a breed without soul

In a recent post concerning overpopulation, I mentioned the lack of identity among purchasing dependent overpopulators:

."..The next time you find yourself sitting in traffic, take a good look at your surroundings, take note of the decals emblazoned in obese fonts with neon hues on westerners' windsheilds, "American Patriot",  "I'm not a bitch, I'm THE Bitch" or the rednecks' fave, bin Laden pissing.  These indicate a desperation to stand out among the writhing masses, wouldn't you say, a loneliness so severe that attention is drawn by means of annoying hapless passersby?   You might also say its obvious they have no identity anymore (if they ever had any to begin with) and obscene decals are the best they could scrabble together in saying "I am alive, look at me, I count dammit!" ..."

... Overpopulators who in elbowing their ways through the journey atop Nascar rated tires or encased in overpriced lookalike cages behind gated walls,  the cabs and carriers of which include amenities such as surrogate identity where none actually exists, rooms and inhabitants displaying various cult features such as fashion. style, cosmetic surgery, meaningless logos and rude decals, never used tourbus campers, accessorized show pets, sculpture for the stupid tipped over on the tiny lawns and so forth which when distilled are banners hovering above their bodies as cartoon thought bubbles since the verbal skills of these cage dwellers are limited to uninspired overused phrases meted out under stress with matching facial expression instead of the age old middle finger hand signal which could, if employed outside the safety of shatterproof glass, bring on drastically unintended consequences.  For example, our mridang master met up with one of these PDO cultists last week, here is his description of the experience:

"On the 20th, in town, I was flipped off, cut off and almost rammed by a woman tearing in the exit to get in front of me at the gas pump. As she calmly got out I asked what the problem was. My eyes met the most icy cold, nobody-home, face I've seen in a long time. I was told to 'have a nice day'. Maybe I just don't get out much, and this is the new normal? Heavily meded-up was my take, and too close to the edge for me to pursue it further, as it was already disturbing enough...."

Hey, good move my man!  Too close to the edge indeed.  Call in the Astrologers or perhaps this event was yet another training exercise...
Shall we translate his tongue-tied  aggressor's meaning behind "Have a nice day", under those circumstances?  How about heated guilt?  Guilt so pure and intensely felt inside it burned in a wildfire of panic.  Caught, the pretender of rights to the pump was instantly reduced to a cheesy four words - words only used in that particular way by all the other countless guilty who know perfectly well they have destroyed your peace of mind by initiating deliberately violent and dangerous action proving for all who happen to be passing by, whatever they are doing is of more importance than whatever you could possibly be doing and are rendered speechless when the unexpected and unknown consequences of their reprehensible behavior suddenly confronts them face to face.   "Have a nice day" means Go away. I have no explanation for my actions, I don't even  know why I did what I did.  I can't apologize because that would give you (and me) living proof I was wrong.   Had it been anyone other than our musician confronting her, you can be certain she was aware her behavior was setting the stage for violence.  She took a wild gamble there and lucky for her, walked away to continue ruining the days of whomever else was so unfortunate as to be in her path.  I'm sure you've met plenty of these kinds of people, we all have, it is unavoidable, especially now as many of them have been born into a world ripped asunder, minus any comprehension of what exists inside themselves and others or even a shred of vague curiosity why the world is what it is today.  To question is to risk exposure.  They run the gauntlet and take their gambles and often lose, the losses piling high in their wake.  And when they don't lose, they still lose, because living a life in this manner makes them no friends.  There is something about being behind the wheel or any imaginary shield that ignites these wannabeWetikos like nothing else because out in the open they become sniveling cowards either looking for the nearest escape or threatening with a show of imaginary protections referring to friends in high places, but when you're looking at them, they are accompanied by no one.  Who could stand them?  They don't even like each other and are so worried their children won't turn out exactly like themselves, the kids are forced to stay indoors, losing their own curiosity and adding pounds watching candy bars broken in half and magically sealed back together on the wide screen.

