JABBERWOOKIE, CHAPTER 2

St George and the Dragnet

They came into the neighborhood in full combat armor and armament, blew up the houses and shot fleeing neighbors in their tracks. One turned to the other and said, “These fucking raghead terrorists are such cheating cowards, they won’t even wear a uniform.”

Thank you, Saint George, for your clarity of purpose and staunch will to stay the course until you win. The overwhelming portion of violent resistence to your benevolent bringing of freedom, democracy and Christ to these heathens were glad you were coming until you got here and are now willing to explode themselves to get rid of you.

The overwhelming portion of the all too passive resistance to your stopping terrorists there so they don’t come here with their not quite ready mushroom cloud believed your lying agenda until you got there and are now willing to grumble up their sleeve while hoping you notice your falling popularity rating in the polls.

Wake up folks, the most official resistance to Saint George’s crusade to make the world safe for the big people is a congress of big people who just gave him one-hundred-forty-two-billion dollars and their blessings to kill fifty people every day for as long has he thinks there is something left to win. I don’t condone violence of any form, but it is going to take an awfully big shake to bring our national conscience awake to our indifferent complicity in his use of our children to do his murderous bidding and the will to stop it by, with and for the people. Waiting until Saint George’s time to leave the throne only keeps it warm for the next war profiteer and lets him skate off to the Fletcher Memorial Home for Wasters of Life and Limb for drinks with Nixon and LBJ.

One

For Lilwave,
Our debate of late
Has centered the tongs on the truth
The essence in that block of ice
Is directly between
So it can be seen
Jesus wants us to let God in.
Buddha wants us to let God out.

The dynamo
Behind the spark of life
As we reward our selves
With the karma laden canvas
We paint with our lives
Of what we think we see —
And of who we think it is
That sees it.

One thing
Endlessly dissectible
Eternally one
No matter what is done.

FORGET MEMORIAL DAY, REMEMBER HISTORY

“Those who forget history are bound to repeat it.” — Woodrow Wilson

Ever since I read Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States my innate skepticism has been enhanced to the point that my suspension of disbelief is virtually nonexistent. I can still enjoy a good old flight of fancy when it is obvious that what I witness is admittedly fiction or excellent poetry, but anyone claiming to speak the truth falls into the bin with snake oil salesmen, lawyers and candidates until I can determine that lying would bring them no advantage.

This rant was initiated innocently enough by watching a movie, until I noted that this is “Memorial Day” weekend, when motorists do their damnedest to keep up with the body count of war.

Even historical fiction can fail to carry me along with it if events demonstrate the writer is oblivious to nature. Already skeptical about Mel Gibson’s gore soaked yawn, Apocalypto, due to my thirty year interest in Mayan culture, I had no problem rebuking the entire movie when our hero, Jaguar Paw, was spared certain ticker extraction, decapitation and a tossing from the pyramid by a solar eclipse, only to flee through the jungle that night by the light of the full moon!!! Talk about your continuity gaffes.

Although his understanding of planetary nature may be more accurate than Gibson’s, the endearment of Al Gore to the gullible presidential savior seekers due to his book, An Inconvenient Truth, comes at the expense of their memory of his complete betrayal of voter faith in him throughout his eight year term as a vice-president elected on the strength of his environmental concerns. The Clinton administration did no more to stop environmental destruction than the present one.

Speaking of which, we now come to Dribbleya and his treating suicidal terrorists as if they were some united army he named “Al Kaeda” so he could have his disastrous war. He invaded Afghanistan to get Osama bin Laden and Iraq to get Saddam Hussein with an armed force large enough to completely destroy the infrastructure of both countries and murder twenty innocent civilians for every terrorist as the acceptable collateral damage of his insanity. He learned that trick from his father, who destroyed the infrastructure of Panama and murdered three thousand innocent civilians on the pretext of getting one villain, Manuel Norriega. Dad’s covert purpose was to disqualify Panama from assuming control of the Panama canal as was scheduled to occur in 2000. The son’s not so covert purpose is to divvy up Iraqi oil among his private oil company supporters. His overt result is making “Al Kaeda” a rallying point for the burgeoning, newly created terrorists.

