The Roman New Year of March 2014

In 1970, I abandoned San Francisco and moved to Europe. “It’s YOU he’s looking up to … don’t let him down” the caption under my photo concluded when I was used for a war bond advertisement at the age of three by the Buffalo Evening News. Thirty years later, thanks to Nixon and the curtain-is-falling cultural clash of the times, I felt that I had been and had resolved to flee. The day I actually left the city was the day of the Kent State shootings of Vietnam-protesting students by the US National Guard.

I had vowed at the time never to return to America other than for funerals. A year later I did precisely that for that of my brother – one of the post-Vietnam veteran suicides whose final number trebled that of the number of war casualties itself. A year after that, I agonised over whether I should break my vow and attend my sister’s wedding. One morning after a week of indecision, I invoked my brother’s spirit for a sign and asked as I was doing my morning pull-ups that if I should go back to America to let the pull-up bar break loose from the wall. It had never done so before, and it has never done it since after more than another forty years, but suddenly on this occasion I found myself on my knees on the floor with the bar in my hands. I accepted that I could not have received a clearer sign from my brother, and so I went.

Ten years later, Richard and I made our first round-the-world excursion  and re-entered America via the State of Hawaii. More or less ten years after that, we bought our house in San Francisco. More than ten years after that, we sold that house and I inherited my mother’s beach-front condo in Rhode Island. The bottom half of this was destroyed during hurricane Sandy; the upper half was destroyed this year when a water-pipe burst during the severe arctic freeze. And now, thanks to a renewed sense of being ‘let-down’, I am again moving toward the desire to abandon my original homeland – again ironically because of her war-mentality, her lies, her bloated war-(ostensibly) defence budget that may exceed the war-budgets of every other country combined and http://www.occupy.com/tags/report-foreign-banks-and-financial-accounts & http://americansabroad.org/issues/taxation/what-do-you-risk-not-paying-your-us-tax/ - which affect me directly by radically reducing my retirement savings in a Europe that has become steadily and increasingly prohibitively expensive from the time I first had moved here.

Measured against the illegal wars the US has engaged in, the renditions, illegal detentions, spying, surveillance and the non-payment of US Federal income tax by 26 top corporations (http://rt.com/usa/low-corporate-tax-rates-275/), I have no real choice but to resist. Many may not agree with me, but the world imperial ambitions of my birth country are astonishing, and the tax outreach demand to citizens living abroad is a peculiarly American law that is not one that is shared by any other Western country and may only be shared, in fact, with North Korea.

For the immediate future, I will do what I am obligated to do, but the longer term decision on what national legality I may wish to retain and/or honour seems already to be solidifying. Yesterday was the Roman New Year day, and Richard and I celebrated with a shamanic walk. Reflecting on the course I am thinking to take made everything I saw and did feel as if it were suddenly the first time I was experiencing a foreign world – akin to my respective experience fifty-three and forty-four years ago. Maybe I have already made up my mind. The emotional relief I found myself feeling after the past three weeks that coincided with the retrograde motion of the planet Mercury would suggest as much. It was in fact the most onerous retrograde period I can remember, and my main computer remains still in the restoration mode. The networks of the firm that stores my backups went down, and when Scott was able finally to fit me into his schedule, we could not secure a functioning connection. Both bankcards have been phished. House insurance here is, I have just learned, several years in arrears. And on and on.

Richard could not be a more loving support through all this. I have remained busy with my work on mysticism. It has been lovely having Chloe living in the house, and we have had some fine dinners together – both at home and out (Shiva, Sherpa, De Kas and Wilde Zwijnen). And we had a great time with Barbara and Patrick’s friends Annie and Steve who stayed with us for two nights - let alone dinners with Stephan, Koen, Jim, Santima, Pierre, Michael, Beverly, Santima, Fred, Faye, Gin, Saskia, Pauline and doubtlessly others as well.

Overall there remains a comfort in realising that there is probably only a twenty year maximum left in which one has to suffer disappointment on virtually every front, experience powerlessness let alone pain and incapacity, witness horror and to resist. More and more I find myself championing Nietzsche’s over-person who stands against both the herd mentality and Big Brother intimidation. I do not believe in war, but if and when necessary, I am a warrior.