The New Face of Public School

Where Learning is Optional

I am sure that everyone in America has learned to be deeply afraid and concerned about the safety of anyone connected to the public school system here since we heard about the six year old who shot his teacher in the state of Virginia. I cannot even imagine what it must have been like to have been in that classroom when the shooting took place. I do not blame any teacher for deciding to change careers now with the extreme violence that has been happening in public schools for some time now, but to tell you the truth, I remember a time when many children were very afraid of their teachers, and I personally found myself on the wrong side of their wrath more than once. I was never a child who deliberately broke the rules but there were times when I forgot some of them in elementary school. Being a child, that is just going to happen sometimes and it wasn’t always the case that I was hit and ridiculed and humiliated for making a mistake, but weighed in the balance that sort of reaction was more common than a reminder not to do it again. I was a frequent visitor to the principal’s office in middle school for wearing skirts that were shorter than 2 inches above the knee. (They actually took a ruler and measured.) During those visits we had a principal who was particularly mean spirited and after several incidents of being screamed at and threatened I stopped going there when I was told to and just walked out the back door of the school. At that point I didn’t care what happened if I got caught. I just didn’t want to be in the same room with the principal. He was mean, snotty, and verbally vicious. Oddly enough, I never got in trouble for leaving by the back door. To this day I can’t figure out why they never called my parents. Maybe they didn’t notice that I was gone. Interesting. They sure noticed a lot of other things that had no real importance. Anyway, I certainly remember many terrible teachers and the emotional and physical repercussions of making a minor mistake during my school years. When I finally got out of school, I had nightmares well into adulthood about having to go back to school again. Those dreams could have been a forewarning regarding the behavior of future employers because I have had supervisors who behaved the same way in jobs I have had. The realization upon awakening in the morning that it wasn’t true was a tremendous relief to me. How public schools and teachers have evolved in to what they are like now is amazing to me. I feel badly for the children as well as the teachers who are afraid to go near the kids but I feel very conflicted and confused about how the situation got this way. Public schools appear to be war zones now and I am damn grateful that there are no school aged children in my family. I couldn’t sleep nights if there were for fear of sending them to school in the morning and maybe never seeing them again.

I don’t think that there is any hope for the way things are in the foreseeable future. I don’t think that there are any rules you can change or laws that you can pass that will turn things around now. People are hell bent and determined now to make someone pay for their fear and unhappiness. This is the case in nearly every facet of life in America. Everyone talks about it but little is being done about it. The reason that little is being done about it is because there is no profit in fixing it. Find a way to make money from correcting the imbalance and you will see things get done. As far as unruly children are concerned there have been a few attempts to change behavior patterns with military like reform schools. These schools are “for profit” by the way. The thinking behind it is to “whip these kids into shape” but I cannot see that they have improved anything. A teacher in Florida once told me that every child in his class was either in jail or going to jail. That was more than a decade ago. I wonder what the situation there is like now? Those children are adults now, at least those who survived their childhood are. Troubled people produce troubled children so the cycle of crime and violence can only multiply.

Can we change people? No, we cannot, but we can promote a different way of thinking to help them make a change themselves. We aren’t doing that, though. Here we teach profit and promotion of the self. People learn more from movies, music, YouTube, and social media than they will ever learn from school and they can pick and choose from these things what they think will give them an advantage over others. Gaining ascendancy over your peers is the highest goal that most people set for themselves now and we have taught them that because in today’s world few give a damn about anything other than being better and better off than everyone else. Don’t expect any better behavior than this as long as all we see around us is how badly we have been cheated and mistreated by people in power. It is good to know the truth about what is going on in our world but that knowledge needs to be followed by information and hard work toward stopping it. That isn’t happening. Telling us the unvarnished truth in too many cases is only told to incite anger about it. Well, it worked. We are damned angry. But the social and political structure here is not set up in a way that we can change it without relying on the very perpetrators of the injustice to fix it. They aren’t going to. The crimes that they commit against humanity serve them too well.

People tend to believe that those who are in power would not be in their position if they were not qualified to be there. That is so far from the truth as to be laughable now. There is a saying that “scum rises to the top”. But what can we do about it? Nothing. This is what people are now. They are inhuman and childish and narcissistic because anyone who has the funding and the resources to be elected into public office now is already adept at kissing up and grandstanding to get what they want or they wouldn’t get very far politically. You don’t get Socialism and human rights advocates out of people who can be bought. So, is there any hope for us? I would say that there isn’t unless we draw the Tower card again like we did in 2016. That year ushered in an administration that took us to the gates of Hell and to the brink of collapse. That was change of the worst possible kind. In 2024 we need to be praying that the Tower will blast us back to a place where we can pick up from the rubble and start again armed with what we now know and how we had better never forget the lessons that we have learned from the school of hard knocks that we should have earned a degree in by now. Not everyone will have learned enough to get a diploma but those of us who have faced our own reckoning and paid dearly for the lessons we have learned need to stand up and blaze a new trail. If we cannot or will not do that, our future will remain on its current path and the body count will be staggering.

Halloween 2023 in a Horror Movie World

I love Halloween. It was much simpler when I was a child than it is now. It makes me dreadfully sad to think about how today’s children cannot experience it the way it used to be. There was a time when one of the coolest things you could do after dressing up and getting a bag full of candy was to stay up late and watch scary movies on television with family and friends.

In the early days of television there was The Vampira Show. This was before my time but I learned about her from the movie Ed Wood.  If you lived in the mid-south region of America in the 1960s you could watch Fantastic Features, with the Monster of Ceremonies, Sivad, a very fun vampire with a southern accent. In other parts of the country there was Creature Feature, with Dr. Paul Bearer, and probably many other scary cool guys who hosted classic horror movies on television. By the 1980s there was Elvira’s Movie Macabre. If this kind of thing still exists, I have not seen it, but even the fake ones like Count Floyd were fun to watch.  The cable networks, Turner Classic Movies and American Movie Classics used to have horror movie marathons during the entire month of October but now many people cannot afford to have cable tv. You would have to look very hard now to find something that isn’t real life horror in a world with terrible wars, people carrying handguns into grocery stores, and human predators who are everywhere with no empathy for anyone, including children.

You can still wear a costume and put on makeup today but you can’t even rent monster movie videos anymore. The makeup now is on par with what SFX artists do for film and television. I’m sure that even Stan Winston would be impressed with what is available to us. My daughter can do wonders with makeup and she is totally self-taught. She has re-created fantastic characters such as the Frankenstein monster and frighteningly real zombies that would scare the hell out of you if you saw them on any night that wasn’t Halloween, but the real monsters now are very much like Wednesday Addams spoke of in the 1990’s film, The Addams Family. They are “homicidal maniacs” who don’t wear a costume because “they look just like everybody else”. They are your coworkers. They are the kids that your children go to school with. They are the kooks who show up at the dollar store in boxer shorts and a tee shirt carrying pepper spray looking for a victim, and they are out there every single day. They make you afraid to participate in life outside of your door and even inside your house when home invasions are rapidly rising everywhere. I haven’t felt comfortable giving out candy on Halloween for years because opening your front door to strangers now is much too risky.

Halloween was taken away from children decades ago by adults. The costume section of any store today has a huge selection of adult costumes and maybe ⅓ of it is for children. The cost of candy has skyrocketed and even though most people would only give out candy that is wrapped, by the 1980’s local hospitals would X-ray your children’s candy for free because by then you couldn’t be sure that it was safe.

This year many people are unable to participate in the holiday because they simply cannot afford to. To be honest, I remember people taking their children out on Halloween when I was a child just so they could get free food. It was junk food for sure, but at least it was something to eat. Many small-town schools back then didn’t have cafeterias and I knew of many children who got an hour for lunch to go home and eat but they lived too far away to get there and back to school within an hour so they stayed at the school playground with nothing to do and nothing to eat during lunch hour. I was too young to think about how tragic this was at the time but I wondered why it was this way. Even now, I hear people complain about schools giving free breakfast and lunch to children. Why would anyone believe that it is ok to deny people something to eat? The dollar menu at fast food restaurants disappeared years ago. SNAP benefits have been cut for people in need and many people still complain that the program even exists. People in war ravaged countries are being denied basic human necessities right now, and though many people are loudly protesting about it there is little being done to change it.

