My America?

We had just under 2,200 new covid-19 cases in my county last week. Brown County, Wisconsin has less than 265,000 people, so nearly two in a hundred got a completely controlable illness last week. Some of them will die. Even at only 1% death rate, 22 people will lose their lives to covid-19 simply because they got infected in the past week. Remember, the case fatality rate is closer to two percent across the entire U.S. I have so much shame and heartache about how stupid we are acting, but that will need to be worked out elsewhere. This blog is supposed to focus on positive steps we can take to chage things for the better. I know that after more than a year, we should be past this point. I'll go over it again just in case you have forgotten.DO NOT SHARE AIR! JUST DON'T DO IT! When you must be near others, mask, wash your hands frequently, do not touch your face, maintain social distance. Also, use your brain. All of our lives we have been taught that uncovered coughs and sneezes can jettison sputum up to thirty feet or more. Increase social distance around those who cough and/or sneeze that choose to remain unmasked. I would love to go into more detail about how to re-allocate the money we wasted in Afghanistan...

As we change our focus... The fact that millions of Americans love to shoot off their ignorant pie holes about how we need to love this country or leave it, one would expect them to be true patriots and work conscientiously to make our nation a place worthy of living in. There is nothing patriotic about claiming that your "freedom" is worthy of trampling on the health and safety of others. From a foundation that thinks liberty extends to hurting others, what can you build on a foundation that horrid? We can bear witness to the fact tha tthese same people claim to be victims themselves, justifying running stoplights and spewing toxic chemicals, even into our shared drinking water. This is not the nation I was taught to love. No one has the American Dream of buying a farm in the country only to turn the spigot and get shit out of the faucet, but in millions of american homes, that is what you get. How can degrading my property values by tainting my water source be allowed? Why is it not criminal to do business in ways that kill people? My America, the one I was taught to love and respect has three primary tenets, Justice, based on legislation and rights handed down from our legal cases; freedom to choose our leaders, based on the vote and as so many love to repeat, life, liberty and persuit of happiness. (falsely called "property" by some who fight to retain their greedy self-interest in an environment that requires cooperation and mutualism.) My right to make a living never absolves me of responsibility if I negatively impact my neighbor's ability and right to health, happiness or their ability to thrive. As we look outside our own niche, we need to accept and defend the rights of everyone to find the things we all claim have value. Living life requires us to be healthy. To have ultimate freedom, we must also carry the burden of absolute responsibility. To ultimately seek and have the hope of finiding happiness, we need to know that the basic needs we all have are going to be met. The dwindling but very loud minority who claim that they have the "right" to re-define reality to suit their claims rather than accepting facts and reality doomks all of us to meeting an untimely end. How will we react in the face of lies? We the people must speak truth to these power-hungry people who claim undue influence through the media, use of capital and who cling to their outlandish claims. We have the power to change, too often what we lack is the will.

Beautiful Eloquence "Syria"

I'm so tired of the blunt arrogance, the judgmental innuendo and hyperbolic vitriol that passes as speech in our country. It is as if we are a mob culture, waiting to swoop in and dispatch any person, group or organization willing to raise their heads, voices or fists in defense of liberty. Linguistic shortcomings aside, the attitudes being expressed through our major media outlets verge on the ill-considered, insane, inane and/or outright ignorant. Even the people who have been paying close attention and who have formulated decent mental constructs that are valid and supportable have to confront the fact that we are awash in morally bankrupt expectations, false definitions and twisted rhetoric designed by our ruling class to neuter any serious opposition.

Today, The Donald said on a nationally distributed interview that the U.S.of A. should take "zero" Syrian refugees. Put another notch on his gun for that! Here is a more apt rendering of the truth. Since it was our foreign policy that allowed the current regime to stay in power as long as it has, we have inadvertently sanctioned their regime and allowed them to commit such heinous atrocities against their own people that civil war has erupted. It has been going on for years. The escalation has been brought about because of emboldened forces that co-opted dissatisfaction of oppressed people, who have been systematically stripped of their dignity, hopes, dreams and humanity. Oh, and did I mention, we sold them weapons too. If one person is oppressed, that is too many. we need the resolve to not let it be by our hand. Powerful elites who practice cultural genocide seem to have become our responsibility, if only because we validate them further by taking them seriously or "negotiating" with them offering to trade and support them, especially and most pathetically with weapons. Those fleeing for their lives are our responsibility. Fully, our responsibility. Remember the time tested and true maxim, silence is complicity.

