Kali at the gates

Certain friends who comment here are insisting I stick around no matter how many weeks in between posts.  This is good, helpful and believe it or not, I've actually composed a few essays and deleted them as not being entirely accurate descriptions of the issues and impressions of this profound period.  Every question that appears to have an answer only brings up more questions and concerns and possibilities that rumble around in the back of our minds where certainty has not yet attached itself.  Everything, when looked into in greater detail, adding in all the considerations for all involved, appears to be insolvable and yet we have come this far on insolvable questions already, sometimes a few are solved by the luck of the draw, but quickly return to Darkness extended.  This says that the question of the life experience itself may very well be unanswerable in the way we want it to be answered.  It doesn't mean we don't have a plan, many of us do, but are unable to act sufficiently on our plans because too much of these plans are dependent on variables over which we have no control.  That's where the good old "wait and see" comes in, unless wait and see turns into the painful and slow evaporation of any plan at all.  Taking apart wait and see, you'll realize it is procrastination costumed in hope.  Now I have always stressed here that hope is as equally empty a human expression as belief, both being variations on wishful thinking which is a real phenomena and often at the root of denial.  Hope, belief, wishful thinking are age-old tools for coping with the harder parts of our journeys and not to be trusted if you seek truth.  I'm thinking these worthless tools have been passed on to us since the days we wore natural coats protecting us from the harsher elements in cave dwelling and kept around because our brains had not yet developed more complex thought processes other than those of our immediate physical needs i.e.; food, water, shelter and sex.  Throughout the turf wars of empires past, people typically clung to magical falsehoods, myths as truth, thinking they were real, alive, inviolate and worthwhile.  In return they became devastated with disappointment and susceptible to plagues, even greater penury than previously thought possible, enslavement, imprisonment and inhumane execution where their hopes and beliefs were sometimes suddenly, sometimes slowly and always cruelly dashed.  All of this still goes on and has mutated over the centuries into regal platitudes of hope and belief as public panacea which unfortunately turns out to be better stated as language used against hopers and believers:  a "dogmatic softening of the target" in order to accomplish whatever it is the regals' plan of the day is trumpeting, which regals themselves are by necessity prone to integrate subliminally.  An example of this would be universal health care.  This is how they can stand before huge crowds convincing the hopeful and the believers, they have convinced themselves they stand on the highest moral ground while omitting an important detail, that of their very own immorality.

Hurricane Katrina, photo: c. Google Images 

We end up confused and in denial.  Denial on the part of the peasants and denial of true intent by the regals empowering situations such as the one in which we are currently embroiled in all its absurd fullness allowing massively over-bloated egos to attempt one world government, a misnomer if there ever was one since the real intent is empire with unfettered possession of free resources anywhere desirable resources exist.  The best term would then be Planet Ownership since governing as we think of government isn't actually happening and has not been happening, perhaps it never happened at all in the way people hoped and believed it was.  In retrospect, Katrina opened our minds to that very possibility and all disasters since continue to reinforce it.  Consider that it has taken the judicial system more than nine years to vote in favor of the 911 emergency management workers, more than a few of whom are long dead and buried.  Consider this in context of having a plan and leaving the implementation up to hope and belief. Consider how non-citizens are slammed with US law which does not apply outside our borders and yet we know the cleverness of the corrupted, focused minds at work will find a way given enough hope and belief from other nations who have grown dependent on that borderless Santa Clause leadership sleighing in with IMF reindeer from the mythical shining city of the company store to whom world citizens are supposed to owe their souls.  I've come to find by reading various items on the net a great many of us feel that 911 was the beginning of all the horrors that have taken place since, but those discovered horrors only show us what was eliminated or glossed over, briefly, during formal education, formal because it is designed to form.  The Internet is here to fill in those weak and blank spots without the Tinseltown touches, but you have to seek or you shall never find.  I will even go so far as to say you have to know suffering to find out why suffering exists.  Suffering, great suffering, has always been around and knowing it only comes though identifying with suffering because you suffer.  Identification with suffering can only happen if you get those stars out of your eyes.  You have to have blown your life repeatedly to understand no matter what you do and where you go suffering is a natural part of life in this world for every one of us except those people who don't think they suffer because they have hope and belief to keep them from cashing in their chips.  I wouldn't worry about them, they are an anomaly to mankind.  They've always been around and plan on going to the grave wrapped in a shroud of marshmellow denial regardless of whatever lives they led.  There are too many categories in which this group falls to mention them all.  I will say these are the invested who do anything to please, typically we call them errand boys, clerks and mostly we know of them as enablers.