Should we stop celebrating Halloween altogether for safety reasons, or reasons of poverty? Corporate fascists would be more horrified at losing revenue if you do not buy their candy and costumes and home decor than they would be at seeing a zombie apocalypse. I believe that we should continue to celebrate All Hallows Eve but give the day back to the children. We should be able to make it safe for them as well but I fear that we won’t because we have become so selfish and greedy and too many people have never grown up. I don’t know how so many people manage to give their children cell phones when I can barely afford them and internet service but I see children and teens glued to their phones and chattering away incessantly everywhere I go. For some kids this is all their life is. If an adult takes their phone for whatever reason some of them lose their minds and react violently. I recently saw a news story where two underage siblings stole their mother’s car and ran away when she took their phones as punishment for some kind of misbehavior. They managed to get 100s of miles away before they were found.

We have created a world that is more terrifying than any monster movie that I have ever seen. Giant mutated bugs, vampires, hostile aliens, zombies, and ghosts are scary fun to watch, but killer viruses, serial killers, disgruntled employees, spurned suitors, jealous lovers and ex-lovers, citizens with AR-15s and AK-47s are killing us faster than Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees, and Freddy Krueger put together and nowhere near as predictably as the fictional monsters. To live in a safer world will require so much more work on everyone’s part than many people are willing to do. If you happened to see a real ghost or noticed demonic behavior in the people you know you would get up off your backside and find a ghost hunter or a priest lightning fast, but we allow war and violence every single day from people with political power and authority. As long as we worship these kinds of people in societies and fear that they are better than us there isn’t much hope for waking up from the “nightmare” on our streets. Doesn’t this scare you? It should. Human monsters are running amuck all over the planet and it isn’t likely that you will wake up on November 1st with a sigh of relief. It isn’t fiction any more. It is a reality that we literally gave our blessing to because we didn’t see the signs of our own demise coming as a result of our preference for ignorance. There will be no happy ending here for far too many, but some will believe that they are immune. Why do we allow that?

Tired of Halloween and “kiddie spook stories”? Look around. The horror is real and in your town. You cannot turn it off or leave the theater. We fear information that tells us how things really are and how we became the way we are. Vaping is viewed as more dangerous than a gun. Being honest with ourselves about our history is something that cannot be allowed. There are people who want to ban Halloween but the annihilation of entire cultures is acceptable. Think it over this coming Tuesday night and ask yourself why we are willing to take all of the fun out of life for our children and are willing to replace it with untruths and virtual reality.

“What kind of sick mind operates like that?!” - Dolores Fuller from the movie Ed Wood

Might As Well Face It, You're Addicted to Money

I have come to the conclusion after several decades of watching humanity and democracy get flushed down the toilet that the only way to stop the flood that has gone in to the sewer system is to take away the money. The people who have amassed great fortunes are using it to insulate themselves from having to bear any responsibility for how badly their actions are crushing anything that stands in the way of their accumulating more, and those of us who stand below them are finding out that we have little or no power to stop them because they intend to destroy us if we try. If their true power is money then it is a fact that their money has to be taken away from them. If someone is beating people to death with a hammer you would take the hammer away from them. It isn’t quite as likely that you would take their gun away from them if that was the weapon that they were using, not in America anyway, but that is another story, and taking away the weapon of money, if that is what they are wielding will be even more difficult but very necessary. The only people that I see with enough power to do that is our government. Since our government is unwilling to do it, we can only sit and watch as the destruction worsens if we don’t get up and find another way.

There is a scene in the Disney film Candleshoe where the children who live at the Candleshoe estate are trying to sell eggs at a village market to make enough money to keep from losing their home. The character, Casey, is doing her best American-style sales pitch to entice customers into buying. Another character, Cluny, begins trying her hand at selling with the intent of outdoing Casey by making outlandish claims about how the eggs will cure a multitude of health issues. She is told by the eldest boy that she cannot make claims like that, to which she responds, “Who cares as long as we sell more eggs!” Sounds like a true capitalist to me. Who cares as long as we make more money? So tell me, who does care that deadly fires, floods, poverty, hunger, crime, homelessness, gun violence, and lack of healthcare is killing thousands of people every day? You might hear some lip service about it from government representatives but it is a fact that they aren’t doing a damn thing to stop it. Who cares as long as we sell eggs?

Whether you live or die now depends on whether or not you can pay someone else for the privilege. I would really like to meet the person who decided that this was a good idea. Even more so I would like to meet the citizenry who decided that this was a good idea and never once sat down and wondered if it wasn’t a ridiculous thing to support. Once actual slavery was abolished in this country we were duped into accepting a modified form of it which looked better for us on the surface. Physical brutality was removed from the equation but fear was attached to employment then that our ability to make a living could be taken away from us at any time based on a whim. This system still exists more than 150 years later except in the case of unionized jobs. Servitude and wage slavery is a bargain that people struck with the aggressive and elitist thinking people who sold us the idea that they would take care of the problems that many of us feel inadequate at doing in exchange for it. Too many people have been willing to accept this rather than give up their perceived freedom from having to make the tough decisions that are required of a society that sees to the welfare of all. It was actually almost inevitable that those who were willing to put forth some creativity and muscle to make this an easier world to live in might get big headed and believe that “because of their highly superior brain” they should rule the world. We let them adopt that mentality and rarely, if ever, stood in the way of that kind of thinking.

In Astrology it is understood that some signs in the zodiac tend to be leader types while others make better organizers and so on. We aren’t meant to assume that any particular sign is superior to any other. What we actually need to assume is that it takes all kinds of people to create a civilization that is balanced. It is a belief in the superiority of a few that creates a tiered system of entitlement in most every aspect of life but especially in the workplace. That point of view is the main culprit in what has given us this warped way of living. More and more people are realizing how badly out of control that system is now but it has gone on so long and is so ingrained in our belief system that it will take a great deal of force and determination to wrestle the hammer away from those who wield it. In the legend of the Nordic God, Thor,  (if you believe the Marvel Studio’s version of it in the movie Thor) he loses his hammer, the symbol of his power, through arrogance, immaturity, and irresponsibility. Those who wield the economic hammer here are hundreds of years overdue for losing theirs. They have misused and abused their authority with respect to their responsibility to the people who have stepped aside to let them do what they are assumed to do best which is contribute their knowledge and abilities to the welfare and benefit of all. It is a very commendable thing to have had the foresight and resources to start a business to manufacture the necessities of life but it is only that.  The actual production is done by others, and to believe that as a CEO you deserve 300 times as much salary for having and implementing the idea is preposterous when you cannot produce 300 times the amount of work product that your employees do by yourself.

A great many people have finally gotten it through their heads that this is the major cause of why we have so much inequality in this world but they are at a loss as to how to stop it. People who have unionized jobs are attempting to right this wrong now but the vast majority of the people are not so lucky as to have a unionized job. It will take a government that actually sees and understands the needs of its people to change this. Without that, it will take brute force from the people to ever eliminate poverty. Will the people do it? Many decades ago, Governor Jerry Brown, of California was running for President and a national magazine put out a headline for a story about it saying, “Jerry Brown wants to give power to the people. But do the people want it?”. I guess that they didn’t because he did not win. We will have to collectively decide that we do want the power to live without poverty and stop the multitude of problems that have been created by greed and rampant inequality. Getting people to understand that this cannot be achieved without taking responsibility for how they have been complicit in supporting a system that allows corporate greed to remain and flourish has to be a top priority.  We will not be able to eliminate inequality in the workplace or anywhere else as long as we keep inequality in our individual belief systems. As long as we use money to buy ourselves a hierarchy in every facet of life as we do now, the ones who have the most money will see to it that we are never able to achieve it. The money is a drug that we are addicted to. Instead of taking it out of the equation we keep believing that we just need to have more to keep up with the higher level addicts who never believe that they have enough. They have already shown us that we will just have to deal with withdrawal because they are not about to share more of their drug. If we do not keep the buck from stopping at their house we will have to show them non-participation in their drug deals. We can do the work but we have to prove to them that they will not receive 300 times the income for what they do versus what we do for them. When there is no money there is no more leverage. Will they all shut down their businesses in protest? If they do, they will starve like the rest of us, or the people with the actual work skills will get up and do it differently and invite others to come with them if they want to live. Yes, it has come to that.

