Sarah Palin and Her Masculinity Complex
In spite of her outward feminine characteristics, which the press keeps reminding us are devastating in a closed room meeting, Sarah Palin might actually feel deeply at odds with her being a woman. Her physical self aside, she is clearly in a rush to ‘prove’ herself and to show the world that she can play with the big boys. Whether it be shooting, fishing or being a politician Ms. Palin clearly demonstrates all of the characteristics of having a serious masculinity complex. Add a dose of narcissism and off she goes.
To fully appreciate the depths of this dysfunction, put aside any notion that it means being a big tough guy or gal, but that the mental manifestation that springs in her consistently is that of a competition among men and herself and can no doubt be traced to her earlier years. Consumed with ‘being equal’ or ‘as good as’ men in her life she clearly becomes deeply uncomfortable, even anxiety-filled, when perceiving a routine question as a challenge to her ability to answer. Not just to answer but to answer as good as a man.
The early life experience in the masculinity complex gets set up by the view a young woman has as she grows and perceives that men can do anything, get away with more, are stronger, can accomplish enormous feats and all the rest culminating in an envy of men and a serious desire to equal their independence and ability to manipulate their world as they see fit. This on either a physical or a mental level. In turn, the young woman embarks on a long journey of actually competing with men in an effort to be as good as or better than securing the freedom she sees that men have in their world and deeply envies. A perpetual flight from womanhood, forever falling short of manhood.
Running for office, mayor, governor, VP are all a means to prove her self worth. Hunting, fishing and all the outdoor adventure-sports found in Alaska serve as an ideal medium to express her desperate ability to compete and to be seen to compete successfully against what she perceives to be real men doing real manly things in what she believes is really a mans’ world. Being photographed with real army men, real guns and wearing camouflage clothing is yet another expression of the same dynamic. And, after all, Trooper gate is really just another attempt to dominate a man armed and in uniform and bring him to her will. The details really don’t matter here for this discussion as it is all the same dynamic. The notion of attacking patriarchal Russia is yet again another and most disconcerting expression of Ms. Palins’ masculinity complex.
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So then, where exactly does the swimsuit competition and the oozing femininity fit into her thinking? Easily, it is another weapon, an alternate one, for her to use if she feels cornered in some way and the perceives a threat against herself and her delicate mental framework which she herself has constructed as a means to cope with, control and manipulate her outside world. Bottom line, if she can’t beat you outright she will dazzle you with her beauty and fancy privileged eyeglasses designed to make her look smarter than she is. When her feminine mind-construct falls short she calls out her body. Under the pressure of this anxiety the ‘girl’ now takes refuge in a fictitious male role.
Doubt this? Probably not. We see her in every photo op showing a lot of leg. Not inappropriate by today’s standards and welcome as a natural expression but not in Ms. Palins’ case. Still doubt this? Look at the interviews with McCain in the same room with her. She is as bundled up as an Eskimo sitting in front of Ms. Couric in full length man-like trousers and a high reaching collar albeit in histrionic red. But don’t show too much skin with Dad around. But oh how it feels so good to be in a room with an interviewer as along as Dad is sitting next to me..,..Honestly she appeared to want McCain to get up and smack Couric if she could have it her way. Palins’ disdain for women is well documented and, of course, has it origins also in her personal self-image and her utter frustration with being a woman at all. Why else would she want to control so many women by making abortion a crime but to curtail women from freely enjoying their sexuality? Her desire to constrain women springs from her personal discomfort with her own inner woman and manifests itself as punishment towards other women in the form of serious and painful legal restrictions that she would apply to all women by abolishing abortion. How better to distance herself from her gender schism than to ban the natural instincts of other women as would a conservative Calvinistic man. Ms. Palin is known for pontificating from a pulpit in church about the evils of progressive society acting more like an elder pilgrim than a modern day woman. This is a glaring admission of her inability to reconcile her inner dialogue with the outer world and present day reality. Also, not to be underestimated, is the safety she feels speaking from the podium. The distance creates a river of safety between her and her constituency. In fact, between her and real self.
Ms. Palins’ facial expression which flash subtlety from defensive when looking at her interviewer to one of a relaxed safe admiration when looking at McCain sitting next to her. The change in lability is astounding, obvious and a bit disconcerting. Her inability to contain herself until the question is finished is another dead giveaway. Ms. Palin is in such a rush to ‘prove herself worthy of the boys club’ that she actually talks over the question never allowing it to just stand-even for a moment. Desperate to show mastery she foregoes the quality of actually having a thoughtful answer; for having a thoughtful answer is not what she herself is seeking. Preoccupied with the compulsive need to show an ability to master the question put to her, it is doubtful Ms. Palin actually has the cognition required to hear the question-as it is-in the first place. So inadequate are her feelings and so strong her need to display self-efficacy, that she has inadvertently made the McCain campaign her personal campaign taking on an inordinate and unmanageable amount of responsibility in doing so. Serious face when acting in her man role. Smiling when acting in her woman role. Clearly she views women as meant to be charming, manipulative and men as more meaningful.
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Sadly, she puts her needs ahead of yours in doing so, which speaks to a co-morbid behavior of narcissism alongside her already problematic complex with both men and women. The end result is an individual with a serous lack of content. A high-octane machine that views male vigor and garrulous responses as reasonable; never mind the actual line of rational, Queen Non-Sequitur.
Could you imagine Joe Biden doing such a thing? Of course not, it is simply not necessary for Biden to act in such a way to defray his anxiety about being VP as he has none and is rightly comfortable being in an Obama presidency and moreover in an administration and not feeling as though he –and he alone-is expected to ride to the rescue in order to distinguish himself. Although Joe Biden will talk you to death.
Just like Bush, the preoccupations of deep feelings of inadequacy arise when they bump up against something they know is bigger then themselves. In the case of Bush it has long since been documented that he ‘loves’ mountain biking and pedals the dirt trails at Camp David more frequently than he is actually in his office. No doubt his office brings up deep feelings of inadequacy and he flees to the hills with secret service men in tow where he feels at least he can beat them on the bike trail. Not unusual in a lot of offices but do we really need someone in the Oval Office who feels the need to flee be it Palin or Bush?
This behavior is not unusual for the average person but it is definitely not vote worthy. Most just meander through life attempting to reconcile their inner dialogue and the outer world with a variety of practices; hunting, fishing and biking in these particular cases. Fundamental religion is also a cornerstone for those who cannot accept even a moment of uncertainty because it offers them the solid construct of a very definite and exceedingly simple answer to the duality of our lives. All is either black or white, good or bad, friend or foe and so on. Comforting perhaps to a simple mind yearning for peace but not at all suitable to a leader in a complex world where tolerance and understanding are absolutely essential to survival. Each of these, sadly including religion, is merely another attempt to ‘butch up’ and gird oneself against the onslaught of an overwhelmingly complex world. Jesus did not practice his faith in this way.
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What to do? Foremost, get therapy. There is no crime in finding yourself suffering these conditions. But not addressing them is a crime and likely to affect everyone around you as we have seen here in this presidency and are presently threatened with in a feminine flip-flop of the same dynamic but in the form of Ms. Palin acting as Mr. Bush. Sarah Palin is in fact simply an upside down Bush. Or, inside out if you prefer. Reading press accounts equating Bush with Palin are more accurate than they know but in a much deeper and more meaningful way than just political views and representations. This is not just a political representation, it is a pathology.
Therapy might allow her to discover what she perceives as shortcomings to be nothing more than a psychological dynamic present in a lot of motivated women. And once the dynamic is recognized a healthier contribution can be made to the life of true public service and in a much more meaningful and useful way than that which we are presently witnessing. Therapeutic intervention would reorder the dynamic not make it go away. No loss of power results from a better understanding of oneself. It would, in fact, make her
stronger, healthier and move closer to becoming the strong individual she is desperately seeking in herself. She is highly motivated but for the wrong reasons guaranteeing an adverse outcome for those around her. Everyone involved with a disordered person gets hurt.
To be fair, Ms. Palin has probably come by her mindset honestly but lacks the analytical mind to be able to deconstruct and then reconstitute herself as a whole person. However, we clearly need to have a whole, healthy and complete individual in the White House.
To hold Palin responsible alone for her debacle thus far is wholly wrong. McCain is the seasoned veteran whose judgment we are supposed to be trusting, whose experience and insight we are to yield to as superior than our own and guaranteed to rise when needed to see that we Americans are all secure, safe and have the rights we have recognized for all of our short time here in this country. Washington is a hall of mirrors for narcissistic personalities who are power hungry and equate their own self worth with money and stature. Sending Palin to Washington would be like waiving a fully loaded needle with heroin in front of a junkie in withdrawal, leaving it on the table and then exiting the room. What do you think would happen?
Friday, November 21, 2008
Thursday, November 20, 2008
Piracy as Investment; Somalia Pirates
Right Thinking On International Investing
Or
Piracy as a Mutual Fund
Piracy as a Mutual Fund
Breezing through the news these days is truly an adventure. Pirates, political crimes, punishment only for the lowly and billions in profits for the bold and righteous.
The pirates of Somalia are an interesting group of people. They are basically fishermen who, after being wholly unable to compete with large fishing vessels that catch and process and freeze their fish on-the-spot, have taken to commandeering vessels worth hundreds of millions of dollars along with their equally valuable cargo. They treat their captives very well and thus create a feeling of honor and a respect for life. The owner/operators of the vessels drop millions of cash dollars onto them, sometimes in burlap bags by helicopter, and they then release the vessel, the cargo and the well-fed crew. Who in these times could not root for such an underdog?
Sure, you could call them desperate, savage, self-serving and as having a complete disregard for law. But, wasn’t the last eight years here in our country full of the exact same behavior? Bush-Cheney have been much more savage and have flaunted their executive status in the very face of law and of the people they are supposed to serve. And, the Bush savages have killed hundreds of thousands, if not millions and continue to do so even after having been told repeatedly by their constituency that they need to stop the killing of innocent men, women and children. The Somali pirates have killed none so far. They’re businessmen. Serious businessmen. Something we need more of.