Sad to say, I've been coming across this kind of thing too much. I try to stay apart, while being there with others, but alert, you never know what triggers another person's unsuspected anger.  Of course, this is not always the case, but it has happened enough in these times to be a recurrent phenomena.  However long and however well you think you might know someone, there is still a hidden, rather low level potential, you could, completely accidentally, set them off.  When that happens, you never forget, whatever you thought you had previous to that moment is gone, the trust betrayed.  The trust I am speaking about is a trust that we accept the totality of others, their baggage, their flaws, their bond with us until it is exposed as one sided, which isn't a bond at all.  Regardless of how fully we might join in smothering the outburst and make a long drawn-out show of loyalty, in your own mind and memory, the scene lives on.  You may think others have long overlooked your lapses too, but from your own experience, you know it is impossible and you can only hope the passage of time brings opportunities where you or she/he show themselves a better man than that deep, dark, secret memory you have of a seemingly out of character event.   Note it works not only both ways, but from an intermingling of angles. If you notice it happening repeatedly, you will eventually be forced to confront yourself, asking what are you in it for anyway?  Some know exactly why they engineer face to face crisis.   The Wetikos and their vain admirers play us like pianos, confident that following a successful guilt-inducing punishment, if you are still present, still forgiving, you are no threat to their existence. One might think they take it for granted no one is paying attention to the dynamic or how it charts itself in the memory-bank.  Over and over I see it going down, day after day, night after night, the same scenes enacted by countless human beings refusing to see the reality of what is happening, what they are doing, stumbling over the damage left in the wake of continuing crisis, poisoned to the gills from a steady diet of pesticides, loaded on mind glazing drugs, oblivious to the tortures they inflict and are being inflicted upon them. They are far beyond caring. What's more, they do not want you to point it out to them either, they already know they are in so deep there can be no escape during their lifetime.

I cannot imagine a life spent like that, can you?  They might as well just be lifers on the chain gang cultivating your crops.  We like to think somewhere down the road the human underneath will show up, but there is no evidence such a folly ever takes place.  That would be like hoping Jerry Sandusky mends his ways or George Zimmerman feels remorse.  Ladies and gentlemen, there is a breed out there that has no humanity and has laid claim to entire lifetimes without sensitivity, sorrow, suffering, love or compassion.  They have learned to blend in order to thrive and thrive at your expense they will.  This breed is one of the worst effects of overpopulation because you cannot avoid meeting up with them in crowds.  Avoid crowds.  Stay aware of your surroundings and keep a low profile. This breed thrives in a pampered and corrupt culture based on worship of the self.  In this way, you could call them vampires - energized by the blood of innocents.

We can also say Great Fortune shined upon our beloved musician while being shown the existence of this breed.  The fact the remainder of his day turned out so well, not to mention void of conflict escalation, speaks highly of his self-control.  That is a self-control we would all be wise to emulate.  Considering the bigger picture, with all its extending pressures and disappointments, the undeniable angst of a planet under siege, the refusal to address responsibility for extinction events immediately under way is leading westerners from denial and refusal into violence as if civility no longer matters.  To say civility has no place, is saying there is no love.  There will always be love, my friends.  No matter how unwieldy it gets, how freaky, how strange, how cruel, humiliating, devastating and physically painful, the one thing we can always count on is Love.  Love always wins. 

I  leave you with a link to an alarming report, Global Warming's Terrifying New Math, written by Bill McKibben and published for the August 2012 edition of Rolling Stone. I am sure some of you have seen it already. The fact that this piece was made available in that publication tells us citizens are meant to see it, share it and lose their cool over it.  Isn't that what Wetikos really want?  Ah, but I've got news for them, the majority of readers will be concerned only until the next personalized blinking ad grabs their eyes.

"... This record of failure means we know a lot about what strategies don't work. Green groups, for instance, have spent a lot of time trying to change individual lifestyles: the iconic twisty light bulb has been installed by the millions, but so have a new generation of energy-sucking flatscreen TVs. Most of us are fundamentally ambivalent about going green: We like cheap flights to warm places, and we're certainly not going to give them up if everyone else is still taking them. Since all of us are in some way the beneficiaries of cheap fossil fuel, tackling climate change has been like trying to build a movement against yourself – it's as if the gay-rights movement had to be constructed entirely from evangelical preachers, or the abolition movement from slaveholders. ..."

dark clouds, silver linings

"Arrows of neon and flashing marquees out on main street.
Chicago, new york, detroit and it's all on the same street.
Your typical city involved in a typical daydream
Hang it up and see what tomorrow brings. ..."
Grateful Dead


The vain and powerful personhoods continue to expand their reign swallowing whole the lesser of their kind like black holes as the only source of statistical profit left to economies. Money makes its own laws.  It makes its own friends and followers and hangers on and suck ups and blood leeching parasites.  Unless it infringes on protected territory, any source of hefty profit, especially carpet bagging, is worshiped and fully supported regardless of how it is achieved, although you'll note with "the gift to health insurers", a loophole of choice was left up to the states to accept or deny medicaid expansion and now we are seeing many states hesitate and back off,  they can't even handle their current volumes. 

A state's denial of funding to expand their health support services can be seen as an intentional enrichment of the fundamental gift.

