the green tablet

a ramble on poison

          My life has been a long line of uncertainties.  I’ve never committed to anything I’ve ever encountered, and I am not fully aware of why this is.  It seems to me that there is nothing worth doing in this world, for there are so many things about it which are terrible and beyond our control.  I can only speak my mind, and yet no matter what I say I cannot change the fact that the people with greed in their hearts are ruining this precious world.  The only thing I can think of doing is helping my children to live and grow up with strong minds and bodies.  Most people are living in a dream (or a nightmare if you happen to be born in certain places), sad, distracted, and unaware of how deeply asleep they are.  I myself sleep, because I am tired of this false world of lies.  Perhaps one day I will have the courage to think otherwise, to carry that spark within certain special people that allows them to do anything, but for now my spirit falters as I look upon our ‘works, and despair’.

           That said, what I may be able to do yet is destroy some preconceptions and prejudices on the premises of common sense, or sound logic, which would be even better.  That feat would make me very proud indeed, for I would be using the “objective” logic and the common sense of a realist to debunk widely held “realist” beliefs.  I use the word belief because until something is absolutely proven as a universal truth it shall always be a theory left to believe in, on faith, and it shall never truly grace the skies of truth, for all of its crude pretending.  Truth is not a cloud or a star.  Truth is everything.  Truth is the sky itself, and all that it holds, both what it seems, from our view, to hold, and also we who are held by it. 

           I see the rich man is no happier than I, and I see those who hang on to vices are utterly devoured by what they consume and make themselves one with empty substances.  Even in my own heart a certain sickness grew, and to this day it haunts the fringes of my sight.  What have I done to better this world?  I have done nothing to better it, except perhaps to make friends with a few like-minded people and reinforce their ideas, hoping that they may prove more useful in time than I have until now.  My life has been lived, all along, with a deep seed of emptiness in the pit of my core. The sadness, inexpressible except by long silence, emerges in gradual waves from my mind, my spinal column, my arms, and surrenders all things surrounding me to an atmosphere of helpless gloom.

           But why would this be?  It is impossible, unless perhaps I must have, somewhere along the way, abandoned my will to live.  The wonders of the world have been lost to my eyes for many years now, though at times I wish to see them once more.  I am always expecting a great and terrible event, and I am always shaking my head for all those who undeservingly live in the high seat of easy comfort.  There are times when I starve myself to feel alive and yet in turn there are also times when I refuse, through an act of sheer obstinance, to sleep, toiling instead over idle games of intellectual conquest.  Pride can be so tenacious a beleaguerer for those graced with any amount of intellect.  It is quite unfortunate how difficult it is to disassociate oneself from one’s self, especially in these easy, automated times, when many of the negative effects of one’s own actions are justified, nullified, and even suppressed by the unwieldy beliefs (and therefore actions) of the masses.

           I do not seek excuses for my lavish inactivity, even in acknowledging my lesser Piscean half, for I was born at the cusp, and how difficult it is to remove her from the influences of others with their odd energies.  However impossible it may seem, I desire a positive and decisive change in the fundamental beliefs of the people of this world, and I desire this only because I wish for their actions to differ greatly from the habitual course the vast majority of the people of the world have taken.  As it stands, the people must enforce a great deal of self-restraint and must do what may not be most profitable or easiest to do in the short-term.  Couples must stop having more than a maximum of two children, one for each person; companies must stop following the preposterous requirement that, by law, the prospective plan or decision promising the maximum short-term profit must be carried out or followed through on.  This is and shall always be a lazy strategy that depends too much on a mindless (albeit learned by the analysis of past trends) set of presets that does not take into account the constant evolution of the market, the dwindling supply of the world’s resources, and, indeed, the disintegrating state of the world itself.  Here I use the word disintegrating because the world’s natural, biological system, which constantly strives to adapt to changes and maintain planetary homeostasis, is in the process of being “soiled” in artificial substances that cannot be decomposed and recycled and are therefore poisons to the planet.  If you study biology for long enough, and have even an inkling of the mental spark required for the development of independent thought, you will realize that when considering the human body, all poisons are merely those substances which happen to dismantle or disintegrate the established and protected system of the body.  These substances, through no “fault” or “intention” of their own, disturb and therefore destroy the delicate balance of countless factors and immeasurably many values by displacing certain elements, thus unweaving the functioning biological structure and, inevitably, ending life. 