And, like the pirates, the Bush family has cashed in big time with the Carlyle companies and their participation in the wars for profit. Cheney too still holds his Halliburton stock and Condi has a ship named after her which flies the Chevron flag in its fleet. And Rumsfeld made over $6 milion in Tamaflu stock during the avian flu scare as he used to run that company. No sour grapes here. I realize the rules change and there can be no doubt about the last eight years as rule-changing extraordinaire. What I do object to is changing of rules and the exclusion of others-little guys like me-who cannot play at the same table. New rules are customary in America as gobs of new laws are thrown at us each month and every year. All that is fine. It is our system after all and I want in!
Looks like the pirates have a good business plan and I think we should consider investing in their efforts. After all, I need to retire some day too. So what if Stanford doesn’t call me as they do Condi. So what if I don’t own anything and have no wood to chop. So what if I don’t have friends so devoted to me that if shoot them in the face with a shotgun, they actually apologize to me. I am equally devoted but to the new pirate business venture. This could be bigger than the bogus gold finds floated by the Canadian markets some time back. And pirates have real equity in the cargo and booty they loot.
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Yes, they are a start-up business and it could get shaky for them. But, they have no taxes to pay as they have no government. They have an endless supply of cargo ships and oil tankers to process for cash and they will always get paid. No doubt. With their earnings they have been responsible enough to create a wealth of new materials and a better life for themselves and for their fellow villagers. New generators, new schools, luxury cars and a lot more food and finer quality food at that. Mostly imported from Dubai, that home of truly unfettered free trade. What is the capital of Dubai? Friedmanville, I should think.
Unlike a lot of start-up companies piracy only requires a small capital investment usually entailing a small wooden boat-a leftover from the failed fishing fleet-an AK-47 which runs around $20.00 in their area and a lean and mean attitude of which there is no shortage of after having been starving and destitute for years. So, we have the perfect investment vehicle. What we need now is for the pirates to go public and get listed on the exchange along with the other equally quasi-criminal outfits that already trade daily under names like Halliburton, Exxon and Vanguard prison services. They would be a really big hit on the already tainted exchanges in Wall Street. And what’s more, they do not need to carry insurance as there is no healthcare system in Somalia. No insurances are necessary as each pirate undertakes his work knowing the risk and weighing it against the reward. Low overhead;high profit. Perfect! Giving them a ticker symbol on our exchange, we could legitimize their efforts and that would allow us to invest and profit from their incredibly bold and exciting new business plan. Is this not the utmost in rugged individualism that we have seen since colonial America pried free the clammy splay-fingered British hands that were raking off profits from us some years ago?
Also, the pirates have revived commerce in Somalia. So much so that the people of the villages actually come to the shores to watch a newly commandeered vessel drop anchor while cheering and setting up booths to serve cooked foods imported for their pirate heroes and their temporary captives. When was the last time you saw Americans at an oil or car port cheering the arrival of new energy or shiny vehicles. No sir, these pirates are really onto something. So sure are the people of Somalia in the investment that they readily extend credit to the pirates knowing they will be very well paid when, uh, their ship comes in.
This could really fuel the next bubble for us to ride for a decade, maybe even more! After all, they are pirating vessels with tanks and oil. I don’t know anyone who owns and ships tanks and weapons except for governments and who cares if some government has to pay an upcharge for their bullets? We know they are going to use them to a bad end anyway. I don’t know anyone who has so much oil they need a supertanker to cart it around. I did know a greek ship owner once but he had no real use for me. Neither did I find any application for him.
Yes, I think in no uncertain terms that we should embrace the pirates and lead them to drink at our well in Wall Street. I want in on that! After all, there are not a lot of industries that have such a bright future right now and investing has become a mine field of certain death. At least with the pirates, we know exactly where they stand, what their business plan entails and there are no huge accounting firms to spin the details. Pretty honest approach to industry and investing for a refreshing change.
And, I like the management style of the pirates. They are tough to be sure but they are fair. Treating the crew of a waylaid vessel by feeding them imported foods and liquors is simply the most brilliant stroke of marketing I have seen in a long time. Perhaps we should have tried such an approach with the Iraqis or Afghans. They might have said, at least we are safe and full of fine food and tipsy until such time as this gets sorted out. In that way, the pirates are a team you can root for without having to feel conflicted that what they are doing is actually hurting anyone.
After all, the ships they have seized are either owned by a government or an oil company. So, what’s the big deal? Who really cares about a government? They can just requisition a new vessel or $10-20 million dollars in ransom and simply get their ship back and never miss a beat in their routine except perhaps for having to call their client and explain why they have a late delivery. The same goes for the oil companies. They can simply replace the vessel cargo load with another or farm it out to a private firm for a delivery. The oil doesn’t go bad so there is no rush nor is there any loss to speak of. What a wonderful business plan these pirates have! I am so impressed I want to call Warren Buffet and ask him to see if he can get in on the ground floor right away in the hopes that my BK-A stock can get back to a more palatable price range. Then I can look to sell those silly American shares and see about investing directly in piracy. I am thinking perhaps a piracy mutual fund would be the best approach. In this way we can spread the risk around-what little there is-and then see which pirate firm rises to the top and go from there. That is the American way and I think this is no time to get squeamish about money and investing.
The pirate firm that wins and leads this new industry will most likely be the one that treats the crew well fostering good public relations and asks a reasonable ransom for the vessel and cargo. Reinvesting in the pirate fleet is not necessary as there are thousands of idled fishing boats available for pirate use and bigger more sophisticated boats are simply not conducive to good piracy. The radar profile of a wooden fishing boat with a few guys and a handful of weapons is really small and a distinct advantage for the pirate-worker. And there is simply no need for a union, no dues, no overhead to speak of, no reporting of monies or worries about bank dealings in this bad economy. No one is going to call in a note and crush your business nor is there anyone else to compete with. And best of all, this business plan does not run the risk of being successful and being taken over by a large conglomerate as there simply is no huge firm like say ‘Pirates-R-Us’ that is lying in wait to make a hostile move. It is that new an industry!
The Somali coast is a beautiful place and it might be well worth the consideration that it would serve as a resort getaway some time in the future after the pirates have had a chance to build a capital base, as did Dubai, and function as a free zone for gambling building casinos and beachfront luxury hotels without the imperial entanglements normally found in a western country. Just as Dubai did. Maybe they can make man-made pirate islands of imported sand so we can see the expressions of their success too. People like to feel they are in good hands and associating with success.
In fact, the pirates have been open about Dubai being their trading partner. In much the same way as Halliburton, Dubai functions as an entity that can and will get you whatever you want albeit at an added value price. But that is ok because the extra cost cover the no-questions-asked part of the arrangement. Just like Halliburton!
What Somali pirates really need first though, as we have seen time and again, is good legal counsel. Retaining a large and well-positioned law firm is the first step to making sure you solidify your standing in industry and with their assistance public relations programs can be implemented changing their image from that of pirate to, say, international trade consulting and holding. After all, we have seen how effective good public relations really are when we use soft words for tough action and that anything can be done as long as it is done in a civilized sense or, at least, wrapped in a flag of patriotic warmness smoothing out the rough edges and showing a more humane side to these efforts. Perhaps a hearts and mind campaign would work. Maybe the pirate flag would have a picture of a starving child, an emaciated dog or, oh! I know! That Vanity Fair photo of the dying child being watched over by a hungry vulture. In this way the world would see the pirates as a sort of Robin Hood rather than a self-serving group like say, American politicians.
Yep, no doubt about it. As long as the pirates don’t kill anyone I am rooting for them as the home team! Go Pirates!!
Then & Now
Then And Now
The formation of America as a nation was truly a miraculous event. But since that time, what went wrong? So much has passed since the days when our initial beliefs were cemented into the Declaration and codified as the cornerstone for our existence as a people.
The biggest change is in the individuals that make up this country and the way in which we meet the challenges of the day. At the time when Jefferson wrote the Declaration, this country was in serious turmoil and put upon by the British in violent and oppressive ways leaving no room for an alternative, no competing narrative moving towards peace. Blood was being spilled and everyone knew it. Many were witnesses to the brutal dominance of the British. The level of intelligence Jefferson brought to our country has not been matched since. JFK, while dining with a large group in the White House said it best when he remarked, “Gentleman, so much intelligence has not been assembled in this room since Jefferson dined here alone”.
The tenor of the early days of America was truly a do-or-die scenario in which the people of the then non-existent America were seeking to break free from the yoke of tyranny put upon them by the British for the purposes of material ownership of this land and the benefits of cheap labor, tax revenue and raw materials. And, indeed, there were people dying in the struggle to free this fledgling country from that yoke.
Seeing fellow countrymen die in the cause certainly had an incalculable effect on the motivations of a newly formed government, a newly united people. Today our fellow countrymen die on far away sands, foreign soil in utterly different cultures. The news of those sacrifices is compartmentalized from our daily lives and only addressed when fed to us by the body politic we know only remotely as Washington Studios. We genuinely need to see death to appreciate life. Withholding truths so deep are beyond destructive.
Bleached and sterilized, the news of deaths among our men in uniform purportedly fighting for our safety, the images of the dead returning are forbidden to television or even to print media and photojournalism. We are simply informed as to the numbers of the dead and told they were heroic in their efforts to save our ‘way of life’. This seemingly simple but devastating withholding of information and images surrounding the returning soldiers that died in the cause is in and of itself enough to raise eyebrows.
Beyond that though, it wrestles control of our future from us as it steals from us the urgency of the present. Not knowing what is happening today leaves us no place for participation in tomorrow.
What Jefferson, Adams, Hamilton and the rest knew beyond any shadow of a doubt was that we were then-and are again right now-faced with the fight for our very existence. A fight to the death for a free nation, a land without oppression from political bodies, religious extremism, excessive unfair trade and especially from the dogma that undermines very essence of freedom. That freedom takes place within the individual and still struggles to find a home to this day even within ourselves.