I.F. Stone’s admonition to fledgling journalists was, “Governments Lie!” And the mindless gullible persist in depending on and voting for them with the aid of journalists who ignored him.

Those who forge history are bound (and determined) to repeal it.

METAMORPHORS: METAMORPHIC METAPHORS

Words to open the third door of perception to how our persistence of vision weaves a blurred veil between metabolisms that fills the void of minute atomic galaxies with light trails of motion so rapid as to be mistaken for flesh and makes any flesh of planetary galaxies invisibly thin and too slow to see, as we reside always in the exact center supposing in all directions. It is to laugh — this irony of intending to find the origin of our purpose in life when our true, natural origin emerges only when intention no longer originates to shade our view, and enables us to bear fair witness to just what it is that merely being does.

All the rest of one’s life is a painting of that perception — with audience and critics less or more in mind. Leaving in our happy mistakes allows our being to appear through a hole in our doing despite the barrage of rotten tomatoes from the sideshow of society. While the art of being may leave artifacts, only artifice begs interpretation or deserves judgment. As Magritte wrote upon his painting, “This is not a pipe,” knowing how society can view civilization and believe it is observing nature. Civilization is the crude portrait of humanity as painted by a committee — brilliant splashes of color by individual heretics being engulfed by the gray smog of moral compromise for the protection, control and shearing of the largest possible number of the lowest common denominator for the profit, security and convenience of the smallest possible number for the highest common dominator.

It is a game one must play if not born among humans living as naturally as the rest of the animals. Ignoring the game requires expending the energy of intentional blindness. One may move away from the grid, but the relief will always flavor the wilderness. Since we can only become feral . . . never truly wild again . . . we could steal some of the goodies and start our own version of the game in the wilderness, if we could actually come to understand what symbiotic respect for the health of our habitat involves instead of being the spearhead of trendy population migration back to roots we promptly tear out, trunk and all. Although there are ample reminders around the planet that great civilizations’ seeds have taken root in an idea good for a tribe or a clan, grown to concretely popular ideology, blossomed into its own golden age, aged with the rigors of the latest rendition of prideful tradition and surrendered in their turn as compost for the tendrils of the rain forests or under the bowels of lava bowls, shifting sands of deserts or depths of the cleansing seas, there is little evidence that any one culture grew to the proportions of the present amalgamation international banks, corporations and trade organizations are forging to stream line the shear line in the name of a search for the golden fleece shepherded by word twisting spin doctors, lawyers, politicians, and stock brokers just as dark age peasants were led by latin spouting, guilt tripping priests on the way to salvation for a tithe. Sure the suits attend church as long as it prohibits measures to limit the global population explosion of new sheep to produce forty pairs of shoes in a day for a wage that affords one pair of shoes every year even if they never saw shoes before the factory came — it’s efficient economics — for the suits.

Come to think of it, perhaps running to the wilderness is like appeasing the lion hoping it’ll eat you last. God knows no wilderness is sacred these days. Looks like we’ve got to change our relationship to the lion in such a way that we aren’t so appetizing to it and not so dependent upon it. Fortunately, our dependence upon it is precisely the sauce that makes us so nutritious to it. We could sever all ties and, therefore, threats if we could just shake our addiction; that unwitting, unwilling support we contribute and by which we are being consumed alive. Beware of indispensable servants, they are your potential running down your leg. Take back your personal responsibility for your welfare, health, education, morality and actions and let the lawyers, doctors, statesmen, priests, news/propaganda anchors, admen and brokers service themselves to effete oblivion.

