The Bludgeoning of America

A somewhat incoherent rant-ette.

What happened? What the hell happened? This question runs through my head frequently, and was especially resonant today as I girded my loins and went to a local department store. Normally I avoid those like the plague, especially the very large, local Box-Mart. However, for convenience's sake, I went to the one just up the road (not Wal-Mart, never Wal-Mart. Never again.) because it was close and would only take me away from home for a very short drive.

As I hurried through the store I noticed that many of my fellow consumers looked rather dazed, as if they were recovering from a particularily nasty work week. Perhaps they were. After all, the automation of everything in life certainly hasn't made life any easier.

I remember as I was growing up, spending my single digits in a home without cable, without a microwave, without a VCR. This was just prior to the advent of those items that have become so "necessary." I remember Saturdays helping my grandmother do laundry, using a fairly old-fashioned washing machine with a ringer, and large sinks full of water for rinsing the laundry. (Heck, I even remember everything being cooked from scratch, and weeding a large garden where much of the fruits of it ended up canned in jars for the winter.)

We'd then hang the laundry out to dry, in the basement where lines were strung, during cold weather or outside when it was warmer. After everything was dry, it was time to iron, including the sheets. No permanent-press sheets in our household at that point, yet.

I never thought that at the ripe old age of forty-five, I would be looking at those days through a lens that makes it seem as if they were a century ago, and not thirty-five years ago. It's strange to live in a house now where I'm hooked up to the internet via cable, and am typing this on a PC. I have a small microwave, and I do my laundry now using a washer and dryer, though I persist in hanging my laundry outside to dry when it's warm. It amuses me to think that that makes me a tad "white trash" even though I'm doing it for the environment.

(And, yes, I love my PC. Perhaps too much. However it has freed up my fingers and brain to write, where I hated writing before because manual typewriters were so dang stiff and electric typewriters you still have to go back an correct errors. And forget about writing longhand. That gives my right hand cramps just thinking about it -- never was able to write much without the hand cramping up.)

Yet, with all this automation, wonderful washer and dryer, microwave ovens, stoves with ovens that clean themselves, people around me look more exhausted than ever. They look as if they had been bludgeoned by life itself. More and more people around me, including myself are on one drug or another just to exist. Some choose alcohol. Meth-amphetamines are another popular choice around here. I've been fortunate in that I'm merely on three different anti-depressants and am able to maintain a certain amount of contentment in life. Even though the job where I work is one of the reasons that I am on so many different anti-depressants, the benefits there pay for those meds.

Good grief, enough about me! What's going on with everyone else?

There was one particular couple that I noticed in that department store this morning. They were slowly dragging their way through the store, duty-shopping (as compared to the thrilling consumer sports of impulse shopping and power shopping). She looked particularily blank and not terribly bright. But to be fair, she looked bludgeoned. Perhaps she had been a vibrant young woman in her teens, but now, in her thirties, life must have tripped her up and landed her flat on her face more than once. He looked a bit more bright and alert than her, but not by much. They were both using their shopping cart as a prop to keep them more or less upright.

And then there was the natty gentleman, dressed up a bit like a cowboy ready to go out on the town with his best shirt, string-tie, boots and hat. He looked a bit shifty as the store clerk helped him find what he was looking for. Or perhaps his shiftiness arose from caution: he knew life and he was waiting for the other shoe to drop. His shiftiness was his alertness to the fact that that shoe might drop at any moment, and he wanted to fend its landing off as much as possible.

Then there were the store clerks themselves: teens and twenty-somethings, they all looked hard and older than their years. What the hell happened?

We've got more junk on the shelves of stores waiting to be bought than we'll ever really need. We have sleek cars and SUVs and vans to get us places. We have fast food and other restaurants of such infinite variety that if we have the cash, we'd never get bored with eating out. Yet, it is all so contrived, with these same products constantly being sold to us, bludgeoned into our consciousness by ceaseless advertising. And all this consumerism drives us into the seemingly never-ending rat race of chasing after the almighty dollar, never mind that we are selling our souls by the hour at least 8 hours a day, five days a week.

We're all bludgeoned these days, it seems. Just when life was supposed to be oh, so much easier.

What the hell happened??