So, what happened to this great nation, this marvelous experiment we call America?
The entire notion of freedom has been subverted to a few causes that seek only to serve themselves at the greater expense of the people. We, all of us, now serve the leadership of the parliament we have accepted as our own government. Identical to the British but bestowed now with an unquestionable edict; to save and protect our country. This elevation to a status of utter infallibility parallels only religious dogma in its nature and its perverted ability to place itself above us as individuals with sovereign rights.
How could we have let the beauty of the Declaration and its’ plain but unwavering pitch towards personal freedom be undermined by such things as politics, technology and the military-industrial complex? Truly, we were warned. And yet, here we are. Subservient to the dogma of Washington, told what to think, what to believe and only handed official interpretations of the world we all are stuck living in. We serve them. Each of us is a cog in their wheel. A happiness machine cajoled and massaged to consume and follow.
This would be a good place for a mild but poignant discourse on the shortcomings of man, of psychology and fear but that is not what we need right now. Our sights must turn to us as a people, sovereign, independent and demand full access to our country.
If Jefferson went wrong in his writings, it was in that he was placed squarely in a time in history between choosing freedom and oppression. His writings and the foundations of this country were laid on dark days when the view was that of a terminal country fighting for its’ very life. Jesus fought the same noble battle against domination by groups over the individual using dogma as its’ main tool for control.
Since that time we have all come to accept a more tolerant and submissive ‘way of life’. That submissive existence is, in fact, the America we now know and live in. Submission to authority is now so essential to our daily lives that even the notion of rearing up against the powers that rule our country are deemed unpatriotic or even illegal and will bring harsh penalties for anyone who dares to speak up against the ruling classes.
Sound British enough? I don’t fault the British. In fact, looking at the way things are today I am inclined to think we might have been better off remaining part of the British Empire where, at least, the rules were always strict and cemented in such a way as to circumvent the excesses of ‘freedom’ we now find intolerable. We suffer at our own hand.
The following are some things we need to fully face without prejudice and with a keen ability to simply see things as they are:
1.) The military-industrial complex was a term coined to mean that the military and American business concerns are inseparable and that the military will, in fact, kill at the behest of the corporation. The corporation, in turn, will share its ill-gotten gains with the military. This symbiotic relationship is central to our ‘way of life’. Using either overt or clandestine tactics, the military clears the way for corporate America to ‘do business’ at a profitable rate generating tax revenue that in turn feeds the military. Neither can exist without the other. We have long since gone passed the point of no return and find ourselves burdened with the incomprehensible relationship between these two factions.
2.) Not knowing the full extent of what is happening in the halls of power in America until after-the-fact is a process that goes wholly against our principles and allows an ongoing perversion of our people, our goods, our lives and our children’s lives. Our leaders routinely rule in secret, dealing under the table until such time as they can dress up their findings, wrap them in the false flag of patriotism and servitude. They reveal their actions only after having had rehearsal time creating the opportunity for them to reframe their actions in such a way as to make it palatable to the constituency. Their actions and their talk do not jive.
3.) Law has failed us. Crime and punishment is more a matter of money and influence than it is of rules and the application of those rules. Everyone knows there is something very wrong with lawyers in this country. Even if they set out with good intentions, once in ‘the system’ they find it to be so different from their initial expectations that they have a choice to either become one of them or to quit the profession altogether. There is no middle ground. Once absorbed into the body politic of law and the courts, the newly minted attorney now morphs into an automaton of which the central feature is they are missing a sensitivity chip and pervert the process. As they do so they see justice receding like a dream while their position and income rise fortifying their place in the broken social structure they helped create. Selling ones soul is a costly event.
4.) Dogma dominates our country today in ways that were unimaginable to the Founding Fathers. Free thinking today is non-existent. There is no area we can visit that has not been subverted, carefully carved up and repackaged to meet the needs of government. Whether it be housing, automotive, banking, healthcare or the pharmaceutical markets, we can only approach these with the blessing of the government that we are doing so in the fashion they approve of and not in a pure and genuine way hoping to make improvement. So controlled are we that alternative energy remains in an infantile planning stage while we barrel endlessly and out of control towards the knowing end of a finite oil supply that creates huge fortunes for a few, again at the expense of the many. There was a time when we would not tolerate a ‘tea tax’ and yet today we routinely stand by witnessing huge shifts in wealth that sap the well-being of the individual. Can you imagine Jefferson tolerating such a thing? True leadership speaks truth to itself.
5.) Authority has been elevated to a supernatural status wherein the judge, the policeman, the lawyer and the politician all act as high priests supplanting any room for individual sovereignty or dissent. Writings such as this are considered ‘quaint’ by those who dominate our world. The Constitution has become an old age document with no real application and is treated much like a religious artifact brought out only on holidays paraded around for all to see, cherish, bow to and then dusted off and put away until the next holiday. Making the Constitution a relic is an enormous problem for America. It is akin to leaving Jesus on the cross at every church in America thereby never really being able to fully appreciate the Man and His message Thee central tenets of the Constitution are nailed to the same cross and kept under glass. They’re not for using’, they’re only for looking at. Like religion, this practice only allows the individual to feel the dominant power of the oppressor without actually requiring his or her participation.
6.) We are trapped, beset on all sides by the irony of our lives. We must pursue more oil or risk losing the energy we require simply to stay warm, drive a car to get milk, care for our children or to work and produce for our family. Our government is so bottlenecked in its own practices that we have a two-party system that serves up a nearly indistinguishable choice in leadership. Once in power the difference in leaders is often a foregone conclusion yielding instead to the overwhelming forces of money and corruption and invariably blamed on circumstances at the time wholly absolving leadership of responsibility.
Through a clear eye we see that it is not us who are ‘addicted to oil’ but rather the industrial concerns that mine and process oil for profit that are the addicts. No oil, no cash. No cash no power. We are open to alternative forms of energy. They are not. Who is the addict?
The Constitution is not outmoded. It has been retired so as to make way for new rules. These new rules allow the ruling classes to pillage in the name of nationalism and defer permanently any justice that would normally correct such actions. They say it is being done for you, the citizen, but we know that to be false. The sad truth is that the Constitution simply hampers the excessive pursuit of money, the dogma of free-market capitalism and the notion that unfettered markets are best. Capitalism killed the Constitution. They simply could not exist together in the same country.
None of us seriously share in the massive profits made by the fortune 100. At best you can get in line for a small dividend on Wall Street but only if you first put up the money to buy a share that costs far more then the dividend itself. Put up $100.00, get ten cents. Your share in democratic principles is even less valuable than that. Proof enough of what is considered important to America.
Our utter inability to delay our own gratification and our seemingly endless need for success in financial terms speaks directly to our own shortcomings as a society. What we seem to have lost is confidence in our country, in our government, our beliefs and in our ability to feel a deep connection. America has become something of a tool to be used and discarded in small pieces by each generation as it passes through the epoch of its existence. That national lack is, in reality, one of a more personal nature than you might think initially. The original foundation was personal sovereignty as a means to freedom. Today, money is freedom and each of us is no more than a profit center, a cog in the big wheel we know as our America.
It is impossible to envision a rising up of people to such an extent that we could affect a positive outcome. Only failure of the system will allow us the opportunity to reframe the country in a more meaningful way and perhaps seek a return to the practices we know are genuine and have stood the test of time. That failure we are now witnessing. So much more painful is having to watch the country fail than it would be to simply advocate for change. But such is the human condition.
Quaint as it might seem, the older more formal guys who set this country as an independent entity knew very well what they were doing.
The formation of America as a nation was truly a miraculous event. But since that time, what went wrong? So much has passed since the days when our initial beliefs were cemented into the Declaration and codified as the cornerstone for our existence as a people.
The biggest change is in the individuals that make up this country and the way in which we meet the challenges of the day. At the time when Jefferson wrote the Declaration, this country was in serious turmoil and put upon by the British in violent and oppressive ways leaving no room for an alternative, no competing narrative moving towards peace. Blood was being spilled and everyone knew it. Many were witnesses to the brutal dominance of the British. The level of intelligence Jefferson brought to our country has not been matched since. JFK, while dining with a large group in the White House said it best when he remarked, “Gentleman, so much intelligence has not been assembled in this room since Jefferson dined here alone”.
The tenor of the early days of America was truly a do-or-die scenario in which the people of the then non-existent America were seeking to break free from the yoke of tyranny put upon them by the British for the purposes of material ownership of this land and the benefits of cheap labor, tax revenue and raw materials. And, indeed, there were people dying in the struggle to free this fledgling country from that yoke.
Seeing fellow countrymen die in the cause certainly had an incalculable effect on the motivations of a newly formed government, a newly united people. Today our fellow countrymen die on far away sands, foreign soil in utterly different cultures. The news of those sacrifices is compartmentalized from our daily lives and only addressed when fed to us by the body politic we know only remotely as Washington Studios. We genuinely need to see death to appreciate life. Withholding truths so deep are beyond destructive.
Bleached and sterilized, the news of deaths among our men in uniform purportedly fighting for our safety, the images of the dead returning are forbidden to television or even to print media and photojournalism. We are simply informed as to the numbers of the dead and told they were heroic in their efforts to save our ‘way of life’. This seemingly simple but devastating withholding of information and images surrounding the returning soldiers that died in the cause is in and of itself enough to raise eyebrows.
Beyond that though, it wrestles control of our future from us as it steals from us the urgency of the present. Not knowing what is happening today leaves us no place for participation in tomorrow.
What Jefferson, Adams, Hamilton and the rest knew beyond any shadow of a doubt was that we were then-and are again right now-faced with the fight for our very existence. A fight to the death for a free nation, a land without oppression from political bodies, religious extremism, excessive unfair trade and especially from the dogma that undermines very essence of freedom. That freedom takes place within the individual and still struggles to find a home to this day even within ourselves.