BELIEF IT OR NOT

Yesterday, amidst setting up my porch for a spring party I’d invited a handful of folks over for, my daughter initiated a series of e-mails the gist of which I understood to have the purpose of saving my soul with new found zeal in response to my last post. When folks started showing up I let the thread run thin on the internet. In the wee hours after they left, I reread the entire series and sent off the following before going to bed.

You have a crutch for life, you'll never have to think again, I guess I'm supposed to be happy for you. Sorry, I failed your test — I'm just an irretrievable guy, hardly worth saving. I will never attempt to intrude myself upon you again.
Lady Astor: If you were my husband, I would poison your tea.
Winston Churchill: If you were my wife, I'd drink it.
Okay, okay … I'm drinking.

This morning i got this reply,

Entering your front door with my white flag clutched tightly in hand looking for the corpse on the floor clinching the tea cup.......helloooo!

You have a crutch for life, you'll never have to think again
Okay fine, lets take a different approach. So do you want proof that I'm not just walking through life as a zombie looking to devour souls? Lets discuss creationism vs. whatever you believe. We both might learn something new. I know I will. Hopefully we can discuss it without anger or the quick sarcasm that we both have. Do you believe in evolution or what exactly? Why do you believe that way and what is your proof that convinced you?

, I guess I'm supposed to be happy for you. Sorry, I failed your test
I was only hoping for your "open-mindedness" to accept me for who I am. Why is it so easy to believe that any other faith has a possibility of truth other than Christianity?

— I'm just an irretrievable guy, hardly worth saving. I will never attempt to intrude myself upon you again.
Your my Dad. Your worth it to me. You weren't intruding. I was the intruder in this case. If you want to end our relationship based off of my Christianity, then I shall not bother you again, other than in prayer.
Love always

I spent the rest of the day thinking this answer out for her.
I am very sad to realize that you have either not read my blogs or never understood them or anything else I have ever expressed to you. One more time for the sake of the old family/genetic bond and because I love you beyond, what I can only perceive as, your suit of Joan of Arc armor all too ready to take on the heathens and make the world safe for only your idea of truth.

Item one: "Do you believe in evolution or what exactly? Why do you believe that way and what is your proof that convinced you?"
I believe only in consciousness that I exist. Everything you perceive because you are also a conscious part of existence is the only proof of that I can offer. Everything anyone has or can express about existence is only that — about existence — not existence itself. As earnestly as different groups coagulate to create belief systems as shelter against the always unknown with agreements that evolve into facts and laws, to guide those who may still have questions, to keep their imaginations in line, so to speak, they are never more or less than theories about existence. I feel no need to believe in creationism, Darwin, the big bang or the end times, the quickening, or the rapture — but I do find them quite enlightening about human perception and culture. If I was being tortured I may admit to favoring the idea of an eternal, ever changing continuum. It is all very wonderful to contemplate and I am very glad that I exist to partake in material life with perceptions and genetics and life experiences that make my version of life as unique as a snowflake with no need or desire to collect the other snowflakes into a ball for some kind of authority or mob mentality. Until this latest spate of sermons from you, I could have sworn I could see that spark of heresy in you too. You damned near snuffed out that candle until I heard you call, "helloooo!"

Item two: "Why is it so easy to believe that any other faith has a possibility of truth other than Christianity?"
First, let me point out that your believing I am especially doubtful of Christianity amongst all the other snowballs has got to be a reflection of your believing it is the only true snowball and the only one worth defending by being offended. I am an equal opportunity religion distruster. This does not mean I have not resonated to the core of my being by contemplating the lives of the inspirational beings that cause such a gigantic paradigm shift in the local population of their time and whose words have become perverted into laws of conformity in the land of their homes centuries later by uncomprehending followers. I just doubt that exploitative religion was ever their intent. If I appear to favor Buddhism it may be because among all the teachings in history, it has no god and, to my eyes, therefore not a religion. It finds the source of happiness to be within the perceiver , not the perceived. No matter what religion one professes, whether it is accepting of other religions or claims exclusivity to the truth, it is either a deeply personal choice, just as you feel you have made, or one made by the culture into which they were born so long ago they have no choice because only one is considered fact to the elimination of all else.

