Parades of hope against the backdrop of fear

While I read the blogs linked in the blog list, I read a lot more that there isn't room left to link here.  That's a given experience, a daily occurrence, facts and fiction of life in the internet age of which we are all doing the same thing more or less at varying times.  What is not an ordinary experience is visiting these "stories" in real life which is why I went along with the group to a candidate's rally.  I'll synthesize it for you briefly: the appearance of this candidate was exactly as we've seen him on TV with the exception of the crowds, crowds numerically rivaling a Stones concert at Madison Square Garden, for example.  What was originally presented as a speech, likely under an hour or less, turned out to be an all day affair in order to get a "good" seat which meant a faraway glimpse of what it was you agreed to attend at all.  Actually, I agreed to go because it was something I would normally never do, such as ride in a giant Cat garbage compactor gliding over the L.A. city dump.  Further, if I was going to continue to blog about our bizarre lives on Planet Earth in 2012, seeing up close in 3D just how the appointed Earth leaders do whatever it is they do, in person, seemed worthwhile. 

From where we connived our seats, connived because only a mere hundred or so people were able to occupy them, thousands upon thousands stood, the angle of the setting sun made photography impossible.  After dark it remained impossible as the stage lights (think Woodstock-style scaffolding) acted as more Suns.  The real show was sneaking peeks at the well-armed, military uniformed security squad on the roof of the adjacent building.  If there was anything to walk away with after such a show, it was the demographics of the crowd on the ground and the roars of approval.  The content was nothing we have not heard before.  The sad part was seeing the sheer numbers of true believers, the shabby and rundown, the confused and uncomfortable, the disabled and the aisle dancing, placard holding families with strollers, the obvious poverty of beleaguered persons and congregational fellowship of unbridled patriotism under the media spell that their immediate future will change everything wrong with today for a better tomorrow if one just manages to climb aboard the magic Diebold bus.  I liken it to a tent revival, the cultists, having lost everything, still filled with worship and couch change as if nothing, no matter how goofy, can shake that faith in the snake handlers' snake oil cure-all.  Too bad the show organizers overlooked the inspirational Bondo of a good gospel choir.

Thus, the first of the candidates' debates was a rehash of the same impossible shuck 'n jive we know all too well because we've read it, seen it and we live with it in one fashion or another every day, like it or not.  Nowhere present in any of these "entertainments" was there discussion of any real plan to survive climate change or what we are going to do when our own municipalities declare States of Emergency (emerge and see), leading to full bankruptcy which means contractual obligations will not be met.  Who will fight the wildfires then?  Will it all become so unweildy they will eventually sit back and let it just burn until there is nothing left to fuel the flames?  And don't even think about calling 911.  It seems as if all the candidates are doing at their meetups and globally televised "debates" is to trade inaccurate statistics on how the health insurance industry will continue to gorge on whomever's version of healthcare is forced down our throats, mandated under a tax penalty - a penalty tax actually of which those very funds could have been paid, and in many cases probably will, to see your doctor.  Now tell me, is it not stupid that one must pay just about the same amount of money to the IRS, if that money were available to the individual, to receive immediate medical attention?  Imagine how it works - law abiding citizen, churchgoing, college educated, but unemployed, deeply in debt, children and more on the way, home in foreclosure, suddenly notes tax scofflaw on his lifetime list of unplanned mile markers.  You better believe these folk were also in attendance at the rally, cheering.


