Changing the world forever for better

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

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

I paid for college, working office, factory, and warehouse jobs. Most of my teachers were relatively oblivious of unjust allocation of resources and effort, sporadic wars, and resulting suffering humanity inflicts upon humanity. My fellow students had money to attend football games and 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 Committee, walked up next to me on a march through MIssissippi, and 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 and 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 was undermining, and to cite them, per protocol. As I wouldn’t, I didn’t get the Ph.d.

Still to avoid being drafted, I hitchhiked back and forth across the USA several times — no address or phone number. I slept outside, subsisted mainly on roasted soybeans and water, accepted occasional brief hospitality, and worked at a series of entry level jobs, including low level teaching jobs.

Whether I would have had the courage to resist becoming a Ph.d. and university professor (and earn about a million dollars over the decades, that I never earned), had I understood that what I wrote would not find people willing and 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, and have never stopped. But sometimes 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. 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 literature and philosophy, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska; and mathematics on the Navajo Nation (reservation) and 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, December, put me to work as a member of a crew assembling conveyor belts and giant storage racks in factories in the area bounded by Tennessee, Ohio, Illinois, and Wisconsin.

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

In turn, this led to occasional assignments ever since, regarding litigation involving industrial and agricultural injuries — as a self-employed consultant. It sounds fancier than it is — but I did have to organize, operate, and manage a business, per state and federal rules, including accounting, in order to pay taxes.

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

Since 1985, I cope, endure, and 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 — though I am almost never attended to, and there is plenty I don’t know that has already happened and is happening — but I have begun to trust my own judgment more than those whose ideas are more frequently cited and amplified.

I am early in the process of becoming a competent wright and competitor to control and 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, on scarce rations, to complete changing the world forever for better, one person (especially myself) at a time, I make longevity a priority — emerging from an unusually long embryonic stage, in which I survived mainly by luck and 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.

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

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