Second, as I said in Item one, my belief in my existence is based on the only truth I feel qualified to attest to — that I do exist. Everything anyone has or will ever express is more or less close to the truth, but the attempt to be specific denies the all inclusiveness of truth, so I don't think anyone or institution can even speak the truth or claim to be right. What culture calls truth is no more or less an agreement among the dependents on that culture, and I do not limit this illusion about being able to speak truth to religion. Governments and sciences and educators all suffer it. Actually I love the stability the chaos of nature seems to have. That its infinite variety is the dynamic of life and attempts to enforce conformity are reaches for the dust of death. But like someone trying to hold their breath 'til they die, the spark of life remains after they pass out and the dust coheres into new life forms after the suffocating dogma passes out of the present and into history.

None of this is to say one cannot know the truth, but the overwhelming vastness of truth defies language, the tool with which to dissect the immensity of reality into more and more specific instances and for which it is doomed to failure unless wielded by the most sublime poets who stitch specifics back together with webs of transcendent descriptions of the big potato upon which we are all eyes, none quite seeing in the same direction but all seeing from the same center, the center of universal life, so large all is within.

If you think I am closed minded as indicated by your quotes around "open minded" it must be a reflection of my reaction to your mirror-like, polished, clad iron claim to the one, the only, exclusive truth that will send me to hell if I don't swallow it. Give me a break.

Of course I don't want to end our relationship, not only do I love you like a daughter, but as someone I have learned to admire no matter who she is. But I gotta point out again, that although you corrected me about who the intruder was, you didn't bother to deny that you have been trying to save me, to retrieve me from other than your path to qualify for your filter. I do not admire such intrusions because they speak so clearly about your submission to an external authority that has somehow crawled up inside you and seems to be driving you like a self-righteous tank against this heathen test case. Imagining that I might be your final exam for your PhD. in missionary evangelism just now brought a bittersweet chuckle bubbling to the surface. Acid reflux of the emotions.

My ego got a bit offended too. Having my daughter condemn me to hell, no matter how indirect you thought you were being by stating our inability to be in heaven together if I didn't eat your brand new shiny apple, it was saying to me, "although I obviously have no idea what you believe, I wanna correct it to my blueprint for heaven." If you want to continue this discussion in that vein I would just as soon give it a rest for a while. Not that it hasn't been painfully enlightening, I just don't like you like this, so I'll wait till your hair grows back. That was a metaphor, as is everything I say that comes comes anywhere close to the truth.

Oh by the way, halfway through this reply I realized that it was going to be my next post. It is a good example of digging a bit deeper to examine the sense of my deepest, longest held ideas when conflict with a loved one is the catalyst. I know you didn't want to comment because it was too personal, but this is more about my observations of religion and the mechanism of belief. Besides no one who reads it will ever know you because you are safe behind the facade of my misunderstanding you to be a snowflake instead of just a flake.
Love —

SEXUAL REVELATION

Wow, I never thought I’d ever post or opine in public at all about the all too personal politics of the rise and fall of the ‘60s feminist sexual revolution, but Pisces Iscariot's latest post at Farcueue stirred something in me that won’t shut up.

Betty Friedan was the first to waken my sense of gender injustice with her book, The Feminine Mystique. More than my late night musings about alternatives to the life I found ourselves leading as conservative pro to-yuppies, my talk of the alternatives to her constant discomfort with her limited role as wife and mother offered by Friedan’s book scared the bejeezus out of my establishmentarian life partner. She had found a financial and social security that such ideas of personal liberation threatened the hell out of. She so distrusted such of my speculations that years later, when I followed up on our contentious discussion of my wish to experiment with cannabis she found the last straw of reason to seek the more established security of returning to life in her parents’ home. That experience dampened any desire to so influence another being ever again. This blog about my thoughts on this kind of subject is as close as I have gotten to offering alternatives since. I neither want nor allow anyone to become so dependent upon me that my spontaneous tendencies pose a threat to them.