Why I Hate Money

My stepfather used to say that if the government took all of the money in the world away from everyone and then redistributed it back to them equally that the rich would have it all back within five years. I have never doubted that this is exactly what would happen because without setting up an equitable for all economic system before they redistributed the money there is no way in heaven or hell that the previous “haves” wouldn’t go right back to what they were doing before the money was taken. It would take firmness on the part of every government on the planet to make sure that financial equality was maintained, and I don’t believe there are enough people in charge who would stand firm on anything that didn’t set them and their kind on a higher pedestal from the get go. So, is financial equality even possible on this planet when unbalanced class systems have always existed?

I would love to say that spiritual awareness and Astrology provide answers for the trials and tribulations that have always beset humankind - but it doesn’t. What it does provide is a guide and a road map to balanced living and higher intelligence and ideals that can keep you from falling into the traps that the corrupt and the egotistical among us set to control and deceive us as we go through life. Its focus is on individual understanding of the self and our relationship to the creator of all life. It does not set down a plan to eliminate all social injustices except at the individual level which is the only level at which one has any power that isn’t a corruption of energies. When many people are connected to the higher intelligence then you have the makings of real social change if you realize your personal potential as it was given to you at birth. Then together with others who have realized theirs you have the combined elements of real change which can only be realized in the combined efforts of those who have transcended personal ego. This is a very tall order to attain. Few will take on the task because it is a lifelong commitment to yourself and it has to exclude selfishness. This can go a long way toward living in mental and emotional peace, but it cannot stop the ravages of a society that has set up a system that is reshaping the world to exclude those of us who believe in fair and equal treatment toward each other and would not be able to live with ourselves if surviving meant that we had to steal from and cheat others to do it.  If we were all the same, we would have no real need to be here. We were given free will to either create or destroy in this life and there are reasons why few people believe that they have an obligation to care about anyone but themselves. Those reasons would fill a gigantic book. Why we didn’t start writing that book as soon as we knew how to write one might take another book to explain.

When we got here, we had already lost much of our connection to spiritual and universal truths, so we had to take some hard knocks to get to a mentally receptive place in our evolution to comprehend those truths again.  Without chaos and crisis, we would never shift our focus enough to ask “why the hell are we here?” We have come to the point in human evolution where we have a pretty good idea why things have gone so wrong in the world but there are not enough of us willing to change what went wrong and a large percentage of the population have taken the position that they would rather destroy than create now. Religion, spirituality, education, and access to information all have a potential for helping to undo the damage that we have done in our world but they are like the old saying about leading a horse to water.

What I know from being a student of Astrology and the spiritual arts is that ego is at the root of every issue that has plagued humanity since day one. How to balance one’s ego is not something that humans want to bother with, and when you don’t bother with it you never solve the problems that have forever lingered despite the fact that many of us never stop trying. The problem of inequality, the problem of misunderstanding and abusing sexuality, the problem of crime and criminality, and the problem of mental illness has never been overcome in any generation. 

Upon our arrival here the planet already had most of what we needed to survive. It had air to breathe, water to drink and bathe in, plants to eat, places to shelter from the weather, and sunlight and darkness so we would figure out that sleep was necessary. We weren’t bright enough to know that sleep was a time for reconnecting with spirit. Many people still don’t realize that. Everything else that was brought into existence was developed by us.  Money was one of those things, and like in the song Hard Headed Woman it has “been the cause of trouble ever since the world began”. Only sexuality has been the cause of more trouble. The money itself is useless. It only has power and value because we say it does. We could have chosen many other things to assign power to like oranges or tree stumps or pine cones but we chose paper and coins once we had created them. So, every problem that has manifested from its invention is totally human made. Sexuality issues were given to us by the creator but we have literally “screwed” ourselves into a multitude of life-devastating problems with it. And though it is the portal that brings us into human form we have abused the energy so much that it creates disease, mental illness, crime, and death every single day by our stupidity of it.

When the founding fathers in America said that “All men are created equal.” they were truly only thinking that white men were and they didn’t totally believe that. There are many poor white men and there always has been. It was no accident that women, the indigenous people who were already living in America, and people of color were not included in that statement. The founding fathers didn’t believe that they would ever have to share anything with them or afford them an opportunity to prosper if they didn’t feel like it. It is now close to 250 years later and those chosen people who were supposedly “created equal” see that when they did do some selective sharing with the rest of the human race it got a bit out of hand and exceeded their comfort zone, so since the 1970’s they have been working furiously to take back their “created equal” superiority and they have been doing a bang-up job of it. It was actually pretty easy to do once they got started but they didn’t really expect that people would start raising hell about it and bringing up Karl Marx’s name to make their point. Now, the elitists are getting angry and scared of a revolution that might do some redistributing of wealth, so they have stepped up their campaign to gather up the money and resources in to their greed pots, and since there is precious little government interference in their way, I fear that we have waited too long to call upon the spirit of Karl Marx to redefine the world. Too many roadblocks were set up along the path to their gathering up all of the aces to keep us from breaking their stronghold. Consider what the lack of adequate income and resources has done to us since the time when President Roosevelt set up the New Deal in the 1930s. Since FDR died there has been an extreme effort to dismantle all of the gains for people that he created, and as they say, “the s**t got more real” after the Vietnam War ended. Their efforts are paying off in spades now, and while there is possibly still hope and some efforts are being made to turn the tide, the battle for balance will not be won easily. But these things do not really explain why I hate money, do they?

I have never in my life seen a time when anything that I want to do or need to do wasn’t dependent upon giving someone money for it. Even before I was born someone was holding out their hand to my parents to pay for my arrival. As soon as I did arrive multiple hands were being held out for whatever I might have to have to stay alive. Without someone forking over some cash I would not be able to eat or sleep or stay healthy or become educated. Without paying someone, I could die from exposure to extremes in heat or cold, illness, starvation, crime, natural disasters, and the list goes on and on. Paying others for my ability to have lived will not even stop with my death. There will be people holding out their hands for money from my children when I die. Health care providers will demand it and funeral servicers will expect big bucks to dispose of what remains. Every life is a non-stop potential cash cow for the capitalists and trying to stay ahead of them without losing your mind is a never-ending struggle. This is a sad and disgusting testament to what human beings have created during their time on earth. So many resources were readily available to us on this planet when we first showed up. The Bible says that animals were here first. It is lucky for us that they weren’t standing at the entrance gate with their paws out demanding a payment from us before they would let us in. I would really hate to have to tell a T-rex or a Rhino that I didn’t have any money. (Trying to tell a debt collector that I don’t have any now is pretty awful, too. The threats and insults don’t compare with a large animal but they are disturbing to be sure when you are dealing with someone who has had understanding and compassion trained out of them.) No, instead we began slaughtering them right off because we were ignorant savages whose first thought was to take everything away from them including their very lives so we could be sustained and comfortable. (Notice any parallels between us and capitalists?). Even now, we still do it without giving it a second thought. That is, the majority of us do. There are many humans who realized that there was a better and more humane way to live. Many people provide care and protection for animals without receiving one penny for it, but there are immense rewards that they provide to us in return for their care. Loyalty, affection, devotion, companionship, and protection are just a few of them. How many humans do that without some sort of payment?

The struggle to stay alive and well in our current culture is increasingly more difficult by the day. I find myself now having to decide which is the most critical thing that I need to sustain myself every day. Will I pay the mortgage payment or the utility bills? I cannot do both. If I choose the mortgage payment and not the utility bills I can stay in my home for another month but if my electricity is cut off I could die from the extreme heat that we are experiencing this year. I will also lose my telephone and internet service. Just try to navigate in this world without those now. Should I buy food or should I buy medicines? How long can I survive without both of them? Account payments have had to be stopped which will destroy my credit rating and make it impossible for me to replace my 18 year old car. Repair bills would be impossible to pay for if it finally quits on me. But none of these issues have stopped capitalism from holding out its hand for more money than I ever imagined that I would be paying to just stay alive now. So, this is why I hate money.  If I just truly cannot keep up and finally die trying to, few if any would take much notice. It would be viewed by most as somehow being my own fault. I did not have the right job skills, or I didn’t try hard enough, or I said the wrong thing, or I did the wrong thing somewhere along the line. All these excuses are considered to be acceptable in a capitalist society for denying me a job that pays a living wage and a roof over my head. They are viewed as valid reasons for making sure that I cannot possibly get enough money to keep living because I must have done one or more of these things or I wouldn’t be experiencing this. If I, and countless others like me fall by the wayside, the true reason for it will be an inability to access enough money and resources to satisfy all of those people who are standing in front of us with their hands out. So, why would I have any love for that? Money equals inequality. It is built in to capitalism and guaranteed to ensure that poverty never ends. It is poverty specifically created to make sure that those who call the shots from the top will never have to experience it. I hate it. There has to be another way.

