A Visitor's New Year Message

A visitor calling himself Oldsubotai sent us this message via our contribution form.
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To sum up in a few paragraphs everything we (as a nation) need to consider as we approach 2010 would be impossible so I'll just pick a couple.

First: when did we become a nation of cowards? Everybody wants a bunker and 2 years supply of food. we all want guns and ammo and sleep with the porch light on. We are afraid to go anywhere after dark. Got to have a GPS to find a 7-11. We all get our reality from the TV instead of going outside and living. Take a chance, live 2010 with some enthusiasm.

Second: It has been my experience that if you wait long enough everybody DIES! Let's quit living in denial about this basic fact of life and instead acknowledge how valuable our time is. do you want to waste huge sums of your precious life building a financial empire you won't live to enjoy or would you rather live a modest life full of joy and pleasure everyday.

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Oldsubotai - thanks for your contribution. While the part about guns and ammo is particular to the US, the gist of your message is universal. We need to get out of our cars and walk. We need to own the streets, lanes and footpaths. From warlord to terrorist to common thug, the power they wield is the power we give them, through acquiescence. (I hope I haven't misconstrued you).

Eat Your Puppy

On Christmas Day Bill and I were visiting my kids, and during the opening of the gifts my only grandchild, who had had lots of sugar that day and even more attention, was hopping all over the place, happily so. A few adults were discussing when and how to use some restaurant gift certificates they'd just received, and suddenly this child lept into the air and shouted:

"Eat your puppy!"

He said it with the kind of joyful exuberance and total abandon that only a five-year-old can muster these days, and the thought occurred to me that "Eat your puppy" could well become the most apt slogan of the second decade of the second millennium in America.

I suggested that someone should really register eatyourpuppy.com as a domain name if it is still available, and then, today, I went ahead and started a blogger blog under the name as a place where I can dump weird thoughts I have about our current situation that have nowhere else to go.

If you want to see that blog, it's at http://www.eatyourpuppy.blogspot.com/

It's not the most sophisticated or most laudable thing I've ever started, but there it is.

Anyway, I was thinking about the Nigerian terrorist on the plane to Detroit and how the passengers subdued this young man after a fire broke out "in his underpants", and although I know this is a very serious topic and no one thinks it is very funny, that in itself--the fact that we are talking about fires in young men's underpants and no one is laughing--is a mark of how paranoid and demented we have all become. First it was the shoe bomber, and we all now have to remove our shoes to get on an airplane. Now this.

What next? Mandatory panty inspections?

Already the news media are clogged with calls for better monitoring of third world failed states that might harbor terrorists and a general reassessment of 'the war on terror' (a term that has frosted me from the very start during the Bush administration) and I'm thinking, we seem to be missing the bigger picture here--which of course is that young men are willing to kill entire cabins full of strangers and themselves too by blowing up their underwear.

Why is that exactly? And why do we think we can control something that insane and irrational by invading messy former-nations all over the globe and blowing up more brown people?

While there will always be people who do insane and violent things for reasons that are difficult to fathom, I think it is at least possible that many terrorists might pass on that opportunity if they only had something better to do. Not all, but many.

What if this young man could earn a good living and had a girlfriend? Maybe he'd still be violent and dangerous. But maybe not all such young men would be so committed to self-annihilation if they had better choices. A job. A house. Kids. Anything.

I also think Americans expect too much in the way of safety and accept too much governmental crap in a futile attempt to secure it. We allow ourselves to be bamboozled into foreign wars that don't make us one whit safer. This is resulting in a world in which people think blowing themselves up in public is a great idea and in which "Eat your puppy!" sounds like a fun part of an ordinary suburban afternoon.

None of this hangs together rationally, not really. But on some level, it makes sense and is coherent, somehow. At least, it is to me.

And that's pretty scary too.

Happy Solstice

Yesterday at 4:47 PM the Winter Solstice came to Michigan.

Winter Solstice is the day of the year when daylight is shortest and darkness is deepest. After Winter Solstice, the days gradually grow longer and longer until we hit Summer Solstice (in late June--usually on or around June 21), and daylight again begins to shrink.

Many religious celebrations occur on or close to the Solstice dates. The fact that Christmas occurs around the time of the Winter Solstice is either an accident, a calculation of the the early Church meant to win pagan converts more easily, or a coincidence that nonbelievers make into a big hairy deal, depending on your own personal views.

