After my 6,000-step morning walk, I had some pretzels and two cups of water and gardened. Something good has come out of this scam incident already. Because I had neither computer for several days, I had to find something else to do with my time than sit on my tush and play games or write. I am making this part of my daily activity.
One downside is that I’m looking at everyone as a possible scammer. I’m sure this too will pass. As the scammers give up on me and my name is dropped from the easy mark list. Will this experience get lost in my memory like many others where people prove trustworthy and loving come in? What makes things stick are frequency and recency. This is a very recent experience, but it’s not frequent.
I suspect some people also look for that side in others and only see scammers, predators. My mom was that way. If anyone showed an interest in her or one of her children, she went into a high alert and wondered out loud, “What do they want?” The pleasure of our company? The opportunity to see themselves in a positive light as they did something nice for us? Not on her checklist. Since I have a commitment to live favoring trust, I will look for that, and those experiences will drown out this one.
Once I got over the shock of my near miss and that I was capable of being corralled that way, my usual perspective took over. A) I feel sorry for the guys. They invested a lot of time and energy into hunting me. I escaped their grasp. I have reason to believe that these are not just money-hungry guys. The one I spoke to on Thursday flipped out and went off-script. He had clearly lost control of himself. He blurted out that I was selfish, and he could live on $700 for a year. Holy cow! As I said before, a homeless person couldn’t make it on $700 a year in this country. I don’t think these guys have the education to have that perspective. I can imagine that there aren’t many ways to earn a living in their country. I see them as honest hunters.
What’s a dishonest hunter? Remember that jerk who had handlers corral a prize lion so he could have an easy shoot. The idiot posed with the lion as his trophy. I think there are people out to kill him now. He is a dishonest hunter. Good hunting requires skill. Good hunters don’t just pick off the easiest prey. I’m an adult. I am not mentally disabled or a child. I am not the easiest pickings. However, I am old, and a widow; the scammer knew that about me.
I had a friend who got cancer and whined, “Why me?’ I thought, “Why not you? Why not me?” That’s how I feel about this situation. Why not me? If the pigs, turkeys, sheep, and pheasants roaming wild on the Big Island can be prey, why not me as prey for the scammers? There is a moral glitch here, but not if those men sought enough money to feed their families. Do I know that for a fact? No. But I feel I have good reason to believe that.
Also, I don’t know who much of this operation was a scam versus a real service. I didn’t have my Mac computer in the house on Thursday and Friday for the scammer to do damage to it because I was advised by one of their techs to take it to someone local. He did this because he was concerned that he couldn’t do a good job. The operation may be semi-legitimate, and some of them or all of them cherry-pick likely candidates for their scam. I’m trusting, but they overestimated me.
I am fascinated by how I allowed them to steer me through this process. I don’t think of myself as easily malleable. I have a whole new perspective. When I work with my therapist, I will explore what was specific to this situation versus just part of me.
When Yvette came up last night, I told her that she should probably keep an eye on me. I seem to be more vulnerable than I suspected. Besides my age, which weakens the mental system, there is the extra stress of being alive in 2020 in the middle of the pandemic.
I continued with the extensive cleaning of my walk-in shower with its river stone pan. The vegetable oil solution works like a charm. I sprayed Pam cooking oil over the plate glass door and the river stone shower pan. It does something to the soap residue. I supposed it breaks it down. I wash the oil off with a Dawn dish soap chaser.
My latest version of the PowerPoint for the decoding demonstration was on Mike’s Surface Pro, still at the tech store. I worked on the article I have been writing on the method for teaching decoding I developed. I am getting worn out reading and rereading it. And yet, every time I do, I see a need to change something.
____-____-____
Musings:
Applying small group principles to large groups.
A talk I heard on TED this morning on Reimagining Capitalism triggered these thoughts. The speaker was a committed capitalist. She believes in the benefits of the open market, but she also recognizes that capitalism has gotten out of hand.
I saw the connection between how small groups deal with power-hungry individuals, suppressing them, exiling them, and killing them, and how to deal with power-hungry individuals and organizations in our highly developed society. I just have no idea how to do it. I think it is impossible unless we all agree on limits. Those limits can’t be set in documents. They have to be implicitly understood and agreed upon. I have no idea how we can arrive at such an agreement. I know that large industries and powerful countries take up more than their fair share of the resources of this earth.
I have a small vision. I’m not committed to it. I learned young that my solutions weren’t guaranteed to be successful. When I was sixteen, I knew that if I could be made dictator of a ‘small’ country, I could force everyone to be cooperative. The ‘small’ country I had in mind was Mexico. Believe it or not, when I was in my mid-twenties, I shared this story with a college housemate. She had the same fantasy. And that’s what they were, fantasies, uniformed fanasties.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. With that in mind, who chooses who should be reined in? In a small group setting, the answer to that question is evolved slowly, much the way the language is. No one handed down English to us. While the French have an organization that monitors changes to the French language and exerts control, we don’t have that in English. There is no one way, determined by some institution, that decides what ‘good’ English is. American English evolves, changes. It’s a living thing. There is an agreed-upon base. People can only move so far from the base before it is no longer considered English. No variations cause harm. Is there any way we can have something like that with large organizations?
No comments:
Post a Comment