         Some poisons merely block or intrude upon some of the secondary functions which, though crucial in the long term, are not immediately threatening (within the span of a few hours) to the survival of the biological organism.  The body detects the intrusion as certain substances fail to be produced, and homeostasis is lost, petering out in some way or the other: and so we feel ill.  We may very well become ill as the body abandons other activities and enters a state of emergency, in the hopes of releasing the poison before it causes more damage.  On however small a scale, while not necessarily deadly to the entire organism at once, all poisons cause the diminishment, stalling, or permanent cessation of biological function, a statement equivalent with the phrase “a loss of life.”  Life is not a light switch.  It isn’t either on or off.  When you sustain any injury to your body, however miniscule it may be, you are literally experiencing a loss of life.  Of course your body recovers that loss, but for the moment the loss has still occurred, and extra measures (in terms of energy and material resources) must be taken to recover it.  The hindrance of even a single organ, however small a role it may play, can drastically shave many years from the life of an otherwise healthy person.    

         When a person drinks too much alcohol, he or she begins to feel ill at ease.  The hyphenation of the word disease is becoming popular as a means of illustrating the intuitive understanding of what dis-ease truly is, ease being the ideal state of homeostasis.  The ethanol-based alcohol found in alcoholic beverages is what I would call a minor poison, while other kinds of alcohol prove deadly shortly after ingestion of relatively small amounts.  Of course, most potable alcohols are derived from the breakdown of natural sugars found in many fruits, vegetables, and grains.  It is no coincidence that methanol, the alcohol derived from wood, is deadly.  Matured wood (as opposed to a sapling stem) is inedible to humans and is of absolutely no nutritional value.  And yet virtually all of the natural foods found on our planet produce, upon proper fermenting, a poison that is quite tolerable to us, and that does not disagree completely with our bodies.  Perhaps it has to do with the sugars themselves, for lack of a better phrase, agreeing with the nature of our bodies. 

          Or perhaps the human body (along with the bodies of many animals) has adapted over time to the occasional and unintentional ingestion of rotting fruits and other foods, which contained the poison ethanol in amounts small enough for our bodies to survive the poisoning and develop (and genetically preserve) countermeasures for it.  Thus, eventually, over millions of years these adaptations would make these sugar-derived alcohols tolerable in modest amounts.  This may also explain why different races can more easily tolerate certain alcoholic beverages derived from certain foods, while other races may find other forms of alcohol, derived from, say, potatoes instead of rice, more agreeable with their bodies.  Most likely the bodies of alcoholics adapt to the lifestyle choices of their owners, pushing their tolerance up to the highest possible bar, and become seemingly immune to the effects of alcohol by configuring themselves in a way that they expect to be regularly saturated in alcohol, and are ready for it.  Of course, it is also likely that this configuration would be wasteful in some way and would not be the optimal configuration for the body to function at in general.  The liver tends to work double-overtime in alcoholics, and it is one of the first major organs, along with the kidneys, to go.  I will not even mention the effects it has on the all-important heart or the brain, which is the essential decision-making survival tool of the human body.   

         Though the planet might not be dying in one fell swoop of a deadly poison such as, for example, a nuclear holocaust, our wastefulness and carefree thoughtlessness is causing a gradual poisoning of the planet’s ecosystem, and thus all sub-ecosystems that science might identify and categorize.  I would like to distinguish the fact that in truth the planet has one, and only one, ecosystem, which encompasses the entirety of the planet, not only its surface, and which also includes its atmosphere.  I can say this with absolute confidence because all of the ecosystems acknowledged by science (and even some which are not) are connected.  They are all a part of one and the same great sphere, and changes in one section of the ecosphere will surely affect the other sections.  There is no way that science can hide or dumb down this truth.  The lack of respect which many scientists, engineers, and (especially) businessmen have for this planet is appalling and downright shameful.  Many scientists, despite knowing the truths of their trade, have either been asked to be silent on certain issues, or have decided not to speak themselves upon witnessing the grave silence that is the trend of their contemporaries.  Were they to speak out, others might ridicule them and publicly denounce them, endangering their reputations, and, therefore, endangering their careers as scientists.  Some scientists have even misled the public with falsified studies, often engineered for the very same purpose of misleading the public by playing with figures and by presenting “facts” the truths of which are veiled by technical terms, rhetorical devices, and downright white lies.  

        And yet this is the world I find myself in, a world that is starving physically and spiritually, that hides its true self from itself, that is obsessed with the very narrow mindset of conquest and possession that bare-boned self-preservation allows, that lies to itself and secretly knows that it is lying to itself, and yet does not cease its endless list of lies and excuses that distract from what is truly important: life, and the preservation of ALL life, not just the self.  At the same time, the limited space and resources on our planet must also be acknowledged, and the future of mankind must be planned according to those limits.  We must plan our future in harmony with one another as one HUMAN race, not divided into cultural, “racial,” and political factions, with peace, love, and understanding.  If we don’t get smart and start working together, start taking down the walls we’re always mending, and start thinking about each other and our fellow inhabitants of this planet, instead of just ourselves, we will only end up killing ourselves by poisoning the source of all of our resources, our earthly mother.  So long as we continue to act against what is best for our planet’s delicate homeostasis, the resources we use now will not be available for us in the future, and the human race might die knowing that it could have stopped poisoning its source of life, yet did not.  And then we will all feel the guilt and the desperation of knowing that we dug our own graves and killed our future by preventing the recycling and re-sourcing of our resources.  That would be terribly sad, indeed.