It seems that we have become so comfortable living with fists clenched and jaw set in our rugged and stoic, adrenaline saturated game face, that we forget to let those assaults, which define our days, pass, even when we interact with our loved ones, friends, family and associates. Staying healthy, is a lot like giving birth. Nature's way is always more about process than reaching a steady state. As in the birth process, the mother and baby both experience clench-release cycles. Blood flow and lymph would virtually stop without this rhythmic dance. The events taking place in "Syria" are truly a cultural infection. Perhaps the best thing for America would be to welcome all comers and show them that our way of life, a life of democracy, liberty and freedom are worth having across the planet.

The trouble that we run into quite quickly is that we have to grapple with the fact the same forces that are oppressing the rest of our brethren with weaponry, dictatorial regimes, and religious police are barely able to keep a lid on outright rebellion. Likewise our oligarchs are barely able to keep the lid on by imprisoning half the black male population, gearing up police departments with military hardware and locking down the population if and when catastrophes occur or protests break out. In some ways, our levels of sophistication nearly obscure the oppression. Media pundits report that we are free, even as they tell us that Bernie Sanders is in second place, following Hillary Clinton in the polls. Why? Because Hillary Clinton is the tool of the oligarchs. She has "proven" herself a staunch ally of those who oppress for profit. Pay no attention to the facts. Bernie Sanders leads in the first two states that will hold primaries. Our nation is practicing cultural genocide in our own way, asking other countries not to do so seems to be bad form in the age of oligarchs.

We are seeing in a microcosmic way in Syria what troubles beset any population that tries to hold on to power, rather than relinquishing that to the people. To stay healthy and strong, and to give birth to a new civilization, peaceful and compassionate, we must overthrow the oligarchs. not with weapons, but by walking away. Remember, anyone who has ever been a parent knows, that the best way to raise a bully is to attend to their tantrums and ignore them when they act with civility and decorum.

"Never negotiate with terrorists." used to mean something because we all agreed that terrorists were like children throwing tantrums. Now, we seem to pick our flavors, let them do the same, as long as they buy their weapons and national debt from us.

Hard Rain

My time on Earth would have been far less exquisite if not for the experience, I had today at the very end of my forty -eighth year, hearing this phenomenal Bob Dylan piece. When I was young, I was raised by what I thought to be the most cynical people imaginable. In their infinite, but supposed wisdom, they cordoned off vast areas of human experience as bourgeoisie pap, mediated fluff or politically motivated distraction. Some of their guidance was of course helpful, but other parts of their lexicon were filled with their own brand of vapid slogan shouting and half-truth. One example was my stepfather, who frequently talked about free love and really meant subjugation of as many females as possible. Much to my delight, my mother was commiserating with a young woman at the Laundromat one day about her suspicions that her husband, John, was sleeping around. See love is only free when given without the attachment of sex. Her new-found friend said that her man was married and would not think of leaving his wife for her. Strangely, her man’s name was John as well, and she asked, Andries? Well, if there had been super glue back in the sixties, it may have gotten used on his genitals that night!

All this said, there were times that I wanted to learn things that the adults in my life wanted me protected from and just as often there were things I needed sheltering from that I had to learn to deal with sooner rather than later. The first Earthday celebration was off limits because my parents said that it was all just a media ploy to distract people from the injustice being perpetrated in Southeast Asia. I was not allowed to watch any media coverage of the war because john had been accosted by newsmen while he was serving in that war, asked to act like his unit was being fired upon and to shoot off a few rounds for the camera.

Bob Dylan fell into the category of things they suspected as manufactured for the masses by the establishment. I don’t think either of my parents were educated enough to understand much of what Dylan wrote, but even more disturbing was their absolute vehemence about his inability to sing. I heard the same tripe about Woody Guthrie, Roy Orbison and Elvis, although for some reason Arlo Guthrie and Frank Zappa made the cut in our house. The stinging in my eyes that brought tears welling up out of nowhere at the sound of Hard Rain came not from the fact that Dylan can’t sing, but perhaps because he can’t sing, but was willing to enter the recording studio anyway. When each of us has something to say, the vast majority would rather hold their tongue, let someone else take center stage, or just fight the urge to speak, or sing, back down inside, hiding their light under a bushel basket. For many of these same silent ones, the prevailing sentiment of their insular sub-culture fills the void that their own ideas have left in public discourse. Ban the bomb sounds catchier than stop poisoning my children, free love sounds better than I’m a fuck machine and so on.

