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25 August 2009
Disillusionment. That is what I am currently feeling and feeling more and more each day. That does not preclude my otherwise assessment that I am enjoying a happy life. But now that I am on the Turtle Island side of 'the pond', it seems a steady litany of violations, ignoble revelations and masterful deceit – all on unprecedented levels, and this not only by a stream of American administrations let alone a wider and more pervasive corporate-financial-military cartel as well as, now, the counter-blemish of terrorism. Can we really not see that the two, the ruling elite and the jihadists, have become intrinsically linked?
I do not think of the two linked in conspiracy, conscious agreement, but rather as systemic/counter-systemic institutional reactions. But then, even that possibility of a mutually agreed upon covert undertaking (911 for a starter) is not unthinkable. And what if it were? We still have the same enemy – whether the unconscious consequences of a controlling mechanism, or the pre-agreed stage play by actor-players that renders us no less as dupes.
Life is hard. And maybe we do not need to go the lengths of Freud and company to seek to 'tame nature', but nor do we need to surrender the aesthetic. There is a dignity of beauty, and we Americans and Western culturists are rapidly losing it. We could also be irreversibly losing our terrestrial arena as a viable organic phenomenon. That too. And perhaps these are all linked, but the non-democratic oligarchy nature of even many of our so-called 'democracies' let alone totalitarian regimes is obviously what we need now to change.
When do we begin to speak as a people? When do we harness the true majority? When do we free ourselves from manipulation, institutional stealth and unnecessary degradation? As an identified and speaking people? When does the majority bypass the politicians, the lawyers, generals and big-cheese managers to solve problems – however laboriously – but to solve them?
Our cyber-capital demands seemingly ever-increasing payment, let alone the risk of take-over control by the powers-that-be, but I am more and more coming to believe that, for better or worse, it is the resource through which a folk voice can be articulated. The thrust of what I believe is a viable if not only recourse I am suggesting to term 'trans-global communication' (TGC). It needs to 'transcend' all the participating particularities, transcend even the 'successes' of globalism and globalization, to become an active conversation between like-minded and like-willing. The TGC need be an open forum where dishonesty is moved to the side and examined, where the myopic becomes ready for exchange and discovery, where all hindrance and attempt at diminishing the conversation and its participants is forbidden and marginalized.
How much longer must we wait before the TGC begins and puts to the side the various forms of impediment? If it is a conversation, it needs to be heard. With a TGC consensus we can turn to mediation/arbitration of disputes – however painstakingly – as our chief means toward negotiable co-existence. Everyone is entitled to a piece of the pie. Some may have a bigger piece than others but not at the price of enslavement, terror, ecologically destructive offerings or basic human indignities.
I know we are all busy. Life seems increasingly designed to prevent us the capacity to insure change. But if life is becoming increasing a defective system, and we are unable to change the system, we need then to transcend/bypass the system. We need to let an organic democracy supersede the faux democracies, the nominal democracies, and the medium of cyber communication might just be the emerging agent to give us a chance.
27 August 2009
This is only a start and most likely will run past the conclusion to the dies festi of August [but it didn't], but the Opiconsivia9 feedback has been interesting and varied; some predictable, some not. Don, in the former category, came first out with: "Your lengthy diatabe can be summed up in a few words - we all use them in one form or another - Life these days sucks wherever one lives. Oh well! shit happens. Always has and always will." And today, in response to the Sara Robinson: "Surely this can be encapsulated into a smaller edition. Attention span for most people - with topic being politics or political hisory - is very short. Great for the buffs but for the rest of us who know via experience gained with age there is not a goddam thing we can do about the crap the articles like this falls on deaf ears. With luck scanned but not read in depth." My reaction? Scanning is fine. We may only be able to absorb that for which we are ready - let alone that there are different ways of absorbing. Sometimes it may work more like sortilege - and something randomly embedded within triggers an insight or thought (the deity 'speaks' to you). It is all metaphor, perhaps - especially when we are conversing on co-nature/the co-natural, but trans-global exchange is both active and implicit - and that's what it is all about from here out.
If I need to do it myself, I will - but I am conceiving this more as an interactively led phenomenon involving perhaps Tom & Bill as the first who come off the top of my head.
Michael, who first sent the Robinson insight, responds to Opiconsivia as follows: " I share your disillusionment, but not your optimism about TGC. The new cyber media can be overwhelmed with disinformation, and those with power and wealth will find the means to protect the status quo. Just look at what happened to the health care reform debate in the USA: highjacked by fearmongers." But then adds: "Still, hope may come from some unforeseen quarter."
I fully recognise the risks involved with cyber-communication and the danger of infiltration, take-over, manipulation and control. But are we not at least as clever? In the least, we might cultivate a consensus on the genuine and build from there. O, have I alarmed some of you? If so, good. This is communication, and we need to develop strategies for 'outing' the disingenuous infiltrators. That cannot be impossible. Difficult, challenging - yes, but not impossible. This attitude has to be our only option - one uneasily between the doomsayers and head-in-the-sand ostriches.