Meanwhile, environmental disasters continue to expand in parallel.  The heat is on - still, and this is only July - encouraging the very real possibility one or more derechos, superfires, floods and droughts will happen again. Power outages will eventually become so unwieldy, there will be many locations the power simply cannot be returned.  If you have ever been in a disaster, you would have seen funding generated by your state's declaration of emergency, go where it is declared to be needed most (the strings attached), which is not the same as restoration of "normal".  The victims of Katrina can tell us all about that.  Normal is relative anyway.  Our normal now is living side by side the existence of mass illusion, its clear failure in sight if by nothing else than by the ubiquitous, ugly consequences of control by proxy.

prox·y
noun, plural prox·ies.
1.the agency, function, or power of a person authorized to act as the deputy or substitute for another.
2.the person so authorized; substitute; agent.
3.a written authorization empowering another person to vote or act for the signer, as at a meeting of stockholders.
4.an ally or confederate who can be relied upon to speak or act in one's behalf....
From Dictionary.com 
5. a robot, android, battery powered remote controlled model plane, boat or car or a skillful hologram
...not from Dictionary.com


As always,  I am more concerned with how all of this plays out on the little people.  Recently, there was an urban structure fire started by leftover fireworks which destroyed two apartment buildings.  I saw it develop while walking the dog.  It was a typical dusty triple-digit late afternoon on our return to the homestead of these weeks, I could see black smoke billowing from the end of the blocks, blocks crammed with tiny apartments void of ameneties or landscaping, culminating at the cusp of stripmalls.  The reports said 48 people were displaced, four injured.  The location and construction details reported in the aftermath indicated a rather low rent complex, which tells you right away some of the 48 had to have been foreclosure victims previous to becoming renters.  And now, where do they go?  Unless they were paying a monthly storage bill, this time around they lost everything.  (Interesting how storage ops blossomed over the past twenty years.  Moneys abhors a vacuum.)  My heart goes out to these people.  I want them to know they still have themselves and there are multitudes of rewards available when the slate is suddenly wiped clean, that whatever material objects stood in the way of the truth matter none to the awakening out of illusion where real life begins, that great suffering is required to rid the mind of trivial nonsense and their character and actions will shortly reveal themselves to be capable of so much more than previously thought possible.  As they trickle into the illusion's help agencies in humiliation bent sideways with desperation, they will find the system was never designed to give them back their "normal", for many of them, revelation awaits while perspiring in long, noisy lines only to be referred somewhere else and somewhere else again until it all becomes a circular journey of last hope where false belief is shattered in the process of testing faith in a system based on infinite economic advancement.  The helping hand they really need is at the end of their arm.

Our own lives are a testimony to the truth.  Nothing worth the effort is easy, occasionally you will be burdened beyond your capacity to function and overwhelmed at every turn.  You will have very little agreement if any at all.  Your spirituality will be crudely shoveled aside ... temporarily.  All the while, the more sincere your suffering, the more your very survival becomes apparent, standing in stark contrast to the situations you recognize from books and films as the dead end of your downward spiral. In this way, the totality of your life itself is a quest, a quest forever seeking higher ground, you know you've come a long way when the judgement of your peers has no bearing on your existence at all. Besides, who among us is in any position to cast judgement, the very act of judging a sacrificial practice.  We look to the animals and fowl to see judgement as designed by Nature, the lame Quail excluded from the tribe as invitation to predation.  The one-eyed squirrel, not long for the living under the glare of a hungry Redtail. Magnify these precious offspring of Earth to what we see being pressed upon the beleaguered little people and right away it become obvious, suffer your way into the lair and trust you will be, ah, safe?  There is only one way out and it is being handed to us every day, but many still don't get it, so thick and impenetrable are the hypnotic gasses producing weakness, beware the beckoning poppy fields on the yellow brick road while seeking your way back home. 

