I don't need anyone to tell me that injustice is immoral.
I don't need to hear that intangibles like justice and morality are nice when you have the time for them but during this political season it isn't pragmatic to use those intangibles to deal with present problems.
I don't have to organize a community or canvass a neighborhood or contribute money to candidates or even be politically savvy to know this and to act upon it.
I am a citizen. As one individual, I am as powerful as I allow myself to be.
Justice and morality - without being mindful of those intangibles we will simply continue to go on as we have been going, pessimistic, angry, watching others suffer and seeing no change in that suffering while those persons of privilege continue to enjoy their good fortune.
I am happy for those folks who enjoy their good fortune. I do not believe their good fortune takes anything at all from me. I'm funny that way.
But I don't consider it good fortune to see other human beings, my brothers and sisters on this planet, suffer - and to turn away is equally as painful because in order to do that I have to block off my own heart. That is not good fortune either.
Eventually our sages in government will legislate something on health care and it will either be written into law or go down in flames, once again a failure of government to serve its people. Even amid all the turbulence, though, I feel fairly optimistic we will get a bill President Obama can sign into law and it'll be something we don't hate too much.
We've been told the next thing our country should turn its mind to is immigration reform.
I have to laugh. I really do. I've heard more than once that one of the reasons we shouldn't prosecute torturers is that it would cause such a terrible uproar, the Repubs would think we were revenging ourselves on the Clinton impeachment, it would "tear the country apart." Like it's real woven together right now? Like we have great cohesion and unity? Anyway, that's not where I'm going with this essay.
The only way to view the political circus nowadays is to put your shades on first.
Seriously!
Don't want anyone to recognize me!
My mama told me to stay out of places like that.
And it's worse than she said!
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All I can say is it's a damned good thing we didn't get health care legislation passed before the August break! Look what we would have missed!
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How can something so utterly serious be impossible to take seriously?
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The circus has come to town .............................. hall.
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My political commentary for the week. It's fucking Friday and I'm gonna put on my cool shades and go prowling down some particularly fine back alleys. Hope all is well with Dharmaniacs everywhere and Happy Weekend!
Some music to prowl by ...
... it's coming up to that time of year again.
From YouTuber maedgen's notes on this tune:
Filmed in mid-2005, this is a glimpse into life on the French Quarter's lower Decatur Street before Hurricane Katrina.
Originally written by Ray Davies of the Kinks, this track is performed by the Preservation Hall Jazz Band featuring Clint Maedgen on vocals with a guest appearance by the New Orleans Bingo! Show in the video.
It was an episode from the original Star Trek. Kirk and his Enterprise crew were in the grip of psychic monsters who fed off of their fear and anger, which made everyone act like lunatics. So Kirk finally figures out the way to fight the monsters was to laugh and laugh and not feed them.
And that took care of the monsters. Not an original plot, but I particularly liked watching Kirk and his crew laugh and laugh.
You have to think kind of well of yourself to do that particular trick, of course. You need a healthy sense of self-esteem.
I don't have much to write tonight, the dominant zeitgeist theme thingy this week was everyone exploring their adrenaline levels at the thought of great (scripted!) faux battles with our neighbors at town hall meetings, like that Twilight Zone episode where neighbors are turned against each other by outer space malicious life forms, mwoo ha ha ha ha.
All they have are smoke and mirrors. I guess smoke and mirrors can be scary the first or even tenth time around.
But after eight years, it's not such a surprise any more.
For some Americans, it's been far longer, it's been hundreds of years. They see the smoke and mirrors very clearly indeed.
I'd like it if so many of the folks who were not allowed to return to New Orleans after the Federal Flood were invited to a town meeting and we could see and hear what they had to say. That would be something. 'Course some of those folks have died since then, some of them made sure they were buried in New Orleans even though they weren't allowed to return there in life. They voted to demolish public housing, you see, in New Orleans, even though the housing itself had not been damaged by the Federal Flood. The Ninth Ward didn't do all that well either when it came to helping families return to homes they owned outright. It was only a coincidence that so many black families, folks who had worked in NOLA for years, for generations, were so disproportionately affected.
It would be interesting indeed to hear a town hall meeting with those folks, hear what they had to say.
Ha. Like that's going to happen.
That would be real. We can't have that. No sirree.
The sad thing about all the troubles we are going through fighting against the greedy and ignorant, is that it gives us a feeling of poverty in the midst of endless abundance.
I read the blogs trumpeting the big fights to give everyone the benefit of healing when they are sick.
We have an embarrassment of riches when it comes to knowledge of how to heal -- and I'm not speaking here of simply taking a pill and curing a particular illness, but of truly being healed.