So, what happened to this great nation, this marvelous experiment we call America?
The entire notion of freedom has been subverted to a few causes that seek only to serve themselves at the greater expense of the people. We, all of us, now serve the leadership of the parliament we have accepted as our own government. Identical to the British but bestowed now with an unquestionable edict; to save and protect our country. This elevation to a status of utter infallibility parallels only religious dogma in its nature and its perverted ability to place itself above us as individuals with sovereign rights.
How could we have let the beauty of the Declaration and its’ plain but unwavering pitch towards personal freedom be undermined by such things as politics, technology and the military-industrial complex? Truly, we were warned. And yet, here we are. Subservient to the dogma of Washington, told what to think, what to believe and only handed official interpretations of the world we all are stuck living in. We serve them. Each of us is a cog in their wheel. A happiness machine cajoled and massaged to consume and follow.
This would be a good place for a mild but poignant discourse on the shortcomings of man, of psychology and fear but that is not what we need right now. Our sights must turn to us as a people, sovereign, independent and demand full access to our country.
If Jefferson went wrong in his writings, it was in that he was placed squarely in a time in history between choosing freedom and oppression. His writings and the foundations of this country were laid on dark days when the view was that of a terminal country fighting for its’ very life. Jesus fought the same noble battle against domination by groups over the individual using dogma as its’ main tool for control.
Since that time we have all come to accept a more tolerant and submissive ‘way of life’. That submissive existence is, in fact, the America we now know and live in. Submission to authority is now so essential to our daily lives that even the notion of rearing up against the powers that rule our country are deemed unpatriotic or even illegal and will bring harsh penalties for anyone who dares to speak up against the ruling classes.
Sound British enough? I don’t fault the British. In fact, looking at the way things are today I am inclined to think we might have been better off remaining part of the British Empire where, at least, the rules were always strict and cemented in such a way as to circumvent the excesses of ‘freedom’ we now find intolerable. We suffer at our own hand.
The following are some things we need to fully face without prejudice and with a keen ability to simply see things as they are:
1.) The military-industrial complex was a term coined to mean that the military and American business concerns are inseparable and that the military will, in fact, kill at the behest of the corporation. The corporation, in turn, will share its ill-gotten gains with the military. This symbiotic relationship is central to our ‘way of life’. Using either overt or clandestine tactics, the military clears the way for corporate America to ‘do business’ at a profitable rate generating tax revenue that in turn feeds the military. Neither can exist without the other. We have long since gone passed the point of no return and find ourselves burdened with the incomprehensible relationship between these two factions.
2.) Not knowing the full extent of what is happening in the halls of power in America until after-the-fact is a process that goes wholly against our principles and allows an ongoing perversion of our people, our goods, our lives and our children’s lives. Our leaders routinely rule in secret, dealing under the table until such time as they can dress up their findings, wrap them in the false flag of patriotism and servitude. They reveal their actions only after having had rehearsal time creating the opportunity for them to reframe their actions in such a way as to make it palatable to the constituency. Their actions and their talk do not jive.
3.) Law has failed us. Crime and punishment is more a matter of money and influence than it is of rules and the application of those rules. Everyone knows there is something very wrong with lawyers in this country. Even if they set out with good intentions, once in ‘the system’ they find it to be so different from their initial expectations that they have a choice to either become one of them or to quit the profession altogether. There is no middle ground. Once absorbed into the body politic of law and the courts, the newly minted attorney now morphs into an automaton of which the central feature is they are missing a sensitivity chip and pervert the process. As they do so they see justice receding like a dream while their position and income rise fortifying their place in the broken social structure they helped create. Selling ones soul is a costly event.
4.) Dogma dominates our country today in ways that were unimaginable to the Founding Fathers. Free thinking today is non-existent. There is no area we can visit that has not been subverted, carefully carved up and repackaged to meet the needs of government. Whether it be housing, automotive, banking, healthcare or the pharmaceutical markets, we can only approach these with the blessing of the government that we are doing so in the fashion they approve of and not in a pure and genuine way hoping to make improvement. So controlled are we that alternative energy remains in an infantile planning stage while we barrel endlessly and out of control towards the knowing end of a finite oil supply that creates huge fortunes for a few, again at the expense of the many. There was a time when we would not tolerate a ‘tea tax’ and yet today we routinely stand by witnessing huge shifts in wealth that sap the well-being of the individual. Can you imagine Jefferson tolerating such a thing? True leadership speaks truth to itself.
5.) Authority has been elevated to a supernatural status wherein the judge, the policeman, the lawyer and the politician all act as high priests supplanting any room for individual sovereignty or dissent. Writings such as this are considered ‘quaint’ by those who dominate our world. The Constitution has become an old age document with no real application and is treated much like a religious artifact brought out only on holidays paraded around for all to see, cherish, bow to and then dusted off and put away until the next holiday. Making the Constitution a relic is an enormous problem for America. It is akin to leaving Jesus on the cross at every church in America thereby never really being able to fully appreciate the Man and His message Thee central tenets of the Constitution are nailed to the same cross and kept under glass. They’re not for using’, they’re only for looking at. Like religion, this practice only allows the individual to feel the dominant power of the oppressor without actually requiring his or her participation.
6.) We are trapped, beset on all sides by the irony of our lives. We must pursue more oil or risk losing the energy we require simply to stay warm, drive a car to get milk, care for our children or to work and produce for our family. Our government is so bottlenecked in its own practices that we have a two-party system that serves up a nearly indistinguishable choice in leadership. Once in power the difference in leaders is often a foregone conclusion yielding instead to the overwhelming forces of money and corruption and invariably blamed on circumstances at the time wholly absolving leadership of responsibility.
Through a clear eye we see that it is not us who are ‘addicted to oil’ but rather the industrial concerns that mine and process oil for profit that are the addicts. No oil, no cash. No cash no power. We are open to alternative forms of energy. They are not. Who is the addict?
The Constitution is not outmoded. It has been retired so as to make way for new rules. These new rules allow the ruling classes to pillage in the name of nationalism and defer permanently any justice that would normally correct such actions. They say it is being done for you, the citizen, but we know that to be false. The sad truth is that the Constitution simply hampers the excessive pursuit of money, the dogma of free-market capitalism and the notion that unfettered markets are best. Capitalism killed the Constitution. They simply could not exist together in the same country.
None of us seriously share in the massive profits made by the fortune 100. At best you can get in line for a small dividend on Wall Street but only if you first put up the money to buy a share that costs far more then the dividend itself. Put up $100.00, get ten cents. Your share in democratic principles is even less valuable than that. Proof enough of what is considered important to America.
Our utter inability to delay our own gratification and our seemingly endless need for success in financial terms speaks directly to our own shortcomings as a society. What we seem to have lost is confidence in our country, in our government, our beliefs and in our ability to feel a deep connection. America has become something of a tool to be used and discarded in small pieces by each generation as it passes through the epoch of its existence. That national lack is, in reality, one of a more personal nature than you might think initially. The original foundation was personal sovereignty as a means to freedom. Today, money is freedom and each of us is no more than a profit center, a cog in the big wheel we know as our America.
It is impossible to envision a rising up of people to such an extent that we could affect a positive outcome. Only failure of the system will allow us the opportunity to reframe the country in a more meaningful way and perhaps seek a return to the practices we know are genuine and have stood the test of time. That failure we are now witnessing. So much more painful is having to watch the country fail than it would be to simply advocate for change. But such is the human condition.
Quaint as it might seem, the older more formal guys who set this country as an independent entity knew very well what they were doing.
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
Dogma Forever
Dogma Forever
While serving as President, Thomas Jefferson spent some of his evenings in The White House secretly pouring over the Bible redacting all parts of scripture that told of Jesus performing miracles. He did this secretly when he was alone and did not share this work of his with anyone during his time in the White House. Jefferson actually sat down with scissors and cut and pasted together his version of the Bible sans miracles.
Jefferson was driven to understand what really happened with Jesus in his time and was painfully aware that sharing such an exercise would be viewed as anti-Christian and anti Semitic and not acceptable by his constituency or by his colleagues. He called this work of his ‘The American Bible’. This was not a religious exercise; it was the noble pursuit of simplifying the foundations essential to freedom that Jefferson followed his entire life.
In altering the Bible solely by way of removing those supernatural parts of the writings, Jefferson was convinced he revealed the truth of Jesus and of modern day Christianity. That truth is void of the dogma of sin and the binding philosophy or religion.
His view was that we suffer from the idea that Jesus was speaking to an afterlife of bliss when in fact that life is here now and has been subverted by the use of dogma making religion a powerful manipulation. In this way, claims Jefferson, the few can easily control the mob and thereby maintain a never ending, self-perpetuating stranglehold upon us, the free citizens of the United States.
Believing Jesus was supernatural, Jefferson argues, forced followers to submit to the idea that we do not comprehend the afterlife and that all of our days here on earth are nothing more than a lead up to death and resurrection. Jefferson felt this was a fallacy and a tragedy as it makes us forego our lives, our daily experience and our very existence in lieu of some other life. Along the way we are guided by a small group of people who use this dogma to tell us what to think, how to feel and how to act.
Dogma is couched as infallible and above the law, as being divine and therefore beyond reproach. Frequently monies flow to those who espouse such a position.
To this day we are routinely provided with photo ops of our political leaders and their pastors. Together, Jefferson felt, they cement us into an untenable and dysfunctional position wherein we are made to feel we are inadequate, that we sin and that we must follow their lead or risk losing salvation. Or at the very least lose the ‘privilege’ of participating in a commercially indulgent life of goods and excesses.
Jefferson was astonished to see that the teachings of Jesus were perverted away from the original concept of self reliance and towards submission to the Roman Church and the Jewish Nation. He openly laments the loss of mans’ inner freedoms, the kingdom within.
