot secrecy might become more important than ever.
But eventually, the people would understand that they are the ones in power and as tempted as they might be to blame everything on, say, whoever the most vocal and well known proponent of the side they don’t like is, ultimately they, as a population, decide.
And that’s exactly as it should be.
I mean, look at all the social progress that has come out of just bullshit fake democracy.
Now imagine the leaps and bounds we could take with the real thing!
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.