Silber, beasts, costumes and slaveships

I'm glad to see Arthur Silber found his voice again, for however long it may last. Even though I don't know him personally, he makes you feel like you do. If you haven't visited his blog, Once Upon a time... , try to make a point to do so, you'll find it hard to make the visit brief. He doesn't have comments and perhaps its just as well. There are so many links you will have an overwhelming volume of material to consider, it may just be an exercise in repetition to comment with any comprehensive remark other than perhaps with a word that isn't in the dictionary. What he does is this: He fills in the holes where you thought you had it all figured out, and did, but could have done better if your mind was stripped of all external noise. His personal life I understand is extremely difficult, bordering on impossible actually. You can see for yourself because you will get hooked and want to read all the way through the archives, not a quickie I assure you.

There is something, hmmmm, saintly to me about people who go right to the heart of the matter without an agenda, without exaggerating or omitting crucial thinking points. It is the height of the whole Internet experience as far as I am concerned. When I say saintly, I am saying "pure", untainted, no flavorings, no e-coli. Its a quality I always look for and more often than not am bored because there is so much of nothing being jammed through the motherboards. Basically, I limit the experience to the tried and trues. Listen, on dial up you don't want to waste time.

I know, I haven't said the H word yet. I am forcing myself to refrain for a short time in an experiment to see if it removes the huge dark boulder of epic tragedy pressing on my heartstrings. It is true I placed it there and once begun, it enters the blood stream flowing to the brain where it acts as an antagonist on normal serotonin re-uptake. Without consciously realizing it we cannot avoid returning to the Polaroids of the Civil Rights era of the deep south, Strange Fruit, Tuskegee, George Wallace, Lester Maddox and his Chicken Lickin' lunch counter and the cooks given axe handles, we cannot avoid going back further to the true to life stories passed on through generations, stories of indescribable suffering. Then you go back farther, as far as you can. You can go back very far, its all there. After living our insignificant and insular lives, we awake to find its still there, costumed differently as are most things, but alive and making plans.

I've known a lot of undercover racists, those who knew better but adopted the mores of their social community for survival within the community whose leaders made their feelings clear. This is not any different than accepting never ending war as the way things are. That middle easterners are dangerous, that security enhancements are for our own good, that we are hated for our freedoms. It has NEVER sat right with me. It is illogical in fact because we are all members of the human species, just another species inhabiting the same planet with the same needs and drives. I must have missed the miseducation of the illiterates where hatred of our fellows was a required course for successful living. It has cost me, it would cost you, too, to go against the grain, to be stupid and feign ignorance, but there never was any other way possible. Not a single time would I have backed down, there was never a choice.

It seems the route racism has taken is a pretense it ended with slavery, then came the pretense it ended in the 60's Civil Rights Movement. And certainly, with a Mulatto leader, it does not exist at all, right? What will they call it when we have a GLBT leader? A Jewish leader? An Arab leader? Perhaps we are supposed to think the world will collapse before it ever gets that far? If the world does not collapse within the predictable future, we will definitely be in line for leaders of any persuasion and nationality, very likely Arab as in the last holdout for the industrial revolution. Westerners have no prejudice when it comes to fulfilling their own needs. The same can be said for psychopaths.

I'd happily end this entry on an optimistic note, but that isn't in the cards right now. What we see overall may be costumed differently, but we're still in 1604. Indeed, there are billions more bodies, but nothing really changed. As the oil depletes, the costumes come apart, the masks slip off and the rough beast is revealed lumbering among us freely, unimpeded, rampaging in riches and gloating in triumph. There are a lot more rough beasts in our overpopulation crisis. Everything multiplied while we were consuming fluff and now its ensured we consume ourselves. There appears to be no end in sight other than an act of God. Everybody in a position to reverse the tides is far more interested in covering their hides from the punitive prejudice of the 1604 community. Everywhere there are warnings and signs of things to come, if we are clear on nothing else, let's at least be clear about that. Never was there a more implosive mix than racism and the end of easy oil.