The Things We Do for A Higher Purpose

There was an author of notable fame some decades ago who wrote several books in the self-help genre. The books were intelligent, easy to read for most seekers of self-knowledge, and balanced in their instruction. I bought two of the books myself. At the height of the author’s fame, I happened to watch an interview of him and was surprised to see that he came across visually as nutty as a pecan orchard. Doctor McCoy from Star Trek would probably say that he didn’t appear to be “operating on all thrusters." Why, I wondered, would such a learned person be so believable in print but not in a person to person interview? Much later I would come to understand why. He was talking about things of a spiritual and universal nature. This kind of information can be very difficult to translate verbally sometimes. It is much easier to convey these things in printed form than it is in spoken words.

There was, many years ago, another author who wrote about astrology and was very good at explaining it well enough for anyone to learn the basic tenets. This author wrote several very well received books on the subject, but in the last few books that the author published there were things that did not make a lot of sense unless you are capable of knowing how the input from spirit is received. As someone who does know, it was easier for me to recognize that some of the information being told there was of a “need to know” nature. The author needed to know it, but that doesn’t equal that everyone else would understand it’s meaning. It is sometimes difficult to distinguish what information can be passed on to others and what should not be when dealing with the higher realms. It doesn’t always come with a warning label and it is up to the receiver to consider it rather like a prescription drug. It is of benefit to you but it could be harmful to someone that it was not prescribed for.

There are some people who are entrusted with higher knowledge who reach a point in their evolution where they have mentally processed too much. Some have difficulty conveying what they know easily and some will find themselves in spiritual crisis until they have time to sort it out. If they are in severe crisis, it may be visible to others. This can be especially true if they have come to a point where they can no longer socialize with people who have not evolved to the same level. When they have moved beyond “small talk” conversations they become irritated and distracted when it is necessary to “come back” from their “level” and focus upon everyday topics that seem irrelevant to them now because they are apt to feel that many surface level subjects solve no problems and may be subjects that only create more problems. This is hard, very hard, to deal with and I believe that the authors that I have written about here had come to that point. There is also the possibility that they were truly losing their marbles. There is a limit to how much storage capacity there is in the human mind. People used to say that we only use about 10% of our brain’s capacity but I do not believe that theory as far as memory is concerned.

There is, in the Harry Potter wizarding world, something called a “Pensieve” where one can store memories or information that is not needed on a daily basis, rather like an external hard drive. You can access and retrieve the information whenever you need to, but only if you are a wizard. Spiritual cognizance is rather like that. Years of universal information has been given to you. To have ready access to all of it all of the time would be a very heavy burden to carry and it would likely rob you of your ability to function well in daily living. To access information that has been placed in “storage” you have to “go within” to retrieve it. Think of how you used to be able to remember telephone numbers with ease when that was something that was helpful to you every day, but with the invention of smart phones the calculation is done for you and you may not even remember the phone numbers of those closest to you now because it isn’t something that is required of you daily. If your brain could retain all of that plus what you know now then I might subscribe to the 10% theory and assume that we just aren’t trying very hard to use what we are capable of. Marbles can be lost. But learning to retrieve them is also possible with a “Pensieve” if you are a wizard, or an ability to access the storage facility of the spirit if you have that connection.

The longer that you live a spiritual existence the more you will find yourself needing to experience things that tend to be very much “outside the box.” If you have a mentor on your journey these things are a little easier to manage. You have someone who has “been there” as far as having to comprehend what seems impossible on the face of it, but the day always comes when there is no mentor and it is just you and your connection to the higher mind. Many, many times the higher mind is very cryptic in what it is telling you. There are also times when you receive information or a warning that comes so far advanced in its lesson that it cannot be verified for years. Then there is the information that comes, seemingly, with a higher price or a sacrifice that you are unwilling to accept. When that happens, mercifully sometimes, it does not come so quickly that you don’t have the time to balance yourself with it or evolve to a point where it isn’t so dreadful as it seems. Until you reach that point you may fight with it day and night. If you are lucky, you can “role play” through the possibilities of what is to come. Think Dungeons & Dragons, except spirit is the dungeon master and you are on the mental quest to see how you will react to the events to come. Initially, you will play out the scenario the way you believe is all that you can manage. Spirit will then show you how you will fall off a cliff trying to play it in your own way. Sometimes the quest is just more than you want to deal with and may throw you off balance in a way that you just cannot stomach. I would say here that “resistance is futile” because whatever spirit is trying to lead you to is not likely to change just because you don’t want to do it. So, you may keep role playing and not believing for quite a while before you get to the point that it feels more manageable.

I hope you get to that point easily but if it takes a long time to get there you may find that others think you have gone nuts if your spiritual role playing trial spills over into your behavior. It does happen. When it does, people usually will jump to the easiest conclusion that they can make. You come across like a weirdo and that is what you get labeled. You can’t blame them, really. They don’t have a clue what is going on in your head, and how many times have you seen movies where someone has schizophrenia, or dementia that is undiagnosed? It is easy for others to think that they already know what is going on, but the higher levels in spirituality do not work like an average day in the life. So, if you are lucky, the people around you are not constant critics of the out of the ordinary but when they are, doing a balancing act is all that you have until your role playing reveals the reality in a way that you have practiced on for god knows how long to manage your next journey. Try to think of it like Noah’s ark in the Bible. Everyone thought he was nuts until the day that the flood came.

That is actually a tricky situation to be in because everything in spirituality is interpretation, and your explanations for your behavior likely won’t hold water for many people, especially when you are likely to be evolving as you go along, and you might not feel like explaining anything. You may not have full knowledge of an outcome. Before we knew about the Coronavirus I was told that there was a very real possibility that we could get severe pneumonia and we would need to stop going to places where there would be lots of people and not go places where items might be touched by many others such as a thrift shop or an antique store. It would also be dangerous to be in a school or a place of employment with a lot of employees. The next month this prediction would be horribly true, but few things will slap you with a right now total truth in what you perceive as this did. An impending accident can be perceived quickly but other warnings can come over time and what you initially are told may seem cut and dry but when it actually manifests it could come to fruition in a mind-blowingly different form from what you have been seeing and when that happens you will be incredibly glad if you didn’t share your impressions with anyone too early because talking about an ongoing spiritual event can well and truly make you look like you have lost your mind. Many things are not a dire situation like Covid was but because what you do is not well understood by the average citizen you cannot afford to risk your credibility early on. It can be tough to know when to open your mouth and when not to but a spiritual life isn’t for everyone. You just will be making judgement calls that are beyond an everyday life. If you couldn’t do it, you wouldn’t have it, but that doesn’t mean it is going to be a breeze.

In the 1957 film The Delicate Delinquent, actor Jerry Lewis has a neighbor named Mr. Crow. (see the video below) Mr. Crow looks like an eccentric scientist of the harmless sort, but who would believe that he has actually invented a frog ship that will be a future necessity? No one. Even I would have trouble believing it unless the earth was actually about to be destroyed and spirit said, “save the frogs!” Highly unlikely, maybe, but I didn’t expect to see humanity go off the deep end, or climate change to wreak the havoc that it is for our planet right now, or to watch our government officials do their damnedest to destroy everyone who isn’t a Christian white male in this country. So, as impossible as a spiritual prediction might look on the face of it, you really cannot discount them even if the possibility seems remote. It is up to you to save your knowledge for a time because few people are going to be as accommodating and philosophical as Jerry Lewis was in the movie.

If you are given more than you believe that you can handle in this life from trying to live in a truly spiritual way, I hope that you find yourself in an environment as kind as Mr. Crow did or the two authors that I spoke about here. They may come across as weird or bizarre until we can see exactly where they are coming from. People went to their death during the height of the pandemic still denying that there was such a thing. They might have been saved if they had just allowed for the possibility that the danger could be real. Know that most people will see things the wrong way from the get go, but when the time comes that we can see things clearly, there may be room for a frog ship in there somewhere, however remote that might seem at first.

