I was never very good at dealing with the opposite sex.  I never considered myself very attractive, physically or in any other way, really, and I just never thought that any of the girls I knew or saw in school would want very much to do with me.  Sometimes I thought one girl or another might like me, but then I would take a look at the other guys – jocks, guys whose fathers had money or were important, and the really handsome guys who always seemed to have a lot of girls anxious to be round them – and I would think “Why?  What would she see in me that is any better than any of those guys?”

Even when one of my friends would tell me that this girl or that liked me, I never really believed it.

I would be at school or some other such place and a girl would happen by and say something or look at me or something, and my friend would tell me that she was interested in me.

“No she’s not,” I would reply.  “What makes you say that?”

            They would respond that it was the look in her eye or something she said or the way she said it – all “signals” I was told.

I never was very good at signals.  I never trusted them; signals can be misinterpreted or simply misunderstood by the sender or receiver.  And it might also be that they were not meant to be signals in the first place anyway.

So, I ignored them.

Consequently, I never got very good at meeting women.  I never knew what to say or when to say it and I never was very confident in my ability to entertain them.

So, as time went on, I found that the things I talked about – the things I knew about to talk about – became more and more isolated from what “other” people talked about.  I didn’t watch television very much and hated most of the most popular shows.  What I read were not exactly the best sellers, being all non-fiction and mostly about history, science or some other subject almost everyone besides me found tedious and tiresome.  Even the way I looked at things seemed to get farther and farther removed from “normalcy.” 

When I would be a party or a gathering, I would listen to other people talking – and to other men trying to “get to know” the other women there – and I would be lost.  It all seemed so banal and trite.  It all seemed so transparent and fake.

Nevertheless, it worked for them and it didn’t work, the few times I tried it, for me.

Neither did trying to carry on a conversation about the Wars of Succession (as some of us who read about the Wars of the Roses prefer to call them) or my opinion about where the civil rights movement needed to go in order to realize its true fullness.

So I simply dropped out of the dating scene and found other things to occupy my time.

But one thing my experiences left with me was the ability to identify and, perhaps, empathize, with those individuals who aren’t really popular or beautiful or, for one reason or another, attractive to their opposite sex; those who are outside the “normal range” of attractiveness.  It also left me more than a little sensitive to the cruelties layered on them by those who are in that range.

An example happened this morning which, it will now be obvious, gave birth to the electronically visible thoughts on this page.

I work at a local supermarket – a large, national concern with a lot of employee; my store has probably close to 100, I imagine.  Among these employees are all the types one would expect to see in any microcosmic universe: pretty ones, smart ones, stupid ones, ugly ones, those who are in some way physically or mentally handicapped, those who are morally handicapped – in short, the same people you would expect to see anywhere, anytime.

One of my friends there is a man a few years younger than I and who was hired a week after I was.  He is an outgoing and friendly person who is very willing to be of help when needed and who is very likable.  A few weeks ago, he was informed by other employees that there was someone in the store who “had a crush” on him – and had it in the very deepest of ways.

This woman works in stocking shelves and is all over the store, so of course, we had seen her. 

She is not the most noticeable of people.   She is normally somewhat quiet and doesn’t draw a lot of attention to herself.  Once the ice is broken, she will carry on a conversation, but doesn’t really seem to know what to talk about.  Her interests, whatever they are, are personal, it seems and don’t appear to be of wide scope, although, that may be very misleading.

She is not the most physically attractive of women, by conventional definition: she is quite short – about five feet tall at the most – rather round bellow the waist with very large breasts that give her overall appearance one of similarity to a ball. 

Her facial features are plain – neither pleasing nor displeasing – and her voice is equally nondescript.  In essence, she is a person who not be generally noticed by most people.

My male friend recently got another job and has been remaining at our store for a while part-time to catch up on some bills, but will be leaving permanently at some near-future date.  The woman in question – let’s make up a name for her – let’s use Bonnie -- knows this and, spurred by the thought that this may be a chance that might never come again, she bought a card and wrote to my friend – ostensibly a “goodbye” card, but in reality, much, much more.

I found this out this morning while at work because my friend was standing in the main aisle along with a couple of our supervisors and, at one point, even the store manager.  They were laughing and seemed to be having a really good time.  This, of course, sparked my own curiosity, although I didn’t wish to horn in on what seemed to be a personal exchange.  It was not easy, however, to ignore the fun they were having at something.  There was a lot of laughter and a lot of excited talk being tossed about followed by more laughter.

