Things Change

   When I was preschool age I always lived in an extended family environment, with grandparents or aunts and uncles. One day I was playing on the stairs with a Slinky; I don't know if they still make them but they were basically a metal spring. I was walking the Slinky down the stairs because that was basically all they were good for. I don't remember how the conversation got started but my mom was telling me that I would have to go to school soon. My grandmother always read us bedtime stories and we children loved it. Since I liked to be read to my mom assumed that it would be an enticement that I would learn to read in school, that was over 45 years ago when there were still separate facilities for whites and "coloreds".  Why would I say such a thing, because it is true and emphasizes how things change. The crux of the matter is that I told her vehemently that I didn't want to go to school much less learn to read.
   It turned out that I actually liked school and even tried to excel in it. I also like to read and as a teen I liked fiction. I didn't know then that that was mostly what was being taught in school anyway. Not many years ago I decided that I would mostly read non-fiction to catch up on my real education and what I've learned since has turned my world every which way. What do I mean? I see that most of the fictions were made practical because of being shared as beliefs and that a lot of what is true does not help in this realm other than to cause contention with the fiction believers. Just take a look at politics and main stream media/news. Fiction is by far the medium of exchange even so in medicine and science. Experts tell us what they want us to think not what we should know.
    We think there is no cure for cancer or diabetes. We think lower cholesterol makes a difference in rate of heart attacks. We think UFOs are just that and government is for the people and that vaccines are helpful. We think that if we work hard we can succeed on that merit alone. We think that if everyone is being watched by security cameras that it will stop crime and reduce car wrecks but in reality all these things just put money in someone Else's pockets and that was by design.
   We think that history has unfolded by a series of accidents and coincidence and by the luck of the draw. If we don't have what we need we are unlucky or less fortunate and perhaps we don't work hard enough. By the by the hardest working people that I've observed are the ones with the least. And those that produce least have the most because they have produced fictions like derivatives and fiat currencies. I know this a generalization and stereotypical.
   Back to the topic what I have not learned through experience I have learned through reading and observing. The catch is what is true. What are the coded double speak and symbols doing to us? How can we know? Can we identify the fictions when we see them? Not all but some perhaps. How true can we be to ourselves?
 What will change one's outlook? I have more questions than answers.
   I'm glad I learned to read and that there are not separate facilities anymore or are they just called by another name with a different veneer. How easily I grow tired of these musings much like watching a Slinky descend the stairs.
   Things change and people change by being replaced but as with Led Zeppelin "The Song Remains the Same".