I understand that we all must do the best we can with what we are given, but the time has come for each of us to begin thinking for ourselves, not jumping on either the politically expedient bandwagon or the let’s overthrow the government  one either. Surely there are those who would lie and cheat and steal from the rest of us, many are powerful men with evil intent, but it is time to realize that by shirking our own responsibilities, we are cheating ourselves of a life of richness and beauty beyond words.

Why the Penis is Like Religion

Please forgive my using someone elses' idea. It was referred to as "something I saw on the internet" which, to me, it is a terrible citation. If you need someone to blame for it, I take full responsibility. "It's okay to have a penis. You can even be proud if it if you want. Just don't whip it out in public and certainly, don't ram it down any child's throat." Now, to be clear, the substitution of the word any for my at the end is completely mine.
Having survived child sexual abuse, including, at birth, with circumcision. I know that it was wrong, but that it was the sole responsibility of the person or persons perpetrating, each, their own particular type of torture. There is no universal evil force, like a devil on one's shoulder telling them to do wrong, every abuser chooses their own path. Often in a demented way, they are feeling powerful by dictating what goes on by their particular choice. We are all survivors of a pathological culture. This male dominated top-down approach survives on command and control, or "power and control" if you will. The new age is cooperative and sustainable, which is on the opposite end of the socio-political spectrum. The current fight between those who have status, privilege and wealth (In America, they call themselves "conservative")and the vast majority of the United States Citizenry, no longer serves any purpose but enslaving greater numbers and amassing ever more fortune on ever fewer individuals. No matter what the rich, or their supporters might say. Oddly enough, many of the most unlikely groups often fall in with the right leaning folks. Poorly educated, make for the saddest segment of the population to take up the repressive standard. I believe this is mostly due to the exploitation of residual hatred for any minorities, and the myth that illegal immigrants are taking most of the available jobs. In fact, the biggest growth in jobs has often been in low level service sector positions that pay poorly and have little security. The kind poorly educated whites are in competition with "smarter" read more affluent, people for anyway.
Seniors, who by their designation are recipients of entitlement program funds that the conservatives often ransack and threaten will be "broke" by the time young people need them. Closer analysis reveals that small changes over time yield big savings and rebuilding the economy with wages and benefits for the lowest level workers would do the most to "rescue" the system. For a group that touts themselves as "defenders of commerce", they sure suck at bookkeeping. Again, playing both sides of the fence with the "We can't afford it, but we're the greatest country in the world" logic. The one thing to be said about the last hold-ons, many elderly are old men, they are dying off. Grandmothers are, on the whole a lot more sensible.
The creepiest sector that still votes with the money are the survivalists. They think that projectiles will keep one "safe" in a scenario that goes totally awry. Again, with millenarian fervor and conviction. Reality Check Guys! If it goes back to survival, love and a sense of community is going to get you further than bullets.

The very terms that we use, in conversation about issues, are dictated by the wealthy purveyors of truth. Like a referee at a boxing match, the media is supposed to keep both sides honest. If we fight fairly, the politics of reason should win out over lies. After all, lies need to be constantly propped up, you might say. In America today, politics is more about the concept of one dollar one vote. The Supreme Court in the USA, ruled that "political" speech can equate to dollars and that corporate money, even that from overseas, including that from media magnates, sent out over "public airwaves", is both free and protected. We have the technology to screen political ads for truth, but when these political action committees get going it is more about innuendo and half-truth anyway. Bad campaign ads are obvious to those who have seen any. Democracy would be further ahead if we spent just half what is currently spent on campaigning on funding social programs.
Religion aside, there are millions of reasons to get government right. look around at the children. They do not deserve a culture based on consumption alone. They should not have to bear the burden of our addiction to cheap oil. When the soils are all blown from the prairies, the watersheds tainted with chemicals and the very groundwater that slakes our thirst is made poison, how will we eat our profits and the factories that grew up around our extractive culture? Perfecting what polychronic creatures have known for ever, can help us grow and adapt to different time signatures throughout the seasons, the moon cycles and the different phases of life itself. Thinking only to next quarters' profit ossifies development and ham strings creativity limiting our ability to find new solutions.
Evolution of our species requires reveling in uniquely variable characteristics to achieve more than a sum of parts. Compelling evidence shows that humans are born magnanimous and compassionate, unselfconscious and endowed with generosity and helpfulness, until they are faced with neglect or abuse. Calvinists and many who have tried to limit the development of humankind with statements about the "human nature" of "brutishness" and rancor have done nothing more than to perpetrate the worst kind of self-fulfilling prophesy. It is time to break free the shackles of old way thinking. Justice and peace go hand in hand. The dawning of the new age requires us to liberate our minds from old strictures, old convictions and out dated limits to growth, awareness and synchronous action. Spin the wheel of life and often you will find that there are many more winning numbers than the ones you bet on. giving away your limits might be the best way to find harmony, or at least resonance with a larger whole.
The art of the give away needs to be explored if we are to