When my friend disengaged himself from the group and returned to our work area, I asked him about what was going on.  He laughed and said jokingly that Bonnie had given him a card and in it, she had been very forward.  From what he told me, she had written quite a lot on the interior of the card and had said, in part, “Would you consider being my boyfriend?”

She had – in all good trust and faith – dropped the card off at the office and asked one of our supervisors to give my friend the card, which they did.

They also simply couldn’t wait so know what was inside it!  It seems that Bonnie’s attraction to my friend was an open secret in the store.

When I heard this, my mind turned to other thoughts:

Here was a young woman who, from all I can tell, knows she is not one of the world’s great beauties and who must have some awareness of the struggle that we all face – some more so than others – in finding and keeping someone caring and compassionate toward us.  Even so, she, just as the rest of us, has the same feelings and needs of love and being part of someone’s life and ants no more than to care for and be cared for by one hopefully special person.

Here was a young woman who trusted her coworkers – not only to carry out her request to pass on a message which was unmistakably meant to be extremely private – but also to be adult about it and to honor her privacy, not to mention sensibilities, by not prying into business that was not their own.

Here was a young woman who tried, very honestly and very openly, to say things nearly all of us have fears and trouble saying, and who did so in the very best way she knew how.

And the end result was not anything at all like she must have imagined – possibly fantasized – at all.

Instead, she and her emotions became a sideshow, a comedy review.  The covers of privacy were thrown off and her heart was laid open and bare on the floor for any and all who cared – including at least one person who, in my mind, has the obligation and should have had the maturity – to put a stop to it. 

And, of course, it won’t stop there. Oh no.

This will provide laughs and chuckles for a week to come, maybe more. And, inevitably, it will travel full circle round the store until news of the fun had by “all” returns home to the ears of that young woman who only wanted to love and be loved.

And now, we sit here, you and I, and shake our heads and click our tongues and think to ourselves “how could anyone be so damned cruel?”  and “Those people deserve to have the same thing done to them”

But think back and think hard.

Have you and I not done something very similar to this ourselves?  Haven’t you and I, at some point, pointed that very same finger of mock and derision at someone else who was merely trying to have what we had?

It is a very uncomfortable feeling I have right now, but it is a necessary one; to admit that, yes, I have done that, and I have enjoyed myself very much in being the center of attention for doing so.

And I don’t have to go back to high school to think of a time when I did it, and, if you are honest, you probably don’t either.

We are cruel creatures, we humans.  Cruel and predatory and savage, no matter how we wish, hope, or dream of being otherwise. And we hurt most when we hurt with laughter – that one human element that we most identify with happiness and which so often causes just the opposite.

I remember an episode of the original Star Trek series in which Captain Kirk was trying to convince one of the villains to be something other than villain.  At one point, he was reminded that humans are savage creatures who kill wantonly.  He agreed with this assessment, admitting that humans kills, but added “But I will not kill . . . today.”

Like an alcoholic or drug addict trying to lift himself out of addiction, he would deal with his bloodlust one day at a time, and each day, he would promise himself and others that he would not kill . . . today.

Is the killing of one’s hopes and dreams, of one’s desires and wishes any less cruel or any less savage than the killing of their body?

When my friend was reporting his fun over the card today, I at first smiled – maybe politely, maybe thinking of some witty rejoinder – and then I felt something that stopped me.

I felt the same sort of insecurity I had felt all those years ago and for so many years – even now, if I am completely honest – when considering approaching a woman to whom I am attracted.  I felt all the doubts about my own ability and desirability to the opposite sex.

And I felt something very much what I think Bonnie would feel if she knew the end result of her very honest and very heartfelt attempt to have no more – and no less – than someone to care about who just might care about her.

I felt at that moment – as I do now – that I can’t promise never to practice the cruelty of laughter again, but I wasn’t going to do it . . . today.

We, in our petty lives, go about our business very much one day as the next.  We rise, we prepare for the day, we do the work that we must do – if we are lucky, we may even enjoy that work – and in the evenings we do whatever sort of recreational distraction we normally do.  We seldom vary, other than to have an occasionally holiday or trip somewhere, and there are a very few external forces that act upon us in a manner that would disturb that daily routine to any great extent. 

