ofREH

The Luddites were terrorists.
A obscure movement in early part of the 19th century in England, where a band of digruntled workers destroyed textile machinery in a vain attempt to stem the tide of the industrial progress that they perceived to be directly threatening their livelihoods.
If correct in that appraisal,
they were criminally misguided in their attempts to rectify it.
A few, lost their heads, literally.
Interestingly, with the exponential advance of high technology, the 21st century faces some of those same challenges but with much greater and widespread ramifications.
Had you been shortsighted enough, in the late 90’s, to have considered a travel agency a worthwhile investment or avenue to start your own small business…Priceline, Expedia, via the internet, had some very bad news for you.
Now what?
You move on, that’s what. You lick your wounds, reassess and, hopefully, recoup some of your losses and try your hand at something else.
I don’t think it is the responsibility of society to protect you from ill fated choices or ventures. That’s what insurance is for (your next venture, perhaps?). Besides, we have MUCH bigger problems on the horizon…
What will we do with the massive, leadened weight around our necks that is the US Postal Service, when it soon becomes obsolete? All it’s lifelong employees, many beyond the age of rehire or reintroduction into a workforce that…well…expects you to actually do some work. Their unions would insist we somehow keep them on. Regardless of how inefficient or irrelevant.
Or Kodak? Having missed the digital bus and now scrambling to compete in a market that is fast disappearing.
What happens when a single application, written by some industrious, ambitious, bespectacled troglodyte, in her basement, potentially can effectually replace the labours of, literally, thousands?
This is where I’m torn.
It seems to me that as this scenario plays out on many different plains, we are confronted with ever decreasing options for where those deposed, are to repose.
Where does the man, that spent the last twenty years of his life maintaining the machine that supported that other, bigger, machine…go, now that both machines are out of business?
The factor that put them out of business is now huge, prospering. Producing more efficiently and at less cost. The profits are greater and disbursed more selectively.
The Man is now bussing tables, making a very small percentage of what he once did and so is unlikely to indulge in whatever convenience the Machine he used to grease, once offered.
The common theme I hear often from the Conservatives is: “I’ve never gotten a job from a poor man”.
Ok, fair enough, but if the only job the rich man is offering is mowing his lawn or cooking his meals, cleaning his house, or washing his clothes, and there are now three times as many applicants for those jobs because his brilliant innovation saw to the end of their previous employment…and with that exponential growth of unemployed, less expendable income, who can afford his product?
Shouldn’t they…I cannot believe I’m even thinking this..as a factor of their own prosperity, insure those that are adversely affected by it? If only to, also, insure their own future?
As a student of history, I am increasingly less inclined to embrace the concept of trickle down economics. History just doesn’t seem to bear support for it. We seem to repeat the same cycle again and again. From the industrial revolution of the Victorian era and that of the trust barons of manifest destiny, the gap in prosperity between the working poor and the worked for, increases until a Prince Albert or Teddy Roosevelt fight to balance the scales.
I don’t believe that we have that kind of leadership currently and it’s becoming ever more likely that it will take a movement of masses to again adjust the tipping scales of fortune.
We recently have seen the spark of such a movement and I despair that it was ultimately absorbed by such degenerates, but a spark nonetheless…and where there is smoke…

January two, the year of our Lord, nineteen sixty one, was born, in Kettering, Northamtonshire England, My Brother, Mark Lee Harrell.
At the time, almost three years hence till my own coming, I could possibly say I know him as well now, as I did then.
I wonder if two Men, born of the same house, could be as vastly different in personality and appearance, as it is with he and I.
Where I am rash and impetuous, he is calm and reserved. Where I am loud and boisterous, he is quiet and pensive. Where I, (the only one, so said my Father) who could destroy a Tonka Truck, he could reassemble it. Mark went Air Force, I went Army.
Where I have light eyes and light(er) hair, his dark and his hair, once jet black, now, at least share the inevitable march of grey. Though, even on this front, my senior, holds at bay and my own march of “dignified bearing”, seems to have outpaced him.
It may have been these stark differences that compelled our Mother, to our eventual, mutual jocularity, on so many documented occasions, dress us as if we were twins.
Doing so, did little to mask our outward differences and it was for he that perfect strangers often detained my Mother with oaths of earnest delight at “such a charming and lovely young Man!”
A beautiful boy and handsome Man, is my Brother.
If this truth in anyway contributed to my own need for attention and the terror I inflicted on my Parents to gain it, I cannot say, but that my Brother was a special child, sharp and imaginative, striking in appearance and deft in manner, is indisputable.
In childhood, we were much like any other siblings with a three year age span. A good part of it was spent pinned beneath him, knees on my shoulders and a long, threatening, swaying string of spit, suspended above my face.
We shared a bedroom and bunk-beds and he, naturally, insisting on the top or bottom, depending on his mood. Only settling on the bottom to finally curtail his proclivity for sleep walking, after having launched himself from the top bunk one night, into the armoire. We conspired against our mutual enemy, our tormenting Sister. For both having the audacity to be infallible in our Fathers eyes and for the unfairness of having her own room.
We shared some friends. The pool of other American children in Italy somewhat limited, age became less an issue as it might have Stateside. We fought the Guinea Wop kids in the Piazza as a gang and took trains into Naples and Pozzuoli as a unit.
We shared plundered Benson-Hedges cigarettes but certainly not the blame once discovered.
I thought my Brother cruel, aloof, enigmatic, stubborn, carefree, brilliant and untouchable. Both my nemesis and hero.
Our teens were an entirely different experience. Not just in application but in perception as well. The usual, predictable rites of passages of boys to men were spent apart with my leaving home at such an early age.
Catching up when we could, I have always been struck by how differently we ended up viewing the world we lived.
The Seventies saw us both grow our hair long and seek distractions. For Mark, it was distancing himself from the stern hand of our Father, experimenting with some drugs and for me it was resisting every hand of authority laid upon me. Each with questionable results, I think.
The eighties, even more of a disparity in perspective. His, Iron Maiden, mine, Depeche Mode.
It would be some years before we again crossed paths, with my inevitable resurfacing after a predictable, if unexplained, long absence. Mark, not to be overly perturbed, was to embrace me again as if no time had passed.
More than time had passed though.
In that time, he had tried his hand at a family life, marrying a teenage sweetheart and having three children with her. Whereas I, on the other hand, could be relied to take a solitary path.
This reunion, by circumstance, had us in each others company for an extended period and our developed natures in difference again were made apparent.
Ever reticent, we parted from that adventure knowing as little of each other as having entered it. Not mourning the fact, only accepting it more readily. My Brother and I are vastly different Men and fortunately so. We will forever be bonded with history and blood. Once, this may have meant very little to me but today, I cling to it passionately and am thankful for it. Thankful for my Brother Mark and his ability to accept me as I am and his open door. I aspire to his own perceptions and look upon him with the same, mutual, embrace. For all we are, and are not, he is, and will remain, my Brother. As will my love for him.