Dr. Forbush Thinks

I started my writing career in 1975 with the line, “Thoughts, the will to think.”

To a 14-year-old High School freshman sitting in study hall the realization that I could think my way past the four walls that held me gave me hope. Sitting in a study hall with no homework to do and no will to do anything else lead me to escape to my own thoughts and write them down. But, the escape route lead me past places of which I had no idea existed. I began writing introspectively studying why I did what I did. It led me to try to understand my actions, but it also led me to a lack of self-confidence. For I would look at my failed attempts to become socially accepted. Well, I had thought that I wasn’t accepted, but as I understand it now I wasn’t really much different than anyone else at my school. I wanted to be able to jump up and lead my classmates, but I didn’t have a vision as to where they should be lead. In fact, the student leadership also had no idea as to where our class should have gone, or what we should have done. The leadership was about planning dances and fund raising events for money that could be used to defray the cost of more and better dances with live bands. What sense did that make?

I was more concerned with how this strange social scheme worked and why people did what they did. What I wrote was confusion with why people should except that status quo’s idea of social behaviour. I was also confused with reconciling the inconsistency between what I was told by the adults in my life and the reality that I observed. At some point along the way I realized that adults lied to you and they shouldn’t be trusted to give you the facts. Instead, adults were more likely to give information that would back up their ideal view of the world, not the reality of the world.

I wrote about my first experiences with drugs and alcohol. I couldn’t understand the point of drugs even though I tried them several times trying to understand the feeling or experience that I was looking for. Alcohol on the other hand allowed me to drop the nervous apprehension that stopped me from interacting socially with my peers. If it weren’t for weekend drinking parties I might be a greek living by myself in my parent’s attic. Well, maybe not that bad, but alcohol allowed me to learn how I should act and react without thinking about every possible thing I could say and what the responses might be. By the time I was in college I felt the peer pressure to drink, but I would drink a lot of ice water and behave the way I remembered acted while I was drinking. But, by this time I was no longer writing introspective analysis pieces everyday.

Today I am back to writing down my thoughts and they tend to be as obsessive as they once were. However, instead of obsessing on what I should or shouldn’t be doing to acquire the “Normal High School Student Status,” I am obsessed about the sad state of the current political state. I know what I don’t like and I have ideas for solutions. I write about these things every day, but I only have a few hundred readers every day. How can I effect politics with so few readers? What’s the point of writing if I can’t effect change? What’s the point of writing this anyway?

Well, what I hope is that thinking about these problems will generate ideas and those ideas will flow through the blogsphere. I don’t care if I get credit for the ideas if people use them in their thinking and the way they look at life, the universe and everything. In fact, if people do take my ideas and improve on them then together we make the world a better place by pushing these ideas further forward. Of course not all of ideas are original either. In fact the way I understand the world isn’t original. In fact, the worldview of most people could hardly be called original because they take what their parents, and teachers and peers tell them and the incorporate these ideas into a personal worldview in order to understand the universe. Depending on the views of these early influences people see the problems and solutions for the world’s problems based on different worldviews. So, maybe getting my worldview out into the universe of public thought will help people who haven’t quite formed a worldview yet. But, this could be positive or negative depending on the current worldview of the person reading my views. I often get comments of the sort that say “Another load of shit blog.” This would mean that I am pushing a person further away my worldview when readers have an attitude like that. So, what’s the point?

Hopefully the point is simple. I simply want to express my views and organize my own thoughts by writing this blog. If people happen to read my thoughts, then that’s fine. And, if they comment on my blog then I have additional feedback in trying to understand my own worldview. And, finally if I do have a reader or two who haven’t formed their worldview, then maybe I can assist them in at least understand where I’m coming from. But, I certainly can’t change the minds of those who already have formed worldviews contrary to my own.