All around us things are happening and yet we recognize them not nor do we allow them to interject themselves into our activities or interests.  We may hear of them, possibly see them -- or more accurately, see images of them – on a fairly regular basis, but we experience them in a mostly disinterested way and then, with seldom more than a few seconds or at most, a few minutes thought or discussion of them, we refocus our attention on whatever it is that is scheduled to occupy us at that time.

Take, for instance, a news story.  Since it is in the news so much, we may use the recent invasion of Lebanon (to use the more accurate term rather than the one that is “recommended” by the State Department and White House). 

Each evening, if we watch the news, we can see people scurrying about, reacting to the latest attack, more than likely we will see someone with a head wound being helped to an ambulance or at least out of the immediate area; we will see at least one, and usually two or three or even more, women crying, sometimes (if the photographer is really lucky) kneeling over the lifeless body of their loved one;  we will see stock footage of tanks rolling through the countryside or  some nameless, stereotypically ravaged town;  We will see soldiers firing their weapons at some unseen enemy.  Over all of this we will hear the  usually baritone voice of The Anchor telling us pretty much the same thing as he told us the day before, and the day before, and the day before.

I wonder, sometimes, why so few people wonder about this?

Try an experiment.  Tonight at the usual hour for your customary news broadcast, switch it on.  But every few minutes, in the middle of a story, switch to one of the other channels.  It makes no difference if it is broadcast or cable or digital – switch amongst all of them.  Better yet, if you have the capability, record the major news programs and then when you have a few hours to waste, watch them.

What you will find, I say with complete confidence, is that every single one of the major news agencies will be telling us the very same thing and, quite often, in the very same order.  You can, on some nights, switch channels and never lose your place in a story because they are saying pretty much the same thing on each of the channels.

Does no one think this is odd?

“Ah,” you say, “that is not sinister!  You are seeing conspiracies where there are none.  It’s just that these are the major stories of the day, so of course everyone is going to cover them.  After all, they affect our lives!”

Do they indeed?

I will be the first to say that events in other parts of the world are matters for our concern.  The AIDS pandemic in Africa; the genocide in Sudan; the injustice  . . . well, just about anywhere . . . all cry out for our attention.

And, yes, someone has to make the decision as to what is important to cover on a national news program.  That, in fact, is exactly my point.

There are five major news televise news agencies that I can think of off the top of my head: NBC, ABC, CBS PBS, and CNN.

Now each of these agencies has huge rolls and dozens of editors each in charge of one area or another of news.  At the top of each are the executives who make the decisions as to what shape the news is going to take when sent out over the airwaves.  While the executives deal with the overall policies and regulation of the agency, the editors and producers all get together on a daily basis and talk over what stories we are going to be told are important in our lives.  This process involves sometimes a dozen or more people at any given agency – it is not one person sitting in an office looking at a sheet of story ideas and checking some and crossing out others.

Try, sometime, getting even five people in a room to decide on what is important to accomplish during the rest of the day from a list of “suggestions.”  The list should consist of at least 100 items.  (I think it is fair enough to suppose that there are at least 100 things that happen in the world each day that we might want to know of)  I daresay you will have quite a lively discussion about why this choice is better than that or why that choice should not even be on the list at all!

Now, try this same experiment with five rooms, each with five or more people deciding the same question from the same list.  Don’t allow them to converse between rooms – just let each room decide for themselves what their list is going to look like after it has been hashed out and finalized to a total of, perhaps, 15 items...

If you do this with much the same people for, say, a month, how often do you think the lists will closely resemble each other?

And yet, we have here five networks, each one giving us more or less the same 10 or 12 stories every day.

I wonder why no one wonders about this?

Now, if we look at the language and terminology used in each of those stories in each of the networks, we begin to see that they are using quite the same words amongst them.

So, am I really proposing that the news we watch or hear or read each night is the product of a sinister conspiracy with dark and secret purposes to undermine our freedoms?

Well, not entirely.

Consider the local newspaper – it can be any size, but let’s say for the sake of argument it has a circulation of 10,000.

Each week, the businesses and services in that community are visited by salespeople from that local newspaper.  Advertising, after all, is what keep the presses inked and the papers delivered.  The businesses may be locally owned mom-and-pop stores or they may be larger regional or national stores, but they all advertise in that same little local newspaper.

