"Letter to the Democrats"

Snabbled from The Daily Kos:
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2006/11/9/13598/9011


AMEN, brothers and sisters!

"Man"

heaven longing ape
angel who stumbles
blind light bearer
who falls and fumbles
worshiper of error
seeker after truth
hurting and aging
lover of lovely youth
wild beast raging
craven and brave
freak of fashion
and custom's slave
puppet of passion
lowest and loftiest
a sideshow gape
god's fool, nature's jest
heaven longing ape

"Man"
Koi Bashi

"The Real Culture War"

An interesting article recently caught my eye because it was written by David Brin, one of my fave sci-fi authors. It proves to be very thought-provoking:
http://www.davidbrin.com/realculturewar1.html

For those who may not have time to read the whole article, a pertinent excerpt is included below. This portion of the article appears to touch on a core of the matter of divisiveness we seem to be experiencing as a race. I have, sadly, found this divisiveness in a variety of encounters with other people. One of those encounters is included below. Also, in the excerpt, as well as the entire article, Brin is pretty scathing of the fundamentalist/Biblical literalist world view. Those of delicate sensibilities should stay away! You have been warned! Basically, the battle ground is Creationism vs. Evolution (Neo-Darwinism).

And as usual, a blog entry from me cannot be complete without some thoughts and/or rants and/or a homily of my own! And, as always, I welcome positive response, as well as rebuttal. (the excerpt is separated by a line consisting of hyphens if you wish to bypass my quite possibly banal commentary) (BTW, ditto the "delicate sensibilities" warning for my ramble as well)

I recently had a discussion about the human race and its future with a friend who is a gentle, loving mother of two delightful, intelligent boys of 4 and 6 1/2 -- that represent the future in their very youth -- yet she doesn't believe that the human race can improve itself in the future, that we'll be wiped out in some Apocryphal Angry God Disaster as punishment for being so awful and sinful.

I take a different view -- My personal beliefs/spirituality simply cannot encompass a Diety who would send me to eternal damnation if I happen to swipe a pen from work and don't repent my thievery (I guess I'm kinda brazen that way). I don't think that that Diety would send even those who we perceive as bringers of genocide (Hitler, etc.) to Ye Olde Firey Pitte.

There's dissonance in her beliefs and in that dissonance, I find continuing hope. That mother truly does believe in an Apocryphal Angry God. However, she took a huge leap of faith in our continuance as a species by bearing those boys and bringing them into this world. That, and why bring those children into this world if, by some misstep, they're going to end up going to Heck in the end? I hope that some day she will perceive the leap of joyful faith she took in a hopeful future and a loving diety (rather than her somewhat Hobbesian view of life as nasty, brutish and short...).

"Good vs. Evil," "Black vs. White" and Apocryphal Occurrences -- Back to Hitler for a moment:

Remember: if you're on the winning side, history is written to reflect that: All those that are on that winning side become the "good guys" wiping out the "bad guys," who, in most cases, were people just like you and me, with parents, families and communities that they wanted to return to. They liked, loved, hated, laughed, and cried just like the "good guys."

I emphatically DO NOT wish to diminish the genocide that Hitler and Co. committed as anything less than an evil atrocity. However, we, as the United States did a small bit of annihilating as well, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in that same war, but our destruction is perceived as good because it stopped the continuation of WWII.

This is a conundrum indeed, in doing evil, we create good. In view of that same conundrum, if we step back to the example of Hitler again for a moment, he and his followers sincerely believed they were doing good (by doing evil) for the German people by attempting to create an Aryan Superrace.

Hmmm. No easy, black 'n' white answers here.

Conundrums aside, I just cannot and do not believe we be destroyed by an Upset Diety, we are quite capable of doing a damn fine job of it ourselves: It appears to me that the issue at hand is to gain the wisdom to set aside those uses of technology that are that destructive, whether all at once (atomic war) or more slowly and cumulatively (pollution in its many forms, whether as artificial additives that we are gradually developing an intolerance for, or greenhouse gases, etc., etc.) .

