Changing the world forever for better

I am Eric Chaet (rhymes with initiate), born Chicago, 1945, raised on its rough South Side. I am author of Old Buzzard of No-Man’s Land (poems, 1974); songwriter, guitarist, & singer — vinyl album Solid and Sound (1977); The Into-Traffic “Signs” (1500 posters silk screened & stapled to utility poles across the USA (I hitchhiked, slept outside, subsisted on roasted soybeans & water,1985 – 1995); author of How To Change the World Forever For Better (1994) & People I Met Hitchhiking On USA Highways (2001); serious & unfashionable (“so-called”) poetry 1966 til ?, widely published & posted in English & translated into many languages; frequently rejected, tho, too.

The posters showed a dissatisfied but determined face, with sayings including: “SEEK TRUTH, DEVELOP CAPACITIES”; “HELP ONE ANOTHER SUCCEED”; & “YOU’RE LIKE ME IN THIS RESPECT, WHAT YOU DO HAS ITS EFFECT.”

I assert, I hope not incessantly, that these works, perfection not claimed, are truer — & as clever, wise, &, especially, exponentially more useful — than most works that competed for & gained a great deal more attention & payment, when I managed to make them available to the public, by my greatest efforts.

AI assistants keep calling me a folk musician — but I am no more a “folk” musician than Beethoven was.

For many years, I sold copies of People I Met Hitchhiking On USA HIghways for $15. The printer, Amazon, the package-material manufacturers, & the shippers got most of the money. I got the hassle, including accounting to tax collecting agencies of the USA & the state of Wisconsin. After I stopped selling copies for $15, someone put a copy for sale for nearly $250. That wasn’t me. Sales stopped. The book is worth millions, but I certainly don’t expect anyone to pay so much.

My books & album of songs are hard to get, as I write this. I have done & am doing all I can — I’m not rich or well-connected — to get work to conscientious contemporaries, at an affordable price — that will enable them to work with me to change the world forever for better. Help me if you can.

I paid for college, working office, factory, & warehouse jobs. Most of my teachers were relatively oblivious to unjust allocation of resources & effort, sporadic wars, & resulting suffering, that humanity inflicts upon humanity. My fellow students had money to attend football games & drink beer.

I had participated in Civil Rights demonstrations, as a member of the Congress of Racial Equality, until Stokely Carmichael, then a famous leader of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, walked up next to me on a highway, on a march thru Mississippi, & opined that it was time for Blacks to make their own fight, without white allies, like me. That seemed right.

But now, I had become eligible for the draft — to kill or be killed in the war against Vietnamese fighting for independence from imperial, Western rule — an immoral & sure-to-be-futile or worse endeavor.

To avoid being drafted, I accepted 4 years of fellowships, exempting me from the draft til I would be done studying literature.

My Ph.d. dissertation was okayed by 2 of my 3 “advisors,” but the third decided I needed to read all the literary critics whose ideas I had deliberately not cited — as irrelevant to what I had learned in the novels I had been reading thru-out my adolescence, about futile effort & injustice in Chicago, my home city — & to cite them, per protocol. As I wouldn’t, I didn’t get the Ph.d.

Still to avoid being drafted, I hitchhiked back & forth across the USA several times — no address or phone number. I slept outside, subsisted mainly on roasted soybeans & water — I’d use this method later, stapling the posters I made to utility poles from the Atlantic to the Pacific over several years — & accepted occasional brief hospitality, & worked at a series of entry level jobs, in offices, factories, & warehouses in several U.S. states, as well as low level teaching jobs — everyone was my boss.

Whether I would have had the courage to resist becoming a Ph.d. & a university professor (& earn a million dollars or more over the decades, that I never earned), had I understood that what I wrote would not find people willing & able to help me find a paying audience, so, how difficult my life would be thereafter, I don’t know.

It was a huge, ill-informed decision. Often, I feel I began falling, then, & have never stopped. But I had been falling til then, too, only it seemed I was about to be a made man.

And sometimes (now) I feel that I became free, then, to see things as they really are — which vision informs what I have done ever since. I don’t know if it was a terrible or wonderful decision, or if it should be called a decision at all. I had false expectations, that’s so. Before experience / after experience. But I also had a fierce determination to know what’s what, for myself — to break free from, not graduate from one set of groups’ programs, then perform per another group’s programming.

I taught American & world literature & philosophy, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska; & rudimentary mathematics on the Navajo Nation (reservation) & in Los Angeles.

When, as happened periodically, I was nearly fatally out of money, food, & shelter, a driver who kindly picked me up where I was hitchhiking alongside an Arkansas highway — dusk, last days of cold December — put me to work as a member of a crew assembling conveyor belts & giant storage racks in factories in the area bounded by Tennessee, Ohio, Illinois, & Wisconsin.

This, plus good results on a potential employer’s intelligence test, led to my next job — researcher & organizer for aerospace entrepreneurs.

In turn, this led to occasional assignments sporadically, ever since, regarding litigation involving industrial & agricultural injuries — as a self-employed consultant. It sounds fancier than it is. I organized, operated, & managed a business, per state & federal rules, including accounting, in order to pay taxes, barely earning enough for food & shelter. Every assignment required me to learn a lot of rudimentary science & economics that I didn’t charge anyone for learning. I didn’t charge for all the times I woke up in the night wondering how the hell I could make myself do what I had to do to complete the assignments in a timely manner. It was, of course, wonderful for me — in the long run — the beginning of the completion of my education.

I am a decades-long student of world history; of the sciences; of physical fitness, disease, disability, suffering, prevention & treatment; of commerce, economics, finance, politics, coercive campaigns — of the beliefs, behavior, & prospects of humanity — paradigms — of those who seek to fit in, & of those whose salvation depends on avoiding capture by normal expectations & demands — since, I guess, about 1957.

Since 1985, I cope, endure, & operate from Wisconsin, mid-North America, the USA.

I claim to have become as expert as it is possible to be regarding the fast-transforming USA — tho I am almost never attended to, & there is plenty I don’t know that has already happened & is happening — but I have begun to trust my own judgment more than those whose ideas are more frequently cited & amplified — including tech tycoons, other millionaires & billionaires, & political “leaders” foreign & domestic, as well as probably a majority of my neighbors who assume I’m just one of the losers, & the bureaucrats & their AI assistants attempting to lock me into the categories they imagine I fit in or am trying to fit into — likewise, most of the bureaucratic literati & those whose work is presenting the arts to the general public, to one another, & to the philanthropists.

In my 80’s, I am early in the process of becoming a competent wright & competitor to control & allocate shared resources. I began about as incompetent as it was possible to be — so I don’t claim to be much along these lines, yet.

Since I will have to live a long time, radically frugal, to complete changing the world forever for better, one person (especially myself) at a time, I make longevity a priority — fit, composed, & robust, I aim to be — emerging from an unusually long embryonic stage, in which I survived mainly by luck & barely sufficient intuition. Of course, almost everything is beyond my control, often occurring faster than I notice — so that, decades later, I finally become aware of an event or series of events, or of its or their significance.

I have begun to hope that I can make & follow a plan — the elements & integration of which I am gradually becoming aware, & attempting to focus — no one yet sharing, acknowledging, or supporting it, or suspecting anything like it might be viable — tho it will benefit many, when successful. I still need & hereby ask for help.

It has been over so many decades, that I often feel as tho no one has ever invested in me — but, thinking about it, I realize that some people who didn’t need to do it, encouraged me, wrote me letters of recommendation, gave me rides! — & sometimes even sent me cash or checks — some famous people, some you’ve never heard of. Thanks! I’m working at earning it!

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