"The world is fucked up," Dexter declared.
Al, the social worker Dexter had started seeing, fidgeted in his seat, in anticipation of another long session of venting. During the first two sessions with him, Dexter had talked non-stop about the indignities heaped upon him by an unfeeling corporation, and the disrespectful way in which his wife had dumped him. Al had not been able to get a word in edge-wise.
Al asked, "Why do you say that?"
"All of the old rules are gone, and there aren't any new rules to take their place," Dexter said.
"Can you give me an example," Al asked.
"If you're going to dump someone, you tell him or her to his or her face. If that isn't possible, you write a letter ... a Dear John letter ... in which you explain things. You don't leave a one line note or a text message," Dexter said. "It isn't right."
"I'll admit that doesn't give you much of a chance to get closure," Al said.
"Here's another. It used to be if you worked harder than everyone else and did a great job, then you'd be promoted. Now they expect you to work harder than humanly possible, and to do a great job, just to keep your job. That's not right," Dexter said.
"Well, that bit about working hard and getting rewarded for it has never really been true," Al said.
Shaking his head in the negative, Dexter said, "It was true when I started working. My boss would say, 'do this extra work, and do a good job, and we'll promote you.' I did the job, I did it well, and they promoted me. Now, they tell you the same thing, and you do the job, and you do it well, and they don't promote you. When you ask why they didn't promote you, they tell you that you should be happy to have a job."
"That's just basic dishonesty," Al said.
"Absolutely. We used to be honest, and now we aren't. That has destroyed the old rules we used to live by," Dexter said.
"So what has dishonesty got to do with the old rules not applying anymore?" Al asked.
Dexter said, "Because when people aren't honest, they won't live up to the agreements made under the old rules. You follow the old rules, only to discover that people are using them to take advantage of you. The new 'name of the game' is: lie, cheat, and steal. There are no rules."
"You don't think you're being a little negative?" Al asked.
"No. I'm being honest," Dexter said. "Look at the games they are playing on Wall Street! They promise 'granny' all kinds of return on her investments. She loses everything because they kill the stock market with junk bonds, insider trading, and Ponzi schemes. Do they lose any money? No. They make money, regardless of what happens. Those crooks are stealing grandma's pension, and they are getting praised for it. If that doesn't prove my point, then nothing does."
"You're talking about a few individuals in a select industry," Al said. "The vast majority of people are still honest."
"The honest ones are losing their homes. The crooks are getting rich," Dexter said.
Al said, "It just looks like that. You're just looking at the worst cases and generalizing from them."
"You're naive," Dexter said.
"No. I just prefer to see the good side of things," Al said. "I'm an optimist."
"There was a time when I was young and naïve, like you."
"Are you saying you're old and jaded?" Al asked.
Dexter sighed, "I remember when I was in college. Some of our professors used to talk about how we would start having thirty hour work weeks, because technology would allow us to accomplish in thirty hours, what used to take forty hours. They said our increases in productivity would lead to increases in leisure time. I actually believed that garbage.
"I looked forward to working six hours a day, or four days a week. I thought the arts would really flourish. I thought that families would grow closer.
"I really thought that by being an engineer, that I was going to help make that happen. I got into the area of information sciences, thinking that I could leverage computers to increase the productivity of office workers. We could generate a report in ten minutes, that used to take all day of a manager's time. That would give some manager a four day work week.
"The result was just the opposite. They got rid of people, and dumped more work on those left behind. Rather than working forty hour weeks, we're working seventy hours a week. Instead of creating a utopia, we created a dystopia.
"There was no escape. Technologies like cell phones and e-mail made it easier to interrupt our leisure time, made it impossible to get away from work, since work could now follow you anywhere and at all times.
"Looking back at all of the seventy hour workweeks that I put in at the company, I am not happy. I helped create this modern dystopia. I don't know how many people lost jobs because of the software that I helped write.
"I think the arts have suffered. I haven't seen any major new trends in art. It is just the same old stuff repackaged. It reminds me of packages of soap that now come with 'new and improved' labels put on them. There's nothing new and improved about the soap. You lather up, rinse off, and you're cleaner than before. No change.
"Television as an art? Give me a break. It has successfully sunk to the lowest common denominator of society. I watched a reality show one night last week. I don't know what planet those folks were living on if they considered it to be anything at all like reality. It was horrible.
"There's no such thing as family any more. Before the technical revolution, most marriages lasted a life time. Now, half of the marriages in this country end in divorce. Half of the adults in this country live alone. We've become isolated. Even when we are together, we aren't.