the philosophy of the world

Thinking about the various forms of government has made me realize the need to describe the state of the world as it currently stands.  Many people believe that a great change is coming, and while I will politely decline stating my opinions on such beliefs here, I will say that the world is in dire need of such change.  The vast majority of people are poor and live at a different pace than the populations of the “world powers.”  Economy has become the forerunner of government policy, along with the exercising and constant maintenance of military might with which to protect a state’s growing assets.  Along with capitalism and exponential economic growth has come an exponential increase of world populations.  The theory of how Industrial Age developments in agricultural technologies began this perpetual increase is rather common, and it is quite true that everyday reality has taken a strange turn towards the fantastic amongst the more privileged “democratic” masses.  An exclusive use of fossil fuels has brought on a new standard of trade, with many large urban areas no longer bothering to sustain their own local and independent sources of food, relying on daily trade via land or sea by using these fossil fuels.  This is, obviously, an unwise food supply strategy that is incapable of autonomous sustainability.  The finely-tuned machine can be easily dismantled by pulling the plug on the supply of gasoline and other petroleum derivatives, which are also imported, often from quite distant locations.  

            For now everyone who has automatically subscribed to this heightened and quickened way of life lives in a rare oasis purposefully separated from the realities of the majority of the world.  The great artistic heights of television programming have virtually replaced what was once a very healthy American pastime: reading.  It is turning out to be a brave new world indeed: brave, and quite foolish.  In the United States the great bubble has only begun to burst, the form of the monstrous bubble rippling away in the evening air, falling to the concrete of the city ground, still waving in the air with a semblance of its former glory, yet destined to fall and disappear.  Forgive my grim reaping of the state at hand, but I shall not delude myself with false hopes.  False hopes are made for the explicit purpose of deluding, and help no one.  Meanwhile, military spending is at an all-time high in hopes that the “world leaders” will manage to keep a hold on their already quite overextended territories, leaving the inhabitants of a dwindling economy to rot and rust in the dust like old unwanted cars.  These inhabitants have been conditioned all of their lives to constantly pursue the sweet nothings of a materialism steeped ever-deeper in ever-fresher fantasies in a sort of wonder-dull illusionary slavery.  Instead of injecting the economy with a reinvigorating life-blood, they choose to prioritize the short-term, violent, tactical plan of flexing their military arms to their limits.  But a starving nation cannot maintain its brutal strength.  The poor financial diet will soon dwindle its entire frame in general, and only when it’s too late will the “leaders” realize that instead of salvaging the closest assets and giving up those least feasible and most costly to maintain they are risking everything on a desperate and dubious gamble and are at the brink of losing it all.  Their arrogance and overconfidence will be their undoing.  Perhaps Obama might have been a great president if he was not prevented, at every turn, by the proud and self-destructive abusers who still think of a 20th century world that can easily be exploited, and act accordingly, while living in a 21st century with a 21st century rest-of-world that has learned their entire playbook of tricks and is now using their own tried-and-true ways against them.

       At some point in the future, after much chaos, the world will begin to equalize once more, and only then will nations work together and think of the long-term effects of their decisions. They will no longer consider only their nations and their people, but will learn to think on ALL nations, ALL people, ALL of their habitats, and on the planet itself.  The strong foundation of health, physical, mental, and spiritual, shall one day supersede the empty, superfluous hyper-realities of wealth.  I have recently read about a secret plan the U.S. of the 1950s had to detonate a nuclear bomb on the moon as a show of power.  What arrogance, what blind egotism the people who came up with this plan must have had, to not think of the irreversible damages such a thing would cause.  The absolute equilibrium of the moon’s attraction to our planet would become disturbed, no matter how much any “scientific study” might downplay the effects with its ridiculously optimistic and falsified predictions, and the effects would be felt on our continents, oceans, and atmosphere for millennia to come.  The sincerity and objectivity of a scientific study funded or operated by a government institution or even with funding, either directly or indirectly, from a private corporation, can never be trusted.