Squatters camp California 1936 by Dorothea Lange

It does appear that with each passing day the gates are closing a little more rapidly each time you look and the recourse to complete work camp enslavement and elimination of the needy, sick and elderly cannot happen on any lesser scale than what we see taking place in these energy wars.  We don't win wars anymore because the people being warred upon know their enemy well.  This has not always been the case, it is only with the advent of 4th generation warfare (the elimination of face to face linear combat where anything goes) and nonhuman weaponry we were able to enter into the state of winless warring at all.  Honor vanished, if it ever existed, replaced with disgrace and never ending defeat.  Now, with world population at an all time high and expected to increase, the conquering of bordered masses of human souls is impossible, no matter how much money is to be made, no matter how much death, disease, suffering, outright theft and occupations of puppet governments, no matter the resources at stake, there are simply too many bright and clever people applying their hearts, minds and skills to these operations for the aggressors to accomplish exactly whatever it was they planned and the warmakers, as you know, are underwriting their performances of power while balancing spectacular, ultimately unmanageable deficits.

The best empire can do is foment civil war and sneak around behind the scenes while hope is warring with belief.  Oh they feared that loudly according to the pundits promoting Rumsfeld in video clips denouncing civil war as absolutely the one element they did not want and yet that is their only way, the last card to play and not even that last card worked in Iraq and it sure won't work anywhere else considering the foibles of ego gone wild playing out in Afpak and anywhere else in the Sustainwesternizationistans.  The greatest failure of the regals is their inability to recognize mankind's sentience and durability to survive in spite of suffering.  That link by the way contains Linh Dinh's message, but Counterpunch displays it more easily without the photo download wait.  I strongly suggest you peek and when you are done then visit his blog for visuals.  No one can say cities are any worse off than rural municipalities, each has its own flavor of suffering which overall is desperation as hope and belief show themselves to be useless push backs against the inevitable. 

If we were in a stage of our evolution where cruelty was banished out of sight and mind, which is in part what empire historically promotes so we won't interfere, we would not be able to reconcile suffering in terms that fit in with our lifestyles (strange word - zeitgeist alert) and would ignore it as some alien noise from the outside that had nothing to do with us.  All of that changed, again thanks to the web and thanks to the overpopulous amping of efforts to control and coerce brought to us by the same technological development that make the Internet possible.  This is yet another take on the double edge sword of being alive during the great toboggan downhill slide of Peak Everything.  In Peak Everything we play musical chairs everyday, every sleepless night under a comforter of dreams while nothing is done to alleviate even minimally the collapsing of social order.

In the world of our dreams we are replacing the missing chair, giving of ourselves without restraints, sharing our tables and sitting at the tables of our friends, all without wishful thinking, but creating the best of ourselves, the humanities, the things that last, the passing on to future generations real survival skills and the realities of our pasts, our love and our nurturing in ways that will see them into eternity - the way it was meant to be without making up useless phrases and deifying false gods because none of that is needed to be truly human.  The world of our dreams will never come about without honesty, tireless compassion and the absence of shame, paranoia and guilt.  As long as we bear guilt for our ruinous investments in nonsense we remain tied to the abusive wheel with which we steer all species into oblivion. In the world of our dreams we recognize the right of everything to exist alongside us without taking advantage because we are all that we need to be exactly as we are and always have been.  And yet, in spite of all we think we know, don't know and learn, see and experience, what is IS. There is nothing else. 

Why anyone, especially at this point in time, would entertain hope and belief is beyond me.  Sure, there is the occasional feel good human interest story put there to sustain the wishful.  After all, it is the wishful making up quite a lot of the sub-party clans that you will note have not been able to get through their agendas, sadly making laughing stocks of themselves as if they are nothing more than another television junk reality show.  Ask yourself just whom exactly sponsors these shows and why.

Last word: It is a HUGE tragedy among us that intelligent, decent people can put up a very direct and truthful blog post only to rescind it hours later on the grounds naked, unvarnished truth will bring them only deeper and more immediate suffering.  Such events tell us the truth of our present and are omens of what we can expect this new year to bring.