My belief is that anyone who cannot feel the darkness attempting to envelop America is not a good person. I honestly believe this.
And I say this knowing full well that there are lots of people with beautiful kind smiles, who write about love all the time, post pictures of flowers and babies and puppies and memes that say “Hang in There!!”
These are not good people. And I will tell you why: they have not processed their shadows, their trauma, their gut energy, the latent capacity for cruelty we are ALL born with.
It is easy enough to be nice. I say this nearly reflexively. And there is zero doubt many people could and would describe me personally as an asshole, based on their interactions with me. But I am not pretending. I am not playing. I have not adopted a role I expect the whole world to love me for. I have, instead, attached myself to three core principles: the rejection of self pity, perseverance, and curiosity. None of these require outside validation.
But if you are playing a role–and depressingly I would count the present Dalai Lama among those–then you are not in touch with the part of you capable of strangling someone. You are not in touch with the part of you that wants to kick people when they are down. You are not in touch with the vain, prideful, overly sensitive part of yourself that can’t get enough praise, and which secretly fumes when criticized.
And how does this manifest? It manifests in 1) blindness and 2) indifference when there should be strong passions.
If you want to be known as the sort of woman with that sort of smile, you cannot hesitate when you are asked to sign the latest petition claiming to right some wrong of some sort, even if it is bullshit. You can’t call it bullshit, even if it is obviously bullshit. You are not wanting to be known as that sort of person. You have an image to protect, that of a “light worker”.
Me, as should be obvious, I don’t give a flying fuck. Or perhaps more accurately, I worry vastly more about living an inauthentic life than I do being judged and hated. I am in touch with all my awfulness, which means that what residual kindness and compassion and love remains is real, and it is clear sighted, and it is honest, and it is powerful.
That, in any event, is how I see it.
I remember meeting a Frenchman many years ago in New York City. He wanted to see a traditional black Gospel service in Harlem–you know, all the fat women in robes with amazing voices singing their hearts out in praise of God–and I went up there with him on a Sunday. We never did find a church like that–I think Al Green operates one down in Memphis, but they likely are not as common as they may once have been–but we got to talking.
He said that the French, in his experience, were vastly more neurotic. Everyone had tics, and minor compulsions and just a variety of oddities. But Americans seemed much calmer and saner. I told him I don’t think that is true. I think we are just less honest as people. I think we are trained from earliest childhood to be nice, to go along to get along, and to never stand out if possible in any way.
This is my own stereotype of course, and somewhat unfair. But it seems likely to me that the people of Japan, to take one obvious example, may well have more individualistic tendencies in private than we do. Most Americans are fed their thoughts, their experiences, and most of them are passive in the face of all this. They are overly well fed cattle, operating a machine that needs them for the moment, but not much longer.
That assessment, itself, is cruel and unkind. Yes, it is. Am I wrong, though? How many of us could stand up and give an intelligent speech on nearly any topic? How many Americans, on balance, create more than they consume, in terms of private time activities? We average, what, 8 hours of TV time alone daily? Plus computer and iPhone? Those are numbers that positively militate that we conclude that we are cattle.
The media, in treating us like we are all fucking idiots, is on reasonably solid ground. Obviously.
But I say again: if you cannot FEEL who Joe Biden is, you are no friend of the light. That is my view.