Systemic Dysfunction

In America most businesses are either manufacturing-retail, they make and/or sell something, or service oriented, they do things for you, like companies that mow your lawn for instance. Even governmental functions can be so organized, for example the government can either build a road ( manufacturing ) or audit your taxes ( service ) Among the service businesses are a particularly pernicious group which I call "systemic" organizations.

In a manufacturing or retail establishment there is a product and a process with a definitive beginning and end; usually the "end" is when the product is made and/or sold. The buyer then pays. In system oriented business the focus is not on an end result, but on the process, because there is no product. You are the product and the business gets paid along the way by servicing you. Thus many of the activities engaged in by these system oriented organizations are designed to keep you in the system because without you, the product, the business ceases to have an income and ceases to be; if you move on out of the system, no more income for the business enterprise.

Examples of system oriented businesses are hospitals, courts and insurance companies. Have you ever noticed that if you go to the Doctor they always find some other test or other thing that you have going wrong? Get a blood test and the Dr is likely to say your "levels are elevated". What the heck does that mean? Insurance companies are set up to take money from you, they make it so easy you can even pay on line, or have the money directly taken from your account. But file a claim! Then you find that the insurance company didn't get your check, didn't send the right form or lost what you sent them.

Bureaucracies are especially effective at this charade and DMV is probably the best example. You almost always have to go back to DMV two, three or even more times. You never have the right form or it wasn't signed by the right person in the right spot. And ask yourself, what does DMV do for you? It's nothing more than a glorified way of collecting taxes. They don't make it easy for you to get what you need taken care of, like they should, no, in fact they make it more complicated. Even when you have done nothing wrong you feel guilty. You walk on egg shells. You don't want to get in trouble with the "man".

Once entrapped in such a system it can sometimes be nearly impossible to extricate yourself. The judicial system is the best example here. Get into trouble with the law, even for a minor infraction, and you can expect months of going to court, paying bills etc. If you get into deep enough trouble you may go to jail, be on probation or parole. In this way you are almost guaranteed to be in the system for years! Job security for some cretin with a brow-ridge and anger issues.

"Oh", you may say, "you can avoid these systems by staying on the straight and narrow path. Just don't get into trouble". Ah, but the system makers have thought of this. They create so many rules and make things so confusing that it is easy to fall into their trap and then WHAMO, your in their system. Look at how many rules there are in our society. You can't do this, and you can't do that. When there are too many laws, then everyone is a potential criminal. It used to be that the lawmakers in Washington were part time politicians with full time jobs elsewhere, not anymore. They sit all day in their plush offices with their leather chairs creating more and more systems. This is why simple forms no longer have names, they now have numbers instead, things like W2, the 1040, the I-9; guaranteed to confuse.

This too explains why the government is against abortion or personal recreational drug use, because we don't want to make things easy on people do we? Heaven forbid that people actually use their brain to make decisions for themselves. We want to control what people do and what people say. We want them to be in the system. It's much like the movie the Matrix. In the movie machines live off the life energy given off by humans. In the real world systems do the same thing. Or to quote another movie, "I keep getting out, but they keep pulling me back in again".

Most people have 6th grade level educations. I have a master's degree and can barely figure out how all these systems work, never mind an 80 years old addle pated grandmother for whom English is a second language. That's why America imprisons more people than any other country in the world! Land of the free? Ha, we put more people in prison than the USSR ever did. Nothing is free in this country. It's the land of the expensive because those systems need to be fed, especially the judicial system. The one system that is supposed to protect our rights is the one that most imprisons us, but only if your poor. If you have money you can hire lawyers and attempt to get justice, look at OJ, look at all the Wallstreet scumbags. If your poor, recourse to the law is yet one more thing denied you: "With liberty and justice for those who can afford it".

Now that you are aware of this, pay attention, you will be surprised how many of these systems there are. Stand up to the systems! Otherwise….,

Plug in, turn off and shut up.

Thanks for the Cache

It seems hard to believe that it has been nearly seven years ago now since I first was introduced to Geocaching. And it was O. Rex who first turned me on to it. I had a GPSr, but we were using PDAs back then, Handsprings with a GPS attachment. I had one ( a gift ), but wasn't really sure how it worked. I was only dimly aware of this thing called Geocaching. Fast forward, and here we are marking significant milestones ( just passed # 300! ). While some people do in a month what we do in a year ( or four ), for me, it is not the quantity, but the quality. When I first started doing this, we were coming down off of some pretty big trips hiking out west. I ( we ) had some heady plans to see the world ( trekking in Nepal and hiking Patagonia ), but they were not to be. Health issues and life in general denied us these opportunities (so far). Geocaching became a new passion. A replacement for what we wanted to do, but could not. It allowed us to condense into a few hours some of the experiences it might take a week to do. It gave us something to do during the day; to plot and plan mini-trips that could be distilled into an evening or a Sunday. It helped define us and added meaning to what otherwise might have been just another day, or week, or year. Simple trips to the store became adventures and every foray to somewhere new became an excuse to geocache. Today, we have each cached in other states. We have even cached in another countries. We have cached in the summer, and the cold, in the rain and in the sun, day, night, we have even tied caching into camping trips and in our day to day work world. Heck, I have even cached with my mother. I rarely go anywhere without checking to see if there is a cache I can do along the way. While one of the best parts was discovering cool new places in my own state where I hadn't been, the best part was hanging around with my good friends and Rex in particular. You couldn't ask for a better caching partner. He has always been willing to do the crazy things few others would, canoeing in the rain, visiting cemeteries late at night, caching cold winter evenings, with Rex putting Christmas lights on his backpack. I, and I think we, have 100+ great memories because of geocaching we wouldn't have had. This is why I love geocaching. Thanks for the Cache