Keeping Us Occupied

I've previously, touched on the topic of the occupation of America. More information has now crossed my path and I have a slightly different perspective of just how this American occupation is coming to pass. I am aware that we are being influenced constantly. I mean, turn on the television and immediately a person is innundated with information regarding terrorism, the latest illness, the latest fear, the latest cure, and the latest advice for avoiding stress. I caught right on to that last one. Get rid of the source of the stress, and so out went the TV, but not soon enough. And now, I have been introduced to the latest number puzzle that is all the craze, which is what really got me thinking. I've been walking by those puzzle books in the stores, just knowing my weakness. I am one of those people that just cannot walk away defeated from a logic puzzle or a game. I just have a terrible time "quitting." I don't have to win, although that is nice, but I do have to finish! So, as I looked at this Sudoku that had come into my life in the paper on my table, I began to feel that surge rising in me. And I thought to myself, this is crazy, this thing is a flat rubix cube with numbers instead of colors. I have two particular fascinations when it comes to just losing all sense of time and space and that would be numbers and colors, so here I am realizing I have to move away from the table NOW or succumb until it is accomplished. Well, I didn't move quickly enough, and I found myself getting very absorbed in completing this puzzle, when it occurred to me, I was occupied. And something began to dawn upon me. As young people are playing their game boys and listening to their ipods, and the middle aged group is working and listening to talk radio, and the older generation is either working puzzles with the radio or doing handwork in front of the television, I realized we are all occupied. And while we are being occupied, we are being influenced in our thinking, which led me to the memory of just how the boardgame Monopoly came to be. It was through the depression, that both Hollywood and and this board game rose to great popularity. To take people's minds off of their troubles, they sought entertainment, but entertainment influences. Hollywood was glamor and a fantasy world of cosmopolitan sophistication, not a barren field with the bank waiting to foreclose. The big city commerce, romance and adventure on the silver screen was certainly more promising than agriculture. The Gold Standard Act effectively came to an end by 1934 and Monopoly was patented in 1935, introducing to America through entertainment the fundamentals of a perpetual motion economy.

Wilt thou set thine eyes upon that which is not? for riches certainly make themselves wings . . .