Civil Disobedience

The Netflix film The Trial of The Chicago 7 should be required viewing for anyone who believes that public protest is the way to promote change in America. The movie is a tragic retelling of what happened at the 1968 protest of the Vietnam War that took place during the Democratic Convention that was held in Chicago. The so-called Chicago 7 were arrested and put on trial for their efforts the next year and subjected to what amounted to a kangaroo court trial after the new Republican administration took office in 1969 when the new President and Attorney General decided to dig the criminal charges out of mothballs and prosecute the protesters and send a message to anyone of likeminded ideals that America was going to shut you down for having the audacity to disagree with its policies. That we have the legal right to assemble and protest what we feel is wrong in the world is a right that can be squashed at any time by our leaders whenever they feel like doing the squashing.  What the Chicago 7 wanted to stop was a war that had already killed many thousands of Americans and would continue to kill many thousands more before the troops were brought home in the 1970s. I don’t blame them for trying to stop the war. They had every right to want to live.

There are few if any protestors today that are objecting to the Russia-Ukraine war that is going on now because there aren’t any Americans over there doing the fighting but as a result of this war many Americans are becoming destitute because we are supporting it financially and capitalism is taking advantage of the conflict. There are more deaths here every single day than are occurring in the war because people have lost their minds and their hope and are taking their fear and frustration out on others who are not responsible for their trauma. We are seeing some protests here for the injustice and inequality that we are experiencing but people who have lived to remember how past protests were carried out were proactive in setting up a legal system that would be able to call a halt to the unrest in most cases before it could get too far out of hand. That is, unless they approve of the unrest, and the protests over inequality are being ignored and stamped out lightning fast by a system that wants to hear no flack about it. So, with all of the deck stacked against us in the corporate, legal, and political factions most of us are incapable of making any headway in our attempts to right the wrongs against us. So, without political representation large enough to bring down the creators of rampant inequality we will see our attempts to stand alone against the Goliath inequality machine that holds a wrecking ball over our heads result in even tighter restraints and in far too many cases the deaths of those who would dare try to stop the purveyors of the destruction of what may be left of democracy. When you see the abject failure of protestors such as the Chicago 7 in the film, you know that it is only a change of thinking in the minds of those in power that will be able to turn the suffering around. But how can we do it? What will it take to redirect the energy that is being used to destroy the people? Only a major loss of some sort has the power to turn the situation around or there will have to be a new understanding of how detrimental their policies really are.

When the people protested in centuries past, they had much less to lose than we do now. Yes, you were probably more likely to lose your life then or your freedom. You would probably be thrown into prison maybe for the rest of your life doing hard labor, but the consequences for standing up against tyranny were mostly cut and dry. It was pretty much you will prevail or you won’t, but doing nothing about the inequality that existed was a sure bet that no one in the ruling class was going to advocate for you and no laws were ever going to be enacted to change your circumstance. Revolt was your only option. In the here and now we have come to believe that there is always a possibility that change could happen. Our elected officials who refuse to actually represent us could logically be voted out after their terms end. We might be able to elect a candidate who understands the needs of the people within a few years. There is still a hope in the minds of many people that this can happen. But our representatives are aware of that fact, too, and they have spent many decades working furiously to tip the scales in their favor by using underhanded tactics to take as much of our voting power away from us as they can, and they have been successful too much of the time. There is much talk about their having cheated us out of truly free and fair elections but there seemingly isn’t the will or the ability to actually stop it. Though we are still fairly confident that it can be done we don’t seem to be able to accomplish that. Historically, people knew darn well that things would not change without new people in charge. So, with the gerrymandering of districts and voter suppression and the voter intimidation that occurs it is amazing that we still believe that anything helpful can come out of an election here. They didn’t believe it back in 1968 and for us to believe it in 2023 is pretty darn amazing since people are more narcissistic and selfish now than ever before.

Let us count the ways in which we lose without actually losing our lives in today’s world. When basic living necessities are enormously expensive and even impossible for many to obtain you would think that the first people to take a stand against tyranny would be the homeless, the working homeless, and the working poor. They have already lost what so many of us are afraid of losing without uttering one word in dissent over a capitalist system that made their situation possible. It is said that many of our homeless here are mentally ill and/or drug addicted. I think that assessment is likely true, but I used to work in a homeless shelter and I have seen that most of them are just regular people who found themselves in some unfortunate circumstances that could have happened to any of us given the same situation. So why aren’t these people standing up and being vocal about what caused them to have fallen and made it impossible for them to get up again? It is anguish and embarrassment that they found themselves in their predicament. It is also a society that is quick to blame and quick to stomp on you to make sure that you can’t get back up. Your life is bad enough without calling more attention to yourself and risking the laughter and abuse that too many people feel entitled to subject you to if you were to dare point the finger at the elitist society that created the circumstances that makes poverty in a very wealthy society possible. Kicking people when they are down is a favorite pastime of those who are arrogantly sure that they are too damn good to ever have to endure such a fate.

So, who among us has the ability to shake up the system and wake up the ignorant to the realization that the fear, the violence, the crime, and the loss of democracy and a true sense of community here exists because of a lack of maturity and a lack of responsibility on the part of too many of us? It is a cinch that they won’t listen to the poor, and the poor are afraid and already pretty sure that their voices count for nothing. Is it possible that those in power would have to become the poor to have any real understanding? I have seen politicians tell their stories of growing up poor or having parents who fell upon hard times like a badge of honor and try to remind everyone that you just have to work hard and get a good education to make it. Once again telling us that it is our own fault that we aren’t living the good life that anyone who isn’t lazy can achieve in America, and pretending that you are responsible yourself for never having enough to satisfy the demands of capitalism. Who will be able to erase that ignorant origin where this kind of thought process comes from? Do you believe that a university education can fix that? I don’t think so when it is our business, legal, and medical schools who are teaching capitalism and obscene profit aspirations. Where will a different mindset be found? If it isn’t already in your heart, you are unlikely to ever find it. And for those people who do not possess that kind of heart the only hope is a government that will legislate it. And if we don’t have the intestinal fortitude to demand and create that kind of legislation then expect the extinction of at least ¾ of the population within the next five to ten years. There just isn’t any other way that can evolve from where we now stand. Everyone wants to keep their freedom but refuses to acknowledge that the ability to belittle and terrorize others for their differences is not freedom, it is irresponsibility and ignorance held on to as a leftover from childhood when if parents and older people didn’t teach you restraint and show you a better way to get along in this world you would destroy it and then wonder how it became destroyed.

How is it possible that this video is even more relevant 39 years later than it was in 1984?

I will not mention any more spoilers from The Trial of The Chicago 7 here but I will tell you that if you can stomach the abusive treatment of the defendants during their trial you will not wonder why the people who stage a protest rarely have a better outcome than these people did. It is because of a system that fears the loss of the superiority that they feel they are entitled to. And it is those very people who believe that they earned their entitlement who are the ones who must see to it that entitlement to live without the fear of illness and death and basic human dignity is afforded to everyone and should never be contingent on the whims of others whose judgements can be horribly wrong when they are based on an illusion of power and grandiosity which has to be proven to an admiring world constantly, many times at the cost of the lives of others. To assume that your station in life grants you that right is to be challenged on that assumption by those who will not willingly lay down their own lives for you, and should not ever have to hit back with violence to get you to understand that.

And So, It’s Not Christmas, But What Have You Done?

Today we are told to remember and honor those people who have passed on from this earthly existence. Nobody needs to tell you to do that if you have lost loved ones in your life. You do that every day, but what we do need to remember - and we might not do that without their prompting - is to pay tribute to capitalism by purchasing flowers, American flags, and red, white, and blue mementos to honor those who are gone. There are some people here where I live doing that, but mostly they are taking vacations, making a mad dash to the lake to water ski and live a glorious few days in the sun with lots of beer and food. We can’t help it. The death of loved ones just makes us want to run out and prove that we aren’t the ones who are dead. We won’t get to do this again until July and September, but the good news is that when those holidays come around, we will also be prompted to buy very overpriced fireworks and accidentally start fires and terrorize any animals who might be close by. We have earned these rights by way of losing our loved ones in death, though their deaths were not in vain. At least, we don’t think they were. Best not to look at that too closely!