There comes a point where you must let it go in order to regain your personal spiritual being.  Compassion is the guide here.  Dwelling in anger over situations over which you have no control only carries you deeper into the illusion. A case in point would be that of a dear friend going through a continuing crisis taking place thousands of miles away from her present where her last living relation is failing rapidly under the spell of a fundie faith healing couple who have already achieved the "aunt's" signature, placing everything in trust for themselves.  While the situation is sad and gruesome in its many twist and turns under the illusion of control, especially the part where just whom is it exactly who can exercise the most power, calling in law enforcement and making reference to friends in high places, this one small story evolves into a dirty little war with the fallout effecting hundreds of uninvolved others, each of whom have some unrelated contact with the offices of either side, all doors to repair are thus sealed making it impossible to navigate through the fog of schadenfreude as one camp works to destroy the other. I listen to the explosions with half of one ear, mindful that should I allow it to impair my objectivity, there will be no one left standing.  When we enlarge the preditorial details of this sole situation, we will at once discover the motivation behind the curtain of compounding complexity, pain exacerbated by false belief and judgement based on hearsay, which in the bigger picture is the primary role of media, and can only result in worsening the state of our current condition.  Every single minute, somewhere, behind the faceless, nameless, tormented bodies of overpopulation, the little dramas and wars of the human species play out in timeless tragedy. We see it all the time, enough to think surely others see it too.  But they don't, not yet! Only through the experience of intense suffering does such suffering turn to prolonged despair deep enough to call it off at which point the absurdity of invited desolation clarifies the spectacular futility of the quest.  If, in such a place, you possess the insight to SEE yourself, consider yourself blessed.

Suffering is welcome as the universal deifying force enabling us to manifest beyond the barrier of impossibility.

And then there are many others, of course, who seemingly through no fault of their own, are forced to suffer silently since the mere scent of their vulnerability lays the foundation for greater torture.  These would be the elderly, the elderly workforce, the battered and abused victims of domestic violence, abandoned and abused children, children in cash motivated foster care and the kidnapped, hijacked innocents at all levels who quickly learn which side their bread is buttered.  We visited a strip mall chain store over the weekend and were waited on by a sweet, chatty, twice-widowed woman easily in her mid-eighties.  During the course of our visit, for one simple inexpensive item, she was unable to produce a receipt for purchase because her elaborate computer system kept going down.  Each time it failed, she called out to Mister Bill, premier salesman, who responded if and when he so desired and when he actually came over to us it was with loud vocal abuse and intent to show off his technical prowess at her expense.  It was quite a show.  It took over an hour of him shoving her out of her chair and ripping through stacks of files and wires before our meager tranasction was deemed satisfactory.  I had sad visions of this woman's everyday ... how she must anticipate and prepare herself to endure the abuse of her bullying co-worker sixty years her junior.  You might see this woman's position as hopeless, desperate for income and acknowledgement at all costs to her pride, but we should know well by now, pride is just another set of rusty pliers in the devil's toolbox.  The truth is, while Mister Bill sought the spotlight, it is she I applaud for maintaining her cool.  

We can't know how long it takes others to walk away from incessant self harm.  We only know that living the mantra of Doing No Harm is salvation.  And now, while the sky breaks apart and the world bleeds, salvation for ourselves is more available than ever before.  We should not fear the mystical appearance of sudden salvation for our loved ones is unavailable because I can testify to the fact everyone gets there on their own timetable without our input.  This too can be witnessed time and again.  All it seems to take is some serious forthright analysis during disaster before your loved ones will be telling you things you didn't know.  The resourcefulness that has taken all of us this far, is still very much alive.  The only thing typical about illusions is the constant pressure to make everyone of us dependent on a mirage in spite of our inate self-reliance and spirituality.  Those two elements exist within all of us and are the two traits for which there are no boxes to check on applications for aid.  They remain off the grid, immune to technology which is the same as immune to control by proxy.

Control by "proxy", by the way, is the chief reason many personal relationships fail.  The proxy in such a case is, of course, the usual suspect, our ridiculous, aggressive Mr. Bill-ish nemesis, the Representative-Self.  No, no Mister Bill 

***

I remain in fairly full agreement with most 2012 Apocalyptic revelations and predictions.  Where we are today is much more and far worse than where we were last year at this time.  I realize many of you do not agree the horrors of these days have overpopulation at the root and find myself not at all divided, convinced we have over-bred ourselves beyond the Earth's capacity to support life AND always willing to give great credence to the many additional causes still operating, morphing, mutating at full throttle and taking down everyone and everything so unfortunate to inhabit the geographies and civilizations in their way.  Maybe LIBOR's scandalous interest rate manipulations will finally create the Grand Global Debt Jubilee and maybe pigs fly.  Expect anything, anything at all, to come crashing through your windshield now, obviously there is no limit to the Wetiko imagination for make believe, insane justifications for criminal/satanic behaviors and interior decorating with matching swags and drapes. 

Forget them, just forget it all.  We must stand back and remain as completely unaffected as humanly possible.  If the Higgs Boson gives body to matter, removing it would take everything apart, right?  Think Tao.  Let us give them NO mind and instead bow our heads and fold our hands in the humblest thanks and praises to the Supreme Creator Divine for our brief journey on such a beautiful planet complete with her incredible Mother lode of lessons.  We are very fortunate.