It's an experience that heals both the person who is sick and the person who heals them.
We have all the great achievements of humanity at our fingertips and so many folks around the world who have the answers to the big questions of how to alleviate needless suffering.
We're headed into the dog days of summer, so no matter how rapidly events seem to appear it doesn't matter, still have to go sloooooowwwwwww.
I read somewhere in ancient Chinese lore about a soldier, he was a general, I think, some big honcho in the court of the Emperor of the time, with all that power, subject to all that intrigue and anyway, the reign of that particular Emperor ended and the soldier had to flee the palace. From various oracles and just his own intiution and supposed political genius, he knew someone would come along to restore the dynasty but it would be like 40 years or something until that happened.
So the soldier found a place to go fishing.
When he was in his 70s the young man came along who he was supposed to teach, a young man who would end up being emperor.
Well I may have this story all wrong, but that's how I remember it, and who's to say something like that never happened?
I got the real estate for this short time, so I'm gonna put meta on the front page. Oh, the thrill of power! Oh, the temptation to abuse it and then ... the sweet surrender!
Heh.
There's personal blog enemies and then there's the blog political opposition and sometimes the two overlap.
Personal blog enemies smear your character, challenge your honor, try to bait you into swerving from your topic! Oh noooooooo!
It's a test of character to have these kinds of enemies.
And these are the enemies that are most difficult to deal with when it comes to political opposition. They will take the side of Hitler rather than agree with you! Yeah, breaking Godwin's law, yeah, I'm edgy.
And this is part of politics, sometimes I think it's ALL of politics. It's so personal.
Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
I imagine the revolutionaries of the 1700s were equally dismayed to see their countrymen willing to accept despotism rather than declare independence. Human nature, and all, we've seen it so many times -- and seen it many times in the history of the United States of America.
All the irony has been used up and hip is coopted in its pre-embryonic stage, wow.
So the hippest parts of the hippest philosophies are released into the cybersphere and general world culture through various other means and all sorts of people grok this rain of wisdom not just from group endeavors like named spiritual paths but from crazy mystics visionaries witches artists maniacs that emerge individually from their travels in existence.
And coyote howls in the full moon night at the sacred Four Corners in the West.
The old ways have been hip enough to change with the times. We see it in the blogosphere, new forms for old hidebound traditions. Dusting those treasures off.
Kerouac, there's a video somewhere of him describing what "hip" means.
Imagine the beats, it's right after World War II and in America there's the boom of imperialism in the air and folks can finally have their own homes with labor saving appliances . . . . and the beats just dug something else entirely about America and about being a human being.
They swam against a merciless tide ... them and a nascent musical movement, rock and roll, race music that left no mother's child unchanged and of course that was the problem, wasn't it.
Cultural misappropriation.
Old R&B saying, "If it's in you, it's gotta come out."
So it keeps coming out in new forms everytime the old ones are stolen and coopted and twisted to material ends.
The form is only important because of the content. And the content is love.
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Happy Friday to all. Summer has arisen here in the Big Apple. I hear our public transportation system infrastructure is not doing well around the country. As a rider of the W and N trains, in solidarity, I salute and wish courage and good luck to all public transportation riders across the land!
First time moving as a free human being. That first step a big rush of pure direct experience, removed from words and concepts and thoughts in the totality of being, the reality of liberation.
Today Malcolm would be reviled even more than back in the day, even more, because he was change, the real deal. He ought to be in the history books because his is a distinct American lesson.
'Course we don't teach about race in America in our schools and we sure don't talk about it in our mainstream culture, so it'll be a while before the rest of the country ever catches up to Malcolm.
His life embodied change. He believed strongly in each phase of his remarkable life, his father taught him about black pride before the term ever came to be, and this in the Jim Crow south, and Malcolm just learned, he trusted each step in the way that he knew what was going on, he lived each phase of his life fully and completely the good and the bad.
So I'm really writing to myself tonight, just to get it into words and then forget about it.
You love Obama? You hate Obama? You are indifferent to Obama?
Fine with me and any permutation in between.
What excites me about the political times we live in are the citizens. Politicians are citizens, but you'd never know it with our present system.
So I'm interested in the citizens.
And not everyone is a citizen, not in my subjective view.
As buhdy and others have said, there are citizens and there are consumers.
Citizens are annoying and politicians wish we'd just shut up and go away. They are willing to spend a great deal of money to distract us! Please, please, just shut up and go away! Can't you see how difficult my job is? I have to please everyone all the time and I can't! There are more important things than your concerns!
Constituents. Ha ha. To the politician we are the audience.