Which brings me to another point, the world’s inhabitants have been conditioned throughout the centuries to think of one another as enemies that they must compete against.  This is a motivational source which derives its motivational power from fear, fear of being overwhelmed, overtaken, and replaced.  People have long thought of the world, THEIR world, as a series of territories under continuous dispute, when originally the concept of “borders” and “territories” did not even exist, yet those in power have, since even before our current history began to be written, acclimatized us to such thinking.  With the technologies we are currently in possession of, we are fully capable of living peacefully and harmoniously as one people of one planet, as equals who may all live at the same level of comfort, with the same freedoms and liberties, and with the same sense of justice, duty, and community.  Yet we have all fallen to a state where we are all blind animals aiming only to survive.  A large part of this is the increasing scarcity of resources brought on by overpopulation.  Overpopulation has only served to lessen the general quality of life, which is worsened even still by those in power who have, long since accumulating their reserves of wealth, established methods and fail-safes for protecting and maintaining their wealth and power.  The distribution of wealth has long been lopsided, with the wealthiest making those who serve them only marginally wealthy in exchange for absolute loyalty in their servitude.  I know what I am saying is spoken of elsewhere, and that it is bound to stir many negative emotions, yet I feel it is my duty to say it, despite the attention saying it brings, in case there is any chance that others feel the way I do and have the desire to live based on more noble ideals, with a more intelligent long-term focus for their lives, who are considerate of their descendants and their communities, not only their immediate kin.  Those of you who wish for a better world, if you are out there, you must live according to the noblest principles mankind has ever conceived, and you must change the world by setting an example through your actions, for only action can show the true spirit of what telling fails to convey.

a theory on why drugs are so prevalent in America

The following was written by me as a comment to someone’s article on the horrendous drug killings going on in Mexico.  I had intended for it to be a rather brief comment, but then got carried away.  Here is the comment I made from the original source:

http://www.guernicamag.com/daily/rebecca-solnit-apologies-to-mexico/#comment-15454

Here is the comment slightly altered since I had originally posted it there:

I enjoyed reading this article for its information and its passion.  I have an opinion of why Americans have become so attracted to drugs, but you may not buy it.  Either way, I thought I would give it here.  The American people have been distracted for a few generations now.  I would say ever since World War II the attitude of people towards life in general has changed.  The former censorship of illicit activity, its portrayal in film and television, or even in books or in speech, has faded since then, especially since the cultural revolution of the 60s.  Also, life was no longer so stable seeing as at any moment a world leader could push a button and your entire city or even the whole world could be obliterated, and so people began to exhibit a lack of faith in the world, and in the existence of God as well.  With such a monstrous possibility of apocalyptic destruction at hand many people throughout the world lost faith. 

This loss of faith is responsible for a spiraling indifference and a sense of depression and hopelessness hidden beneath every smiling face.  In the art world, even, everyone wanted to break down representation and deface symbolism to find the essential relationships between color and space, zooming in to the point where the viewer was lost in abstractions.  I am referring specifically to the Minimalist movement, though I still believe Abstract-Expressionism has merit with what I am trying to say, as a sort of modern outlet for those who still felt the need to express their spirituality in a non-representational way.  Not to say I don’t think abstraction is good.  I love abstraction, but I’m only showing how suddenly a world that had wanted art that made sense, that had a rich and traditional meaning, that told a story, that depicted the characters of fables and legends and, yes, religious themes and characters, suddenly rejected those things and wanted the other extreme, the objective, scientific treatment that lacked any style whatsoever, as if to be human and to have one’s own personality show in the work were evil.

If you were to rationalize it in another way, even Minimalism can be seen as spiritual.  Perhaps Minimalism and Abstract-Expressionism were trying to find a purer essence or a more direct truth that could not exist in a depiction of the impure and imperfect mundane world.  However, it was still a crisis which led to this alternative form of thinking, and along with this crisis came a rejection of certain traditions.  This is important because suddenly there is a refreshing independence of thought throughout art, and after Minimalism’s experimentation with the essential relationships of color and space you have the evolution of Conceptual Art.  The birth of Conceptual Art was interesting because it was beginning to look at the underlying structures of almost all forms of art and was seeking out the basic concepts behind those structures.  In the same way all scientific hypothesis and experimentation can be seen as a search for God simply because science wishes to find and identify the laws of the universe.  The laws of the universe, many would argue, were created by God, and so they seek out their own creator by studying his works, because somehow these laws help describe or at least shed some light on the nature of his very essence.  But that is a completely separate argument meant for another time.

So I consider this a very subtle form of self-depreciation and self-flagellation, by attempting to subdue or destroy the self in favor of the scientific endeavors of a new age.  Somehow because science triumphed over the religions of its day and gained favor in the eyes of the people for what it could do, atheism and existentialism became much more valid arguments and lifestyle choices, seeing as science had hard, verifiable evidence to show for its theories and assertions.  This is also a form of guilt as a nation for what has happened to the citizens of two cities of another nation, their almost instantaneous destruction, because the two nations were involved in a worldwide war.  The governments have a right to defend themselves from other nations, but to detonate a nuclear bomb on a city full of innocent civilians?  This was too much.  The psyche of the nation broke down.