Like most social conflict, the combatants in the sexual revolution represent too many variations for anything like a system to steal much of a march on the patriarchy established so long ago that almost everyone assumes it is reality. Freedom of choice is limited to the selection offered us by a culture still suffering from the delusions of the myth that transformed Pan into the devil, the evolution of nature into the creation of a god who made MEN in his image and gave them ownership of all they surveyed, including the women, and women into the beneficiaries of their male children’s largess. This tautological prison of the conforming mind is so complete that the words to express alternatives to patriarchy don’t even exist. The emergence of psychedelics, tattoos and body piercing among the young, yet to become contributing establishment members of western society are among the only forms of expression they find that pierce culture’s proprietary wall with a human nostalgia for the archaic symbols of symbiosis with a nature that existed before Pan was relegated to hell as its caretaker.

The article by Paula Rothenberg which evoked Pisces’ post is a brilliant analysis of the failure of the women’s liberation movement, as evidenced by the choices it fought so bravely to be free for women to make still seeking to satisfy male sexual fantasies, rather than in consideration of the values and vision such choices reflect. Yet she too confusedly equates wearing a t-shirt with “dirty girl” printed on it to the ancient art of body piercing as both being bad choices. The variety of personal preferences obstructs the agreement, the paradigm shift required to achieve lasting social change, the final taming of nature.

The simultaneity of the winning of a more equal footing in the work place achieved by women’s lib and the national economic shift requiring both parents to have jobs to maintain the social status quo in the American dream has made me suspect that it was some sort of cosmic collusion so that the establishment could take over the raising of children as soon as mothers could get back to work. Laura Bush reinforced this notion when she declared, upon being informed of how early in the life of infants they begin shaping the person they’ll grow to be, “…we should get them in schools by the age of two.” Yeah, let’s cover up their potential with the requirements of society before they catch on — then they never will.

After my wife liberated me with her one woman’s movement home to mother, I had several fairly debauched years of catching up with the free love sentiment of the ‘70s until it occurred to me that sex just wasn’t all that great when seduction and/or performing were ingredients. By the mid ‘80s I decided to cease employing persuasion to satisfy my sexual urges and to allow mutual attraction to allow it to happen if it was going to. I laughingly refer to it as the strategy of playing hard to get and being entirely too successful. From what I hear, Catholic priests get more than I do, and I didn’t promise anyone I’d be celibate. I’m happy — I have learned to become friends with women to an degree impossible if they were still primarily potential sex partners. Maybe.

SIMPLICITY

“Simplify, simplify …” realized a man living in the woods by a pond. As much as I love witnessing the healing symbiosis being awakened around the planet by the proliferation of world music and its demonstration of the charitable nature of those who serve the muse, I need to talk about a much more direct connection to whence cometh true amusement.

Until I left home I was surrounded by musical instruments upon which to noodle, tootle, plink and squawk to my heart’s delight but I had the wrong attitude about music due to my aptitude for drawing. In the graphic arts one may become financially very successful with no more than good drafting technique and the ability to tolerate clients who want something to match their couch. One may even acquire some authority in the arts by way of a degree without ever personally meeting the muse that completely enthralls artists who have. With music, there is no faking it with drafting techniques because playing every note in the correct order and tempo yields no music without performers losing the doing part because they have fused with their instruments in being a conduit for the message of the muse. Anyone who has learned to juggle or touch type understands this.

This is all to say that for a long time in my life I was frustrated by trying to play music to the same degree that I was in love with what I heard coming from others who made it seem simple. Within a few years after forsaking my yuppie pursuits my hippie slackerdom came across a classic guitar with nothing better to do either. We moved in together. She was my first piece. I loved stroking her supple gut strings and palpitating the fretted vertebrae of her spine, but she just laid there talking in a language I still didn’t get. I memorized a whole fucking Beatles song book as if it were an engineering manual by meticulously translating the notes to the strings and making up whatever rhythm my fingers could manage, but she just spoke beautiful words that didn’t make a sentence or the sense I was looking for.