And then the day came last week, at some point, there was yet another negative Monsanto mention on some site out of the hundreds visited so that nothing really stuck, but the thought, which according to all we know about what it is they do, came together in such a way it overwhelmed the latest evil reports and took on the solid form of the answer we've sought for how many years now?  Everything since that insightful moment unfortunately fits.  The birthrate in the US is down for the fourth year.   We are to think this is because of the economy, the 2nd Great Depression, ah, the recent recession which we are also to think is well along the road to recovery. Maybe we're not thinking too well, maybe the steady diet of pesticides in GMO seeds, the massive romance with convenience foods pushed at low prices or free with ubiquitous government food stamps, maybe this has something more to the point to do with low birth rates?  And maybe Monsanto is in league with a certain global agenda and everyone including the suicided farmers and new moms, even the journalists offering implausible justifications are oblivious?  They want us to think an under-performing economy does not translate into something as basic as increased sexual activity.  Hey, when you have no money to go out, what are your plans for the evening?  And what do we know for sure anyway, maybe legitimate rape is on the rise and women's bodies just sort of magically shut down all those mysterious female secretions that make babies?  My friends, I will not insult your intelligence, you and I know the global population needs to be lowered asap, there simply is not enough of anything to go around. All the media's trending growth reports are growth only in their clever manipulation of tragic facts.


The debate of my dreams will come on the day these Charlie McCarthys lay out realistic repairs granting every man the right to choose and construct plans of his own making wherever his vision of survival appears most possible.  That the candidates admit to being powerless over Nature and throw off the reins of the personhoods that train them, promote them, pay them and mold their agenda and allegiances. The candidates are their spokespeople, testing consumer enthusiasm, allowing them to statisticize response and thus reach further.  As long as there are so many populations stuck inside ridiculous beliefs they are free, better, smarter humans than all other humans existing outside their country's borders and and will always be safe and prosperous thanks to the benevolent all-seeing government, everything is heading on a perfectly linear course towards cruel, unnecessary and absolute chaos worsened by the accelerating effects of climate change and its revolving disasters.  We know how that came around too, don't we.

Truly, posting on this subject is not pleasant, nor particularly deep.  In between the rare moments when we are not under the cloud of the enforcers, I have many other things to be said here.  Perhaps the pain of life itself is on hiatus in those hours of system anguish in which case there are too many who welcome the intellectual exercise.  However, the epidemic of re-election fever, simply in its overabundance, is making us ill, queasy and becomes cause for strange and unlikely interactions pitting us against our fellows as if the clock was turned back to the Civil Rights Movement.  In reference to our last post on Fear of Being Real, it appears no one is willing to experience the consumerless lead-up to authentic change.  As Charles Hugh Smith says  Crisis is a Positive Force, I've said as much myself, for it brings out the innate compassion and self-reliance of every human being, but to get there we have to be fully willing to rely on our own creativity in survival and that requires we put fear on the far back burner.  Of course we have that creativity in our makeup, its just been dulled like the useless appendix so that we live inoffensively on the chain gang.  Few escape successfully, no one apparently has ever been successful enough to live to tell about it.

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Last but definitely not least, somehow I missed this on Property from Ran Prieur last April and today is a good time to bring it into your thought process. 

"April 24. I've written before that we could define the "owner" of a place as whoever lives there, and factor out the whole concept of "property". Last month I discovered that Pierre-Joseph Proudhon had the same idea in 1840, in his book What Is Property? Specifically, Proudhon noticed that our word "property" blurs together two opposite concepts: the rights of someone who actually works with a piece of land, a house, a sum of money, a tool; and the rights of someone who does not work with it, who might never see it, but who is said to "own" it because, well, the rules say so, and we don't question them.

Looking just at land, where do pieces of "bought" land originally come from? Usually they are violently stolen from indigenous people, or in the case of unoccupied wilderness, some central authority simply declares "ownership" out of thin air. Tribal people have the concept of territory, but they would think it's insane for one tribe to "own" the land that another tribe occupies. Even neolithic farmers, who have already carved fields out of the forest, would not understand how one family could work a field "owned" by another -- unless they were slaves.

The concept of non-occupying ownership is like a magic spell that makes violent conquest and near-slavery seem natural. It enables ecological destruction, because people actually living on land, seeing the effects of their actions, are less willing to cut down forests and deplete topsoil than remote commanders seeing only numbers. And it enables positive feedback in wealth distribution: the two big ways the rich get richer are rent and interest, one where you pay a fee to the "owner" of land you're occupying, and the other where you pay a fee to the "owner" of money you're using...."