Creativity, Determination & Innovation Drive America's Economy

The wealthy often lack these desired traits. When we get too comfortable in any sphere of our existence, change suffers. A wise friend once said, "If you're not growin' you're dyin'." This sentiment echoes this point quite well. Change is the onlt thing that remains constant in our world but you would be hard pressed to find it in our culture today. When still in college,I did a research project on the relationship between creativity and television exposure. The sheer mechanics were daunting, but in the end I was able to gain some great data and insight into some of what is ailing our nation today. In general, all the data lined up along a critical curve. As children watched more and more television, their creativity was more and more impaired. Two notable individuals from the thousand or so in the study provided exceptions to this and were exceptional for several reasons. One child scored the lowest on the assessment of creativity, but watched no television. As it turned out, their parents were Bible thumpers who didn't even own a television because they believed that it was an agent of the devil. Another child watched an inordinate amount of TV, but was still rated at the highest level of creativity. They tended to talk back to the television, challenging every premise that the advertisers could posit. As in most other realms of our lives, the more turned on you become, the more the world opens up to greet you. The more experiences that we have in the "real world" the higher our level of creativity. The more mediated our environment becomes, the less creative we become.

In my experience, I have learned that the America we hold up as a beacon to the world, the one that worships freedom and liberty, is less and less recognizable in our current perverted, media dominated era. We seem to have become part of a vast marketing scheme that leaves no room for questioning why any of our consumer goods should be purchased. In essence, we are expected to jump at the chance to buy whatever the box in our living room, or kitchen, or den tells us is fashionable. The dogged determination that led Louis and Clark to find that there was no Northwest Passage, or indeed the sustained effort required to link the nation with railroads is hard to find in our population today. The America we all learned about in school when I was young seemed to have a penchant for proving others wrong. If someone said, "You can't do that." no matter what it was, we had to prove them wrong. When they said we would never build a bridge across the Mississippi, we proved them wrong. When we began the trans-continental railroad they said that was impossible. Same with the interstate highway system and going to the moon. That was then, this is now.

Innovation flows from creativity. Trying something new often leads to new products, new ways of seeing the world and new ways of expressing who we are as a people. wealth tends to flow in the direction of what works, or more specifically, what has worked in the past. We are reaping the fruits of several generations of the faulty logic that if we do more of the same, endlessly replicating what used to work, all will be well. Even though the times have changed, there are still cheerleaders who advocate the old ways of doing business and "growing" the economy. Look around at the Christmas catalogs. Hundreds of items have been miniaturized but precious few items turn out to be "new". Invention and innovation have taken a back seat to miniaturization. We can hold a laptop computer in our hand, but many times we cannot find the time to try something new or different.

The indomitable human spirit that lived in the hearts of millions of Americans has been relegated to a status of quirky individualism, scoffed at and mocked by many. I often wonder where we would be as a nation if we were to reward novel approaches to problem solving, rather than providing corporate welfare to business as usual methodology. What if we were to value fluency and encourage folks to push the limits of what is real, good and possible? We shouldn't have let the rest of the world bring us hybrid car technology, or surpass us in renewable energy production. As we have fallen into our boob tubes, it seems we have lost perspective, purpose and a sense of who we are. If we are to survive as a nation, we need to become more than a police state in search of an excuse for eliminating rights that our citizens fought and died to protect.

