I was eating McDonalds for lunch today and as I was sitting there, well, eating of course, I was pondering a lot of things. People mainly. It’s always been depressing to me to go out into the public and observe people. In more urban areas (like places around McDonalds), one usually observes a wide range of people from all sorts of socioeconomical classes. The thing that is depressing is that certain groups of people have a certain look to them. There are a lot of traits to look at and they all add up to a final analytical picture of a person, but a few of the more explainable ones are physical traits (usually the face), how one dresses, and how they move. For instance, you might see someone with a worn down and tired face, dressed in bland clothes (of the working type), and they move with less confidence—maybe with a little less posture or speed. One might conjecture from these observations that this person is from a lower class. I suppose the thing that bothers me the most is that these people have a little bit of hopelessness in their face. It’s kind of like they resigned themselves to be the laborer. It’s like waking up every day to the same boring job or maybe even to uncertainty about keeping that job. It’s about hating that job, but persisting with it as a way of life. The uncertainty in the face is about not being in control of their lives and always having to worry about having enough green little slips of paper.
And I hate that because I can’t really do anything about it. I can’t think of any way of remedying such situations. A staggering proportion of the population is in such a situation. It might require more educational programs, but it’s really difficult to educate someone to be really competent in a technological world when they are competing against younger people who grew up with technology. Non-technological jobs are largely gone. And again, there’s always a big language barrier of populations whose native language is not English. Without good jobs, they don’t have good health insurance either. Without the means of taking care of their health as well of those more fortunate than them, they would probably need the health insurance more than any other class. But it’s not that way, and so more problems result. The despair for me is that it’s impossible to solve this. It’s not an easy formula like: 1. Pour billions of dollars into here. 2. Problem solved. It involves something like changing a lot of politics, education, and the government. And that’s just a few of many things.
Now, the other thing that depressed me was seeing kids and then applying the observation technique to them. I realized that you can just as easily stereotype kids and predict what their future will be like. Well, okay, it’s mostly probability not some magical skill of having an oracle’s eye or something. For instance, maybe one observes a kid about 11 years old from a low to middle class family and he dresses in a kind of hip-hop style. Well, connect that observation with statistics and just general experience from living close to a city and attending public high school and one might be able to predict what the future of that kid will be like. The sad part is that one could possibly be 60-80% correct in these predictions (of course, the predictions are general like what class this kid will be in, what type of job he or she will have, etc.). Imagine! What kind of depressing world is this that I can look at some child and foresee a (possibly negative) future for it? How one is affected as a child can really carry into adulthood.
And then here I am, in college, living in some kind of artificially crafted environment where kids worry about socializing and getting good grades eating $14 lunches and dinners every day amusing themselves by wasting food or breaking things; Sitting around talking about abstract ideas—being totally disconnected from the real world…
