something following me

An old Procol Harum song, it’s about someone essentially confronting death.  “Imagine my surprise/I thought I left it at home/but there’s no doubt about it/ it’s my own tombstone.”  The tombstone sits next to the guy in the movies, at the dentist, everywhere.  Which, when you think about it, is a bit like where we find ourselves now.  We are followed, and even preceded, everywhere by the potential of death and destruction.

There are lots of deaths we all experience of course aside from the deaths of the living beings we care for and know. Attitudes, dreams and situations die out in our lives.  Beliefs die.  This is a good thing, of course, if we keep focus on our hearts and what is in fact true.  Not easy, but more dynamic than fitting oneself into a space created by some larger entity like one’s family or country or politics. Or religion, or…an endless list, Gentle Reader.

In any event! In this rather dismal period we now live in and through, the fundamental issue is that things are not at all what they seemed to be, or what we were told they are or were. The foundation of things is, and has been, rotten. No getting away from it. The truth is coming to light every day and a lot of it is excruciatingly painful.  Even if one thought one knew at least some of this before? Things like the fact that George Washington, far from having wooden teeth, had dentures made from the teeth he pulled from the mouths of his slaves. (How could you even conceive of “owning” another human being? I can’t even say I own my Dog.) So yes, dear, the “father” of our country was in fact pretty much a massive bastard.  And you don’t have to wait.  There’s a lot more.  Some simple research into the actual origins of “police departments” will be revealing, just for one instance.  I suggest soda crackers and 7up be handy while you do this, just in case you make yourself sick. Which you probably will because it links to many more actual facts that are just about precisely opposite to what is being put out as truthful history.

So as always, what is to be done? That old saying, if you’re not part of the solution you’re part of the problem is really true.  Just as you wouldn’t allow some icky slimy mold to grow on, say, your toothbrush, you can’t act like the slimy mold of the current milieu does not exist.  You must clean your metaphorical toothbrush.  You cannot hide behind the hateful tropisms of the powers which are doing their damndest to stay in control.  To do this is to actually say: you’re OK with evil.  People’s suffering doesn’t matter, not really.  Not as long as you have your security (illusory at best) and privilege and life continues on more or less as usual.  People will deny that this is what it is, of course.  Me? Hateful and racist? Sexist and bigoted? Selfish? oh no.  But I AM better than most other people. And it is my right….blahblahblah…to do whatever the fuck I want no matter what the effect is on anything else.  My wishes are all that matter.  Forge ahead, oil companies! Who cares how many people are homeless in this world? Doesn’t really affect me!

What this sort of thing does to those who are outside that particular loop is nightmarish.  Traumatic. Crazy making. It makes you think twenty times before you do anything. Not to mention it all being a travesty of what is professed to be true.  George Carlin said, they call it the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe in it.  And this is what it looks like now to me, in a way.  The sleepers are refusing to awake and the bed is on fire.

The Dalai Lama has said non-violence takes a long time.  And it does.  And, ultimately, nothing is really achieved through violence and anger- those energies have to be harnessed to work cleaning all those toothbrushes, so to speak.  Personally I really don’t know exactly how to proceed given that at times I think a rocket launcher would be a good thing, except for striving to set aside the fear that keeps one from speaking out, from disagreeing with people, from allowing things to go on unremarked.  But. The time is now to stand in the light and see what can be done right in front of you, for a start.  And that does mean speaking up, at a minimum.  What is wrong is compounding the suffering on this earth.  What is right is working to alleviate that suffering as much as one possibly can.  What is right is also LEARNING and OBSERVING and HEARING.  Every day.

Blessings and thanks to you all! Keep healthy and safe.  Meanwhile, here? It’s 107F and the fire planes are zooming around.

 

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for God’s sake (possible diatribe alert)

While it is quite true, Gentle Reader, that my own little life has completely blown apart lately, it is also true that it is coming back together again, however Walter Mitty-like the repairs may be at the moment.  Fountain pens only go so far…….

But.