I understand that in order to receive food stamps now you will have to be over the age of 54 to get them without being subject to a work requirement. I hate to tell everyone this but in some states you had to be at least 60 to escape that requirement more than a decade ago. Even better than that, until Jimmy Carter became President in the 1970s you had to pay for food stamps. A family of three, depending on their particular circumstances, could be charged $94.00 for ninety-five dollars’ worth of food stamps. Even the social workers who had to deliver that information to the families in crisis were horrified and embarrassed by it. But hey, what do you expect, you poor person? You are lucky to be alive. You survived Covid-19, several wars, and September 11th if you are over the age of 35 or so. We don’t want to hold your hand or give you anything to eat if you aren’t an essential worker here. And believe me, the kind of work you do has to be something we deem important. Do not think that an Etsy or EBay shop is going to cut it. You should be grateful that we aren’t remembering you today while we are on vacation!

So, let’s be honest, if we can’t use you to make money for the economy or give us an excuse to celebrate away from our work for at least a day, do not assume that you are worth feeding or housing or providing medical care for. Go get a job, slob! Earn your holiday like the rest of us and be glad that you are still here to witness this momentous occasion when your government can once again pay the interest on its debts because it all was dependent upon whether or not you get to eat.

What Will Save Us? Who Will Save Us?

“When the truth is found to be lies. And all the joy within you dies.” - Somebody to Love by Jefferson Airplane

Whether you are willing to admit it or not this planet and its inhabitants are doomed. Nobody runs around incoherent and blabbering and blaming and fighting and stealing like people are now unless they believe that their bubble has burst and they cannot get it back without destroying whatever it was that did the bursting. And there are so many things that did it. How can we possibly stamp them all out?

 A truth teller now is a marked person. “You just shut up about what you think is wrong because I know that it is you who is wrong. The truth has come out and I don’t want to hear it. You are changing what I have believed in all of my life. You are killing my nirvana! I won’t accept it. I will destroy you. I cannot just die like this. I am unhappy. It is your fault that I am unhappy. I have an AR-15 and I will use it.”

They are angry at you, you lying liberal assholes! There is a target on your forehead and on your back. How dare you point out what got us here to this miserable state! So…what has set us against each other besides a difference of opinion? Theft of property. And who is doing the theft? Bottom line; a system of government that has sold its soul to keep its job. I hear all the time how capitalists and corporate fascist masters have set up a system where everything that they want can be bought, but who are they buying from? A government that has sold its soul to keep its job. So why are people shooting random people in the streets and in the marketplace and in the schools and churches and on, and on, and on, when these random people are not the ones who have burst your bubble? Because you are terrified of calling out and holding accountable the real perpetrators of the theft and misery. To do so would really topple your house of cards and the “I’ll get you anyway, peewee!” solution is always unpacked first because it is the easiest and isn’t likely to make us as uncomfortable as the possibility that we will have to build our house again from scratch if our pseudo monarchy falls.

Until we get it through our heads that we have lost and we cannot go back and fix it, we are not going to come through this black hole unscathed. It is inflicting pain to avoid pain and it will not work. We are nowhere near as repentant and apologetic as the little dog in the following video but what this dog has brought upon himself because he was troubled by Fluffy talking back is where we are about to be. Take a lesson. There is no hope without the realization that we might actually be totally wrong about our entitlement. Our sacred truths have been found to be lies. Have any joy left?

Have a nice day. It is at the expense of your own world.

Single Payer Society

We have come to a point here in America where we can no longer pretend that we have the ability to carry on with the myth and the ideal that we are the admiration of the world and there are equal opportunities for all to achieve “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”. What we actually have is “your tired, your poor, and your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”. No matter what you have heard, the ability to prosper here is being eaten alive by massive job losses, massively expensive housing, and massively high prices on everything.  Too assume that the situation is going to improve is the acme of ignorance and for those of us who haven’t fallen yet there is the wonder how long we can remain on life support. But wait - we aren’t on life support! Not when we are rapidly being replaced by AI, robots, employers who expect one person to do the work of 3 or 4, and a society that doesn’t seem to care.

As incredible as it may sound, there are still people here who will tell you that these things aren’t happening. They will also get in your face and tell you that whatever hardship you may be experiencing is your own fault or call you a whiner for pointing out the facts. This society is going down the tubes rapidly and if you don’t believe it, you might want to take a look at all of the gun violence here. Where I live, there are people who carry guns into the grocery stores and people who sit on their front porches with loaded firearms. It wasn’t always like this. There is some reason why people are aggressive and terrified and just looking for someone to take their frustrations out on. You do not see behavior like this in a free and prosperous country with opportunities and hope for the future.

Poverty, hunger, sickness, homelessness, want, and fear are all around us. There are people who are extremely angry about the inequality that exists here and even though they desperately need help they will “bite the hand that feeds them” because they are furious that we have inequality in the first place and we have a society that sees no reason to change that because charities exist and sometimes crumbs are passed around to put a band-aid on the problem long enough to shut people up for awhile. The haves and have nots are so disconnected and so far removed from each other here that they might as well be on different planets. We might actually have some peace if they were, but since they are not, the time has really come to take a hard look at why inequality exists and persists.

There is an assumption in this world that if you work you can have your needs met but this isn’t true. If you have a job outside of your home you may earn enough in wages to buy a shirt or many shirts if your job pays well. Why is it that a person who is not working is denied one? The answer to that is that business owners who wish to have many, many shirts will share a small amount of their wealth with those who do their work for them so they receive lots of money for whatever their company produces. They hire others to do the work that is actually their responsibility for having created their own company. They enlarge their company to the point where they can no longer manage the production alone. This is when they seek out others to do their slave labor. But since slavery was abolished in this country many years ago, they have to call what they are doing something else. It is called employment. If you are not employed right now, the process involved in finding a job is a total self-esteem crusher. Even if you have valuable skills, a good work record, and a degree of faith in your own ability those who make the decisions on who gets hired and who does not tend to play a game of proving that you are nothing more than a human resource whom they do not really need and you should not assume that you have any worth beyond an inadequate salary and a casual notice. Whatever hardship that you may be experiencing that brought you to their company seeking a job is irrelevant and not their problem.

In some cases, employment will provide you with a salary large enough to meet your needs and the demands of a society that wants money as much as you do. They usually provide some sort of mutual exchange in return for your money but it is rarely a fair exchange and you find that you run out of your resources quickly and are barred from making all of the exchanges that you need to sustain your life and wellbeing while others amass a great amount of wealth at your expense. How do we change the dynamics of this situation so it is equitable for all and not just for a few? They rely on your inequality to maintain a system that will never allow things to be different.

It is not a natural and inborn trait in humans to believe that they should have more than others do. Children know instinctively when they have had enough to eat. Small children nearly always stop eating when they are full.  They usually cannot be compelled to eat more unless an adult forces them to clean their plate by requiring that they not waste food. Most animals are the same. They will stop eating when their need has been met. It takes a developed ego to deny food or comfort to others, and a perceived sense of superiority in people to delight in the discomfort of others. This behavior is learned. Even when a small child refuses to share a toy with other children it is usually because they do not wish to be deprived of their own amusement with it and not because they wish to be mean. That comes later in childhood if it happens. Here again, it is a learned behavior that comes from either curiosity to see how others will react to deprivation or it stems from a desire to make someone else deliberately feel bad.  It is behavior that will only get worse if an adult does not intervene and explain why being that way is a problem. It would appear that there are few adults in power in this world. While there are some laws and rules regarding selfishness in our culture, they are not enforced in an equitable way. Too many people see no reason to be fair in the distribution of life’s necessities. And though not everyone delights in seeing others deprived they are complicit in perpetuating want and need by ignoring that it exists or placing blame on the victims of poverty.

Most people won’t do anything that doesn’t make them feel good in some way. Many people work but they don’t all enjoy doing it. It is a necessity of life that they feel they have to do and would not do it at all, at least not at the behest of a business owner whom they don’t give one damn about, if they knew another way to get by in this world.  Much of that mentality is behind scamming, cheating, and criminal behavior. It is much more fun to set up some unsuspecting sucker and talk them out of their money than it is to get out of bed early and go down to the office or factory or retail shop and do something that benefits someone else more than it does you. It takes a lot of fear, force, and brainwashing to accomplish this. There are some jobs that people enjoy enough to do for nothing. Many do volunteer work, but that won’t pay the bills so it only happens when people already have their basic needs met. To have an all-volunteer society you would have to provide a basic income to everyone up front. Here is why the employer class does not want that to happen; because few if any people would take their crap and their crap jobs. I think that many people would still take the jobs that serve a purpose and serve the greater good, but most would not clean the employer’s toilets, wash their cars, do their laundry or any other job that a typical adult is capable of doing for themselves, and they would not give 75% of what their work is worth back to the employer so he can be 75% better off in life than they are. You would still see street cleaners and sanitation workers because that serves the entire community and the common good. Trash will pile up in your house, too, if the job isn’t done. Yes, some people would not get up off their asses to hit a tap but those kinds have always existed and they would quickly find that there would be no appreciation from others of their existence and they aren’t likely to think that is too great. Nowhere in the world is there a place where all of the people are reasonable and responsible.

