O Many Pay Me Come

 Oh my. It's getting harder and harder to see the Buddhanature goodness in other human beings, particularly in those behemoth corporations lawyers claim as the newest members of our ever evolving species. (Got that, Darwin?)  This last week alone Comcast flexed its monopoly power here in the supposed epicenter of tech innovation, San Francisco, to raise my internet rate by almost 5% to over $75 a month for nothing new and nothing to rave about. Because I refuse to pay them an additional $100 to watch TV that has nothing worth watching, they prevented me from viewing the Winter Olympics. i do have a small TV with an HD antenna on which I get to watch Downtown Abbey, but I can't watch anything on NBC. Comcast owns it and thanks to money squabbles in San Francisco, the station picked up and moved to San Jose with a transmitter that deliberately doesn't reach the city. So if you don't meet their demands, no NBC, no winter Olympics, no SNL for laughs. This same week Comcast announced it wants to be gatekeeper to all communication and nobody except consumers like me flinched at being screwed with our own non-negotiable fees.

As I was digesting this, the annual renewal for homeowner insurance showed up in the mail not only with a hefty unexplained premium increase, but an extra $230 payment for worthless terrorism coverage that is not legally mandatory but I am not permitted by the issuer to refuse. They can do this because there's not much competition in this particular niche market. You got another definition for extortion?  

I went to buy a new batch of the See's Candy chocolate lollipops I distribute as small spontaneous thank yous for sudden acts of kindness and also take to the Tibetan monks who seem to love them. For at least four years, these treats were $.50 a pop so i could be very generous in handing them out. Then See's the corporation changed hands and its mission was not so much to sell candy that made people happy but, you know, "to unlock pent-up financial value." So despite stability in the price of basic foods and minimum wage labor, every few months over the last two years, See's Candy has increased the price of the lollipops by a nickel. They're now $.85 a pop, for the moment anyway. 

And to top it all off, I went from the candy store to the pharmacy to fill a prescription, the only prescription drug I have needed in the last at least ten years except for the occasional generic antibiotic, and had to pay out of pocket $150 because the insurance company refuses to pay for the only available option of a drug needed by thousands if not millions of menopausal women. They know we have no options.

I have been trying not to seethe and Dharma practice is a help with that. Yet I have been thinking more than usual about basic goodness and Buddhanature and the compassion supposedly buried in all of us. Frankly, and probably because one of my signs is Scorpio, what I have been thinking is that if I were trapped in a room with one insurance company executive and one Jihadi terrorist, and I had one shot at saving myself so I might benefit beings, I wouldn't need to hesitate to decide who to kill as the more evil. Life has become that twisted in the United $tate of America. 

To get away from it all, the insidiousness we have to live with, I've four times in six weeks re-read the entire collection of Peanuts comic strips given to me by surprise as a birthday present by the Charles M. Schulz Museum and Research Center, which I visited on my special day. It still tickles me that the most awful words in the world, according to Snoopy, are: "You stay home now and be a good dog." And that when Linus tells Lucy there's something she needs to know: "The world does not revolve around you", she looks at him and says: "You're kidding."  What's so infinitely loveable about these comic characters, like the sitcom characters of Seinfeld who delighted everyone with a surprise re-appearance in a Superbowl ad, is not just their inner goodness struggling to shine through, but seeing the sweet fallibility this bottleneck produces. George and Charlie Brown, Elaine and Sally, Lucy and Jerry are all striving, struggling and conniving but--and it's the really really big but--they are all clearly sometimes mystified by life, often in fact a mess at meeting its challenges. They're allowed to fail and keep on going. Getting to see that is what makes us love them.

We all used to be able to fail too and love ourselves and each other and keep going...before too big...you know...only monopolists and big money got to do that-- at our expense.




~Sandy Garson "Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
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