Traveling

When I was a kid on a northwest Missouri farm, eight miles out of town, sometimes I would see ads for pen pals from around the world and think that would be the coolest thing ever, to exchange letters with someone thousands of miles away, in a place you would likely never visit. For whatever reason I never chased that particular dream--probably I just got distracted, forgot about it, thought about it again, forgot about it again, got involved with something else. As John Lennon said, “Life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans.”

A whole bunch of years later, more or less on a whim, I plugged one of those omnipresent AOL disks into my computer and went online, went into “chat” and was dropped into one of those generic chat rooms, and found myself talking to someone in England, another somebody from Germany, other people from all kinds of other places, and it just fascinated the hell out of me--and I was hooked, although I did wear out, when it came to “chat,” within just a couple of years (after it had taken me, physically, to Louisville and Memphis and New Orleans and New York City, among other places not so well known, like Natchez, Mississippi).

A decade or so after that, I found Flickr just a month or so after I had acquired my first digital camera. Pictures I posted there led me to friendships with people from Romania (my two “Romanian Lauras”), Sweden, England, Thailand, Australia, the Philippines, Japan, Canada, Montana . . . All over the place. (One of the proudest moments in my life came when one of the Romanian Lauras, an artist and a good one, told me that my photographs had inspired her to take up photography. She is in Italy now, studying photography at a school there.)

I could never have dreamed all that up, even as a pen-pal-dreaming kid.
For almost 10 years, I’ve been working at home as a medical transcriptionist for a Tennessee-based company. I’ve had supervisors from New York, Mississippi, Georgia and Pennsylvania, co-workers from nearly all over the country (as well as India, he says, grumpily).

Turns out the whole “pen-pal” thing was not a dream put aside, but merely a dream deferred.

It’s funny how life works sometimes, and funny how the world can shrink and expand, all at the same time.

Perhaps paradoxically, or maybe only contrarily, I’ve never had any particular desire to travel. In my distant youth I was stationed in Germany, saw a very little bit of that and loved it, and also got to visit Paris (France, not Missouri, although I’ve been through the latter as well). I’ve lived briefly in Kentucky, briefly in Indiana, for seven years in Montana, about the same in Mississippi, thought for a while about moving to Albuquerque, New Mexico, Knoxville, Tennessee, and Weatherford, Texas. I’ve admired photographs from all over the world, wondered at the sheer beauty and grandeur and desolation and squalor and everything in between, but nevertheless remain quite content to stay where I am, to explore and photograph my own back yard and the occasional wonders within it.

My neighbor a mile or so to the south, who has lived in this little corner of Gentry County, Missouri, once told me, when I asked if he ever took a vacation (the guy works 12-16 or more hours a day on his farm; “When you love your job,” he once told me, “You never have to work a day in your life”), he just said, “There’s no place I’d rather go.” Gotta respect, maybe even envy that.

Just another rambling day, here in paradise.

Nothing like watching old movies . . . .

Watched again the other day an old movie, “Independence Day.” Okay, it’s not THAT old, but it has been around for a while. Anyway, there is one scene in it where the president of the United States gets locked into an alien’s mind and sees what the aliens have in mind for the human population of the planet. “Extermination,” he says, when he is finally freed from the alien’s telepathic grip.

Upon revisiting that movie scene, it dawned on me why listening to my company’s quarterly report the other day had so shaken me.

Our “bosses” have in mind for us, the American medical transcriptionists and editors who do the work the company sells and greatly profits from, exactly the same plan that the aliens in “Independence Day” had for human beings: Extermination.

That is not isolation paranoia-borne hyperbole or exaggeration, it is simply fact.

The more work they can send overseas, the better their profit margin. They were positively gleeful over the fact that they’ve managed to offshore 46%--up from 44%!--of transcription in the last quarter, and the picture only gets brighter (for them)!

They were equally happy that 77% of dictation now goes through speech-recognition programs before it gets to a transcriptionist. This makes them happy because they pay us much less, and in fact, unfairly less, for lines we edit than for those we transcribe. Anything that makes us, the workers, poorer, makes them richer--of COURSE they’re happy about that.

There was also some mention of a 19-million-dollar tax windfall of some sort or another, no specifics were provided although I suppose they are all still bowing and praying to Mr. Bush for that. Astonishingly, they didn’t use that tax windfall to enhance or create American jobs. Go figure.

I will never name the company for which I work, for a variety of reasons, some of them pretty obvious, and also because it doesn’t matter. The same scenario has been playing out in a lot of companies, a lot of industries, over a whole lot of years. If it hadn’t been, there would be no “Occupy Wall Street” movement--there wouldn’t have to be.

What I still have not figured out is what the corporate and political honchos, the 1%, think the result of all this will be. To me, it looks like, at some point, the misery will have to begin to trickle UP. Our economy is about 75% consumer-driven, last time I heard. What happens when you eliminate consumers by eliminating anything above a subsistence wage? What happens to the healthcare system (10% of the economy, I think I’ve heard), for instance, when only 1% of the people can afford healthcare?
I don’t know, I honestly don’t.

When I figure out some way to prevent what looks increasingly to me like the impending destruction of America, and not just economically, I’ll happily post it. Unfortunately, I’m just not that smart, so I suspect I’ll never have to write such a post.

Cheers!