"My wife and I never talked to each other. We were each too busy with work to talk. Texting. That's how we communicated. That's not real communication. How can you look deeply into her eyes and tell her that you love her, when you're fifteen miles away, and all you've got are one line text messages flying back and forth across the telephone network? You can't! The 'I love you' carries as much emotional impact as: 'pick up milk.'
"My son plays video games all afternoon and evening. Trying to get him away from the game is impossible. He says that he's doing things with friends, but he's interacting within a fantasy world. He's killing mythical monsters with magic spells. That's not real. He's not even looking at real people, just computer generated avatars.
"My daughter spends all of her time chatting with her friends online. She's holding six or seven different conversations at once. How can she share something meaningful? She can't. Thinking and expressing deep ideas can't be done by typing single lines of text back and forth. Does she do anything with her friends? No. What kind of friendship is that when you don't do anything with your friend?"
Al said, "I'll admit that I see a lot of that."
"Could you imagine treating me using chat, or texting?" Dexter asked.
"Not really," Al said, thinking that in this case, he'd like to give it a try.
"The thing is that this kind of surreal and unnatural form of interacting is going to become accepted and normal, if something isn't done to change it," Dexter said.
"I have a bit more faith in people than that," Al said. "We'll find healthy ways to work within that matrix. We'll have relationships with people, but they'll be different in nature than the ones in the past."
"They'll be dishonest relationships," Dexter said.
"Why do you say that?" Al asked.
Dexter said, "It is real easy to lie when your interaction with someone is via text on a one inch by one inch screen. I could tell some woman that I'm tall, dark, and handsome. She'd never know that I'm of average height, pale, and nothing special in the looks department ... unless we actually meet, which is becoming less and less common. Lies are easy."
"I don't believe that is entirely accurate. Lies can introduce inconsistencies, and people pick up on that pretty quickly," Al said. "It is also a lot easier to be honest about things from a distance."
"I don't believe it," Dexter said.
"It's true. People find it easier to admit to some things, when they aren't face to face. I think the net result will be better relations among people," Al said.
Dexter snorted. "When was the term 'friends with benefits' introduced into the popular culture?"
"I don't know," Al said.
"That term didn't exist when I was a teenager. At that time, sex was making love with the person you wanted to spend the rest of your life with. A man didn't experience sex with a woman, until long after everyone else knew they were a couple. Otherwise, she'd be labeled a slut. Now, it is something 'friends' do. What the fuck is that all about?" Dexter asked.
Al said, "Relationships are little less formal today than they were in the past. I don't think that is a bad thing."
"They are also a lot shallower. That is a bad thing," Dexter countered.
"It eases the loneliness," Al said.
"Where is the passion? Where is the mystery?"
Al said, "I wonder if it isn't a sign that we're becoming a more mature society."
"Mature? Is that a new synonym with decadent and corrupt?" Dexter asked.
"No. It just means that we're growing beyond being a society governed by its passions," Al said calmly.
"That's bullshit," Dexter said. "That's got to be the stupidest thing I've ever heard."
"Why do you say that?" Al asked.
Dexter answered, "Human beings haven't evolved. A twenty year old kid today, needs passion in his or her life, just as much as I needed it when I was twenty years old. If they aren't finding that passion in something positive, like love, then they are going to find it in something negative, like greed or gluttony.
"Think about all of those extreme sports. We didn't have 'extreme sports' when I was a kid. I used to ride a bike to get from one place to another. Now kids are performing stunts that are likely to get them killed on bikes. Why? Because there isn't any other way for them to feel the same excitement I felt when was their age."
"What kind of excitement did you get that they don't?" Al asked.
That was a hard question to answer. He'd had to discover the world on his own. He rode his bicycle everywhere, and learned about his surroundings. He played in a patch of woods near his house, and learned about nature. He met people and listened to stories. The television wasn't there to explain every little thing about everything. His parents weren't taking him places such that he wouldn't have the opportunity to discover what was between here and there. It seemed to him that every day was an adventure, and that he was experiencing it, first hand.
"The biggest mystery of them all was women," Dexter said, "I remember when I put my hand on a woman's bare breast, for the very first time. It took nine months for me to get to that point with her. Every little obstacle was another adventure. Holding her hand. Putting my arm around her.
"The first kiss was a major milestone. Then came touching her outside her clothes. Then slipping my hand under her clothes. Finally, came the night when her shirt was opened and my hand caressed her bare breast. I felt a thousand feet tall that night!
"I'm pretty sure that teenagers today are having sex when they was three years younger than when I first kissed a bare nipple. Sex can't mean nearly as much to them, as kissing that nipple did to me. It comes too easy for them."