Unless, of course something about that newspaper offends them.  Let there be a story that runs contrary to the interests of, say, Wal-Mart (I use this example because I happen to know that it has, indeed, been done) and see how quickly the publisher of that newspaper gets a call from the district manager of Wal-Mart telling him that, because of that article, Wal-Mart just doesn’t think they can, in good faith, advertise with that newspaper anymore.

Poof!  Just like that – maybe $250,000 or more is jerked away form that newspaper.

How long do you think it will be before there is a retraction or “correction” made on the front page of that newspaper?

Now, let’s expand our little newspaper into a national network dealing with maybe a billion or more dollars each year in advertising contacts for their news shows alone.  That very same Wal-Mart pays that network million upon millions each year to put its name in front of the public.  And if something happens that it doesn’t like . . . ?

Our news – what we are told is and should be important to us – is dictated by one thing and one thing only: money.  Our knowledge of the world around us, our country, our state, our community, our health, even our money, is the direct result of leverage placed on the media by those who have a vested interest in keeping certain things fresh in our minds and certain things far, far away from our thoughts.

Even the mighty PBS has been forced to make changes to what it airs in the way of news and how it airs it.  This is because Congress, since the 1990s Republican Revolution, has repeatedly threatened to cut off all funding for the network if it doesn’t follow the party line – so much for freedom of the press and freedom of speech.  Those things are relevant to who holds the purse strings.  And who pays huge sums to make sure congress people vote “the right way?”

If you listen, as I do, to news from other countries, you find out there is a whole lot more going on in the world that merely what we are told, and some things even truly matter in our daily lives.  While here we are told of how important The Fed’s latest interest rate decision if and how it effects us (most experts agree it has very little affect on the average person’s finances) Radio Netherlands may, for instance be telling us about the latest study that shows the United States producing more than 25% of the greenhouse gasses causing global warming.  While we hear about the war in Lebanon, the CBC in Halifax is talking about the newest medical treatment for cancer that has been shown to work better than any other.

There is a lot of talk about the “liberal media.”  In truth, I have found it to be quite the opposite.  Most media are owned by quite conservative business people who have as investors other quite conservative business people who, in turn, are very aware of the fact that some other very conservative business people pay large sums of money to that media in exchange for advertising. 

Is there liberal media? Of course there is.  And there is conservative media as well.  But to say that the media as a whole or even as a majority is liberal or conservative cannot be substantiated and really is not of very much good anyway.

After all, what really determines what we read or hear or see isn’t political bias in the first place.

I can understand how it happens.

At first, there is a denial and, at the same time, a kind of self-assurance that it is only temporary; just a minor setback.

But then, as time passes and the situation does not improve, there grows a type of frustration or anger.  “Why me?” you ask.  “Why aren’t things different?  What did I do to deserve this?”

This can – and hopefully does – give rise to a determination that you will conquer the “enemy” and somehow get revenge on the forces, natural or otherwise, that have led you to these straits.

But if that determination does not result in a solution, it deteriorates into gradual, steady decline into desperation, then depression, followed by sorrow and finally a kind of unwilling acceptance and resignation to your fate.

That, of all the stages of falling into poverty, is the most tragic, I think.

I have spent quite a lot of time around poverty and the impoverished.  I have been poor myself and I have felt that series of events described above and am more than a little aware that they are very much akin to those felt by individuals who are diagnosed with a terminal illness.  That is not, in my mind, coincidental.

You see, poverty is a sort of terminal illness.  The stress and the burden of it causes physiological changes – for many reasons; poor diet, unrestful sleep, lack of proactive medical care, and, just the natural consequences of stress itself – and will without a doubt cause a steady and gradual decline of both physical and mental health.  It is undeniable, unrelenting, unchangeable.

Poverty is a weight; a physical, tangible weight that settle upon the shoulders of those who must bear it and steadily and ruthlessly drives them down, wearing them, crippling them and finally exhausting them.  Toward the end, addict-like, one cares only about the effects of the disease upon them.  There is no interest in the issues or events or activities of daily living.

It is easy to judge these poor from a level higher than they.  They are seen as being lazy, manipulators of “the system,” ne’er-do-wells.  Kinder opinions say they are “caught in a static inertia” or products of a welfare society that breeds incestuously within itself, or that they are castoff people, throwaway “human resources.”