Referred to as the Holy Spirit, the inner kingdom to Jefferson was the freedom each of us has in our inner dialogue. To Jefferson, the conscience we live with, the innate understanding of common decency and indeed our very humanity is predicated upon how we interact with that inner narrative, what he felt was in fact our soul.
Jefferson did not seek to reduce scripture in any way except to make it more pure and more specifically to rid it of the overlay of beliefs brought into the words of Jesus some 300 years later by Paul whom Jefferson felt had intentionally perverted the message for himself to use as a means to grow his particular sect and to unleash a power upon the masses that would allow the church to reign supreme while citing Jewish law as equal and infallible.
The concept of sin was a Jewish creation and Jefferson had serious difficulty with the notion. The idea of being born into sin and then overlaid with an incomprehensible guilt was bizarre and went against all the teachings of Jesus which, Jefferson felt, were specifically aimed at organized powers- at that time Roman & Jewish -and that the central message to all peoples was to resist dogma altogether. Treason was recreated as blasphemy. Freedom was replaced by ritual and free thought by dogma itself.
Trust yourself was and is the message. Clearly we see governments and religions want you to only trust them. To follow their rules, their edicts their findings, allows them to ride upon the backs of good people and to manipulate the unperceiving. Jefferson felt the central issue was dogma and the acquiescence by the unperceiving. Jefferson viewed Jesus as the most perceptive of men. One who espoused non-violent freedoms over submission, personal happiness and real love over group participation in religious services and in that way actually found freedom within His time albeit at a mighty price.
So against personal freedom was organized religion that they actually killed Him rather than allow or even consider that each of us should be free to pursue their own idea of worship. Reading Jefferson’s American Bible, it is easy to see how Jefferson’s thoughts translated into the Declaration and the firm positions he held on freedom of speech, religion and assembly.
They were intended to be beyond simple laws. They were intended to form the very basis of freedom from dogma and the stifling control which we now labor under as a people.
Eliminating the miraculous, or supernatural, portions of the scripture Jefferson argues that what Jesus was really fighting against was dogma. The dogma of the Romans and the Jews was inordinately powerful in Jesus’ time and He spoke openly to resisting those unfounded principles. What Jefferson was espousing was a natural law, a God of Nature as he wrote in the Declaration of Independence, your inner world, the kingdom of heaven. Free from the oppressive nature of organized groups, Jefferson felt that then and only then could you be free to live a good life of love, fulfillment and truly follow the pursuit of happiness.
During Jefferson’s indispensable participation in writing our first breakaway document in 1776, The Declaration of Independence, he also argued for a civil society where each family would have its 40 acres of heaven. On this private and irrevocable land grant we would live in peace, sovereign upon our own patch of land, grow vegetables, fruits and the like and from there we could offer a trade specialty or professional status to exchange for other trade with neighbors or for cash. From this base, this safe haven, we could also pursue higher education and the fruits of that labor as well. This land would pass without question from generation to generation making a stable and independent life secure to all Americans.
This idea of 40 acres was not a backwards kind of lifestyle. It was not intended to create a permanent world of farming or to perpetuate rugged colonialism. But rather to make certain that dogma could not creep into our lives and make us subservient to those powers at the expense of living a truly free and thoughtful life. Being dependent upon large industrial concerns for food, water and energy as we are now speaks to a level of dependency that Jefferson viewed as dangerous and stifling to the human spirit.
Sadly, Hamilton agued successfully for a large and organized central manufacturing economy, the one we live in today. What we call consumerism, Jefferson viewed as a slow death. He knew that freedom lies within security, not against some unseen foreign element, but against groups that seek to control the masses. He knew that without the 40 acres, great numbers of people would simply submit to doctrines claiming supremacy over others and that these unperceptive people would wear uniforms, robes, funny hats and even kill to maintain their position within the ranks of dysfunctional dogma.
What the 40 acres did was allow each family the opportunity to be free. Truly free to pursue their own dreams. It would make them invested in themselves rather than dogmatic groups that really having absolutely nothing to do with their daily lives other than impose their own needs and desires in the form of laws, edicts and religious decrees.
And, of course, it would allow each of us to have a plot of land to walk, feeling close to nature itself and to commune with what Jefferson called ‘Natures God’, which only then was he content to call our God as well. In this way, Jefferson felt, God was pure and free of the perversions of group-man but would maintain the human qualities of individual-man. A critical distinction in his mind.
In this way, each of us could easily see how dogma affects our lives and how, if left unchecked, we would lose that very life which has been bestowed upon us by some truly miraculous event allowing us to completely separate out the authentic wonder of life from the constructs of group-man.
Today we see dogma hard at work. There is something exponential about dogma and the mechanism it brings to our lives. Perhaps it is modern day media that magnifies dogma, a technological echo chamber, a hall of mirrors for narcissism.
In modern times we see dogma used to beat into our minds that we ‘need to attack’ this country or that, even when we are fully aware of the constructs that government has created to manufacture such a need to attack. Dogma is used to browbeat us into submission on the most perverted concepts that we should not underestimate the force of dogma.
Modern warfare, sophisticated financial markets, high speed computers all are fine but they’re no replacement for the common sense that Jefferson was trying to maintain in living a life free from oppression by way of dogmatic beliefs.
Who believes we needed to attack Iraq? Yet, the drums of dogma pounded day after day until such time as a majority support was actually generated for the attack. False or true, never mind. “My country, right or wrong” said the sarcastic Mark Twain. My dogma, my culture, my money right or wrong seems to be the modern day war cry.
Dogma prevails over truth, over facts, over logic and humanity itself allowing our country to violate the most basic tenets of civilization. Truly we biologically regress at a time when technology has multiplied dogma to an unseen before level of dominance. Like everything else today, dogma has attained a high-octane status fueled by split second technology.
To Jefferson, this was the teaching of Jesus. Dogma was to be avoided and railed against at all costs-even at the costs of a life, a crucifixion. Nowhere near as awe inspiring as a miraculous messenger from heaven but arguably much more important to out lives.
Who believes the financial markets are free of the constraints of reality? In the level of sophisticated financial instruments, derivatives and the likes, lies the perversion of the truths that have caught up with the market itself and is now exacting a heavy price for being ignored. The dogma here was, of course, that the American way of life is best, that the markets will always grow and that our technology and world superiority would always carry us to safety and higher profits. So desperate were we to secure the dream that we actually insured these bundles of indecipherable investments to make them more attractive when, in fact, they were rancid causing failures of banks and the companies that wrote and distributed these empty insurance policies. Billions of dollars of worthless paper, gold gilded edges and dressed up to appear valuable. Another golden calf falls to a pile of rubble.
Had the homeowner been living under the 40 acre rule today there would be a lot less suffering, certainly less foreclosures and less dependency on a system we can no longer can even understand. We have out slicked ourselves with excessive dogma.
Jefferson argued for ‘Natures God’ because he knew there would always be constants that dogma could not overturn. Incorporating natural law was akin to keeping one eye on gravity while riding a bike. There was not a lot of thought in the process but to ignore it altogether would surely result in a fall.
The simplicity of such an elegant statement is often lost in today’s world of complicated systems and the belief that the individual is dispensable.
Dogma has so dominated our world for centuries that all we really have to show for having lived on this earth for at least some 2000+ documented years is a fractured existence pitting one dogma against another. The ‘American way of life’ against radical extremists who would ‘have our heads’ if they could. And so on and so on. Modern explanations pit culture against culture but really dogma still dominates as the central theme to our existence.
On a smaller more immediate practice we see dogma played out in schools where teachers follow some form of a script and an understanding of what it means to be part of that group, that dogma. In police stations there is dogma in that ‘these are the rules and we follow them and we enforce them’. In politics, religion, universities, unions we find the same dynamic practiced but to what end?
Most of our institutions have proven to be self-serving to such a degree that frequently they lose sight of their original charter; to make a positive contribution to civil society.
The lines between government, industry and education have been so blurred as to be imperceptible. Economic strains create a clear view of our society and how we coordinate ourselves to live what we think is a better life. To Jefferson, this was akin to being a hamster forever stuck in a spinning wheel inside a small cage.
Jefferson knew dogma was an enemy of personal freedom and sought to crush it and eradicate it from every bit of our existence beginning with the 40 acres.
The 40-acre concept was not just for newly freed slaves but for all who find themselves pinned to a narrow life by dogma.
While serving as President, Thomas Jefferson spent some of his evenings in The White House secretly pouring over the Bible redacting all parts of scripture that told of Jesus performing miracles. He did this secretly when he was alone and did not share this work of his with anyone during his time in the White House. Jefferson actually sat down with scissors and cut and pasted together his version of the Bible sans miracles.
Jefferson was driven to understand what really happened with Jesus in his time and was painfully aware that sharing such an exercise would be viewed as anti-Christian and anti Semitic and not acceptable by his constituency or by his colleagues. He called this work of his ‘The American Bible’. This was not a religious exercise; it was the noble pursuit of simplifying the foundations essential to freedom that Jefferson followed his entire life.
In altering the Bible solely by way of removing those supernatural parts of the writings, Jefferson was convinced he revealed the truth of Jesus and of modern day Christianity. That truth is void of the dogma of sin and the binding philosophy or religion.
His view was that we suffer from the idea that Jesus was speaking to an afterlife of bliss when in fact that life is here now and has been subverted by the use of dogma making religion a powerful manipulation. In this way, claims Jefferson, the few can easily control the mob and thereby maintain a never ending, self-perpetuating stranglehold upon us, the free citizens of the United States.
Believing Jesus was supernatural, Jefferson argues, forced followers to submit to the idea that we do not comprehend the afterlife and that all of our days here on earth are nothing more than a lead up to death and resurrection. Jefferson felt this was a fallacy and a tragedy as it makes us forego our lives, our daily experience and our very existence in lieu of some other life. Along the way we are guided by a small group of people who use this dogma to tell us what to think, how to feel and how to act.
Dogma is couched as infallible and above the law, as being divine and therefore beyond reproach. Frequently monies flow to those who espouse such a position.