An ideal society has never existed anywhere but the majority of the social and societal ills the we have manifested as a result of inequality and favoritism on the part of elitists who tightfistedly covet a system that will constantly support the illusion that they do not have to experience fear and hardship has backed us into a corner where people are coming out fighting and shooting and feeling that they have little to lose now when everything is being taken away from them.  As long as we are complicit in allowing the elite to keep a master/slave mentality by agreeing with them that they are deserving and others are not, we condemn the majority of the people to death because their resources continue to be claimed and stolen away by an elite minority. So, we need to set up a system where volunteer work is valued and appreciated enough to provide a basic income to all because they are here and they contribute to society in the best way that they know how.  That basic income would need to be for every individual and be equivalent to a living wage. A one-person household would receive an amount equal to what it costs for one person to live comfortably without fear that they would not be able to pay for housing, food, and all that goes with that. Another basic check would be received for every other adult and child in the home.

For too long we have told people that they are not worthy. To volunteer is to be proactive in charting your own future. To wait and hope and pray that others will somehow notice that they have worth is all that we have given to the majority and if they won’t get up off their backsides and contribute to their world it is mainly the result of making sure that they never see that they matter.

The basic income would be distributed by the government but it would be funded by the business class and the wealthy. Money would not be paid to the volunteers by the business sector. There would be no tiered salaries based on favoritism or longevity. This system is actually not much different from the Medicare for all system that most people want for this country.  Compensation would be paid to the providers of the medical services from one source through taxation. It is similar to the military in that all of the basic needs of the enlisted people are provided for and our military has been all volunteers since after the Vietnam war. Back then many people thought that no one would ever enlist in the military again but they were wrong.

One of the first arguments against a system and society like this would be regarding the federal income tax. It needs to be remembered that there was no income tax on a worker’s wages until 1913 when the income tax bill introduced in 1909 was ratified by Congress. The US had been going along very well without it before that for more than 100 years. Where did the money come from to run this country and its government prior to that? Since the early 1950s our government has relied on working people to support it as much as 80%. Consider that our country was built from the ground up. Where did the money come from to build cities, roads, universities, government offices and everything that we have before the average working citizens were required to pay for all that is here? It came from those who were most able to afford it - corporations, businesses, and the very wealthy. Their ability to amass incredible fortunes was viewed as a privilege of being able to accomplish such a thing here and it was fair and just that they give support and something back to the country that allowed this to be possible. Somewhere along the line it was decided that they shouldn’t have to do that anymore and their contributions have been less and less for decades to the point where we are now. The wealthy do not even pay into the Social Security system. When the ungodly rich pay little or no federal taxes and somehow manage to receive millions of dollars in tax refunds every year there is little wonder why the average wage earner is having such a difficult time surviving now.  Doing away with corporate welfare and tax refunds to the rich who pay little or no taxes into the system now would more than pay for a basic income for the people. We are supporting the bloated and obese oligarchs who would still be filthy rich if they were being held accountable as they previously were. Ungodly wealthy people have always existed even back when they were required to pay their fair share.

A volunteer system of work would eliminate so many of the social problems and inequality that are dividing and destroying this nation. It may be that you would want to keep your present job because you are good at it and know that it has worth. Where your income is distributed from would not change the fact that your time and effort and expertise are still needed. It would only change the hierarchy and classism that exists in the workplace that keeps you from having a feeling of pride and self-worth about what you contribute there. It would also do away with the fear of being unemployed, uninsured, and unable to keep your home and meet your obligations because your income is not governed by a work requirement. The only real requirement is that you understand that you are an integral part of your society and a necessary element in keeping your world functioning not only for your wellbeing but for the wellbeing of a society that is worth living in.  There would be many jobs that would fall by the wayside because they would no longer be relevant or they never were to begin with, but except for those who are too old, too young, or mentally or physically incapable of working there are so many possibilities when you eliminate the unnecessary and put your energy into the things that really matter. Whether or not a business or a product or a service is needed and relevant would likely need to be rethought. If there is a need and demand for its work product there would be no question regarding its survival but most towns do not need more than one of the same business and many of them now have multiples in cities that cannot support them all. A clean and safe world, good health and wellbeing, and a sense of accomplishment and pride in your own worth are the elements that could make life in America the marvel of the world, and they are at the core of what we all seek for ourselves in our lifetime, starting at birth. To feel that your life has meaning and a purpose is the ultimate accomplishment at the highest level. Far too many Americans do not have that and see no hope of ever achieving it when they are shown every single day that their life means nothing when it is so easy to lose it. Leveling the playing field is our best hope because the alternative is to stand by and watch the downfall of our country.

 

“From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” - Karl Marx

For We Are the Chosen Ones

“And one ring to the race of men, who above all else desire power.”- The Lord of The Rings - The Fellowship of The Ring

In the Fellowship of The Ring, Frodo Baggins inherits a ring of power from his Uncle Bilbo. Neither one of them fully understand the extent of the power that the ring holds but Frodo comes to know how powerful and dangerous it is as he is charged with seeing to its destruction before it falls into the hands of others who would destroy their world in full ignorance of what it actually means to hold that kind of power. Frodo embarks upon a journey fraught with incredible danger for him. He is nearly killed many times and the ring exerts a sometimes overwhelming power over him. Ultimately, he does destroy the ring but his journey leaves him depleted of the ability to pick up from it and live normally again. The power of capitalism and greed that we are experiencing the fallout from right now is destroying this generation. More than 150 years ago Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels realized what it was doing to societies and individuals in their time. They set about trying to create a society that would not destroy the people as they tried to make a decent living for themselves and their families. The struggle of Marx and Engles is still going on today. It has never taken hold in any generation since their time because there are not enough people who will listen to a philosophy that can negate the destruction of the modern world. Destroying capitalism’s unbridled power once again falls upon those of us who may not be able to withstand the forces of men who have sought only wealth and profit and power to the point of eliminating a future for their descendants.

The adults in America who had lived through the stock market crash in the 1920’s, the Great Depression in the 1930’s, and World War II in the 1940’s never wanted to see their children suffer through such times as they had seen. Babies born after the war grew up in a world of building up instead of tearing down. There was a new prosperity and great hope for the future. These children were the future and no one wanted them to know poverty and want or need. A great many of them never did. So their comfortable world was built for them and they had the time and the freedom to cash in on it. Unfortunately, they saw no need to keep building on that for the generations to come.

“But I got a drug and I got the bug and I got something better than love.” -from the Beck song Beercan

For a time in the 1960’s, there was freedom and fun and college and protest when war came again, but this generation did not see it in terms of patriotism and civil responsibility. This war was different and this generation was different, and the times were different. So there was a period of energy focused upon the previous generation who had gotten us into the war. They were wrong, we are right. “Make love not war.”, and so they did. Then in the 1970’s the troops were brought home from Vietnam and the children felt better. But what would they do now? They would make money. Lots of it. It was decided that there were many untapped avenues for doing so. They weren’t doing it just for the money. They were “doing it for a “s**t load of money!” (from the film Spaceballs) And thus began a 50 year quest for ungodly profits for the former “love generation” who were able to leave that philosophy behind and never look back and not remember to preserve a place for their children who would never learn about the struggle that came before them. “Nobody told us. ‘Cause nobody showed us.” (from the song Don’t Go Breakin’ My Heart.)

And now it really is up to us to fight for and insist that our elders who have left us a crumbling and broken system and society fix the damage. We are working hard to repair what we can but they keep showing us in no uncertain terms that we aren’t deserving of a good start in life. They fix nothing and break everything. They are taking away every freedom from us that they enjoyed, squandering resources, and making it impossible for us to afford a balanced life. Why are they doing that?  Because they cannot stand the fact that the future is ours and they are on their way out. They were the generation that was going to stay young and beautiful and on top of the game forever. How dare these kids expect to take over! This land is not your land it is my land and I will destroy it before I let you take it from me.  It is jealousy and narcissism from the “Baby Boomer” generation who fear the death of their lifetime in the sun that they enjoyed for longer than they were entitled to. 

