RISKY BUSINESS

At times, now, in my recliner years, I’ve looked back over my life and wondered why I had such a tendency to do things impulsively, take unnecessary risks, make self-destructive decisions. I struggled harder than some of my friends just to survive and get along, and I lived a lot of years in poverty and skating along near poverty. It’s not that I didn’t have opportunity and friends who might have helped me. One friend tried to bring me into the technical writing field, but I shunned that. He worked himself up into high digit incomes and told me it was as easy as falling off a log. And I’ve had other friends who have worked themselves up into six figure jobs, being responsible parents and steady members of society. My own sons have become teachers and businessmen, yet, thinking of my masters’ degrees, I know I must be considered an underachiever. Professional or financial success were not for me.

When I think back to my impulsive behavior, the way I often just followed the moment and made decisions with no thought of tomorrow, I’m amazed since I know I’m no dummy. Most of the time I seemed to purposely duck advancement and hide from responsibility. For a long time I swore in my cups that as long as there was one poor person in the world, I wanted no financial success for myself, somehow yoking myself to failure and actually making it impossible for me to be of any help to those with less potential than myself.

Often I’d do something just to be able to say that I’d experienced it. When I was 50 years old, back 17 years ago, I’d already held 53 jobs in a wide variety of professions. I was everything from a janitor to a high school teacher and college teacher to a painter’s and sandblaster’s helper on oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico. I’d been a window decorator, a clerk, an aluminum awning salesman and a certified nurse’s aide in a nursing home. I suppose I thought that, somehow, all my experience would translate into the books I was going to write which would make me famous....

Well, famous I am not, but okay I am with that. Somehow I’ve found a little peace in my old age.

Anyhow... I’ve noticed others like myself who have poor impulse control, and since I’ve been reading so much science these days, specially in the field of brain chemistry and the evolution of consciousness, I’ve begun to think that much of what I’ve been is genetics, twisted by nurture. And here another small article inSCIENTIFIC AMERICAN which finds that the volume of the amygdala may have something to do with those of us who just seem to have no fear and no sense when certain decisions approach. We just seem to gotta go find out about whatever it is and damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.


THEY’RE ONLY JUST BEGINNING

The following are from FREETHOUGHT TODAY, November 2004:

“Three Christian youths taunted an 11 year old boy over his family’s non-Christian beliefs and threw rotten apples at him in late September, reported the TACOMA NEWS TRIBUNE (Sept. 29).

The boy, whose family is pagan, was called names and a ‘Jesus hater.’ He was hit five or six times during the attack by middle-schoolers.”

In addition, a film maker was murdered by a Dutch Moslem fundamentalist; a Muslim stabbed four of his seven daughters to death because his faith told him he must have sons; in Michigan a Christian believer shot an atheist to death because “he is evil; he was not a believer”; Moslems stoned to death two Nigerian women for having sex outside of marriage; a Hindu family killed an 11 year old daughter for being possessed by demons; in South Africa a Christian soapbox actress hacked her 2 year old to death because he was possessed by the devil; a Texas Christian plucked out his eye, quoting Mark 9:47, while being held in jail for killing and cutting out the hearts of his son, estranged wife and her daughter; and another Christian in Penticton, B.C. cut his penis off and ran through the streets, yelling, “Repent, repent fornicators.”

Now that Canadian dude might be a solution for all this religious nonsense going around. If they’d all just follow suit we’d soon be free of them.
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"I tell you I can feel them! They're all around us! Young people! Getting closer and closer!" —Hamilton cartoon caption