To this day we are routinely provided with photo ops of our political leaders and their pastors. Together, Jefferson felt, they cement us into an untenable and dysfunctional position wherein we are made to feel we are inadequate, that we sin and that we must follow their lead or risk losing salvation. Or at the very least lose the ‘privilege’ of participating in a commercially indulgent life of goods and excesses.
Jefferson was astonished to see that the teachings of Jesus were perverted away from the original concept of self reliance and towards submission to the Roman Church and the Jewish Nation. He openly laments the loss of mans’ inner freedoms, the kingdom within.
Referred to as the Holy Spirit, the inner kingdom to Jefferson was the freedom each of us has in our inner dialogue. To Jefferson, the conscience we live with, the innate understanding of common decency and indeed our very humanity is predicated upon how we interact with that inner narrative, what he felt was in fact our soul.
Jefferson did not seek to reduce scripture in any way except to make it more pure and more specifically to rid it of the overlay of beliefs brought into the words of Jesus some 300 years later by Paul whom Jefferson felt had intentionally perverted the message for himself to use as a means to grow his particular sect and to unleash a power upon the masses that would allow the church to reign supreme while citing Jewish law as equal and infallible.
The concept of sin was a Jewish creation and Jefferson had serious difficulty with the notion. The idea of being born into sin and then overlaid with an incomprehensible guilt was bizarre and went against all the teachings of Jesus which, Jefferson felt, were specifically aimed at organized powers- at that time Roman & Jewish -and that the central message to all peoples was to resist dogma altogether. Treason was recreated as blasphemy. Freedom was replaced by ritual and free thought by dogma itself.
Trust yourself was and is the message. Clearly we see governments and religions want you to only trust them. To follow their rules, their edicts their findings, allows them to ride upon the backs of good people and to manipulate the unperceiving. Jefferson felt the central issue was dogma and the acquiescence by the unperceiving. Jefferson viewed Jesus as the most perceptive of men. One who espoused non-violent freedoms over submission, personal happiness and real love over group participation in religious services and in that way actually found freedom within His time albeit at a mighty price.
So against personal freedom was organized religion that they actually killed Him rather than allow or even consider that each of us should be free to pursue their own idea of worship. Reading Jefferson’s American Bible, it is easy to see how Jefferson’s thoughts translated into the Declaration and the firm positions he held on freedom of speech, religion and assembly.
They were intended to be beyond simple laws. They were intended to form the very basis of freedom from dogma and the stifling control which we now labor under as a people.
Eliminating the miraculous, or supernatural, portions of the scripture Jefferson argues that what Jesus was really fighting against was dogma. The dogma of the Romans and the Jews was inordinately powerful in Jesus’ time and He spoke openly to resisting those unfounded principles. What Jefferson was espousing was a natural law, a God of Nature as he wrote in the Declaration of Independence, your inner world, the kingdom of heaven. Free from the oppressive nature of organized groups, Jefferson felt that then and only then could you be free to live a good life of love, fulfillment and truly follow the pursuit of happiness.
During Jefferson’s indispensable participation in writing our first breakaway document in 1776, The Declaration of Independence, he also argued for a civil society where each family would have its 40 acres of heaven. On this private and irrevocable land grant we would live in peace, sovereign upon our own patch of land, grow vegetables, fruits and the like and from there we could offer a trade specialty or professional status to exchange for other trade with neighbors or for cash. From this base, this safe haven, we could also pursue higher education and the fruits of that labor as well. This land would pass without question from generation to generation making a stable and independent life secure to all Americans.
This idea of 40 acres was not a backwards kind of lifestyle. It was not intended to create a permanent world of farming or to perpetuate rugged colonialism. But rather to make certain that dogma could not creep into our lives and make us subservient to those powers at the expense of living a truly free and thoughtful life. Being dependent upon large industrial concerns for food, water and energy as we are now speaks to a level of dependency that Jefferson viewed as dangerous and stifling to the human spirit.
Sadly, Hamilton agued successfully for a large and organized central manufacturing economy, the one we live in today. What we call consumerism, Jefferson viewed as a slow death. He knew that freedom lies within security, not against some unseen foreign element, but against groups that seek to control the masses. He knew that without the 40 acres, great numbers of people would simply submit to doctrines claiming supremacy over others and that these unperceptive people would wear uniforms, robes, funny hats and even kill to maintain their position within the ranks of dysfunctional dogma.
What the 40 acres did was allow each family the opportunity to be free. Truly free to pursue their own dreams. It would make them invested in themselves rather than dogmatic groups that really having absolutely nothing to do with their daily lives other than impose their own needs and desires in the form of laws, edicts and religious decrees.
And, of course, it would allow each of us to have a plot of land to walk, feeling close to nature itself and to commune with what Jefferson called ‘Natures God’, which only then was he content to call our God as well. In this way, Jefferson felt, God was pure and free of the perversions of group-man but would maintain the human qualities of individual-man. A critical distinction in his mind.
In this way, each of us could easily see how dogma affects our lives and how, if left unchecked, we would lose that very life which has been bestowed upon us by some truly miraculous event allowing us to completely separate out the authentic wonder of life from the constructs of group-man.
Today we see dogma hard at work. There is something exponential about dogma and the mechanism it brings to our lives. Perhaps it is modern day media that magnifies dogma, a technological echo chamber, a hall of mirrors for narcissism.
In modern times we see dogma used to beat into our minds that we ‘need to attack’ this country or that, even when we are fully aware of the constructs that government has created to manufacture such a need to attack. Dogma is used to browbeat us into submission on the most perverted concepts that we should not underestimate the force of dogma.
Modern warfare, sophisticated financial markets, high speed computers all are fine but they’re no replacement for the common sense that Jefferson was trying to maintain in living a life free from oppression by way of dogmatic beliefs.
Who believes we needed to attack Iraq? Yet, the drums of dogma pounded day after day until such time as a majority support was actually generated for the attack. False or true, never mind. “My country, right or wrong” said the sarcastic Mark Twain. My dogma, my culture, my money right or wrong seems to be the modern day war cry.
Dogma prevails over truth, over facts, over logic and humanity itself allowing our country to violate the most basic tenets of civilization. Truly we biologically regress at a time when technology has multiplied dogma to an unseen before level of dominance. Like everything else today, dogma has attained a high-octane status fueled by split second technology.
To Jefferson, this was the teaching of Jesus. Dogma was to be avoided and railed against at all costs-even at the costs of a life, a crucifixion. Nowhere near as awe inspiring as a miraculous messenger from heaven but arguably much more important to out lives.
Who believes the financial markets are free of the constraints of reality? In the level of sophisticated financial instruments, derivatives and the likes, lies the perversion of the truths that have caught up with the market itself and is now exacting a heavy price for being ignored. The dogma here was, of course, that the American way of life is best, that the markets will always grow and that our technology and world superiority would always carry us to safety and higher profits. So desperate were we to secure the dream that we actually insured these bundles of indecipherable investments to make them more attractive when, in fact, they were rancid causing failures of banks and the companies that wrote and distributed these empty insurance policies. Billions of dollars of worthless paper, gold gilded edges and dressed up to appear valuable. Another golden calf falls to a pile of rubble.
Had the homeowner been living under the 40 acre rule today there would be a lot less suffering, certainly less foreclosures and less dependency on a system we can no longer can even understand. We have out slicked ourselves with excessive dogma.
Jefferson argued for ‘Natures God’ because he knew there would always be constants that dogma could not overturn. Incorporating natural law was akin to keeping one eye on gravity while riding a bike. There was not a lot of thought in the process but to ignore it altogether would surely result in a fall.
The simplicity of such an elegant statement is often lost in today’s world of complicated systems and the belief that the individual is dispensable.
Dogma has so dominated our world for centuries that all we really have to show for having lived on this earth for at least some 2000+ documented years is a fractured existence pitting one dogma against another. The ‘American way of life’ against radical extremists who would ‘have our heads’ if they could. And so on and so on. Modern explanations pit culture against culture but really dogma still dominates as the central theme to our existence.
On a smaller more immediate practice we see dogma played out in schools where teachers follow some form of a script and an understanding of what it means to be part of that group, that dogma. In police stations there is dogma in that ‘these are the rules and we follow them and we enforce them’. In politics, religion, universities, unions we find the same dynamic practiced but to what end?
Most of our institutions have proven to be self-serving to such a degree that frequently they lose sight of their original charter; to make a positive contribution to civil society.
The lines between government, industry and education have been so blurred as to be imperceptible. Economic strains create a clear view of our society and how we coordinate ourselves to live what we think is a better life. To Jefferson, this was akin to being a hamster forever stuck in a spinning wheel inside a small cage.
Jefferson knew dogma was an enemy of personal freedom and sought to crush it and eradicate it from every bit of our existence beginning with the 40 acres.
The 40-acre concept was not just for newly freed slaves but for all who find themselves pinned to a narrow life by dogma.
Saturday, November 15, 2008
The Real Brutality of America
A War of Civility
The Real Brutality of America
Or
Civil Obedience
In the course of watching the news and living a life, I have come to more fully realize the brutality and shortcomings of our country, where we are going wrong and what precisely needs to be done to make a correction that is essential to the survival of our nation. Indeed, the survival of our very selves.
For some time now, it has been painfully evident that we, as a nation, are openly waging a war. Not a war against a foreign entity, be it justified or not. But a war within our borders. A civil war. A war of civility. A war that has stripped each of us of our right to our constitutional freedoms but not by the means we are all accustomed to reading about nor by the redundant explanations we hear parroted on talk shows, news outlets and numerous internet sites.
What we have done is actually far worse than simply a runaway government hiding behind some ideology, economic philosophy, legal interpretation or party affiliation. It is the way we treat each other.
Group violence on the individual has long been cited in classic writings. Most notable in recent literature is Eric Hoffer in the The True Believer. In his book, Mr. Hoffer plainly lays out the way in which a group unites with a common purpose to perpetrate a violent assault upon the individual, typically for the good of the group at the expense of the individual, always for personal gain and frequently directly for money.