Combine this shift of power from the religious institutions of the world to the academic institutions with the threat of apocalypse-scale annihilation that was the Cold War and you have the necessary components to breed an insecure, despondent people who do not know what to do with themselves or how to find meaning in their lives.  Add the general distraction from the real world, the here and now moment of awareness of oneself, that is television, its dawn and its quick breakthrough into the mainstream culture, and you have the perfect formula to create the all-consuming, ever-spiritually-lacking race of zombies that the majority of Americans today exemplify.  The word boredom used to be a catalyst for inspiration, for imagination and change.  Unfortunately, American minds are no longer given a chance to have time for themselves, unless they make the titanic effort to willingly isolate themselves from all forms of media.  Otherwise they will always be rifled with bright, colorful, jingly shows and advertisements all vying for their attention and all making themselves more pleasantly artificial, more hysterically colorful, and more ridiculously loud and even schizophrenic to gain an edge over their countless competitors.

All of these things have helped contribute to a warping of the American mind so that it may become the perfect consumer of goods, both working to create and sell these goods, and pumping as much money as possible back into the pockets of the many (yet very few overall) owners and investors.  It all adds up perfectly, the lack of spirituality, thus the lack of meaning, the belief only in the physicality of the world and the rejection of any other possibilities not immediately verifiable by the five senses, which then leads to a focus on immediate, simple pleasures such as comfort, entertainment, and, yes, lewd, unashamed and animalistic sex.  Free love had to happen, yet it also weakened or destroyed many important foundations, foundations like marriage, and it allowed an animalistic freedom that had once been hidden and looked down upon to be opened to the public, including the children of the public, so that every generation that followed abused and perverted the wonders of sexual contact more and more.

For all we had to consume as Americans, all the products we were told were wonderful, brilliant, idyllic, and were presented as our shining dreams come true, it was never enough, and that was the aim of the experiment, to create an infinite lack, a void in every one of us that would eat everything it came in contact with.  That’s why American families often fail and both the men and women have become such takers.  The art of giving has become forgotten because of this void.  The drugs are for those people who need the next hyperbolic experience to consume, for the consumers that can no longer sustain themselves with the natural states of pleasure easily available to them in this world, and who wish to quicken the decay of their minds and bodies in order to experience an exaggerated and volatile form of pleasure.  Whether they actually have pain and suffering they need to cover with this pleasure or it is something as basic as exaggerated boredom due to excessive instant gratification should be taken case by case. 

Well, seeing as I have made this comment too long, I will have to post it in my own blog as well…  Thank you for writing this, I enjoyed reading it, and I hope that its many concerns will be addressed by some form of power or other.

(Source: article:http)

True Utopia, part 1

People say Capitalism doesn’t work, that it’s bound to fall sooner or later.  Today it looks like it’s going to fall sooner or later, but you can never be too sure.  Karl Marx thought all the governments in the known history of the world were corrupt from the beginning, having a class system and a bias towards the upper classes, in other words, those in charge.  I agree that true law should be as though it were a law of God, and should be absolutely universal, meaning the law applies to absolutely everyone and there is no way to cheat it or find a loophole around it.  The problem with kings, despots, dictators, commanders, and any such thing, even prime ministers and presidents, is that the governing body has a chance to become selfish by following the will of a human being, a will almost guaranteed to be selfish and imperfect in some way.

There are checks and balances here in these United States, sure, but there are only two parties painted different colors, red and blue.  These colors are very general and very stupid, because they are lies.  The real person hardly ever stands for what their party represents, or what that name or color has come to convey in the current political context due to what it has done in the past.  But everybody buys the colors, they love the two big teams going to war, it reminds them of a football game or something.  However, having two similarly painted choices is no choice at all.  People choose only those two because they believe there is no point in choosing any others, not because they truly believe they will lead their countries in the right direction.  There is no point because everybody else believes the same thing, that there is no point because everyone else will vote only for those two, and that self-defeat echoes throughout the consciousness of America.

But I am not writing this to complain of the passivity of the general public.  I mean to show the nature of the most popular systems of government today, both strengths and weaknesses.  It seems to me that all the styles of government ever fabricated by man have been made for one purpose alone: survival and supremacy.  They are two words, but they are one thing, the need to continue to exist, or, in other words, the will to live.  It would be divine if this were the noblest cause for creating a governing body, but, to be honest, it is not.  This form of government is always willing to compromise its ideals to better fit the actual situation, and while this may seem like adaptation and evolution, somewhere along the lines an original infallible law, a self-evident right, somehow becomes compromised, weakens and fades from the script.  Utilitarianism is another idea, perhaps one of the fundamental precursors to American-style democracy, which seems to make sense but doesn’t.  It says that what does the best good to the most people is what must happen.  But “good” is not easily quantified or qualified.  Moreover, it is another system of compromise.  When the schematics and the values change, when the resources rarify to the point where the full spectrum of citizens is no longer equally sustainable, it simply does the best it can with the situation.  Utilitarianism does not demand change.  Utilitarianism lacks anticipation; it too quickly collapses into failure due to its being almost exclusively reactive.

