When people who have spent one quarter of their lives watching TV get to their death beds, what of that experience matters?
I am asking questions. I am not at the moment willing to suggest answers.
This is obvious, I suppose, and perhaps has long been obvious to people who had their needs met better than I did.
But all the same, this fact is hitting me today for some reason.
You the reader need love, and most likely more than you are getting.
The enemy of my enemy is my friend. This is the creed of the Left, and based on their actual behavior, they consider their main enemies the United States, its history, and the people who in the main built and maintain it.
At a minimum, REAL oversight, by elected representatives of the American people, needs to be implemented.
And until people start going to jail, the culture of lawlessness–of being above the law, and immune to it–will continue. The highest officials of at least the CIA and FBI have told bald faced lies directly to Congress. That should not be allowed to happen without the severest penalties. I really think Comey, Brennan, and Clapper belong in jail.
Here is the thing: how can we even know what dirt they have dug up on Congress? Why would it not be a reasonable assumption that, if Congress fails to do its job, that key members are being blackmailed by people we TRUSTED to protect America, not a lunatic left wing agenda?
One of the most basic foundational flaws of Islam that I can point to is its hostility to song and dance in any form. Singing, playing music, and dancing are all activities which soothe us, which calm us, which tame the wild beasts within us. They make society possible. They facilitate the laughter and shared happiness which are the essence of communion, genuine goodwill, and the capacity for love.
Now, practically of course, many Muslims break this code. They sing, they dance, they celebrate. But the zealots hate all of that. Their creed is one of meanness, cruelty, rigidity, death, and darkness. There is nothing good they will bring to Europe.
Making everyone mean is of course good for the religious business, if the goal is expansion and control through agents of violence, but it is not good for peace or human well being, and certainly not for thriving.
I would add that shame is a basic tool which, when installed at a young age, makes social control much easier. You inculcate through it both submissiveness, and fear of being different.
It is for this very purpose that shame is being so carefully cultivated in our own youth, in the form of the Original Sin of being born white or male or unapologetically heterosexual. The indoctrinators want their propaganda targets to feel deep shame at their very existence. And kids are so fucking desperate and stupid that they BUY this bullshit. Amazing.
Politics comes from Polis, and the underlying Greek idea is that no true community could be larger than could hear a loud voice yelling from a 2nd or 3rd story rooftop. They are small by design.
And America is by design intended to consist in many, many Polises (Poli? Polei? I don’t do Greek), many small communities. This is the whole point of the Electoral College, whose SUCCESS we saw in the election of Trump.
We see fear of Trump ending any number of Federal programs. If I might again paraphrase Bastiat, simply because someone objects to one person doing something, having control over something, does not mean they object to it being done. To object to bad policing is not to object to policing. To object to bad policy is not to say there should not be policy.
And to object to the Federal Government doing something does not mean that it should not be done. We can and should point to long term failures in educational achievement and view the Federal role in it as either irrelevant or pernicious. We can and should point to the fact that the arts have been completely politicized, to the point that conservative tax-payers are in many cases being forced to subsidize–in the NEA, in “The People’s Radio”–media that are overtly propagandistic.
But that is not to object to art. Art, and environmental policy, and education, and food for the elderly and everything else can be funded by the States, if they choose. It can be funded by cities and counties.
This is the thing: caring should be local and responsive to specific problems which individuals can see in the places they live. It should not be monolithic, one-size-fits-all, and originating for most of the country in a far distant place, filled with career bureaucrats who get fat paychecks and retirement bonuses, and who are nearly impossible to fire, EVEN WHEN THEY FAIL MISERABLY.
The EPA has more or less said to Trump “we don’t work for you”. Fine. What they do can be outsourced to the States. Where there is a stream or river or lake or land area that crosses State borders, the two States can negotiate. The EPA has clearly been abused for partisan political purposes. That sort of abuse should not be possible in a politically well organized nation, which is what our Constitution created.
Culturally, both the right and the left want their politics to represent some ideal of community. But caring is not enacted by bureaucrats disconnected from the lives they have so much control over. And we cannot go back to the past. What I might call the log of the past is falling, never to rise again in the same way.
We need new ideas, new seeds, new visions. This is what I continue to attempt to provide, and I do not think I am speaking out of turn in saying I have enjoyed some success in at least the articulating, even if I am a nearly complete failure, thus far, in the implementing.
Comey is corrupt. Period. And we don’t need s politicized hack running an agency with the power of the FBI.
Are not all Federal employees at-will? If not, can we not make them that way?
Ultimately, it is about redemption and survival, which are both highly positive themes. I liked the ending.
And I don’t think Chiron is gay. This was not a movie about gayness. It was a movie about the importance of positive and nurturing physical contact combined with trust. Trust is everything, especially for people who have found the world hostile and dark.
And I really like that aspect of it: that there was no preaching, merely telling, merely relating. There was no politics there, even if it is safe to assume Hollywood read the politics into it.
It is perhaps both poignant and appropriate that there should have been such a fuck-up at the Oscars. Barry Jenkins never thought he could get there in the first place. He got there only as a result of an extended act of faith, courage, and putting one foot in front of the other and hoping for the best.
And he gets there, and wins, and gets his thunder stolen. But he still won. Whatever the shit was that happened on the way, and when he got there, he still found redemption and acceptance of his vision in the end.
We all get hit. Many of us get kicked on the ground. But there is no use dwelling on all that. There is still much goodness, much love, and much reason for hope in this world. Perhaps it comes in small doses at irregular intervals, but this is still God speaking in this stony world.
In the past, the belief in heaven helped most Americans deal with this grief of anticipation, because whoever they lost, they would see again. But more and more Americans–and the world generally–are indoctrinated in the creed of Materialism, or what I read is now more often called Physicalism.
To love deeply is to be hurt deeply, so why not make your relationships more superficial, and your lasting attachments to abstractions who will never leave you?
I look at our kids today, and at my own childhood not so very long ago, and I think many American kids bear subtle scars of having been loved a bit, but not enough. Their parents were distracted by work, by media. Quite possibly their mother worked full time and they were raised by care-givers who were not family and not able to care quite enough in the first two years. Quite likely their parents divorced when they were young, each seeking some new adventure, or at least escape from an inability to mature into a healthy giving and receiving relationship.
I was struck many years ago by how much more mature kids in Europe seemed to be than American kids of the same age. Partly it is the real demands placed on them by the school systems over there. Partly it is the continuity of culture and expectation which is communicated person to person, parent and grandparent to child, and not socialization through television.
We did not used to be overgrown children. Americans were as mature and able at the same ages as Europeans. But the 1960’s happened, and somewhere in there the ideal of becoming an adult underwent a crisis and psychosis, and permanently weakened.
And the core of maturation is individuation, and the core of that is the development of a felt sense of personal agency, that your world is in important respects within your control, that your behavior dictates your future, that you have a say, and that even if dreams take time to manifest, that persistence prevails most of the time.
None of those core personality beliefs and attributes can manifest in conditions of continual protection from psychological randomness and difficulty. Life inherently becomes something beyond control, something dark and dangerous, something fearful, and life in a cage–to be called a “sanctuary”–something to be treasured.
I do not feel today as I felt yesterday. But I needed to let that energy out. I am tempted to stipulate as a general principle that if something is falling, let it fall. Then allow something new and more robust to be planted and to grow where it stood. No use protecting dead wood. This is not how life–which is inherently wild when lived honestly and freely–works.