Examples of this abound today. We see in Wall Street and current fiscal crisis the way a group is continuing-even now-to feather their bed with untold wealth while the individual homeowner goes off the cliff somewhere or simply finds a dark corner to cry in his/her beer or prescription medication. Choose your poison but the reason for doing so is not simply economic. It is more psychological in nature and here are several examples of how it works, why it is being done and what we need to do to stop it and truly become a great society.
Today, you do not have to go very far to find a soldier, a military person or a Dept. of Defense employee who is completely alienated from the group they work for, dedicate their life to and, in many cases, have literally put their life on the line for. Returning soldiers feel they been sold a bill of goods with no real content. Patriotism without direction. Fighting a fight with poor or no equipment, and little training. And, upon their return, finding they have been thrown under the bus when they find they need assistance to recover their losses. Assistance that was also promised them when they initially made the step into the service and decided that they would serve their country.
-2-
The DOD is a huge organization, of course. But for our purposes we need not examine the inner workings of a government agency. We need only to follow the constant in the dynamic that we are witnessing destroy our nation. That dynamic is specifically a complete disregard for the individual. A wholesale slaughter of his/her rights as a man, a woman, a father, a mother, a child, as a human being. The needs of the group are placed as an inordinate and insurmountable burden directly upon the shoulders of the individual with a complete disregard for the human costs that will inevitably come with such a demand. There is simply no way a soldier, in this case, can survive the training, time away from home, the call to arms and then return and be expected to re-engage as a fully human citizen and participate and, indeed, contribute to the society he no longer believes in and, for many, have extreme difficulty simply functioning in that society.
The soldier commits, leaves to do the job required and then finds that they have been handed a really bad hand usually followed by divorce, bankruptcy and broken families. The result is that of a broken person. Traumatized by both their experience and by their government, the returning soldier has difficulty sleeping which leads to trouble in performance resulting in either poor or no employment. A complete mistrust of the military becomes a permanent feature for the ‘man in uniform’ and is often transferred onto the government as a whole. How could it not? And all the while a profit is being made by a wide periphery of players, suppliers, aircraft and weapons manufacturers, all the way down to a plastic bag full of goo for the soldier to sustain themselves on in the field called a meals-ready-to-eat, of MRE for short. Billions of dollars spent in the form of an endless supply of disregard for the individual. As of this writing foreclosures in the US are 400% higher in military towns than they are in non-military ones. Semper Fi !
The American justice system perpetrates the identical type of violence with the only difference being the tools of the trade are a little different. In law, we routinely see young people hauled into court for minor offenses, typically marijuana or petty theft. In these instances we see the same trauma take place albeit in a somewhat lesser fashion. Certainly lesser than being shot at in a foreign country but no less devastating in its long term affect upon the individual. In this case, the young person has a revelation in the court experience in that they witness the utter cruelty and self-absorbed nature of law and the change becomes an ever-lasting one to be carried forever with them in their lives. A complete mistrust of the justice system is born in these individuals and remains as a permanent feature in their psychological dynamic. How could it not? Unable to comply? We hold you in contempt. We have a jail for you.
Many divorce cases are casually coupled to bankruptcy. The dissolution of a marriage is a very difficult time for many people. Indeed, if it is not, then their may be something wrong with the participants. During this time of enormous upheaval the couple in divorce is preyed upon by a bevy of supposed professionals that serve as officers of the court but bear a striking resemblance to a low level entertainer. They play to an audience even lower than themselves, namely to the bar, the judge presiding over the charade.
-3-
Not knowing the law is no excuse for breaking it these days and frequently the punishment is steep. I cannot imagine what kind of a person I would have to be to hold everyone I meet as fully accountable for the depths of psychological understanding; my area of expertise. The deep abyss of the subconscious, the endless interpretations of Freud or the complexities of co-morbid behaviors and their affects on the constellation we call a family are serious business. And yet, this is an acceptable practice in law, but, again, only because it serves the needs of a few under achievers that feed off the legal system and make a pretty fat living defrauding the individual of their rights, their work, their monies and, indeed, frequently of their very lives. Non-compliant? Refuse to participate? We will call you contemptuous. We have a jail for you too.
Returning to Wall Street for a moment, nowhere do we find a more egregious assault upon the individual than the current bailout. Nowhere in this event is the consideration due the individual noted except in fluffy terms about a return on investment. A return no person seriously believes or expects to see; ever. The utter disregard for our humanity in this equation is astounding and the level of violence being perpetrated upon the person of this country is so severe it can only lead to a complete loss of confidence in our government, the financial sector and the millions who have abandoned their responsibility to their fellow man in the process.
The dynamic here is consistent and beyond the group violence level of explanation, it bears a little more thought. When we turn away from another person living in our community and leave their devastation to them and them alone, we are laying out our own future. The way we treat each other is what we are truly made of and is the very essence of our society. If we allow the money changers, the judges, lawyers, accountants and the rest who feed at the low, swampy but fertile troughs, of this great nation we can expect nothing more than utter failure and destitution due us as compensation for acting in this manner. A more serious form of impoverishment is sure to follow. Predatory lending is a good example.
For Wall Street to be allowed to gamble with your money, for Washington to be allowed to kill for personal gain, for law to be an event that occurs in some dank room with strangers who carve you up with archaic terms designed to mask their true motive belies the genuine needs of humanity. Those needs cannot be repeatedly dismissed in favor of some other system of belief. There is no other system of belief than that which serves us as a people. No computer program, no technology can replace the needs of humanity or place it into a framework that does it justice. We need to act as a people first, not as a country first. Without its people, we begin to suffer the deficits we are now experiencing.
And we have lost our people. Our culture was already thin. Now it is being completely replaced or more accurately ravaged by the faceless monsters of government acting as agents of American business. The veil between the two is indistinguishable.
-4-
So, what to do? A return to common decency and civility with healthy boundaries needs to be re-constituted. Not reform but a true affirmation of rights. Reform has long since been furtile ground for corruption. We should reaffirm The Constitution and consider adding more severe penalties to those who would abandon it under any circumstances. We should see that no war power is ever given to a single individual – ever. No case in a court should be deemed so unimportant that a person can be overrun by a few criminals posing as officers of the court colluding with the court itself for personal profit.
The only genuine way to effect a positive outcome here is to include citizens in the process. We must organize and defend ourselves. We must realize the needs of the government of our country are actually at odds with the needs of the individual. Courts must have citizens groups who serve as witness and make formal complaints against abuses. In this way and only in this way can the person be guaranteed of their rights and the protection of themselves, their family, their work, their very lives. No judge will be allowed to operate in a vacuum. No case will be deemed ‘unimportant’ and dispensed with quickly and unfairly.
Regulations for Wall Street are not inappropriate either. They have functioned very well for many years and only until recently have those barriers been demolished by a handful of people acting as a group for their own benefit with the use of the legal system. Severe punishments should be doled out if, in fact, there are deviations from these healthy boundaries as they are their not to stifle democracy-as is often claimed-but there to protect the citizenry that makes up the greatest part of those very same investments as well as Wall Street workers themselves who are also being ravaged in these times.
It follows, of course, that if a war is illegally pushed upon the society that the perpetrators of such a heinous crime should also find themselves at the end of a long prison sentence if not hung by a war crimes tribunal if found guilty.
We should not fear this type of tough talk when it comes to protecting out nation. This is truly the battleground for our survival and if we are to apply tough, hard and fast rules anywhere, this has to be the place. We cannot go forward without correcting our mistakes. Implementing those corrections is the only way to rekindle the confidence essential to being a whole and functioning collective. A people. An American people.
-5-
Our New Deal must include not only a reinstatement of regulations but also the creation of a witness program staffed by the people. This new witness program would bear witness against corruption, against the reckless abandonment of our Constitution, indeed against any man operating in a lone room abusing power and rendering the receiver helpless. Politician, judge, policeman notwithstanding. Anything less than this approach will only continue to fuel our high-octane approach to governing and invariably result in abuse of power. We have doubled our efforts but have no destination in mind. A sure sign that we are all being had on some level. And we know it. We know government is a mess. We know that in our country a sure way to devastation is having either medical or legal problems. Either will sap you of your beliefs as well as of your money and self-efficacy. We are all at-risk when it comes living in our country. And, we know it.
Through these measures we can return to a simpler life with greater productivity and live safely within the healthy boundaries of real expectation. Expectation that our financiers will be there when we need them and not ask for the umbrella back they lent us simply because it began to rain. Expectations that if we go to court we can be assured that we will get a fair and reasonable solution not one that destroys either party or fleeces both parties of their monies delivering no result. And, of course, the ultimate expectation that if we are in fact called upon to serve our country and to risk having to lay down our life in the cause, it must be that the cause be totally just and not veiled behind a series of non-sequiter events coupled to make it look like we are just when in fact we are not.
We need clarity and continuity in our lives to re-create the stability we have so obviously lost and desperately need to get back so that we can go forward. Without taking these steps there is simply no way we can progress as all we have left is more deceit engendering more panic and further despair. The despair we feel is as much moral and civil as it is financial. We have been robbed and we know it. Denial is not a viable long term solution. We need to truly reconstitute our sense of honor and of justice. Not in a punitive way but in a genuine and relevant way so that we can proceed and go forward head up and as it has been said, ‘enter our house justified’
Strong fences make good neighbors-Robert Frost
The Real Brutality of America
Or
Civil Obedience
In the course of watching the news and living a life, I have come to more fully realize the brutality and shortcomings of our country, where we are going wrong and what precisely needs to be done to make a correction that is essential to the survival of our nation. Indeed, the survival of our very selves.
For some time now, it has been painfully evident that we, as a nation, are openly waging a war. Not a war against a foreign entity, be it justified or not. But a war within our borders. A civil war. A war of civility. A war that has stripped each of us of our right to our constitutional freedoms but not by the means we are all accustomed to reading about nor by the redundant explanations we hear parroted on talk shows, news outlets and numerous internet sites.