My own personal view is that Winter Solstice is symbolically compatible with the feast day of Christmas, and because that symbolism draws on a very ancient tradition of various myths about the death of a King and the rebirth of a magical child at the point of greatest darkness (look up the story of Osiris, for example), it makes semiotic sense to pin the birthday of Jesus on that date.

The famous University of Chicago scholar Mircea Eliade argued that all myth is organic, not rational; that far from being a made-up story to explain natural events (the way popular culture usually regards myth), myth is created out a whole-body and mind response to a great natural mystery. Myth is created the way emotion is created: with the body and the mind.

For this reason, great myths become universal and are retold again and again, changing the names or elements only slightly over periods of thousands of years. We all live on the same planet. And we are all human beings. We are much more than just brains with meat around them--at least when it comes to our experience of that planet if not the facts of our existence on it.

The question of why we are on this planet is a mystery each of us faces daily.

Without in any way attempting to answer that unanswerable question, what all this really means is that story (as in myth) can, in some sense, be alive. The 'word' really can take on flesh in the sense that it can impart deep and true facts about human feeling and experience for millennia, from one person to another, from one culture to another. A universal myth carries an emotional charge that, while not rational, does contain vital information.

Specifically, Winter Solstice gives rise to stories about how, at the point of greatest darkness, hope is often born into the world. At the time of greatest despair and cold, a small point of light can begin a giant transformation of the human spirit.

That emotionally true fact is what we celebrate at Christmastime. (Anyway, it's what Pam celebrates. Plus a few friends and family.) The nice folks at Drop Out Nation can safely pin their hopes on this truism, no matter what religion or lack of religion you all espouse rationally. Why not choose hope at Solstice? It may not be audacious, but it goes with figgy pudding better than despair.

Merry Christmas, Happy Solstice, Feliz Navidad, Cheery Yule, Saturnalia, Hanukka, and Kwanzaa to you all.

And a Happy, Happy New Year.

God bless us, every one!

All About the Benjamins

There's been a lot of heated discussion (and no small amount of hot air) lately at a website many of us write for and enjoy, all about how much money is being made there, who is making the most money, and how to excel at making lots of money writing for the internet and selling stuff in the process.

The people who are able to do that and who nail down thousands each month are now regarded as the good smart people, and the rest of us are supposedly the dumb loser people.

Let me just cut to the chase:

I hate that perspective. I really, really hate it.

I've gotten at least six lectures in recent weeks along the lines of "suck it up, life is all about money, talk that trash and make that cash or shut up," in regard to my writing, and I just want to say that, no, no life is not all about money.

Life is all about money if you make it all about money. But you have to consent to that.

A couple of concepts from Buddhism seem useful here: Renunciation and Sanctuary. I renounce the love of money, and choose to instead see money as useful to me only in the service of something else. Money is a means to an end, not an end in itself.

I use money to get food and keep us living indoors. I buy stuff for my kids with it. I pay the electric bill. But I don't live for money. I use money to live. I make what I need, then I stop and do what I love. To my way of thinking, that's sane. I'm not pressing my views on anyone else, but that's what I choose to do with my time and my money. I expect at the very least respect for my own choices, not ridicule.

On a more personal level, I take sanctuary in writing as a means of contacting that force inside and outside of me that is beyond me, that creativity that is bigger and more useful than my own puny self. Writing for me is both personal and transpersonal, and while I do indeed write and sell 'content' for money, I never see the money as the main reason I write.

I'm sorry, but the fact that I take this view does NOT make me some kind of sucker or idiot.

Jobs are drying up in the U.S., and it feels to me like a kind of desperation is setting in online. It's really disturbing. Everyone wants to get rich now. Isn't that how the U.S. got in the mess it is currently in? Money for nothing?

The plain fact is that 99 out of 100 people will NOT be able to squeeze several thousand dollars out of the internet each and every month selling crap and getting ad clicks. That was very hard to do two years ago, and it gets harder by the minute today.

If you want to do that and you can do that, great. But please. Spare the rest of us the attitude.

The profit motive, usury and empire are elements of war, the antithesis of Peace.

Kapitalist amerika is the predominant proponent of these elements, the greatest purveyor of state sponsored terrorism and the most blatant war-profiteer of all nations.

LET IT FALL