From my world-view, this gaining of wisdom is going to be one hellaciously long process at the rate we're going. But if (and that's a big IF because of the fulcrum point we have been balancing on for the past few centuries and continue to balance on yet today) we manage not to blow ourselves back to the Dark Ages, or annihilate ourselves completely in the next several centuries, I believe we will make it over this difficult, adolescent time of our species. And, unless something happens to cause us to have some sort of "conversion experience"‡ as a species , this WILL be the work of centuries! But we can do the best we can to plant seeds for a wisdom-filled future now in our life time!

‡(Who knows! Those darn Tabloid-Newspaper Gray Aliens may land yet, and drastically rearrange our world view that is still a Earth-centrist view of the universe, which is espoused by many adherents to our major western religions, and change it to a more universal view.)

As per my usual style, I have dealt with sweeping generalities above (I'd go on for a frightfully much, MUCH LONGER ramble if I got down to the microscopic level of that sort of discussion -- you really, really DON'T want that!). However, I do have great hopes for the gifts we have been given/have evolved into that, using those gifts, we might not destroy ourselves as a species (and all other species around us) and will continue evolving into something better than we can even imagine.

NOW -- on to the excerpt!

--------- Excerpt from "The Real Culture War"-------------

...I ask: With whom should you ally yourself? Someone who shares your immediate political campaign, while disagreeing with you utterly over long-term goals? Or someone who shares your deep agenda for a better world, but disagrees over immediate tactics?

Most people -- when it is posed that way -- choose the latter. After all, tactics are a matter for pragmatic debate. We can try out all sorts of methods. Success may call for a mix of your way and mine.

But how can we work together when we disagree over the very nature of the universe and of the future? Or over the very possibility -- the desirability -- of human improvability?

Suppose you perceive -- through evidence and scientific consensus -- that the universe is about 13 billion years old, containing a trillion-trillion stars, some of which may be visited by your descendants: People who (you hope) will be greater, better, wiser than ourselves. You look forward to incremental steps in that direction, whether fostered by social benevolence or fecund competitive markets.

Perhaps those descendants -- while carefully overcoming challenges -- will even find important work to do, worthy of their ever-rising stature in a vast and ongoing universe. Does that sound good to you?

Then do you really want to put civilization's decision-making process in the hands of people who believe that native tribes had a better vision of the cosmos than modern science? (Left-handed mysticism.) Or people who actively yearn for an imminent apocalypse that will end a cramped, 6,000 year-old Creation in fire and damnation for everybody who uses different incantations than they do? (Right-handed mysticism.)

It sounds silly. Yet that is what some of our finest intellectuals do each day, from Jared Diamond and Kim Stanley Robinson to William F. Buckley and George Will. Oh, they grouse about some of the maniacs who are now running their parties. Then they close ranks, rationalizing that you ultimately have to ally yourself with fellow members of the right or the left.

But this election has shown, at last, that America just is not divided that way.

Rather, we seem divided between those who feel alienated toward -- or enthusiastic for -- a 21st Century filled with change.

---------------------------

End of the Excerpt. For those of you have made it this far, I pose a challenge:

It appears to me that in order to co-exist peacebly, we need to be more inclusive, to be able to agree to disagree with those who think differently from us -- perhaps have a vigorous debate about how we disagree rather than pulling weapons (whether actual or more subtly coercive by gradually legislating, creating laws that support their belief system, and punish those who do not support that system) on each other.

This creates a problem: those who would take an exclusionary view (if you don't believe in my God/Theology/Holy Book, you're gonna pay for it/suffer/burn, whatever) would need to change their viewpoint/belief to include those who do not see the world this way. Which then changes their viewpoint, thus resulting in the death of belief in a Retributory Diety (RD).

How can we encourage this world view change in those whose belief in a(n) RD goes so deep that they would:

a) force others to believe the way they do, quite possibly doing this in a peaceable manner by legislating it, rather than open warfare (for example, those of a rather more fundamental persuasion who get themselves elected to national government)

and/or

b) destroy themselves and others in worshiping/showing their love and devotion to their RD (for example, suicide bombers),

and/or

c) ultimately be destroyed themselves (whether mentally or actually destroying themselves physically in pursuit of their belief in their RD) in some way by being unable to accept a more inclusive world view?

The Bludgeoning of America

A somewhat incoherent rant-ette.