What we have done is actually far worse than simply a runaway government hiding behind some ideology, economic philosophy, legal interpretation or party affiliation. It is the way we treat each other.
Group violence on the individual has long been cited in classic writings. Most notable in recent literature is Eric Hoffer in the The True Believer. In his book, Mr. Hoffer plainly lays out the way in which a group unites with a common purpose to perpetrate a violent assault upon the individual, typically for the good of the group at the expense of the individual, always for personal gain and frequently directly for money.
Examples of this abound today. We see in Wall Street and current fiscal crisis the way a group is continuing-even now-to feather their bed with untold wealth while the individual homeowner goes off the cliff somewhere or simply finds a dark corner to cry in his/her beer or prescription medication. Choose your poison but the reason for doing so is not simply economic. It is more psychological in nature and here are several examples of how it works, why it is being done and what we need to do to stop it and truly become a great society.
Today, you do not have to go very far to find a soldier, a military person or a Dept. of Defense employee who is completely alienated from the group they work for, dedicate their life to and, in many cases, have literally put their life on the line for. Returning soldiers feel they been sold a bill of goods with no real content. Patriotism without direction. Fighting a fight with poor or no equipment, and little training. And, upon their return, finding they have been thrown under the bus when they find they need assistance to recover their losses. Assistance that was also promised them when they initially made the step into the service and decided that they would serve their country.
-2-
The DOD is a huge organization, of course. But for our purposes we need not examine the inner workings of a government agency. We need only to follow the constant in the dynamic that we are witnessing destroy our nation. That dynamic is specifically a complete disregard for the individual. A wholesale slaughter of his/her rights as a man, a woman, a father, a mother, a child, as a human being. The needs of the group are placed as an inordinate and insurmountable burden directly upon the shoulders of the individual with a complete disregard for the human costs that will inevitably come with such a demand. There is simply no way a soldier, in this case, can survive the training, time away from home, the call to arms and then return and be expected to re-engage as a fully human citizen and participate and, indeed, contribute to the society he no longer believes in and, for many, have extreme difficulty simply functioning in that society.
The soldier commits, leaves to do the job required and then finds that they have been handed a really bad hand usually followed by divorce, bankruptcy and broken families. The result is that of a broken person. Traumatized by both their experience and by their government, the returning soldier has difficulty sleeping which leads to trouble in performance resulting in either poor or no employment. A complete mistrust of the military becomes a permanent feature for the ‘man in uniform’ and is often transferred onto the government as a whole. How could it not? And all the while a profit is being made by a wide periphery of players, suppliers, aircraft and weapons manufacturers, all the way down to a plastic bag full of goo for the soldier to sustain themselves on in the field called a meals-ready-to-eat, of MRE for short. Billions of dollars spent in the form of an endless supply of disregard for the individual. As of this writing foreclosures in the US are 400% higher in military towns than they are in non-military ones. Semper Fi !
The American justice system perpetrates the identical type of violence with the only difference being the tools of the trade are a little different. In law, we routinely see young people hauled into court for minor offenses, typically marijuana or petty theft. In these instances we see the same trauma take place albeit in a somewhat lesser fashion. Certainly lesser than being shot at in a foreign country but no less devastating in its long term affect upon the individual. In this case, the young person has a revelation in the court experience in that they witness the utter cruelty and self-absorbed nature of law and the change becomes an ever-lasting one to be carried forever with them in their lives. A complete mistrust of the justice system is born in these individuals and remains as a permanent feature in their psychological dynamic. How could it not? Unable to comply? We hold you in contempt. We have a jail for you.
Many divorce cases are casually coupled to bankruptcy. The dissolution of a marriage is a very difficult time for many people. Indeed, if it is not, then their may be something wrong with the participants. During this time of enormous upheaval the couple in divorce is preyed upon by a bevy of supposed professionals that serve as officers of the court but bear a striking resemblance to a low level entertainer. They play to an audience even lower than themselves, namely to the bar, the judge presiding over the charade.
-3-
Not knowing the law is no excuse for breaking it these days and frequently the punishment is steep. I cannot imagine what kind of a person I would have to be to hold everyone I meet as fully accountable for the depths of psychological understanding; my area of expertise. The deep abyss of the subconscious, the endless interpretations of Freud or the complexities of co-morbid behaviors and their affects on the constellation we call a family are serious business. And yet, this is an acceptable practice in law, but, again, only because it serves the needs of a few under achievers that feed off the legal system and make a pretty fat living defrauding the individual of their rights, their work, their monies and, indeed, frequently of their very lives. Non-compliant? Refuse to participate? We will call you contemptuous. We have a jail for you too.
Returning to Wall Street for a moment, nowhere do we find a more egregious assault upon the individual than the current bailout. Nowhere in this event is the consideration due the individual noted except in fluffy terms about a return on investment. A return no person seriously believes or expects to see; ever. The utter disregard for our humanity in this equation is astounding and the level of violence being perpetrated upon the person of this country is so severe it can only lead to a complete loss of confidence in our government, the financial sector and the millions who have abandoned their responsibility to their fellow man in the process.
The dynamic here is consistent and beyond the group violence level of explanation, it bears a little more thought. When we turn away from another person living in our community and leave their devastation to them and them alone, we are laying out our own future. The way we treat each other is what we are truly made of and is the very essence of our society. If we allow the money changers, the judges, lawyers, accountants and the rest who feed at the low, swampy but fertile troughs, of this great nation we can expect nothing more than utter failure and destitution due us as compensation for acting in this manner. A more serious form of impoverishment is sure to follow. Predatory lending is a good example.
For Wall Street to be allowed to gamble with your money, for Washington to be allowed to kill for personal gain, for law to be an event that occurs in some dank room with strangers who carve you up with archaic terms designed to mask their true motive belies the genuine needs of humanity. Those needs cannot be repeatedly dismissed in favor of some other system of belief. There is no other system of belief than that which serves us as a people. No computer program, no technology can replace the needs of humanity or place it into a framework that does it justice. We need to act as a people first, not as a country first. Without its people, we begin to suffer the deficits we are now experiencing.
And we have lost our people. Our culture was already thin. Now it is being completely replaced or more accurately ravaged by the faceless monsters of government acting as agents of American business. The veil between the two is indistinguishable.
-4-
So, what to do? A return to common decency and civility with healthy boundaries needs to be re-constituted. Not reform but a true affirmation of rights. Reform has long since been furtile ground for corruption. We should reaffirm The Constitution and consider adding more severe penalties to those who would abandon it under any circumstances. We should see that no war power is ever given to a single individual – ever. No case in a court should be deemed so unimportant that a person can be overrun by a few criminals posing as officers of the court colluding with the court itself for personal profit.
The only genuine way to effect a positive outcome here is to include citizens in the process. We must organize and defend ourselves. We must realize the needs of the government of our country are actually at odds with the needs of the individual. Courts must have citizens groups who serve as witness and make formal complaints against abuses. In this way and only in this way can the person be guaranteed of their rights and the protection of themselves, their family, their work, their very lives. No judge will be allowed to operate in a vacuum. No case will be deemed ‘unimportant’ and dispensed with quickly and unfairly.
Regulations for Wall Street are not inappropriate either. They have functioned very well for many years and only until recently have those barriers been demolished by a handful of people acting as a group for their own benefit with the use of the legal system. Severe punishments should be doled out if, in fact, there are deviations from these healthy boundaries as they are their not to stifle democracy-as is often claimed-but there to protect the citizenry that makes up the greatest part of those very same investments as well as Wall Street workers themselves who are also being ravaged in these times.
It follows, of course, that if a war is illegally pushed upon the society that the perpetrators of such a heinous crime should also find themselves at the end of a long prison sentence if not hung by a war crimes tribunal if found guilty.
We should not fear this type of tough talk when it comes to protecting out nation. This is truly the battleground for our survival and if we are to apply tough, hard and fast rules anywhere, this has to be the place. We cannot go forward without correcting our mistakes. Implementing those corrections is the only way to rekindle the confidence essential to being a whole and functioning collective. A people. An American people.
-5-
Our New Deal must include not only a reinstatement of regulations but also the creation of a witness program staffed by the people. This new witness program would bear witness against corruption, against the reckless abandonment of our Constitution, indeed against any man operating in a lone room abusing power and rendering the receiver helpless. Politician, judge, policeman notwithstanding. Anything less than this approach will only continue to fuel our high-octane approach to governing and invariably result in abuse of power. We have doubled our efforts but have no destination in mind. A sure sign that we are all being had on some level. And we know it. We know government is a mess. We know that in our country a sure way to devastation is having either medical or legal problems. Either will sap you of your beliefs as well as of your money and self-efficacy. We are all at-risk when it comes living in our country. And, we know it.
Through these measures we can return to a simpler life with greater productivity and live safely within the healthy boundaries of real expectation. Expectation that our financiers will be there when we need them and not ask for the umbrella back they lent us simply because it began to rain. Expectations that if we go to court we can be assured that we will get a fair and reasonable solution not one that destroys either party or fleeces both parties of their monies delivering no result. And, of course, the ultimate expectation that if we are in fact called upon to serve our country and to risk having to lay down our life in the cause, it must be that the cause be totally just and not veiled behind a series of non-sequiter events coupled to make it look like we are just when in fact we are not.
We need clarity and continuity in our lives to re-create the stability we have so obviously lost and desperately need to get back so that we can go forward. Without taking these steps there is simply no way we can progress as all we have left is more deceit engendering more panic and further despair. The despair we feel is as much moral and civil as it is financial. We have been robbed and we know it. Denial is not a viable long term solution. We need to truly reconstitute our sense of honor and of justice. Not in a punitive way but in a genuine and relevant way so that we can proceed and go forward head up and as it has been said, ‘enter our house justified’
Strong fences make good neighbors-Robert Frost
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