Moderates United

In the 1950’s, drab conformists voted for Eisenhower.  In 2008 and 2012, they voted for Obama.  It’s the same people.  All that changed was who they were told to vote for.

I was having I guess a new version of nightmares last night–really anxiety dreams–where I was in some new happy place, with smiling managers, everybody dressed really well, and me miraculously somehow in a roughly fitting, somewhat rumpled but acceptable suit.  I was supposed to be selling something to somebody, after all the pep talks.  They gave me some list to start making calls, and I was supposed to know somebody, since they mapped my social network for me, but I had no clue who this person was, and made the mistake of asking them, and was starting to see frowns.

Corporate America really can be an odd place.  To play politics well, you kind of need to focus on it, and forget your core self.  You have to be who your bosses seem to think you need to be.  You have to perform, of course–something in my experience in most cases of outside sales means making selling something close to your real religion, something which intrudes into everything you do, such that church is a place to meet new contacts, golf something you use to close the sale, and vacations something you plan to use as an item of relating to clients–but you need to kiss up to the right people, too.  You need to be the right “sort” of person, the sort who never really makes any waves, who goes along to get along.

Two anecdotes:

1) I was sitting on a conference call a few months ago–something I avoid gymnastically and generally successfully–and was the first one to arrive.  I was on time, which meant everyone else was late, which I assume most of them looked forward to it as much as me.  Anyway, I asked the gal running it how the weather was.  She told me, then when the next person got on she said “Oh, we’re doing this fun team building exercise.  How is the weather there?”  The vibe I actually got from her was that corporate life had traumatized her, and she probably knew it. 40+ hours a week of conference calls will do that to you.

2) I and a couple other sales reps were socializing with this woman who worked for a Very Large Company (VLG), and one of them made some inappropriate joke about sleeping with clients, and she just smiled without batting an eye and said “I’m always willing to take one for the team.”  It was so extraordinarily unoffended I actually, honestly wondered if she WOULD be willing to do that.  It was a very weird vibe.  According to stories I hear, there ARE women who will sleep with clients to get the contract.  Imagine that.  They are paid, but the process makes them into literal whores.

Anyway, I think the underlying energy is anxiety.  I’ve gotten through the hard trauma–the screaming and shaking–by and large, but what is left is years and years of feeling out of place, scared, and anxious.

And to the title of this post, I think being forced to live like this has political effects.  Can you imagine the pressure of being a Trump supporter anywhere in Silicon Valley?  Or most of the West Coast?  If the corporate culture is already cult-like, how expanded and powerful must be the compulsion to conform at least publicly?

I was at an air show yesterday, filled with military paraphernalia.  They had both the planes that Jimmy Stewart and Jimmy Doolittle flew.

And they had muscle cars, some of them quite nice.  And I was contemplating and wondering.  Is our government REALLY in possession of alien artifacts?  Unrelated: how badly were our soldiers betrayed in Vietnam?  We won the war.  But was the CIA secretly undermining us with one hand while supposedly helping with another?  What secrets exist which we don’t even suspect?

These sorts of things will drive you to despair.  There is no knowing.  Oh, and I was wondering about the dilution of our national wealth by money creation.

Then it hit me: in spite of ALL THAT, we made some really awesome cars.  I was looking at I think a Cobra or a Corvette (I’m a late 60’s Mustang convertible in that world, painted yellow or orange), and a sense of awe and gratitude came over me.  In spite of everything bad (most of which exists mainly in our imagination), there are some really amazing things in this world, both natural and man made.  The physicality of the car, the Done-ness of it, the completion, the this is something a group of men and women made at one time, really struck me.

Today, I am contemplating how one enjoys life.  Every one of life’s pleasures is evanescent.  They come and go.  How can you enter into anything which won’t last?  The answer, of course, is: what choice do any of us have?  There is a cheese plate with some excellent wine being placed in front of you at every moment.  You can say no, but why?  That moment won’t last, but none of them do.  And life is really just an endless succession of moments.  I think in Buddhist theory they do consider time to be discontinuous, and this would be the sense in which this would be true.

The conclusion I have evolved–and you know maybe they should make a movie about this, with oh I don’t know maybe Jim Carrey–is that I need to practice saying Yes more often.  I’m a grouchy old man, a badger in his lair, and that’s no way to grow older.

The sky shines for everyone.  You can take it or leave it as you choose.  You can enjoy where you are at and what you are doing all the time, or you can try and “spend” all your moments only in some times and places, hoping the outsized pleasure will make up for all the want.

 I would argue though that when you practice enjoying everything, that can only expand the experience when something truly amazing happens, like Twue Luv.

The more I learn about personal growth, the more I realize how little I knew.  

I am in a place emotionally now where I am trying to form a new normal.  I have become so used to strong, uncontrollable emotions bursting in on me, driving me, pushing me, pulling me, that calm represents something qualitatively new.

And what are coming back to me are feelings from the last time I felt anything close to equilibrium, when I was about 14.  Something happened then (I was not molested, although that would be a good guess) which changed how I approached life.  My light–which was to be sure not that bright to begin with–dimmed.

I think most of us are like this.  You lose your childish pleasure in things as you slowly find out about all the bad things that can happen in life, and start worrying about them, start anticipating them.  We shrink.  I shrank.

But this is not a necessary process.  If I might generalize very broadly, the best spiritual teachings are about how to retain the childlike wonder and thoughtless grace of a child, with the wisdom and capacity of an adult.

Bad experiences come and go.  The pain comes, and if you let it, it goes.  What so often stays, though, is the change in your base expectations of life.  “if this is how life is”, I probably said unconsciously to myself, “then I’m not going to feel that any more, or open myself up in any way.”  That “setting” stays, and for most of us it stays across a lifetime.