What happened? What the hell happened? This question runs through my head frequently, and was especially resonant today as I girded my loins and went to a local department store. Normally I avoid those like the plague, especially the very large, local Box-Mart. However, for convenience's sake, I went to the one just up the road (not Wal-Mart, never Wal-Mart. Never again.) because it was close and would only take me away from home for a very short drive.

As I hurried through the store I noticed that many of my fellow consumers looked rather dazed, as if they were recovering from a particularily nasty work week. Perhaps they were. After all, the automation of everything in life certainly hasn't made life any easier.

I remember as I was growing up, spending my single digits in a home without cable, without a microwave, without a VCR. This was just prior to the advent of those items that have become so "necessary." I remember Saturdays helping my grandmother do laundry, using a fairly old-fashioned washing machine with a ringer, and large sinks full of water for rinsing the laundry. (Heck, I even remember everything being cooked from scratch, and weeding a large garden where much of the fruits of it ended up canned in jars for the winter.)

We'd then hang the laundry out to dry, in the basement where lines were strung, during cold weather or outside when it was warmer. After everything was dry, it was time to iron, including the sheets. No permanent-press sheets in our household at that point, yet.

I never thought that at the ripe old age of forty-five, I would be looking at those days through a lens that makes it seem as if they were a century ago, and not thirty-five years ago. It's strange to live in a house now where I'm hooked up to the internet via cable, and am typing this on a PC. I have a small microwave, and I do my laundry now using a washer and dryer, though I persist in hanging my laundry outside to dry when it's warm. It amuses me to think that that makes me a tad "white trash" even though I'm doing it for the environment.

(And, yes, I love my PC. Perhaps too much. However it has freed up my fingers and brain to write, where I hated writing before because manual typewriters were so dang stiff and electric typewriters you still have to go back an correct errors. And forget about writing longhand. That gives my right hand cramps just thinking about it -- never was able to write much without the hand cramping up.)

Yet, with all this automation, wonderful washer and dryer, microwave ovens, stoves with ovens that clean themselves, people around me look more exhausted than ever. They look as if they had been bludgeoned by life itself. More and more people around me, including myself are on one drug or another just to exist. Some choose alcohol. Meth-amphetamines are another popular choice around here. I've been fortunate in that I'm merely on three different anti-depressants and am able to maintain a certain amount of contentment in life. Even though the job where I work is one of the reasons that I am on so many different anti-depressants, the benefits there pay for those meds.

Good grief, enough about me! What's going on with everyone else?

There was one particular couple that I noticed in that department store this morning. They were slowly dragging their way through the store, duty-shopping (as compared to the thrilling consumer sports of impulse shopping and power shopping). She looked particularily blank and not terribly bright. But to be fair, she looked bludgeoned. Perhaps she had been a vibrant young woman in her teens, but now, in her thirties, life must have tripped her up and landed her flat on her face more than once. He looked a bit more bright and alert than her, but not by much. They were both using their shopping cart as a prop to keep them more or less upright.

And then there was the natty gentleman, dressed up a bit like a cowboy ready to go out on the town with his best shirt, string-tie, boots and hat. He looked a bit shifty as the store clerk helped him find what he was looking for. Or perhaps his shiftiness arose from caution: he knew life and he was waiting for the other shoe to drop. His shiftiness was his alertness to the fact that that shoe might drop at any moment, and he wanted to fend its landing off as much as possible.

Then there were the store clerks themselves: teens and twenty-somethings, they all looked hard and older than their years. What the hell happened?

We've got more junk on the shelves of stores waiting to be bought than we'll ever really need. We have sleek cars and SUVs and vans to get us places. We have fast food and other restaurants of such infinite variety that if we have the cash, we'd never get bored with eating out. Yet, it is all so contrived, with these same products constantly being sold to us, bludgeoned into our consciousness by ceaseless advertising. And all this consumerism drives us into the seemingly never-ending rat race of chasing after the almighty dollar, never mind that we are selling our souls by the hour at least 8 hours a day, five days a week.

We're all bludgeoned these days, it seems. Just when life was supposed to be oh, so much easier.

What the hell happened??

There Is A Planet

by Sharon Pacione

There Is A Planet
Where illusion is the accepted reality,
where ego is king.

Where war mongers flex their nuclear muscles
creating wars to boost the economy,
keeping the masses bound to false hope
that they live on a safe planet.