But those who judge are very seldom those who experience that thing that they judge.  They very often are those who have not had the challenges and the injuries done by the problem they see as so easily solvable.

Greek mythology tells of Sisyphus who, for stealing the secrets of the gods, was doomed for all eternity to roll a large stone block up a hill only to have it, once at the summit, roll back down to the foot so that he would have to begin all over again.  No matter how tired or weary he becomes, the task is still there before him and must be done.

That is the punishment set before the poor: to each day, at the time of rising, confront the tasks of carrying the weight they bear up the mountain, built of minutes and hours piled one on top of the other until at the summit they drop off into the dark time of sleep. 

But even that is not restful.  No one sleep well who is sore and ill and worn.  At best, there is the blessing of unconsciousness or, if one is really fortunate, a dream that takes the dreamer to another reality for a few moments.  But all this is broken in all too little time by the coming of the next day and the sentence of carrying the burden once again.

Unlike Sisyphus, however, those doomed creatures of our Hades are tortured endlessly by their angry gods, for rather than being simply surrounded by accompanying hills and valleys, our offenders are relentlessly assaulted by visions of what defines and determines those who are successful from those who are failures.  Like the sailors who sailed too close to the Sirens and, hearing their beautiful songs, were dashed upon the rocks to become slaves of the singers, they are tempted by voices telling them that this is what you need to be “someone;” this is what everyone has, so why don’t you? This is what the beautiful woman or handsome man wants and if you have it, you can be just like them.

All around them are the things that constitute “Our Culture” and determine the hierarchy of social castes – oh, and be certain, no matter how we publicly deny it, America is very emphatic about its social/economic caste system and would not, for any reason or under any inducement give it up! 

We take a sadistic joy in judging the poor.  We group them together in ghettos, mostly inner city areas that were once thriving and attractive places, and set upon them tired and tedious clichés about how they “can get out of there is they really want to” and how they are “still in the best of all countries: think of what it would be like for them if they were in some Third World nation!”

The fact of the matter is that, for all realities, our inner city ghettos are Third World Countries that exist within a First World Country.  They are a separate and distinct society that exists apart from the rest of the nation because that nation wants nothing to do with it.  It has its own rules, its own legal system and its own economy, all of which we are happy to ignore as long as it does not spill over into our daily lives.

Sort of like cancer or AIDS.  As long as it is someone else’s disease, it’s not a matter of concern.

And every day, those people get up, hoist that rock upon their backs, and begin the repetitive punishment of carrying it up the Mountain of Hours.  The only succor is that, at some point, unlike Sisyphus, their punishment will end and they will die, passing their burden and their sentence on to their children and children’s children.

How is it we do not recognize poverty as a disease – not a medical disease, but an economic, societal disease? 

There are those who say that HIV sufferers are being punished by the Old Testament god YHWH for being gay.  Does this mean that those who suffer from cancer are being punished for being smokers, or eating pesticide-laden vegetables and fruits, or for simply breathing polluted air?  Perhaps those with heart failures are being punished because they were insincere or because they had been dishonest.  Could Alzheimer’s disease be the result of having been too interested in the answers to questions that Jehovah does not want us to find?

We recognize that such things as substance addiction – including nicotine – are disease-like maladies that deserve treatment and therapies rather than disgust and degradation, and yet, we do not think of poverty in the same way.

More than forty years ago, President Lyndon Johnson declared War on Poverty in the United States and pushed through programs – some of his own device and others which had been around for differing periods of time – that were to be a start toward ending poverty in our society.  The welfare system as we know it today; food stamps; Medicaid – and other programs were to be a first step in that direction.

A first step – not the final one.

Today these programs are criticized and rebuked as being ineffective and too costly.  They don’t work, we say, and they have become burdens upon our society.

But who is it that dropped the ball?  Who was it that, once the first step was taken, took no more? 

It was we who followed Johnson and who decided incredibly, that, with the initiation of those programs, the War on Poverty was won – like another president to follow, we declared “Mission accomplished” far, far too early.

We can call the social aid programs burdensome if we wish – we have that luxury from the higher levels of our societal terraces.  But the true burden is not carried by us at all.  It is carried by those who were the victims of our own “static inertia” and lethargy.