Bob Dylan (Nobel Prize Winner, although not acceptor) had that great phrase “I was so much older then/I’m younger than that now.”

I think I am going to generalize and say that the point of most spiritual work is recovering spontaneous delight in life.  This is the root, the seed, of whatever then becomes possible beyond that, but very few of us even get that far.

I would like to shine.  I would like to be able to teach with my being.  I think it is possible for me, in this life, although certainly I have many miles to go.

https://news.sky.com/story/hundreds-of-young-trans-people-seeking-help-to-return-to-original-sex-11827740?fbclid=IwAR1q3NK755q5R9NUDthtwY84dMtVSilzXz7r8fLNzzJr4oERIy0CPakZWnk

I don’t recall the exact language I used in the post where I discussed this, but this sort of outcome was pretty obviously a strong possibility for many kids “transitioning” for the wrong reasons, which in my view is nearly all of them.

As I’ve said, I think the primary reason the Founding Fathers put the right to keep and bear arms in the Constitution (in the Bill of Rights, I might add, which was added to get the assent of States fearing a tyrannical Federal government) was to make watering the tree of liberty with blood a more present possibility, thereby constraining in advance many possible abuses particularly of Federal authority.

But I think they were also quite aware that guns serve many purposes.  For the lonely homesteader, the gun is their only line of defense.  Communities which are well armed tend to deter criminals.  Most criminals are not looking for a fight: they are looking for an easy score.  This has always been true, and remains true today.

To this discussion, though, I would add an angle which just occurred to me: a factor worth keeping in mind is the ratio of offensive to defensive gun uses.  In a community which has been disarmed by law, one would expect this ratio to be very high.  It is high, for example in Great Britain.  It is high in Chicago and probably New Orleans.

When you look at poor black communities (this issue would apply in white communities too, but if we are honest, the overwhelming bulk of street gun violence happens in black, and to a much lesser extent Hispanic, ghettos), the problem is often not that guns are not available, but that they are EXPENSIVE, making most of the people who own them people who got them illegally.

In both cases, though, criminals are much more likely to have guns than the people they are victimizing. In such a case, it would look like “guns” are causing violence, and doing little good.

But guns are both a disease–when used offensively–and a vaccine or remedy or medicine, when used defensively.  Violence is a disease which is often PREVENTED by the presence of guns.  It is prevented when you break into someone’s home and they point an AR-15 at you, as was the case in a video I watched a couple days ago.

And it is also prevented by the idea that you PROBABLY have a gun.  Most homes in most of rural America have AT LEAST one gun.  And in those areas, crime is very low.  As Sun Tzu wrote, for unfailingly secure defense, defend where there is no assault.

He also said to to attack where there is no defense.  This is the rough situation of people who own guns where guns are hard to own legally.  They have an advantage which is not even remotely mitigated by the possibility of police help.  As the saying goes, when you need help in seconds, the police are AT BEST minutes away.

So you need, to evaluate this thing honestly a disease/prophylactic/ or disease/vaccine ratio.

If the CDC wants to treat gun violence as a disease, it has LOGICALLY to treat ALL violence as a disease, for which guns are often the cure.

My hypothesis, which I am quite sure about, is that the ratio will be high where there is legally constrained access to guns–which is a disease out of control–and very low where gun ownership is plentiful.  I would suspect there are many communities in America where the ratio is less than one, where guns are used more often to stop or prevent crimes than to commit them.

If violence is the disease–and if you think about it, this point is really indisputable–then anything which alters it in a positive direction must be seen as a policy failure, and as extremely stupid.

I’m safe now:

The World sleeps, its belly

full, with dreams of its own.

The schemers are lazily reading, smoking, drinking coffee,

their ambition idle for now.

A kind breeze gently stirs the leaves

soaked in a new, early sun.

I’m safe now. 

It won’t last, but I’m safe now.

I am going to state the latent but still obvious: all incels, as the term is used by the media, and particularly with regard to The Joker, are white.  There are no black, hispanic, or Asian incels.  Just pointing that out.

Effectively, it is a genuinely racist term, in the way I am seeing it used.  You might just as well substitute or use it interchangeably with “angry white male”.

May we all aspire to one day be as great as you already think you are.

To call your thinking simplistic would be an insult to simpletons.

If I knew nothing about Donald Trump other than who hated him, I would vote for him—and contribute to support him—for that reason alone.

Joe Biden shakes down Ukraine, then lies about it: crickets (and ritual use of the “debunked” propaganda tool). Trump asks about it:  IMPEACH.

Fuck these jackals and literal, taking money from our enemies to help destroy America traitors.

Whatever his shortcomings, Trump is willing to tell the truth come he’ll or high water, and to do his best to do what he said he was going to do.

I have to believe we have reached peak lunacy. There is no 11 from here, I do t think, even if they DO   impeach him.

Either we are batshit insane as a nation, or people in large numbers are awaking from their slumbers.

I think the long term efforts by Cultural Sadeists to induce shame in Americans (and everyone else, and everywhere else they operate) has to be seen in the context of building hatred and violence, as divisive and usable forces for ripping apart target societies.  This is done in the name of utopian ideals, but as I have long argued, the destruction IS the end.  It is Satanic in all but name, and in what I suspect are no small number of cases, literally in name too.

Do all Democrats worship Satan?  Of course not.  It is a stupid idea.  I didn’t follow it carefully, but it does sound like someone said something profoundly stupid.

But at the core, among perhaps 10% of the people pushing this thing, I DO believe there is a hatred that is deep and powerful, and that they want to infect as many people as possible with this hatred.  This, of course, is why they accuse everyone else of being haters.  It is relatively simple psychology, seen both sociologically and politically.