Oppressive Rules

There are things of this world that I do not understand. Obviously. First there's the stories of young women who are homeless, who may be pregnant or trying to care of a child while homeless. The kinds of stories that home-town newspapers like to publish so as to show folks that we are a community of caring individuals.
     But wait! A pregnant woman who has no home. How's that work?
     Are they suddenly in a family way and they're out living in a tent under a railway bridge?
     If so, why?
     Where's the father of the child?
     Is the father of the child also living under a bridge? If he is, why the hell isn't he out getting a job.
     Which makes me ask another question about something I don't understand: People living in tents under a railway bridge who can't get a place to sleep in homeless shelters because – and this is the part the boggles my mind – the don't like the rules they have to abide by to gain entry to the sleeping quarters of said homeless shelters.
     "I'm homeless, man. I live under a railway bridge."
     "Whoa, dude! Why can't you go to the homeless shelter?"
     "Shit, man! Them people down there! They have too many rules!"
     "So you sleep in a tent because you don't like the rules?"
     "Yeah, that's it. They's oppressin' me down there!"
     All of which means that someone lives in a tent because they don't like to play by the shelter's rules.
     Like people don't want to work because they would have to work by somebody else's rules. And they can't find a job because having a job means you play by the rules of the employer.
     Or you don't want to live somewhere because you don't like to live under the rules of whatever government there is wherever it is you don't want to live.
     Which works great if you are, like, well, a Cuban and you don't want to live under a nominally Marxist/Communist, totalitarian regime's rules of conduct.
     So you don't want to live in the US because the Republican party has been hijacked by Southerners. So you move to Canada – or sneak into Canada – and discover that you don't have any rights to insurance under their legal system because you sneaked in.
     Snuck in. Whatever.

At which point we come to the question of why all these folks are homeless or why they don't want to play by the rules or the father of the child of a homeless woman is himself homeless or completely vacant from the life of the child and mother after having participated in getting the women pregnant in the first place. And we ain't even going to ask why a woman would bed down with a man who she must have known in some small measure would disappear the minute he had finished inseminating her.
     "Ah looooves you, Billy June!"
     "Ah looooves you too, Thelma Lee!"
     "Let's have unprotected sex in this tent over here under the railway bridge."
     "Ok. If you get me pregnant . . . "
     "I'll run from here like hell's a poppin' an' you'll never see me again."
     "Oh. Well, ok. Let's do it right here and now with the train goin' over 'cause it's so Freudian!"
     "Ah looooves you, Billy June!"
     And so the cycle of procreation continues, as for the animals of the field and the flowers upon which they dine, so too with every living thing in the sight of the railway overpass of the divine . . .

Don't get me started.

See, what I see in all this is the ongoing degeneration of human society to little more than what it has always been, despite our technological prowess and our abilities to change the world around us so we can all live comfortable little lives.
     The baseband lot of human beings is nothing more than what every animal enjoys, if enjoyment is the appropriate term.
     You're born; you come to maturity; you procreate; you grow old; you die.
     All the same stuff everywhere you go, high order primate or collection of cells around a hot well of water at the bottom of the ocean.
     So for all we think we know and think we can do, we're still a bunch of stumble-bum monkeys when it comes to making sense of what we're doing. And actually, it might be that monkeys and badgers and even your occasional platypus makes more sense than what we do, even with a free-to-the-masses railway bridge under which to pitch our tent.
     Only difference is that the possum takes up a space in one of my outbuildings or the snake that one of my cats plays with don't have the gift of communication across time that we humans get from language and literacy.
     One snake lives in one hole and bites a cat that just happens to be stumbling by. The cat gets sick or dies. No cat writes down the event to warn the rest of cat-dom about it. No snake sits back in a conference room and projects the number of cats the snakes as a group can bite in the next six months.
     We have language. The rest of the animal kingdom, communicate though it might within groups or even between generations, have no way of passing things on or discussing outcomes.
     Which makes us special?
     Nah, not really.
     We still act like animals, regardless of the simplicity of a tent over a collection of tree branches or decaying outbuildings where animals hide out, procreate, live and die.
     Which says a lot about us & our foibles, don't it?

It comes down to the choice between being humans and being just another stupid, shufflin' monkey in the middle of the field with the tigers closin' in.
     We fail miserably when it comes to asking ourselves, at that moment just before action, if what we're about to do or what we have done is really what makes sense.
     We ain't rational, see?
     Instead we go on about our day to day, stumbling along as if what we are doing was representational of reasoned process all along. We don't think about what we're about to think about because no other animal on the planet really ever does that.
     It's the same old 10% thing again.
     You only use 10% of your brain because the other 90% – the part that's more animal than any of us would willingly admit – is keeping the first 10% out of trouble. At least from the animal perspective.
     From a human perspective everything looks just fine for the moment. Then when the moment is passed and we're faced with homeless pregnant women not knowing where the impregnator is – or even who the impregnator is – livin' in tents under railway bridges.
     You can't get more Freudian than that, yo.