The New York Times is doing a series on inequality. James Atlas is the writer and I read this Sunday New York Times as I was born to do, on Sunday.
A young man that I worked with and regarded as a friend told me he had heard I was a “fighter”, looking at me with his head turned just so while still maintaining eye contact.
I’d not grasped my Class for a long time. I really had wanted to be a pilot and can’t stand to repeat the story of my life around that in the memoir way.
I could steal your airplane and fly it away.
Anyway there came a day and I went to change my life out at he airport discovering civilization.
Letting poor people in on civilization in the meritocracy makes life safer for the upper classes really.
The US is getting close to losing all civilization. We all feel it even in the Blue States. I wrote and read some poem about it ten years ago probably.
-All about the fracture, and fractures and there it is on the maps just the Southern States of the Confederacy with South Carolina there at the lead.
We used to call it “Sub Carolina”, but who cares now? The right to abortion was something touchy and fought about decades ago. Frankly I don’t care if it is murder. It is a woman’s right to do or not do.
There are other issues and wars and laws that affect civilization. it is there at its height on the ramps of the Fixed Base Operators. I’ve worked at on three. Someone could leave a jacket in a closet of the Pilots Lounge and come back 3 months later and it would be there.
Ramp Rats like me didn’t get paid much but were on their way to becoming pilots. Still I feel I got the best of the lot. I mean I want to just buy that place and hang out there even though it is for flying there is more to it. All of it is just still left attained as Civilization. There are some stories about the Silk Road that cause me to feel there was a Civilization attained same before the airplane.
As I understand the history the Silk Road was destroyed as a trade route by the rise of Islam because Mohammad took to robbing with his band of women. He led about 200 in raids on merchants traveling the Silk Road. It was apparently a bad example for his followers. I read a book by John Loftin titled THE BIG STORY. I’m pretty sure I remember the jist of his stories of the religions and what they have done and caused.
Poor people and the working classes have to fight to enjoy some civilization before they get crushed and killed. Invited to go nowhere and back on a Learjet, I just did that and have seen the Sun rise from 35 thousand feet sitting in a leather couch chair.
I guess I fought for that? It is uncomfortable work fueling aircraft, though still greatly preferable to mucking out horse stalls or feeding pigs or picking cotton or getting tobacco into the tractor wagons. I could read a book standing by the fuel truck holding a dead man switch.
I’ve got the rich beat walking up and down inside an empty freighter DC6. The lives of the upperclasses when witnessed by the poor or savages create desire and envy in them if for nothing else in the men than that fire stick weapon more fun than a bow and arrow when the women want a cook pot and a steel spoon and a fork and some cutlery.
So we working men who become rich and powerful may well want our sons to experience what only the working man can. it is often then the reason for knights to be dressed in armor out of the classes of the aristocrats. Strong young men find ways to die everyday. Let the women watch at the jousts.
No wonder Ted Turner and then that Sir Richard Branson go sailing and floating around in balloons.
Ahh yeah, better than war it is that stuff, the stuff of Civilization. It is something to fight for.