If the rich were capable of taking real risks, I would be willing to follow their lead from time to time, but the entrenched values of competition, keeping up with the Jones', and playing the stock market and assuming that lack is the engine behind our economy have helped me to realize that the people with all the money are completely out of touch with reality and therefore can't get a grasp of what is needed in our current economic slump. The irony is that our electorate was told by big money to embrace the same party that drove the economy into this ditch. Now we will have to fight for change even harder. Looking at the big picture almost certainly leads to frustration and disappointment. What has worked for me lately is to look to the examples of solutions that abound all around us and the fact that there are millions of little guys making the real investments and creating new systems for meeting human and planetary needs efficiently and with malice toward none. Sweetwater Organics in Milwaukee seems to be on the right track. They have converted a giant warehouse to a three tiered living system. A greenhouse filled with food, fish and a biologically complex living filter. They will be able to annually produce hundreds of thousands of pounds of food and hundreds of thousands of pounds of protein, providing jobs, turning the tide on urban blight and feeding hungry people in the middle of a food desert.

Little things are happening daily that each in their own way contribute to the type of change that will be required. The one thing that they have in common is that they each have a dynamic person at the center of them. Someone who refuses to give in to the idea of scarcity. someone who sees the unfolding future as bright and full of potential. These are the people we all need to model ourselves after. Bernie Madoff's son committed suicide rather than face the facts that his ways were wrong and do the time that could not possibly fit the crime. The wealthy idolized his dad, because he was seen as a wealth creator. Nothing creative about it. That system was tapped long ago, he just did what had worked in the past. What is needed is revolutionary change in the way we create wealth, the way we measure success and how we think about the nature of our part in the grand scheme of things. The good old boys networks have failed us. No matter how hard they cry out, we should not waste resources keeping them on life support. Corporate welfare pays no dividend. If the least of us are worse off for the betterment of the wealthiest among us, we have forged down the wrong path. We have been lied to for so long that for many, even knowing which way is up can be difficult, but if we pay attention, understand who is behind all the messages we are inundated with and investigate the options that we have, chances are good that we will find a better path to freedom, dignity and liberty that will not enslave another or the planet that the Gods and Goddesses have blessed us with.

Crazy Old Lady Makes Excellent Point About Obama's First Year

Today, while driving, I had the good luck to hear an older woman on the radio, talking about our current President. Using my imagination, I matched the voice with a person I had known many years earlier. It sounded like a cat lady. You know, the type. A woman who all the youngsters in the neighborhood know, because she gardens inside a fence and hangs out her underthings under the roof of her back porch. Long ago she tired of losing her tomatoes to grubby-faced hooligans who most likely used them to throw at one another. She can't afford to keep up her house, but feeds the birds and keeps the curtains pulled to preserve the colors on her couch cover. Most of the children fear her, but they challenge each other to ring the bell at her house on Halloween. Those who are brave enough to do it tell no one, because she gives full size candy bars if you aren't too scared to sing a song, tell her your mother's name and take an apple as well. I have learned to listen to these wise crones, but many forget that women twice you age or older know more than you can possibly imagine.
Her point was that we are living in a drive-through culture. If we could have gotten things yesterday, that's not soon enough. She said that those who deified Obama, electing him by a large margin. We all knew that he was inheriting many of the worst crises in history, and yet we have expected him to turn the ship of state on a dime. They expected this one man to carry the day by whipping five-hundred entrenched politicians into shape (not including the hundreds of thousands of local politicians) and taming the media Medusa.
Children fill in the gaps with what they know. Real or not, their imaginations make their world. Adults respond to facts, ask the right questions and hopefully listen long enough, and hard enough to get closer to the truth. Our culture needs to turn the corner on our childish ways. We all need to eradicate feelings of entitlement that plague our children as well as many of their parents. We need to take a good long look at the current situation, fight for what we want, change.
How many of us have written letters to the intransigent representatives in the House and Senate? How many of us have stopped providing the fuel that fires furnaces of hatred? How many of us have used the rhetoric of hate, the fruits of slave labor? The disconnected contrition that fuels much of our apathy reeks of cynicism, used against us by those who have the most to lose.
I was strengthened in my resolve to fight for what is right with our country by hearing this lady's words. Those who would bow their heads and admit defeat are not worthy of the freedoms we profess to stand for. This is the part where the route to freedom gets messy. There is plenty of B.S. to shovel. It has been heaped up on us for years. If we all take up shovels, we can eliminate the threat to our freedoms in time, but if we keep our heads down, there is sure to be more coming.
Ask yourself, "Am I all that I can be?" I'm sure you know that my answer when I asked was "No.", but rather than letting that stop you from changing, rather than giving up, or getting more depressed, reach out to one another, become an agent of change. Our President needs us. Don't abandon him in his time of need. We all know what happens when that is done to us! We have the right to demand change, no matter what the money says!