I just have to say: the Loser of the Popular Vote is indeed a total loser.  He is a reprehensible example of human form and in one short week? He’s managed to spew evil sauce over the world- oh, except the parts where he has investments.  This bullshit about refugees and immigrants and Muslims, taxes, health care, abortion, and that infernal wall!  Has to stop now.  If you call yourself a Christian? ASK YOURSELF WHAT JESUS WOULD DO.  Oh, and btw? You might remember who Jesus was, ethnically and geographically speaking.  And what it was HE actually  espoused.  Not a bunch of men who wrote a book hundreds of years later to reinforce their supposed right to authority over that most of evanescent of things, a human soul. You might stop and think about just exactly where your own family came from.  Because in checking the historical record?  This hemisphere was not inhabited by White people and Europeans to begin with. ( Or even Black people- they got to get here the really fun way, after all.) So, for your perusal, today’s word is immigration.  And today is when we should all step up and disentangle the concept of immigration from the concept of genocide- which has been used as an enforcement mechanism on both sides of the issue.  You may think that is an overstatement but I suggest a little cogitation on the subject. Unless you want to adopt immigration as a thing for Whites and dominant paradigm upholders only and continue to pretend that nobody is ever there before YOU arrive.  I suspect this would exclude women altogether, just as an aside.  Unless they’re approved emigre attachments.  Like the wife of the loser of the popular vote.

Every policy ” ” (and I use that word VERY loosely) he espouses is built on hate, exclusion, selfishness and fear mongering.   Stupidity sandwich.   If we do not all stand up now, right now, and make this stop? If only some of us stand and make the attempt in good faith and love? Those who do not stand up will have an awful lot of shit on their hands.  And they will deserve it.

I know violence does not work.  Anger is a dangerous knife.  But so is inattention and inaction.  This may well be the natural way of things in the unfolding of cosmic history.  But.  Given that we do not, and most likely cannot?, know that? We have an obligation as human beings to do unto others- and that means all others- as we would have them do unto us.  And yes, I know that means, literally, love thine enemy.  I can’t quite get to love at this point but I can get to deeply breathed tolerance of those who trample the light and the good under their feet.  Tolerance may build bridges, and bridges link things and progress can be made.  I’m struggling with Martin Luther King Jr’s essay, from the ’50’s, on the experiment of love in effecting change.  But I attempt to draw on the wisdom there in my daily life.  And tolerance does not mean not resisting.

Luddite that I am, I haven’t been able to do a reblog, but terriermandotcom.blogspot.com was right on today- I’m With Her.  A brilliant friend also suggested that we all observe the Islamic five daily times of prayer, wherever we are out in the world, by stopping for a moment, stepping aside if we’re in a line or something somewhere? and gently, concisely, explaining what we’re doing and why.  I’m in.  How about you?

Blessings and thanks.

picking up the pieces

Good lord, Gentle Reader.  I completely lost it last night after seeing, yet again, a shameless, depraved, pointless and nasty execution on the evening news.  For a minute I thought I might be “getting used to” this stuff, but.  NO.  NO.  It is time, Gentle Readers, to stand up and say absolutely not, no more, get your heads out of the paper bags and think.  Living as we do in a place where people snarf around about second amendment rights and how “law abiding citizens are being turned into criminals” with “background checks required!”, it never goes too well when I ask what about your basic right to life?  What about your basic right not to get shot dead by someone just because they can?  The out of control emotion in the voices of the shooting officers sounds to me as though they are too unbalanced to be performing their duties.  What about that? Those who protect and serve all too often ignore and ravage and aren’t even as mentally well adjusted as the perps they arrest.  What has happened to people?  I walked into the garden and just stood there last night.  Wondering what I can do about all this.

So, today when an Adele song came on the radio as I was driving home from a lengthy waste of time cum frustrating ritual public humiliation (Medical tests needed.  Medical tests not paid for by my “insurance”. No medical tests for you, in that case, so bye bye.  All of it happening in full view of a dozen or so people.) it seemed not unreasonable to burst into tears in the privacy of the Trusty Subaru.  And, bursting into tears can be quite therapeutic- it gets the static out of your wavelength, and then you can, from a calmer state of being, approach whatever it is that’s making you cry.  At least that’s what I tell myself.  So it’s just pretty strange, because while I KNOW that it is all energy and all moving in the direction it is intended to move, and that knowing gives me a degree of peace…at the same time? It just seems to all be blowing up as we speak and it’s indeed hard to keep the faith.  Of course that just makes it more necessary.  So I’ll do what I always do in these drastic moments: cook.  And say some prayers for all of those grieving for their loved ones, everywhere. My hope is we can all put down our anger, and pick up Love wherever it was last seen.

Thank you.