Unless we yell. And then they pay attention because that's their job, that's something they can understand.
Sometimes while prowling back alleys you find things that don't bear the light of day, brass ritual cymbal turns out to be a trashcan cover, exotic seafood dinner is really rotten fish guts.
Yet perhaps there's some truth to these lies.
Here in NYC the sun has gone down. That's the time to prowl.
You're in kindergarten and some strange large being is telling you about reading and showing you something called an alphabet. And you go with the flow and recite all the letters and hear how they're put together and daydream and look out the window and listen some more and sneak candy from out of your desk and make faces at the other children when the teacher's not looking and take naps on mats.
And then one day you can read. You look at a page with black squiggles on it and all of a sudden they're not squiggles any more, they're words and you can read them. You've taken the leap.
It's fashionable now for even the right wing to invoke how wonderful Martin Luther King was, now THERE was a nice gentleman!
I remember at the funeral of Coretta Scott King, the talking heads on the teevee were aghast at the Reverend Lowery's eulogy where he dared bring up ... gasp! ... politics!
A brief example:
"She deplored the terror inflicted by our smart bombs on missions way afar," Lowery said. "We know now there were no weapons of mass destruction over there. But Coretta knew, and we knew, that there are weapons of misdirection right down here. Millions without health insurance. Poverty abounds. For war, billions more, but no more for the poor."
I remember the discussions at the orange about this and was shocked when there were many who agreed Lowery was out of line saying such things at a funeral. Propriety was important. This did our cause no good. Etc., etc.
Of course, Martin Luther King didn't hesitate to call folks out at a eulogy he gave for the young girls killed at the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing:
And yet they died nobly. They are the martyred heroines of a holy crusade for freedom and human dignity. And so this afternoon in a real sense they have something to say to each of us in their death. They have something to say to every minister of the gospel who has remained silent behind the safe security of stained-glass windows. They have something to say to every politician who has fed his constituents with the stale bread of hatred and the spoiled meat of racism. They have something to say to a federal government that has compromised with the undemocratic practices of southern Dixiecrats and the blatant hypocrisy of right-wing northern Republicans. They have something to say to every Negro who has passively accepted the evil system of segregation and who has stood on the sidelines in a mighty struggle for justice. They say to each of us, black and white alike, that we must substitute courage for caution. They say to us that we must be concerned not merely about who murdered them, but about the system, the way of life, the philosophy which produced the murderers. Their death says to us that we must work passionately and unrelentingly for the realization of the American dream.
See, Martin Luther King won his struggle, in the sense of changing the frame of how Americans view civil rights. I'm not saying the struggle is over, but the moral force of his message is such that even the most bigoted folks will give lip service to respecting him.
I've been spending quite a while following certain events, news, and writers on the issue of torture. I've written some essays, poems and comments as well, but looking back there's a real beginning for me on this and that was getting involved in the Special Prosecutor Project and the view I got from that, way more than anything I've written.
Seeing Bob Fertik post a question at Obama's .gov website and then seeing George Stephanopolous ask Obama the question on teevee. That was quite an amazing experience.
This effort was driven by so many different groups of people, from all areas of the political spectrum. From my corner of the liberal world, I paid particular attention to the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights, and, of course various bloggers who educated me on not only the facts but the politics and political strategies of confronting the issue of torture.
This week there's been an explosion of traditional media attention on this issue. From Nancy Pelosi's involvement, dragged into the fray by the Republicans and the CIA, to the Whitehouse Judiciary subcommittee hearings earlier this week where I had the interesting experience of seeing Lindsay Graham literally speaking out of both sides of his mouth, to the controversy over Obama deciding to fight the release of the DOD torture pictures, everyone's chattering now.
I've also seen this issue covered very differently in the diversosphere, where torture is not the top story for those who have had to face this kind of behavior by the USA for generations. That view is stunningly different.
In some ways the moral high ground on this issue is clear -- torture is wrong.
In other ways, the moral high ground is bitterly contested.
Do you know what it means? Old Buddhist question, do you understand the words and do you understand the meaning?
The great Indian prince Naropa was tops in his field, of high renown, and everybody granted him great respect and obedience, no one wanted to tangle with him because he was the greatest of the scholars at Nalanda University and he would decimate their puny arguments, yeah, he had proven himself a great scholar and great teacher, all that.
One day he was sitting in his room and a really ugly woman appeared before him. He was revolted by her, she was that ugly!
She asked him, "Do you understand the words and the meaning of what you are reading?"
He answered, "I understand the words," and stopped there.
An amazing thing happened! The woman began to laugh and suddenly she transformed in Naropa's eyes to not being ugly at all, yeah, she looked rather beautiful all of a sudden.