Where forgotten prisoners of long-ago wars
live the horrible truth of abandonment.

Where less than 2% of the population
determines the economic structure
for the other 98%.

Where government representatives
are bought and paid for
by lobbyists with private interests,
and where decisions are not
based on what is for the good of all.

There is a planet
where individuals accumulate more wealth
than they can possibly use,
hoarding rather than sharing
with those less fortunate,
because of fear of losing their position
on a media created list
of "wealthiest people in the world"...
Or, sometimes, for an even sadder reason,
because they don't care.

There is a planet
where the ozone layer has diminished,
causing global warming,
reducing an already shrinking land mass
housing 6 billion people
and countless other lifeforms.

There is a planet
where children are abused
and often die
at the hands of those trusted
to protect them.

Where the eyes of starvation
and homelessness stare blankly
into those of acceptance.

Where hatred rules and
racial and religious intolerance
are an accepted form
of freedom of expression.

Where there is no reverence for wisdom
that comes with experience and age.

There is a planet
where destruction of the interior
and exterior of the planet
is looked upon with apathy.

Where pollution rains
and water is so contaminated
that fish commit suicide.

Where free energy for all
is not unveiled
because industry can outrageously
continue to charge for the current system.

Where man can rocket to the moon,
but cannot solve the problem of over-population.

There is a planet
where dead soil grows dead food,
where other lifeforms are consumed as food.

Where the medical system
concentrates more on treating illness
than preventing it,
because they have lost their connection to nature.

Where with every generation
a new disease becomes prevalent
causing chronic deterioration of the physical body.

Where news media thrives on bad news,
on the profits of murder and war,
and good news is considered boring
and not profitable.

There is a planet
where prison guards and officials
turn their heads
to the rape of young men and women,
finally caught by an arm of the same system
that ignored neglect and abuse
in the now adult's formative years.

Where baby seals are clubbed to death
in front of their mothers,
hunted for their soft white fur.

Where deer hang as trophies on family room walls,
staring at their captors with eyes of the hunted.
Where rhinos are slaughtered for their horns
so that humans can satisfy sexual curiosity.

Where elephants are massacred for their tusks,
carved into figures for living room tables.

Where dolphins breathe their dying breath
ensnared in a net, grasping at freedom.

Where power and control
eat for lunch
compassion and integrity.

There is a planet
where, to others in the universe,
those on this planet are alien...
sick in body, mind and spirit.

Where is this planet?
This planet is Earth

If these conditions
continue to ring on indifferent ears,
then our mind has indeed
become a rug piled high with the debris
that has been swept under it

When a large segment of the population
is proud to say "but, we still live
in the greatest country in the world"
it is proof that we have anesthetized ourselves
with our addictions,
choosing to live a comfortably numb life,
indifferent to the suffering of all forms of life,
including the planet herself

We have failed as caretakers...
the time has come
when it is no longer acceptable
to jeopardize the balance
of our home and the universe.

Planet earth can recover,
but we must first realize that we're ill...
we can all serve the process
by healing our own body, mind and spirit,
by choosing love over fear,
by picking our passion and getting involved...

Which moment will you choose to remember
that ONE person can make a difference?

from the self-published book
"Winking at Destiny - A Journey into Consciousness"
Sharon Pacione, 1998

The Lab Rat

I read a funny saying the other day:

"Even if you win in the rat race, you are still a rat."

It was funny at the time that I read it. Only now it strikes deeper chords within me and it's not so funny anymore.

"You're still a rat."

Boy, am I ever! And I'm mad about it, and I'm distraught about it and I'm shaking with these emotions even as I type this. Because I am bound to silence about my rathood. Corporate non-disclosure, don'tcha know. So I can't even blather on in my blog why I feel like a big, hairy lab rat. I'm being asked to sign, yet again, my vows of corporate silence.

(Side joke to myself: Heh, I've become a contemplative nun, whether or not I am actually in a convent!)

For that's what I am now. Yet another lab rat in that big, hairy, on-going psychological experiment called corporate culture. Too bad, just like our very own societal culture, it has no awareness of its culture-hood. So there is the potential for people and other businesses to be ground up in it and remolded by it, just a societal culture does to its members.