Survival and supremacy are words that do not hide the true nature of the current world situation.  There is no point in hiding it.  To hide it and pretend everything will be alright in the end is not only a waste of time, it is a stupid move.  Maximizing on short-term tactics to get the biggest squeeze of juice out of the world economy will only lead to a world that shrivels up and gets thrown out.  Practically all businesses throughout the world are acting like the world itself is dispensable, and the truth is it’s not.  We live here.  It is in our own best interest to take care of our home.  I don’t mean our nation.  I mean our world, our true home, Earth.  We can point fingers and say speeches all we want, but the real problem is not the businesses that try to find the sharpest edge to cut production time and manufacturing costs with.  The true culprit is all the governments of the entire world, which did not account for our too-rapid growth and consumption of natural resources to write in the stone foundations of their constitutions laws that would protect against our overexpansion.

All too often, the governments of the world realize their mistakes by force of the natural world rising to dethrone them.  All great empires have fallen prey to their own people, simply because they thought they could proclaim themselves empires and rulers and yet trick their subordinate nations into thinking they were independent and equal.  Once you claim you are an empire, or even act like an empire and do the things an empire would do, you are saying that you are not equal, that you wish to control, dominate, and make life easier for yourself and harder for others.  I don’t care how you sugar coat it – an empire is an empire is an empire.  Why did they fall?  They fell because they were going against the true nature of our world, and the true nature, the INTENDED nature, of human beings.  “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal…”  Who intended this nature?  Who do you think?  When humans follow their own plans, unless they have common rapport with the unknown creator, who is far greater than themselves, they are guaranteed to be selfish, to set those around them back, and to lose out in the end.

Everyone respects tradition, and the Constitution is the best example to date of a great foundation, but we are ignorant of our own shortcomings, our own short-sightedness.  When someone has something negative to say about something we’ve done, we just don’t want to hear it.  Our own pride in ourselves makes us deaf to the suggestions that could make us even better.  We think because our forefathers did such noble things as creating freedom from all tyranny for anyone who chose to come here that somehow our work is done and we deserve to overlook the world from a privileged place.  We don’t DESERVE a privileged place anymore, and we have to recognize that one way or the other, because our non-deserving is real, it is happening to us.  The world is correcting an imbalance, pointing out our own mistakes to us.  Capitalism means Capitalization, which means capitalizing on opportunities, in other words to make the most of a situation.  I cannot stress this enough.  We cannot afford to live with a short-term mentality anymore, because the entire world has long been discovered and colonized and we are running out of time the more and more quickly we grow.

When we were young and the land we lived on was virgin territory ripe with potential, this seemed like the right thing to do. It seemed like our resources were never-ending, and they led to our lightning-fast ascent.  We abused our potential, and ended up spending it all at once, not as one nation, but as ambitious individuals who capitalized on opportunities and made themselves into extreme monsters of wealth.  The mines have been stripped of their valuable ores, the ground has been practically sucked dry of its oil, and the trees are scattered into small forests, large parks. There is rarely a space of 50,000 acres of wilderness without some town or city in its midst or some highway cutting straight across it. If the Constitution needs to be revised and re-ratified then that is what needs to be done. We all respect the Constitution, but why don’t we have the same respect for the future of our planet? One word: selfishness. Seeing only what is in front of you is close-minded and selfish, narrow thinking. If short-term gain means long-term loss then I don’t want it to happen at all.

Now is the time to exercise reservation, to reassess our values, to admit things to the public, and make the necessary changes.  We shouldn’t hide our problems.  We should make them known throughout the world, so that all of us can understand them and we can all reassess our personal values and effect change on the individual, personal level, the only level where change can truly last because it is not forced.  When we ourselves are given the choice, and we choose freely to change based on our own thoughts on the matter, then change comes not from some powerful institution forcing us to change, but from inside of us as we process and understand the situation for ourselves.  That kind of change is the only kind that can change the destiny of mankind.  So we have to ask ourselves, what is not working?  What needs to be changed?  What are we doing wrong?

As we all know, it seems that the main competitor to Capitalism in the world is Communism.  Communism seems to be an extremist system coming from the opposite side of the spectrum, but it really isn’t so different.  However, it has been either proven a partial failure, or sabotaged by the bigger players in the game among the nations.  Either way, it has its own problems.  It seems like this is going to be a very long series of posts, as there is a lot to explain in my mind.  I will try to structure it as best I can, and then I will probably go back and do some shifting and snipping and smoothing over.  Let me address Communism and, more fairly, Socialism, first, as it seems like a common neutral ground to start from.  These systems are concerned with survivability, but not so much supremacy, instead they are worried about equality, to the point where they become stifling to the human creative expression which has the ability to solve the problem and reinvent the situation.

so what do the women say about men?

