Rage Against The Machine
Ray Bradbury, the acclaimed author from Waukegan, Illinois said that the secret to life was knowing how to fall in love and stay in love. (I’ve not read Fahrenheit 451, but plan to do so.)
My instincts tell me that Bradbury hit the bullseye with his sage comment. Nevertheless knowing and doing cannot be separated. Awareness and courage is necessary. One cannot be a spectator.
Yesterday in Long Grove I thought on these matters in the course of a day spent at the office. One project on my “to do” list was to call my health insurance provider to place an order for insulin pumps which I cannot do without. If you are insulin dependent you know what I mean. The customer service representative was helpful and efficient. The surprise came when I learned that the cost of fulfilling my prescription would be 
one third more than the information that I had been given just one week before. I reminded myself the person with whom I was conversing had conveyed the outcome of the computer query. A ninety day supply of disposable insulin pumps would cost me around $300 rather than the $200 which I had been led to believe. I placed the order. I thanked the representative for her help and hung up.
Departing my office for a walk at lunchtime I felt a smoldering resentment 
toward Medicare on account of the rules which cap coverage for prescriptions. I was raging against the machine. Institutions are mechanisms, virtual machines and government is the greatest virtual machine of all.
I walked across the square and could not help but notice the looming Komatsu power shovel working in front of me. Thoroughfares in the village are under construction to install new 
waterlines. Great machines lay waste to the streets and sidewalks and it looked as if Long Grove has been taken back to the dirt roads and dust of the early 20th century. I felt a grudging resentment toward the machines, digging, and roaring and dumping great buckets of earth into the idling trucks. The scene matched my mood. We are dragged along by the logic entailed in our machines, by the mechanisms we designed and fabricated for our benefit.
On my walk I took note of the flowers at hand that continued to bloom. 
They were exquisite in their beauty, within sight and sound of the road construction chaos. Long Grove has always been a community graced by a variety of flowers throughout the warm months. Today the bees and other insects aggressively visited the blooms taking their nourishment.
I was reminded that the flowers around me were enough. I need not fixate on the disappointment at the cost of my prescription. There is much in life that must be endured, accepted as the given of one’s place and time — like the filth, the cacophony of road construction. The flowers on the other hand are a reminder of how magnificent it is to be alive, to experience with sight, sound, taste, and touch our interface with this world.
To know the goodness of life is to know love.
One thought on “Rage Against The Machine”
Juxtiposition. Balance. Yin & Yang. Light & dark. All terms we use to describe the various aspects of the teeter-totter of life around us. Just as you did, my friend, in finding flowers to counter the frustrations of government and of the dirt digging machines that represent the metaphor of power over the individual. Yet in my estimation we are all searching desperately for the positive, for the light to counter-balance the darkness that is seemingly growing daily. We are most certainly out of balance, or as is so well expressed in the Hopi language, Koyaanisqatsi. The darkness is indeed increasing, much like the fictional smoke from Mt. Doom in the land of Mordor, potentially covering the earth with a massive self-inflicted wound from which we may or may not recover. Tolkien, Orwell, Asimov, Bradbury, and so many others were prescient in their foresight, warning us against human folly that is now morphing from their fictional tales into a nightmare of reality. In order to bring back the light of reason, or at least try our best, we must band together and immediately use every means necessary to restore the balance. As the old comic strip character, Snuffy Smith, used to say, “Time’s a Wastin’!”