"You're equating the age at which things are experienced, with the intensity of the experience. They aren't the same thing," Al said.
"They are immature," Dexter said.
"So you are saying that because they are engaging in adult actions while they are still young means that our society is not mature. I don't think that's true," Al said.
Dexter was silent for a moment while thinking about things.
He said, "I think that maturity is about focusing on living a good and proper life. As you get more mature, you get a little more cautious about things. You focus on the long-term and stop living in the moment.
"I think a mature society is one that focuses on the long term. The sixties, when we put a man on the moon, is a good example of a society working in a mature fashion. The nation had a goal and worked towards achieving it.
"We, as a nation, watched man first obtain a foothold in space during the Mercury missions. Each time a rocket went up, we held our breaths with excitement. We watched man explore the basics of doing things in space during the Gemini missions.
"Then came the Apollo missions where we reached for the moon. Everyone sat in front of their television sets watching us obtain our goal. We cheered ... as a nation ... as a world ... when Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon. 'One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.'
"Then it kind of unraveled. We all held our breaths when Apollo 13 had difficulties on its mission, but that was the last mission that held our collective attention. We just dropped it after that. We gave up our long term goal of going into space right after we had proved that it could be done.
"Everyone remembers the name of the first man to step on the moon. Does anyone know the name of the robot that explored Mars? No. No one cares about a robot. We can't really say that we've been to Mars, until a man steps on the surface of that planet.
"You say that we are progressing in maturity as a society. I have to disagree with you. I think we're regressing in terms of maturity."
Al said, "We dropped the space mission to focus on the human mission. We wanted to stop war..."
Dexter interrupted with a wry grunt of disgust and said, "That was a real success. Have you watched the news, lately?"
"We wanted to eliminate disease," Al said.
Dexter interrupted, "We stopped Smallpox in the late fifties. In the early sixties, we contained Polio so that it is a rarity today. In the seventies and eighties, we watched HIV become a world-wide epidemic, and did nothing. In terms of real improvement, we haven't dealt with HIV. Rather than addressing HIV directly, we tell people to change the way they behave so that it can't spread so easily.
"What the fuck is that? That's like having a rabid dog in the room with you, and having our 'experts' advise us that we shouldn't try to pet it. That's not dealing with the problem."
"HIV is a lot more difficult to eliminate than Smallpox," Al said.
Dexter said, "Bullshit. HIV is a political disease. The American scientific community wouldn't accept that a laboratory in France was the first to get a picture of the virus. It affected mainly gays at first, and no one was interested in a 'gay disease'. Now, it is prevalent among drug users and poor people. You can live with it for years before it kills you. And guess what ... treating the disease is a lot more profitable than eliminating it."
"I think you're being a little excessive in your description of the situation," Al said uncomfortably.
"I can guarantee you that we wouldn't be able to eliminate Smallpox today. People would refuse to get vaccinated against it, because the vaccine had too many side-effects. They'd sue the manufacturers of the vaccines, and that would be the end of it," Dexter said.
Al said, "I don't believe that."
Dexter laughed. He asked, "Do you know what are the most commercially successful drugs on the market?"
"What?" Al asked.
"Drugs for fighting erectile dysfunction!" Dexter said. "We're more interested in drugs that let us fuck, than those that save lives."
"Keeping an active sex life is important to a lot of people," Al said meekly.
"A kid will skip work for a chance to fuck. An adult will go to work so that a greater good is achieved – like providing for a family. You say we are becoming a more mature society. I think you're wrong," Dexter said.
"We'll just have to agree to disagree," Al said.
Dexter shook his head. He said, "Do you know what really gets to me?"
"What?" Al asked.
"I don't see any way to fix things," Dexter said.
"Why do you think it is your job to fix things? Wouldn't it be better to adapt to present circumstances?" Al asked.
"I'm an engineer. It is my job to fix things. It would not be better for me to accept my present circumstances," Dexter replied.
Al said, "A mature person seeks to fit into society rather than rebel against it. Learning how to adapt to change is much more healthy than resisting it."
"A mature person tries to improve things. He doesn't just run away from difficulties," Dexter said.
Al said, "There's a prayer about recognizing what you can change and accepting what you can't."
"Can you repeat it?" Dexter asked.
Al pointed to a poster on the wall and said, "There it is."
Dexter examined the poster, quietly, then he read it aloud.
"Lord grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
"I can't do that."
"Why not?" Al asked.
"I am not a lemming," Dexter replied pointedly. "I'm not going to run off a cliff, just because everyone else is telling me that is what I'm supposed to do!"
Edited By TeNderLoin