Before I get to the main line of conversation concerning this post, I would like to mention that my father said his mother-in-law, my grandmother, had said that once they turn 21 all children should be kicked out of the house.  My father seemed to think this was unfair and unreasonable and did not agree with her beliefs.  I tried to paint her words in a different light.  I likened her belief to the common analogy of a mother bird pushing her children out of their nest to teach them how to fly.  I’ve seen my mom say goodbye to us.  I know she is suffering as she does it.  It must be the hardest thing for a mother to do, to let go of her children and let them fall into the fray. 

But they don’t do it to be cruel.  On the contrary, they do it because they love their children.  Mothers want their children to become successful and mature, and the best way to ensure that they do is to teach what they can and then let them go.  They can’t protect them from the world forever.  When it is time, it is time.  As they confront the pressures of the real world for the first time only their own instincts can give them the capacity to cope, to adapt, to learn, and to evolve as full-fledged adults.  They must learn to fly on their own.  The cycle must continue.  The boys must become good husbands, or at least men of great responsibility.  The women must ensure the future of their children, and they must pick wisely who they will share their lives with.  Of course, these are extremely traditional views.  I don’t think like this, but I do perceive that there is some kind of innate formula entwined in the expectations for both men and women.  Whether that paradigm has recently been made by man, or it is age-old and completely biologically-based, I cannot say.

Mom had a best friend too.  Apparently they are more like enemies now.  But back then, when the divorce was happening, my mother’s best friend had already dealt with her husband cheating on her.  Unlike my mother, she decided that her marriage was too important to her and to her children and so she gave her husband another chance and forgave him for what he had done.  I make it sound so easy.  There was plenty of pain and suffering involved, I’m sure of it.  But she had two daughters to think of, and she didn’t want them to know that their father had been unfaithful.  She kept it hidden, and they never found out.  Perhaps she understood men a little better than my mother, or perhaps she was willing to put her own ego aside to reinforce the stability of her household.  My mother could not accept the strike my father had committed against her dignity.  Mom came from a large family with four brothers and three sisters, so there was a lot of pressure, especially from her two sisters, to give my dad what he deserved and end the marriage.

Two women; two different choices.  I wonder what they would say when they would have their discussions about men.  They had to have had those discussions, I’m almost sure they did.  I was young, but I think I remember them having the female equivalent of our own three-man discussion.  Would they have said, “All men are pigs.  All they want is sex, and they are always looking at other women.”  Maybe they said something else entirely.  I must confess that I can only guess at what they actually said.  But I can imagine…  We must admit that mother nature has provided man, at least the average man, with his own set of highly predictable instincts.  Number one on that list of instincts being the insatiable and bestial search for beauty incarnate.  Okay, I may need to rephrase that later…  A man’s personality is often forged with that irresistibly flirtatious charm.  There are a great number of men who are constantly fueled by simple yet playful flirtations with their co-workers.  They do it so often they don’t even notice. 

My father’s best friend said it himself.  When they were in bed he forgot everything.  Everything that had ever gone wrong suddenly disappeared.  Nothing else mattered.  That’s a strange little reset button mother nature put on us.  It’s awfully convenient that only women have access to it too.  These two men have decided that women are no longer worth pursuing.  They came to their decision after many years of pain and pleasure, but here they are…  For now.  Whether they are truly wiser or they are just tired is another question entirely.  Goodnight.

a discussion amongst men

I found myself the other evening having a discussion with two men about the nature of women.  I did not start this discussion, nor did I intend to, yet somehow the subject came up.  Though at points there were specific women being spoken about, I will not name or hint at who they might be.  One of the people I had this discussion with is my father, and so his views are quite familiar to me.  However, his best friend is someone I’ve hardly ever had a conversation with.  To be fair, both of these men are older men who have had much more experience with women than I have.  One of them has been through divorce.  The other is currently going through the process of divorce. 

The discussion centered on the subjects of control and money.  Both of these men held the belief that women became more and more controlling as the marriage went on, and that most women try to control the man they are with in some way or other.  My father’s friend had many examples, and we all agreed that his wife was an extreme case.  Compared to his experience, my own problems with the women I’ve loved are nothing.  My father’s story is one that I was obliged to share from my own viewpoint as a young boy who didn’t understand (and hated) what was happening.  Long story short my father cheated on my mother and begged for forgiveness but was repeatedly denied.  There was plenty of bitterness, including court sessions over failure to pay child support, and many bad memories that are better to forget.  Anyway, I didn’t want to recount a long series of unfortunate events.

Their viewpoint was that all women wanted money, and the more men had the better they treated them.  This stemmed from their own insecurity, as far as I could tell, as did the urge to control men and ensure that they were on their side and not cheating on them with other women.  It seems like a somewhat barbaric belief, but I began to ask them questions and found that there were some similarities in their experiences with my own.  Then I wondered, as we were speaking, if mother nature did not have to do with this shared experience we all had.  I began to reason that it must be instinct that causes women to act in these ways.  From the information gathered in our conversation, which lasted a couple of hours, I realized that women were not so much like this at first, when dating, but that as time passed and dating became marriage, and marriage became raising a family, so did the female powers of exherting control over their spouse multiply.