Then one day
A dear departed friend
Dropped by to say his howdy-dos
We talked about this
And smoked some o’ that
And he showed some chords of the blues.

I heard her sing
In a language I loved
The mellow sound of
But never knew the words.
It was all that I needed
Though I never heeded
Where his fingers were for the chords.

After he left
I gave her a heft
And held her close to my heart
Where her vibrations
Transmitted mutual sensations
Through our bodies right from the start.

I wasn’t just playing
And she wasn’t just laying
There came our union of sorts.
The notes flowed so freely
Without me ever really
Playing “Michelle” as a check on reports.

The next time I visited my dad I went straight to the baby grand in his living room and began playing the same way on the keys. He came out of his den and stood there dumbfounded that his tin-eared son had discovered some gold. To this day when I play we never know where we are going, where we’ve been when we’re done or how to return there, but my traveling companion, a beautiful bamboo flute, and I know the voyage never gets out of the dock if we must buy two tickets to ride.

•

This shouldn't be so complicated either.

The White House move to create a national ID card for voting rights is a poorly disguised attempt to gather more information on US citizens, especially obvious since everyone has a national ID already. It’s called your Social Security Number. If it's secure enough to satisfy my bank, it should be good enough to verify my vote … on the internet. If it satisfies the most paranoid segment of our society, the neocon, corporate, capitalists who make billions with secure confidence from deals on the internet, why shouldn’t it be good enough to hold and verify national elections with more confidence than any of the more riggable methods reverted to so far in our nation’s history?

THE TIES THAT BIND

It is always a warm feeling to be amongst kindred souls. You don’t have to be a penguin huddling together against an Arctic storm to enjoy the company of empathetic friends. I spent thirty years attracted to a place where I could rely on finding at least ten of sixty such spirits to hug with the fullness of our mutual admiration. This cadre of characters gathered daily for no better reason than good company. There were no causes more serious than the celebration of our existence, no agenda more urgent than the anniversary party, no leadership more authoritarian than the annual king and queen of the krewe of bubba for several years in the Austin wannabe version of Mardi Gras, no rules except, “leave your firearms outside.” And, take my word for it, everything else happened inside. Bursting out through the windows on several occasions.

I have never experienced the breadth and depth such as our kinship any time or where else although I’m sure it happens all the time for people who live in the same place long enough and care to notice. I remember a cowboy who began hanging out for a couple of weeks who never seemed to quite catch on to something that puzzled only him. One evening he put two and two together and declared, “Now I know why this place is so weird. Y’all‘r all yankees!!” He dashed out and never returned to learn how diverse our genesis really is. When Rolling Stone wrote about the place being the colorful hangout of the latest musicians in their spotlight, we found delightful sport with any groupie tourist who sought us out from afar, totally oblivious to their sore-thumb visage to a bunch of strangers only to them. The percentage of these carpetbaggers who remained to become regular habitués was about the same as we who had happened upon one another and enjoyed the company — a resonant cross section you might say.

I have experienced that feeling to a lesser degree when attending concerts, exhibitions and lectures by people I enjoyed, knowing the other attendees must have similar feelings. Often, as I approach the venue, the spirit of the attraction seems to become denser as my anticipation assumes everyone is on their way there too — even out on the highway if the event is out of town. Although we all have a fairly common appreciation of the drawing card, it may be the only kinship we have. Such gatherings have one thing in common with the gang I described in the first two paragraphs — they were motivated and shaped by attraction with no qualification or purpose beyond enjoyment of their occurrence.