Things That Go Bump In The Night

Karl Marx had it pretty well figured out, I’ve always thought.  Good concept, poor execution in terms of what Communism became.  But really, we have an outstanding example of “false class identification” in Herman Cain’s revealed strong connections to the Koch Brothers.  I’m sorry, but really.  How any black person could, let’s just say it, get in bed with people who have, even if you don’t get it, an avowed program that on its’ face is racist and sexist and capitalist in the worst sense of the word and aimed at maintaining, nay exalting, the very things that are corrupting our current system unto death.  These very things that keep the rich rich and the poor poor and everything that goes along with that., all over the world and which, not to put too fine a point on it, keep people uneducated and hungry and how many of those people are “of color”.  Ever wonder, Herman?  How corporate manipulation and power and greed have brought our beautiful earth to within a hair’s breadth of destruction, no matter how dark your designer shades are?  So to me this means that the pursuit of money, or the American Dream, causes people to completely lose touch with themselves, what makes them human, what gives them heart and life meaning.  Money ain’t ever gonna do THAT.  So there it is, another presidential candidate who’s actually a Replicant.  Not a Republican, Gentle Reader, but a Replicant.  Downright scary, if you ask me.

In related news, the moneyed classes are once again waving their pitchforks at medical marijuana; the California Medical Association voted this past week to endorse the position that there is little medical value, apparently, flying in the face of actual FACTS. [EDITOR’S NOTE: Our bad! It was the NIH that expressed the no use concept, and the California Medical Association came out in favor of medicinal use, and expanded studies on same.  So, kudos to them! and we’ll try to keep the fluff out of our ears in future] But we don’t need to pay attention to those pesky things!!! No Way!!!!   The Department of Justice has spoken and once again determined that This Menace Must Be Stopped and the good Medical Association, thinking for itself as usual, falls right in line.  After all, people are now, at the moment anyway in 16 states, able to get medicine they really need, safely, and people can actually generate income for themselves and their families, safely and honestly, by selling this medicine to dispensaries.  What the hell is going on here???  You should be happy to be in pain, suffer from your chemo, and also be unemployed, instead of embracing something that provides a wide variety of good things (like fiber for clothes and paper, oil, nutrition, medicine)?  Because some person at some high level some where thinks it’s a bad thing, which means they are also ignoring quite a substantial amount of not only research and study but thousands of years of anecdotal evidence?   Admittedly since we are continually having to deal with human beings things get much stupider than they should but that is no reason to throw the baby out with the bath water.  Personally I think this continued ridiculous inclusion of marijuana as a controlled substance on the same level as heroin is because of one thing.  That one thing is that big pharma, big tobacco, big whoevers, haven’t been able to figure out a way to make all the money in this particular market.  They’re not likely any time soon to get a monopoly on seed stock.  They’re kind of shut out, so they’re taking their toys and going home.  Except they’re leaving their attorneys and tax collectors behind.

What else.  Let’s see.  Oh yes.  I went slightly berserk after last week’s Newsweek cover featured a plump, caucasian baby, with a related story about how people are getting sperm donated by using (ANOTHER FAVORITE AROUND HERE) social media to link up with sperm donors who arrive with penis massagers in tow to their local Starbuck’s, where the..er…desired substance is produced and then strapped into place on the questing recipient’s interior region..So suddenly I saw in my mind’s eye another picture.  This picture was of another caucasian hand, holding in it an entire black forearm and tiny hand:  A small child, dying of starvation in Africa.  It seemed to me that your eyes would just turn to fire if you were someplace, where the babies’ arms look like twigs, going on and on past all that needless suffering, and those fire tears would turn into fury. All the people, all the animals, all the waters and land and trees, that are suffering needless agonies and desecrations.   And what do we do about THAT? Do we just continue populating and populating as though it doesn’t matter how many frigging people we put on this earth?  On this earth that is controlled by interests that both promote this situation, and care nothing for those in it, as long as their interests- financial of course- are served?  People who think they can sell RIVERS and patent potatoes?  The people and groups who do work to remedy these ills are surely overtaxed and although I am sure this is not a popular sentiment, wouldn’t it make better sense to contribute to helping the people who are already here instead of just continually making more?  This really is an issue that should be addressed in a serious and thoughtful manner.  So far I haven’t seen that happening.  Twenty percent of the children in THIS country live in poverty.  Think about the Congo.  Or Peru.  Isn’t that something that deserves attention?  What about everybody learning how to read? or having enough to eat?

Oh, dear.  I’ve ranted again.  But so many people never say what they really feel or think, and hide what they really are, and so many more appear not to really feel or think anything independently of what they’re propagandized about.  Sometimes one despairs.  Except my Rose of Sharon bloomed, finally, and it is BEAUTIFUL.  Hope springs eternal.