Swamiji:
"oh my dear one.
i knew it was going to be hard on you and dear richard when you got to the states.
it hit me like a wave of fear mixed with inhumanity when i got here. that is why after the cancer operation i wrote you that i had to leave. everything you said in Opiconsivia9
was sadly right on.
what coming here to the states has done for me was to make me stronger inside although. it can make one feel like they are standing naked, unarmed, alone before the masses just for being right. i am sorry, but the earth is not flat. it seams like being right no longer matters here. the far right wing nuts have 24/7 media coverage. radio, TV. Internet all saying the same lies and half truths. with the Internet one can find some truth but one really has to dig for it. if there is anything i can do to be of help to you and yours please let me know.
mahadevananda"
Great! Swamiji is onboard. And, yes, it's sad. And the truth of this last does not, ironically, preclude living ecstatically happy at the same time. I guess it's no longer a time of black-and-white but instead a horrendous jumble of many, many things. Are we speeding up to the end? Perhaps, and if so, make it a wondrous and joy-filled ride. But maybe at the same time we might just grab the mantle and steer the course.
Jake comes right out with "Right on, man!" with, in addition, the wonderfully apropos "If this message seems rude or short, it's only because I wrote it on my iphone!" And, no, I am not yet trusting Facebook.
Then Barbara laments: "Sorry to hear this. I think Obama made a major mistake -- not taking his major windfall/mandate to places it could have gone. He was too careful because of the Clinton experience. But Clinton didn't have the mandate Obama had. Clinton got in on a squeak because of Ross Perot. Obama had a "movement" behind him. Now he's squandered it. His supporters are disillusioned like you. (Even if they are not disillusioned by Obama; they still see the right wing going nuts and gaining traction.) I'm not sure Obama can get it back." But he has to. Can we not remind him / hold him to his mantra and say, "Yes, you can"? "Yes, we can!" Did we think it was going to happen overnight? That phrase encapsulates what the conversation is about. Let's, then, start conversing; let's start 'canning'!
I thought Obama's holiday-interrupted address over the death of Senator Teddy Kennedy showed a weak and defeated man. Vice President Biden was much more believable. For the Pres, I keep hearing Tom's earlier statement, "They've got to him!" Over and over. But is it now just too late, or can we still do something? And if this last, then what? On the Opiconsivia occasion, Tom says, "Nothing in the past year has disillusioned me more than, after work, I turned on the TV, the news, and there was footage of Obama playing golf on Martha's Vinyard with the president of UBS, a big campaign contributor under federal investigation. That's not who I voted for." Me neither. And I think there are enough of us, or could be/become enough of us, to let him know about that and start him - insist - on the road to disengagement with that contingent. If not, the game is surely up - unless as Richard puts it, "the surreal [and he adds, most or many people confuse the supernatural with the surreal] is probably the only thing that's going to save [sic.] us" Bron, Graham, Hitchens, Dawkins and others might cringe at any implication of a supernatural as a distracting impediment - and usually they are unable to separate it from a personal entity [e.g., God] on top of it all, but an active intervention of a metaphor might provide that needed disjunction to get us back on track.
For Lois, "Just because they dress in Armani suits they are still tribesmen with bad teeth. We the American people, acting like the world police run around the world casting democracy on countries like so much confetti, we are acting like a shameful epople. Countries look at America with disdain, I am embarrassed. Cyberworld just spreads the nonsense more quickly.Corporate/financial america will eventually sink under its own weight." And there is an American problem, but the conversation cannot just be among ourselves but with our Western and global comrades as well. We might start by addressing all the problems. Before solving them, let's ritually declare them as a starter. Ms Paganus (correctly 'paganus' as in 'lpaganus') concludes with: "WE HAVE SEEN THE ENEMY AND HE IS US....REMEMBER? LOVE LOIS"
Anne agrees with my original posting and says: "Yes, we have lost beauty and the sense of beauty and maybe this is the real problem as the loss of our terrestrial arena as a viable organic phenomenon. I believe that the solution is only the return to organic communities." And I agree with this as well. I see our viable future as one in which we focus upon our immediate and local communities - something currently seemingly beyond our mall-culture and the like. But it is going to be, and needs to be, a world that is radically different than the one many of us inhabit at present. And it ain't gonna be easy. Like Bette Davis' "Old age ain't for sissies," a viable organic evolution (let alone a saving of the day) 'ain't for sissies'.
Stay tuned,
Michael
28 August 2009
And Noah adds: "I didn't follow this one so easily... I could feel though some disillusionment, frustration and oppression... as they say: Life these days sucks wherever one lives.
Eat cheese, don't go mad; or better, smoke weed, keep madness.
«As a small child, I [feel] in my heart two contradictory feelings, the horror of life and the ecstasy of life.» (Baudelaire)
Much love from Noah!"
