WHO ARE YOU?

There seems to be two basic categories of attitude about one’s life held by my fellow humans. We are either organs integral to the living organism of the planet from which we arose and without whose health we wouldn’t exist or voracious tenants in a supermarket shopping carte blanche as granted us by the big spooky propiator in the sky.

The undeniable reality of our arising from and decaying back to the earth defines and qualifies our belonging here as earthlings. Belonging to the obviously artificial creations of civilization, nation, religion, corporation, et al ad nauseum has obscured the undeniable truth of our primarily being cells of Gaia, exceptional only to ourselves and the creatures we’ve domesticated to think like we do.

I experienced this difference in full force when I dropped out of my yuppie career with IBM and left their compound to integrate into the beautiful village of ’72 Austin. It was like a military base’s relationship with the townies, temporary and disinterested, another stop along the way. We as members of wastern civilization have a industrial/military complex about our existence on earth resulting in its commodification and destruction.

The global warming debate is a distraction from the undeniable poison and pollution our way of life injects into the circulation of the planet allowing oil profiteers time to suck the last drops from the most remote location, environment be damned.

You can either drink from the stream or a plastic bottle, still your choice.

NO THEFT

Thank you for reminding me, dear thief

If I have, it’s only to share — you knew that

Of things, there’s always too many

As I learn to own up to my self

SAME STAFF, NEW JOBS

I’ve had another of my hare brained (or is that hair brained) ideas that are born of two examples of the US government’s being run by dollars and sense is just small change. One of the biggest costs of health care, the bureaucratic staff who make the eligibility decisions, is unneeded in a single payer system, more than compensating for the increase in service given. One of the arguments against such sense, made by insurance’s congressional shill’s is that saving money by ending useless jobs is somehow cruel to the people hiding in them.

My suggestion is that rather than pink slipping these paper pushers we just start giving them new application forms to play little Caesar with. These would be applications for eligibility for continued future use in a petroleum independent economy. There is no necessary evil we must embrace, lest it be our need to be served we cannot face. Shedding the spoiled skin of what I’ve come to call wastern civilization (the happy accident of a typo) is the end of a dream become nightmare.

In youth we feel richer for every new illusion; in maturer years, for every one we lose. -Madame Anne Sophie Swetchine, mystic (1782-1857)

The entire government is elected by people living next to an oil refinery and breathing the toxic fumes emanating therefrom, saying “I know it’s terrible, but it’s the smell of money.” They're just an exaggeration of our own corruption. There is no anarchist meeting at which we all get better together — individual integrity revolts when it will.

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Relevant addendum: Something to emphasize the contribution individuals make to the problems for which we like to blame the corporation that we support with our money — The entire amount of oil spilled in the Gulf of Mexico this summer amounts to that required to produce just one day's worth of plastic in bottled water, as ubiquitous as cell phones.

FOOD FOR THINKERS, POISON TO THE FAITH FILLED

Here are a few of the ponders I’ve gleaned from my journal that, once I condensed them to their essential kernels, may, taken with a swig of ganjava, result in an expanded mind…

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The Golden Rule, a simple statement of the symbiosis required for man’s relationship with all of nature, including one another, is obviously either misunderstood or is being purposely undermined considering the booming business of incessantly passing laws to patch up flaws in civilization’s premise of human exceptional superiority over all other life forms.

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“Majority Rules’ either strips individuals of their autonomy in the minority or protects those surrendering autonomy in preference to sycophantic anonymity in the majority.

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Death is like sex in high school; if you knew how many times you just missed it, you’d be paralyzed.” — Dead Like Me

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Language ignores the violence fomented by verbal misunderstandings while usurping the credit for understandings made possible only by the reasoning of the participants whose genetic memory is basically identical, regardless of the words transmitted.

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Liberal advocates of government responsibility for individual welfare must ignore the debilitating effect on personally evolved integrity to the point that the government appears necessary.

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Karma: looking over one’s shoulder in fear of retribution for hopefully hidden malice makes going forward more liable to injury in innocent situations.

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Our institutionalized tradition of abusing our natural environment contaminates the internal systems in a cycle civilization is loath to cease, preferring instead to grow a pathological pharmaceutical industry to further nullify our body’s natural preventative and curative systems. This half-assed promulgation of pathology over prevention is also seen in the disposition of the disposable culture’s preference for land fills rather than stop the production of packaging and products destined for the midden.

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Can we ever recognize what we learn from life without it being an answer to a question or has our education obliterated our ability to translate preverbal thought?

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Certainty, like faith, seeks nothing but converts, while fresh ideas are dismissed for lack of footnotes.

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Twelve step programs validate the parking of one’s pain in the sympathy of fellows equally unable to live alone.

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The rules of war are suspended when it is waged against an enemy declared to be “illegal” combatants by the wagers. WTF?

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When genetically generated instincts are declared destructive to civilized behavior individuals are persuaded to turn against themselves by fashioning an acceptable façade to fake self-esteem based on a favorable reputation. These traitors to themselves make mighty manipulable mendicants. Isolate them from others and they cease to exist and will do anything to escape solitary confinement.

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Like the big bucket on strip mining behemoths mindlessly cutting through tree roots, water passages and animal dens searching for fossil fuel, purpose leaves destruction of everything ignored by its myopically intended goal.

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What kind of culture is characterized by allowable questions?

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Good ideas cannot be owned or patented since anyone is capable of independent recognition of truth wherever it occurs.

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Gibbon’s observed that paganism’s multitude of nature gods were for the common folk equally true, for the philosophers equally false and for the magistrates equally useful.

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Salesmen know that if they don’t take no for an answer people will say yes to get rid of them.

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Nature weaves a silk noose as culture’s reward for its abuse.

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Candidates political hypocrisy reinforces the opinions of voters from both sides and swing voters already know they lie and vote for the lesser of two evils, so their mendacity never hurts them at the polls.

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Mistaking civilization for nature is like passing laws to make wishes come true.

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The hairlessness of humans destined them alone to find fire useful.

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Pride in accomplishment is the heretics next victim.

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That’s enough for a while. The number and variety should evoke many comments from those who think for them selves and bewilderment from those who don’t

HERENOWTHERETHEN

Tomorrow is the picture attitude paints of the past. Plans are attitude’s attempts to rearrange tomorrow to more match its painting. The present is where the painted and the arbitrary state of its paintings are on exhibit; the garden and the vase; where we are and how we want to affect this earthly home. Attitude is our most intimate responsibility as organs sharing the health of the living organism, earth. Understanding this leads to a freedom claiming to own any of it never will. 

GEORGE KNEW