So, we stand upon the mountain battered and beaten with the hope of changing what our forefathers left us with, and as we contemplate throwing the capitalist ring of power into the fire, we encounter those who covet it so much with a poisoned mind that they see nothing but how they must hold onto their prize, and they will fight to the death to keep it, hoping that the death will be of those who seek a different way. God only knows if we will prevail as Frodo did when the ring went into the abyss with the power-hungry creature who could not stand to live without it. Even if we do prevail, we will never be the same. It has taken too great a toll on us. And the spoiled children who brought us to this point will bring about the death that they so fear rather than find the courage to let go of the myth that they are invulnerable and immortal.

Well, You Know, We’d All Love to See the Plan.

-from the 1968 song Revolution by The Beatles

The winds of change have been blowing for many decades here in America. They have managed to stir up a few tornados in the business of being a citizen here but since we entered the 21st century those winds have blown mostly a torrent of anger and violence that we either can’t or won’t address to bring us to a balanced center where we can sit down at the table and negotiate for a settlement of our deep differences. You can blame the right or you can blame the left but it all boils down to people who are too selfish and spoiled to do the hard work that peace requires.

I hear many people speak about all of the things that are wrong in this country every day. Politicians say this, religious leaders say this, economists say this, legal experts say this, and the common blowhard says this at the dinner table and on social media and in the faces of anyone not fast enough to get away from their speeches. So what is the answer to a society that has gone off the deep end and is drowning in hatred and resentment, poverty and a lack of empathy? To begin, we will have to find one common ground issue that we all can agree is affecting everyone. What is that issue? There doesn’t appear to be one unless you count the congressional anger about Tik Tok. One could assume that we all want to live our lives in the best way possible but the truth is that a lot of people don’t want all of us to.  Many of our citizens do not give one damn about the survival of anyone other than themselves. To have come to this point should be terrifying to all of us but it isn’t.

The town that I live in used to be a lot nicer than it is now. In the last few years, I have seen it turn into a dirty and dried up community of haves and have nots where the affluent have migrated to the outskirts of town and left the city center to rot. A few attempts at reviving the area within the city limits have been made but they mainly focus on tearing down condemned buildings and replacing them with restaurants and areas where one can walk through the city at night carrying a cocktail in a paper cup, or not replacing them at all. One end of the Main Street looks quaint and festive and the other end looks like total crap. Everything is a half-assed job here which serves only a small portion of the population now and the rest can be damned. So where would you find a common ground in a place that never even considers what the quality of life might be like at the other end of the street? You won’t. It does not exist in the minds of those who have the power and the resources to bring us toward a common ground. This is the situation everywhere, and too many people are fine with it.

So, for everyone that I hear pointing out all of the injustices in this country I have yet to see their plan for getting us all on the same page to correct this inequality. How do you change the people’s minds when they are fine with the minds that they have?

You tell me it’s the institution.

In the 1988 film The Last Temptation Of Christ, the character Pontius Pilate, played by David Bowie, tells Jesus “It simply doesn’t matter how you want to change things. We don’t want them changed.”  Socialism, Communism, or Marxism, any “ism” that you want other than Capitalism falls upon deaf ears too much of the time. The “haves” in America put up a mental block to them many decades ago. Too often our words do not penetrate through that block. Why would they want to give up the great position that they are in? Why should they be willing to have a little less on their plates so others can have more? When you must explain the why in this to people, you are dealing with closed minds and hard hearts. To make a dent in their point of view you would almost have to put them in a time machine and take them back to infancy. As an adult, you will not see what you don’t want to see. Even if your reasoning for changing the world is sound and logical they would see no legitimate argument. Allowing pain and misery is easy if you have already sown up your argument with “it is their own fault”. They won’t debate that point with you because they don’t have a leg to stand on in reality and they know it, but capitalism is an institution that in their mind is untouchable.  In the film, it had been prophesized that Rome would fall but they were too arrogant to believe it. It did fall, though. The predictions are here for the collapse of capitalism as well. If their own actions make this prophecy real, will we have sense enough to build up again with a better system? Armed with a sense of direction for that right now, we absolutely will.

You ask me for a contribution.

Bernie Sanders wrote in his latest book, It’s Okay To Be Angry About Capitalism that the average contribution that his campaign received during his 2020 run for the Presidency was $18.50 and the vast majority of the contributors were average citizens. If he were to run again in 2024, I could probably give that much in support this time but I might have to skip dinner for a couple of nights to do it. That’s how bad things are now. It should not be, but those who worship the god capitalism are not being told not to starve us out and take away our livelihood. Bernie is certainly a person worth donating two potential dinners to but the choice should not come down to that. That it would for many of us reflects a warped set of priorities put upon us to keep a warped system going.  Bernie has always remained steadfast in his message and ideals on what needs to be done in America and he proves it every time that he speaks. Support for him is a no-brainer even when the chips are really down and the fish is too.

A great many of our representatives in Washington were born in the 1940s and 50s. They were around during the time that the song Revolution was playing on the radio, and when there were many people protesting about civil rights, human rights, women’s rights, and the Vietnam War. Many of them participated in the protests, but except for a few, these people seem to have forgotten how to care about anything except profit and their position.

But if you want money for people with minds that hate…

There is a reason why we tend to hear more in this country from angry and resentful people. It is because a ton of money is being made from the internet and nowhere near as much is made from brick-and-mortar businesses. I have heard that many Amazon Go and Whole Foods stores are going to close.  Anger and hate words trigger algorithms lightning quick and peace, love, and solutions to problems are not conducive to making money. So, if you wonder why you hear more about the rude and reckless attitudes in the mainstream, this is why. It is more profitable. Does anybody care about that? Not if they are the ones reaping the benefits. Anger and hatred get attention faster than any other topic and it gets converted into chaos and criminality every single day. The profits are enormous and it doesn’t matter if these prompts are lies. Once the money is made who cares?

You say you’ll change The Constitution.

I have my doubts about this one because you don’t have to change it to get what you want. All you have to do is reinterpret it and it has been proven that they can take away any freedom that they want. If this doesn’t frighten you not much will, but so far it has been quite acceptable to do this as long as it is someone else’s freedom that is being lost. Yes, there are many who realize how wrong this is but so far, their voices are not loud enough to make a difference.

You tell me that it’s evolution.

Yes, I would tell you that. The troubles that we now have could very well evolve out of the culture after a time. We sometimes outgrow childishness and stupidity, but if we wait for an evolutionary change, I fear that the current generation would not live to see it. I also fear that the planet won’t survive the slow winds of evolution. De-evolution is another story.  It has the pedal to the metal. There has been a sharp decline in balanced human behavior that reminds me of barbarians. At first it reminded me of the Old West where there was lawlessness and a disregard for anything that got in the way of what a disconnected man saw as an easy road to success by virtue of having two guns strapped to his hips. When the citizens grew tired of living with people like this, laws were enacted to put a stop to it. We are now beyond that. Scammers are constantly calling us and sending deceptive texts to trick us out of our money.  Guns are everywhere and few attempts have been made to stop it. So now the rule of the gun and the rule of lies is used whenever we don’t like something. That is enough to intimidate a great many of us and keep us afraid and distracted enough to stay out of the other rule which is corporate greed is good. If you doubted it before try buying an affordable car or renting a house at an affordable price. How much more are you spending per month on groceries than you were last year?

You say you’ve got a real solution.

If after reading this you still have a plan for a workable revolution, please tell the rest of us. When John Lennon wrote the song change was a real possibility. But even back then it was going to require more cooperation than many of the people in this country were willing to offer. By the time the 1960s protesters reached their 40s most of them had abandoned the causes. The children that they had couldn’t relate to the struggles that their parents knew so the old problems came back and it truly shows that those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it. Will future generations know about the problems that we have today? Will there be textbooks that tell the stories of our struggle for fairness and equality or will they all have been pulled from the school libraries and never be spoken about? Stock your personal library now and pass it along to the next generation because it may be the only record left of how we worked for their future at a time when too many of the people lived like there was no tomorrow. Your children are going to be the keepers of what we were and what we stood for. The meek (or the weak) are on track to inherit the earth by being beaten and starved into submission by love of profit. The affluent are already looking for a new home to ravage and plunder. What would John think of us now?