I will say this very, very, softly, then I will be silent forever upon that subject, because I do need that paycheck to pay for the very roof over my head: It smacks of fascism.

Perhaps I am being overly-dramatic about this all, but I am, at the root of myself, a singer, a person of the stage. So drama plays very naturally into it. My "selfhood" comes into this; everything I do comes into this, because, even when I'm sleeping, I'm an ambassadress of my corporation. So they tell me. So no farting of corporate secrets or contempt of the corporate in my sleep, no sirree, Bob!

I'm wondering if I should start wearing brown shirts to work, because it feels so...fascist.

There. I've said it again, even though I said I wouldn't. It's the new fascism. It's called corporate culture, and it's coming to a theater near you, son! Your life's theater, to paraphrase ol' Shakespeare.

It's the new way of life as smaller businesses that are worthy are swallowed by these larger entities. Smaller businesses that aren't worthy simply...go out of business. The mechanical dogs are feasting upon the real dogs these days.

For a corporation, for all that it tries to be a culture, is ultimately an artificial mechanism, an artificial intelligence that is trying to come to life...

...Using you and me as the cogs within its driving raison d'être, that raison having nothing to do with the raison d'être that you or I may call our own. It may coincide to some extent with my raison, however that is merely incidental. It is its own entity and what can a lab rat like me do, but squeak every now and again and hope I don't get slain by a passing machine part.

Somewhere along the line, I thought that the economy was going to devolve into lots of smaller businesses, some, like my own little business of making Anglican Rosaries (Hey, I never signed anything about non-disclosure within my own company! I'd never make my employee, me, do anything like that. Thus a moment of gratuitous self-pimping!)

My Big Brother Corporation wants to know if I run any businesses, so that it may ascertain if there is a conflict of interest. Hmmmm. Rosaries. That's the small picture. Here's the bigger one: I'm nominally a Christian, so if you take THAT to its logical extreme, that's a HUGE conflict of interest. So, yes, I guess my wee business could be a conflict of interest. In any case, I find that kind of prying question a huge invasion of my privacy.

Now, I never planned to make a living off rosaries, there's something vaguely unethical about that -- the gift of prayer and meditation is exactly that: a gift one gives to oneself, whatever one's beliefs are. It's just a small sideline, a chance to do something creative, which I'm rarely allowed to do at my real job. And I make a few dollars off of it, enough to cover the cost of the materials and maybe the occasional Happy Meal.

I'm no raving capitalist. In fact if you poke me with enough verbal pins, I'll go off on why a moral socialism is just as hard to achieve as a moral capitalism, but why it is a wisdom we need to achieve to survive as a race. Actually, either moral socialism or moral capitalism would work as effectively. And my usage of the word "moral" encompasses this whole planet, but that's a rant for another time. If I dare.

Oh, wait a sec, today's definition capitalism would state that "moral capitalism" is an oxymoron. However, as usual, I find that I have digressed.

I never thought that I would have to sign myself away so thoroughly to earn an hourly wage. Don't squeak anything bad about your maze, lab rat, you're rendering yourself open to legal action.

Squeak.

A squeak, in this case, is worth a thousand words.

Squeak. Squeak. Squeak. No more singing for me, I am mute, except for this tiny little...squeak.

Shaking My Head

I haven't updated in a while, because I'm working on my "novel"* for National Write a Novel In A Month.**

However, I haven't been missing out on any "news." I'm using the word "news" even more loosely than I'm using the word "novel" for this month-long writing extravaganza. Every day I see something new to shake my head over, whether in disgust, or delight, or just plain amusement at the absurdities.

Anyway, I can feel a rant building that I may just have to get out of my system if I wish to keep novelling...

*To read my novel so far, click on this link: The Pittsville Evening Prairiedog

Caveat lector! This is pure genre Romance written in haste and will probably be repented at leisure. Sigh. Shut up Inner Editor. You can come back out of the dusty closet of the back of my mind in December, OKAY???

**For more info about writing a novel in a month see nanowrimo.org

Short and sweet -- Help out as a crafter or...

Short and sweet -- Help out as a crafter or... as someone interested in purchasing a crafted item. Please check this out.

Whether you're crafty or not, you can help the cause: