A Saturday Night In Starbucks

Several years ago, an unusual set of events found me at Starbucks on a Saturday night. It had been a reasonably decent day, but somehow the pressures of the world – its parade of negativity – had had its effect on me. Sitting in the Starbucks cured me. What I Saw It was a very average Starbucks in a very average location. And the very average people sitting with me were a nearly perfect cross-section of the American demographic. To my left was a middle-aged black man, doing something on his laptop. Just past him was a middle-aged white woman doing the same. Past her, in the corner, were three teenage girls – one black, one white, one Latin – studying together. Behind me was another black man with a laptop and piles of papers, and past him a young couple falling in love over lattes. At the big, center table was a 25ish woman, with multiple piles of paper upon which she was working very hard. After a while, her boyfriend showed up. She hugged him, laid her head on his shoulder, and they kissed. It was sweet. Then he got to work with her. There were also people coming and going. They were more of the same: A cross-sectional American parade of people behaving quietly and well. Watching these people, I decided that it would be far better to spend time helping them than to obsess over all the threats in the world. These are the people who deserve our efforts. What Would Help the Bright Side of Humanity? My observations brought me to the question of how to help the bright side of humanity, and I decided that a great start would be to assure them that their way is right… that they have every right to live their way.  That concept should be utterly obvious, but the fact is that productive people have been assiduously taught to abandon their ways whenever authority speaks.  This is the great error of the bright side people, and those of us who recognize it must make this point repeatedly: The narratives of the power-seekers service primate models of organization. They do not serve human advancement. The people I saw in the Starbucks held a different and better set of ideals. They believed that everyone should be treated with respect; that coercion and fraud are wrong; that everyone should be left alone to do as they please, so long as they don’t intrude upon others. This decent side of humanity needs to know that their ideals should never be abandoned, no matter how Earth-shatteringly urgent a reason may seem. The people I saw in the Starbucks, to be blunt about it, were morally superior to the powerful and the fear-peddlers. Their ways should be held above.  And Once They Do? Once the people I saw at Starbucks start believing in themselves, the world will change, and massively. These people – and there are untold millions of them – are productive and cooperative. Their problem is that they’ve been laying their virtues at the feet of fear-peddlers. Once the Starbucks People decide that fear and subservience are contrary to life itself, they will move into a better age. Such transitions are difficult, of course, but once these people truly believe in their own ways, the ways of the fear-peddlers will pass away. May it be soon. ** Paul Rosenberg freemansperspective.com

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