Naropa thought to himself, "This is amazing! If she's this happy with my answer then I should make her even more happy!"
And he said to the woman, "AND, I understand the meaning!"
Now another change occurred. The woman stopped laughing, the corners of her mouth turned down, and she began to weep, and she became even more ugly than before.
Naropa was perplexed! And even more perplexed when the woman accused him of lying, the reason for her sadness.
Long story short, Naropa realized the woman was right. He left Nalanda University, left his high seat of prestige and sought a teacher who could help him understand the meaning. Well that's a whole other story, Naropa's meeting with the crazy Tilopa.
That is a saying my mom used to use a lot. Or maybe she didn't, and it was my brother who said my mom said it. Being the youngest of six children, well I don't always have the facts straight.
But I could picture her saying it, as she had a tough life, yet always appreciated anything to be optimistic about. Granted, she wasn't a credulous person, so we couldn't just make stuff up and lift her spirits. But she was always ready to acknowledge a sincere effort.
I was fortunate to have her live long enough for me to be a comfort to her -- when I was in my 30s. For most of my childhood and adolescence, we were at loggerheads and it was a frustrating time for both of us. But eventually I broke free of her authority (a story in itself) and when I returned on my own terms, we had so much to say to each other.
She loved it when I'd use stories from what we called "the Blue Book," Jewish Wit and Wisdom, edited by Nathan Ausubel. She loved stories, and there were some very wise stories in that book. I could actually feel the light going on in her head when I'd apply one of the parables in the book to whatever situation she was talking about. Made me feel good.
My mom was not in good physical health by that time, and yet she had a lightness of spirit in her later years that was never evident during the difficult years when she was struggling to raise six children with a problematic husband and no money. (Not to diss my father, because he was quite an interesting character, but this story's about mom.)
She told me once her biggest fear was not of suffering misfortune, but becoming bitter over it. I thought that was very wise of her and was glad to see she won that struggle. Her ability to find the light in the darkness increased even as her body wore out.
Anyway, her birthday would have been Sunday, May 3. She would have been 93 (born in 1916). She died in 1992, doesn't seem that long ago, but time is funny that way.
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Happy Friday to all. It's raining here in the Big Apple and I'm still taking the subway ... so there, Joe Biden!
Wrote an essay a while back entitled Yin. Definitions:
Yin originally meant "shady, secret, dark, mysterious, cold." It thus could mean the shaded, north side of a mountain or the shaded, south bank of a river.
Yang in turn meant "clear, bright, the sun, heat," the opposite of yin and so the lit, south side of a mountain or the lit, north bank of a river.
From these basic opposites, a complete system of opposites was elaborated.
Yin represents everything about the world that is dark, hidden, passive, receptive, yielding, cool, soft, and feminine.
Yang represents everything about the world that is illuminated, evident, active, aggressive, controlling, hot, hard, and masculine.
Everything in the world can be identified with either yin or yang. Earth is the ultimate yin object. Heaven is the ultimate yang object. Of the two basic Chinese "Ways," Confucianism is identified with the yang aspect, Taoism with the yin aspect
I think we are now in yang time, hard power, conflict in activity, aggressiveness, and most of all a fight for control.
Control of the narrative, we are seeing that both in the blogs and in the media. Control of our national priorities. Control of the moral high ground.
We're receiving a great wave of information about torture, but that information is also about how power was exercised and control taken in the most brutal fashion. The information we are receiving illuminates far more than the past eight years. A lot of chatter has resulted.
Hard power. Yin and yang are not separate, cannot be separate. As the image shows:
Well I don't usually do this, but I'm just going to whine tonight. I thought I'd warn y'all upfront about that.
I was used to being invisible duriing the Bush years ... I mean to the Democratic Party. They were busy holding their powder and doing other secret things I just couldn't figure out, and so I got used to never feeling connected, in the human sense, to my Democratic representatives. It hurt, of course, but I got used to it. Even after Katrina I got used to it -- I was intolerably angry but I no longer expected my party to do much. And they didn't.
And I'm not talking legislation here, either. I'm speaking of morale. A silly thing, I guess, can't quantify it, can't even explain it all that well. Just that feeling that someone gets it, on a visceral emotional level feels the way I do about what's important.
And heck, I don't style myself as the be all and end all of how one should feel. It's just that it got lonely, here I was, part of the Democratic base, and I felt so invisible.
Now, oh good lord, now it's even worse.
(Gilbert O'Sullivan, Video courtesy of YouTuber Namikaze1028)
Reform Immigration -
March on Washington