While Don comments: "One can philosophize, theorize, breast beat and do the big boohoo with tears a plenty until the cows come home but it still boils down to the fact that we have no control over events, political or otherwise, and life still sucks and will do so long after were dead and long forgotten. And believe you me - we will be forgotten in a very short time - Cannot be bothered with this stuff. I have more important and pressing matters - such as meditating on the lint in my navel, assisting a friend here in my home going through wretched Tina withdrawal, finding palliative care for him soon due to anal skin cancer and a few other issues such as own declining health. Sorry, Michael, my plate is very full of very real to-hand serious issues. I live in the real world, feet on the ground, and cannot be bothered with that over which I have no control and never will. Great stuff for people with little to do who live effete lives. Such is not my situation. I am a caregiver and deal with reality not pipe dreams. Later, Don "
On the 30th of August, Swami Ji writes: "what can i say. when people elect a professional politician --Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary--
says POLITICIAN --1 : a person experienced in the art or science of government; especially : one actively engaged in conducting the business of a government
2 a : a person engaged in party politics as a profession b : a person primarily interested in political office for selfish or other narrow usually short-sighted reasons.
and then when the politician starts acting like a politician some are surprised.
as for when obama was flipped was before he was elected. he and hillary clinton meet with the
bildebergers and were given their marching orders as how things were going to be.
this happened at the brook street resort. i am sure you know of the council on foreign relations (CFR) the trilateral commission, the club of rome.
the bildebergers are the ones who run things now so if you want to change things on a large scale then find out which one of your friends is in the bildeberg group and have them do it.
i was not joking when i said i would and will help you in any non violent action you want me to. i do not offer this lightly but with all my heart. if nothing else please know besides richard i will always be there for you and richard,,, no matter what i got your backs."
The following day he adds: " here in the USA children are sent to adult prison for life without parole that means they will die in prison, without the possibility of a second chance at life. locking children up forever for crimes committed when they are 13 too young to vote, drink, drive why??? because they are children, !!!
city of newark nj has started turning the water off of those who have not paid their water bill. the landlords do not pay the water bill then the tenets who pay rent that includes water in all apartments go with out water it is not like one can dig a well in a concrete jungle..
fliers were posted last week throughout the city, on all the affected properties, notifying residents of the impending shut-offs this week.
"The owner of this property has failed to make payment for water and sewer services," the flier says. It also says that once the water is shut off, it may take up to two to seven working days for the water to begin flowing again after the delinquent bill is paid.
Anyone trying to illegally siphon water after it is shut off will be fined and sent to jail, the flier says.
"Should the occupant/owner turn on the water, it will be shut off again, the shut-off at the curb will be dug up, plugged or capped and the excavation refilled," the notice says.
the city has shut off water to delinquent customers in the past, but curtailed the practice a few years ago officials said. the water department is returning to the shut-offs to get customers to pay up.
now about the future; the children.......here in the USA they are putting children as young as 13 adult prisons for life without parole. oh the privatization of prisons is in full swing. why let out humans early or at all if the government is paying you $20,108 per year to keep an inmate in prison nation's jail and prison population has climbed to 2.3 million people this year, or about one in every 100 adults. not counting the ones at guantanamo bay and the rest of the secret prisons around the globe. we wont even get into the practice of shackling women prisoners while they give birth.
here is a URL about the children in for life. http://www.eji.org/eji/childrenprison .
in california. gov-ba-Na-tor Schwarzenegger is shutting down the schools to save money. money he has and is giving to big biz the ones who put him in office..
in many schools there 2- schools in one or 3 or 4. meaning children stand or sit on the floor. so many drop out. schwarzenegger is going to close 80 percent of california state parks
In all, 220 of california's 279 state parks,
he is going to cut 5 more school days from the 180 year the kids have now.
that means the children of to day here get 1.97 (all most 2 years) less than you and richard received back when you were wee ones.
classrooms are closing, summer schools have been canceled and music and art are being scrubbed. but there still is all the money for football that the teams needs. -- he likes football.
as for no summer school that means the mother and or father need to pay for summer school or day care or not work or if they have friends or family who can be co- parents for 8 or 14 hours during the 6 months of summer.
i have friends in the us military who are in the few wars in the middle east the us is in. they can not get out. the higher ups just keep sending them back for another tour of duty.
the a.p.h.a. says ''veterans are twice as likely as non-veterans to complete suicide and more active-duty soldiers are now taking their own lives than are being killed in combat in iraq and afghanistan. The latest Army report reveals that in one month, January, 2009, the number of suicides by deployed soldiers was six times as many as killed themselves in January 2008, the year in which the suicide rate surpassed all previous years. There were 128 confirmed suicides plus another 15 suspected suicides in 2008. Suicide among active duty soldiers in 2008 exceeded that of the general US population.
i am sure you know all these things. so i will stop.
please keep on keeping on.
two hands blessings for you both.
mahadevanand. "
And I replied to him on the 1st of September:
"The latest Army report reveals that in one month, January, 2009, the number of suicides by deployed soldiers was six times as many as killed themselves in January 2008, the year in which the suicide rate surpassed all previous years. There were 128 confirmed suicides plus another 15 suspected suicides in 2008. Suicide among active duty soldiers in 2008 exceeded that of the general US population."
On this one alone, I went to an anti-war rally (a candle-light vigil for peace?) a couple of years back during which someone announced that there were six times as many vets who had committed suicide who had fought in Vietnam as there were soldiers who had died in the combat. I realised that my brother was one of those six times.
We're in the Big Apple for the week and seem to be having email only sporadically.