But this was not a sudden change.  No.  This took place over years and years.  It was a sort of conditioning, or training, much like an athlete or a dog is trained.  The subject is given the amount of training that it can tolerate, until it is able to tolerate the next amount of training.  In the case of my father’s friend this training involved speaking only to the people she allowed him to speak to, constant confiscation and monitoring of his cell phone and his computer, including e-mail, answering his phone for him without telling him who called or letting him speak to the person, and constant accusations of flirting with other women.  Also, curfew.  Again, this is an extreme case developed over forty years of marriage.  In some ways I think he was digging his own grave by letting her bad habits get so out of control.  He could have stepped in much sooner than forty years later and let her know that she was going too far, or simply left until she came to her senses.  But… what’s done is done I suppose. 

When I asked him why and how he put up with it for so long, he said, “She is a beautiful woman who I could not resist.  When we had sex I forgot everything.  Plus for our kids I wanted us to stay together and be a family.”  I don’t know how common this man to woman interaction really is, but it almost seems ridiculously commonplace to me, almost stereotypical.  Of course my father had his own examples centering on money more than control, but it amounted to the same thing: a need for security and stability.  My own belief is that a woman’s instinct, especially once she has become a mother, is to ensure that she and her children are provided for.  The best way to do that is for them to “watch their man” and make sure they make enough money.  I don’t know any numbers, but apparently the amount of divorces due (mainly or in part) to money issues is overwhelmingly large.  A part of being a husband is shouldering the financial pressure of raising a family.  That is simply a part of the husband’s many responsibilities, and there is nothing wrong with that. 

On the other hand, when the woman takes full charge of the matter and becomes the man’s supervisor then things can get out of hand.  When my father’s friend moved out his wife withdrew half a million dollars from multiple bank accounts they shared and put those dollars in her own individual accounts.  He says she robbed him, and she retorted that all the money was hers to begin with and that she was the one who made all the money.  This is, as far as I understand, just not true.  Unlike these two men, and maybe it’s just because I’m young and naive, I don’t believe that all women have this control issue or this money problem.  Insecure women are insecure women, but not all women are insecure.  That all women are insecure is a ridiculous stereotype that I refuse to share with them.

My father said my mother demanded money from him and threatened to put him in jail because she needed the money to pay for our college education.  My father rightly cited the fact that she hardly helped pay for any of our college tuitions at all.  He also brought up the fact that he was the one helping my brothers and I to pay our tuition fees.  I cannot deny that.  I remember it well.  He still owes 60something thousand in child support.  He couldn’t start his own business for years because his bank accounts were constantly being emptied by the government.  Now that we’re all over 21 years of age they’ve stopped doing that, but he still owes her, and he still has bad credit because of it.

After this slightly awkward conversation with much more experienced men I don’t know what to think.  Do women need to secure the foundations for their home by controlling their spouse’s actions?  Are they money-hungry because of some primeval, maybe even motherly, instinct?  I think I may have to write more about this subject.  This seems unclear.

Worthy

I’ve wondered for some time now what would be appropriate topics for a blog, and I’ve yet to come to a definite conclusion, but that is the nature of who I am.  Therefore, I would like to simply say whatever might come to mind.  What would be something truly worthy of saying?  What would be considered something that would not waste anyone’s time?  It is difficult to say, and even more difficult when you say things people disagree with, or might even get offended about.  This is what I’ve always found so strange about writing.  We write with an audience in mind, and so already there is a degree of separation, a degree of censorship.  We never write the complete truth.  We are always editing out, skipping, telling white lies by leaving pages blank.  I do not pretend to tell the truth, for that would be unseemly and hard to read.  I suppose, like any craft, writing must be held up to standards to be seen universally.  These standards are technical, sure, but they’re also social standards, moral standards, and intellectual standards.  Whatever I may end up writing about, I hope that I take its truthfulness into consideration very carefully, despite that I must depict it in such an indirect and conveniently alterable way as in writing.  I would like to write about only that which is verifiable by facts, or by evidence.  We are all living in the same world, and we are a testament to one another.  We share our lives with each other, and we enjoy this sharing.  Love is sharing.  Yet as far as I have seen, the overwhelming loneliness of each person is unshakeable.  It is there even when we are not conscious of it, and when we wake we find it was waiting for us as we were dreaming, and we feel it with us again the moment we fall back into our bodies.  We share our lives here, our thoughts, and our feelings, because we long for the understanding of others, and because we want to love and be loved.  Communication is a basic need.  So I ask, what is it that makes us all long for one another?  What is it that makes us sad and happy?  What do we want?  What is it really?