Most other sorts of human gatherings appear to be motivated by repusion by, fear of or competition against a perceived foe, real, imagined or artificial. From prehistorically natural fear of real predators to the mythical vengeance of wrathful gods through majorities of voters clamoring for security from each other to nations indulging in mutual genocide, mankind has celebrated its worst characteristics, performed its most devastating acts and resorted to the only means left to anyone who cedes their individuality to a misery that loves the company of the mob’s bumbling momentum always perversely perceived as strength in numbers. Rarely do these groups remain merely circling the wagons in defense of themselves against a foe that considers them an intrusion. The growth of such groups convinces them of the evangelical righteousness in preemptively spreading their truth to prevent sins yet to be committed amongst those to be saved or exterminated for their own good. Such mob mentality creates laws of conduct for the entire membership based on controlling the behavior of the least competent among them leading Vonnegut to posit counterweights to be worn by the strong to compensate for the weak. Ayn Rand visualized the free thinking individual as sitting trapped in a cell catty-cornered from a perfectly inactive, but voracious behemoth whose appetite awoke only when its cellmate manifested signs of creativity.

The closest kinship I have ever felt to any generalization that swept me up, lock, stock and barrel, into a group was when I heard Cornel West describe a leftist as someone compassionate, unable to be indifferent to the suffering of others. The form such concern takes varies from the blessings of Mother Theresa through the cursed sham of religious, political and corporate missionaries to conscientious Save Our Rain forest and elite mendacity protesters — and then there’s those silent, unallied, more numerous than any of us know, individuals who live lives that consciously do not contribute to the existence of those things they perceive as causing misery to themselves and others to not only experience the alternative, but to be an example of an exception to the cultural myth that keeps the matrix in the myst generated by smoke machine spin doctors dressing the missionary octopi in saintly savior suits.

One of the joys of being a walking contradiction, once one admits its inevitability, comes when two seemingly opposed ideas are found to be those same kind of exceptional examples to each other when juxtaposed properly. The behemoth in Ayn Rand’s example was her metaphor for the parasitically malignant collective she had escaped in Soviet Russia and perceived in the full, yet mutant bloom of West’s inclusive definition of the left here in her adopted country, ala McCarthy. Using the Democratic Party as its leftist front, the bean counter’s bottom line goal for the Corporation of the United States is served up public coffers full of money to be laundered from welfare to warfare in times of hostile takeovers of other companies, er, countries declaring it to be, with utmost facetious arrogance, the preemptive spreading of capitalism, er, democracy for their own good. Riiiight.

Well, now I’m in the streets in solidarity with and sympathy for both the troops being taught to hate and ordered to kill innocent people in their homes for their president and for the people who have been taught to hate and incited to kill representatives of the United States for their malicious imposition, disruption and murder. I know that such demonstrations can only serve as a wider than local example of government abuse when the authorities choose to attack and draw the blood that draws the piranha press from the mainstream to come running to gobble tidbits of juicy footage from leftists who get it all, and then to be digested, shat, diced and spliced for the evening's smorgasbord injection of excitement into the vicarious boredom of dinnertime consumption by a target audience who willingly pays for the war while muttering under their breath about lost freedoms lest their new found security overhear.

I am automatically part of any group, and by definition they would have to be leftists, who wants war and weapons (tools designed specifically to kill) banished from the face of the earth. For such a thing to happen the largest human paradigm shift since the mistake of totalitarian agriculture must occur. If only the hundredth monkey theory were true. If the planetary population could imagine and accomplish that, maybe the rest of the reasons for leaning left or needing to form majorities would banish themselves. I have a belly button, what other group ID is required?

There is no group one can join to stop the rape and poisoning of the planet. Giving lip service to global warming from ones SUV isn't gonna get it. That is one form of suffering we each impose upon our environment by our individual behavior and shopping habits. Well, now I am out in my garden in solidarity and empathy for those who have fully realized their responsibility to become a living example of low impact, small footprint existence on the planet. No trendy hoopla will spread this idea any more effectively than genuine, personal examples in everyday life.