The thing is, once you become a Headless One, you immediately start committing crimes against truth and your own nature.  Everyone is doing it, and you are reinforced in it daily, hourly, and if you need it minute by minute.

To wake up, to grow beyond this haze, you have to reverse course by calling these crimes crimes.  You have to recognize the monster you were, that you became.

And your unconscious knows this.  It goes along, because from a physiological perspective this change, this alteration into cult member, delivers a steady state nervous system.  It is in constant mild around, and periodic high arousal, but gone are the petty anxieties, the worries, the doubts.  You can forget you don’t have the money to pay the rent, that you are a middle aged fuckup, that you are an unlikable asshole (I can relate to some of these, by the way, and mention them because I too would like an easy way to forget).   You no longer have to worry what to believe. 

Waking from this haze requires returning to confusion, to not-knowing, to petty anxieties and doubts, all piled on top of a massive hangover of moral conscience.  If you lack a moral conscience, by the way, you will NEVER wake up, because you have found your home, if you were not already a serial killer or rapist.

Individual mental health, and spiritual growth are inherently anti-Collectivist.  When I speak of my own struggles, my own breakthroughs, my own development, this is political, too, in this respect.

For Communists, everything is political.  This means that to oppose them, we need to do so in all domains. 

Teaching someone how to sleep soundly at night, with an earned clear conscience, is thus inherently anti-Communistic. 

Teaching someone to respect themselves is anti-Communistic. 

Teaching someone to speak the truth is anti-Communistic.

Yes, they are good at what they do, and get around these barriers with lies they have learned to propagate far and wide at the drop of a pin, but they are still responding to steps in the correct, healthy, spiritual direction.

And actually, with respect to that last word, I would suggest that no one who is spiritual will ever try and control you, and if they do, they are not spiritual.  A spiritual person is available, and willing to share what they think they know, but they will never tell you what to do.  Your path is your path, and they know that.

You know, in the Vietnam era the Vietcong and NVA shelled and attacked civilian targets daily, as a matter of high level policy.  There was a Montagnard village, as one example, where they took flame throwers to everything.  Torched everyone and everything they could find.  Any living children, they kidnapped and took back to North Vietnam for brain washing in Communist lunacy.

They shelled hospitals, medical convoys.  They shelled civilian areas without any targeting whatsoever.  They put, in one case, a bomb on a young girl of about 9, placed her on a bicycle, had her drive among her friends, and then blew her up remotely.  They assassinated everyone who disagreed with them.  They would sometimes first rape their wives and daughters while they were tied to a post helplessly.

That was the enemy we faced.  They committed a “Lt.  Calley” daily for the duration of the war.  It was standard policy.

But somehow–and really it was not a somehow, was it?–our troops are remembered for atrocities.  We are remembered for “aggression” in trying to prevent the overthrow of what was eventually–by the late 1960’s–an elected and reasonably popular government, by Communist dictators who routinely engaged in political murder, political torture, political imprisonment, political corruption, and campaigns of deception.

“Truth is the first casualty in war.”  I believe that goes back to the Greeks, probably Thucydides.

But it needs to be said that in a culture war, truth is a key target.  It is a stronghold, a rallying point, a key defensive element.  Communist do not target primarily armies and social systems: they target minds.  Their goal is mass madness.  Their goal is the cessation of the very IDEA of individuation, of individual psychological health and maturation.  Everything is the State.  They call the State Society, but it is, and necessarily always will be, a system of force and power run by individuals with names, personal histories, and personal agendas.

All good, if I might oversimplify only slightly, comes from people capable of growing in prolonged solitude.  Such solitude relaxes the sense of compulsion most of us bring to human relationships, and which makes most of us selfish and self centered.

All evil comes from what I might call the unrisen self.  All evil, seen pictorially and symbolically, comes from loaves of bread which were never allowed enough time to rise, and which are compacted, hard and rock-like in the center.  It comes from people who are not people, who have not individuated, who have to be endlessly reinforced from outside to have any sense of existing at all.

And in the sense that a smart phone represents a constant companion, it would like not be overstating the case to call socialization with such a device training for Communism, which I could perhaps call “Power Elite dictated Other Direction”.  Such children, from early ages, are never, ever alone with who they really are.  Ever, even perhaps in sleep, where the phone is still next to them.

I have gotten a bit off track, but I think these are useful and interesting thoughts.

The larger point I initially intended is that, in the way that our bombs sometimes kill people we did not intend to kill–what we call euphemistically but perhaps necessarily “Collateral Damage”–the efforts even of well meaning combatants in the Culture war sometimes produce unhappy results.

On the one hand, we have amoral nihilists who are doing their best to carpet bomb everything we hold dear.  They want to destroy our faith in our country, our culture, our history, our ideals, and in one another.  They want to kill that little voice that says “everything is OK.  I am safe.  I feel good”, something which we all instinctively have, and which by all rights should thrive in a world of plenty, where most of us are truly safe in nearly all respects nearly all our lives.

And the central Communist lie, the one only seen by the absolute core, and even there probably not consciously (emotional deformation, malnourishment, and following stupidity being the defining attribute of these people), is that, while they want to tear everything down, THERE IS NOTHING TO REPLACE IT WITH.  There is no plan for plenty, and no plan for individual psychological thriving.  They have to destroy, to get what they want, all natural instincts towards the light.  They have to empower the worst sorts of human beings, who should be in jail, not in charge.

Again, this is what I call Cultural Sadeism.  It is a sort of church dedicated to destruction.  It is evil.  It is Satanic.

Ponder: if you did not know they were using children as suicide bombers in Vietnam, if you did not know they massacred entire villages, if you did not know they kidnapped from their parents tens of thousands of children, WHY did you not know this?  Can you REALLY believe the press was either trying to tell the full truth, or genuinely concerned about these horrors?  Of course not.  That is a fairy tale.

We have had Communists in positions of influence for at least 60 years.  Millions of people have died unnecessarily.  Tens of thousands of Americans have died pointlessly.  Hundreds of millions of people have lived miserable, shorter lives, because of these treasons.

It has for a long time been past time for all people of genuine goodwill and decency to finally grasp these facts.  The true bastards are no more than 1 in a hundred, but the idiots are all who fail to see what they are up to.

Edit: actually even that was not fully what I wanted to say.  Let me put it this way: McCarthy both went too far, and did not go far enough.  If it is true he used the faintest whiff of suspicion to accuse people, then he was imitating the Communist Commissars in all the benighted nations where they held sway.  He was conflating the suspicion of guilt with the reality of guilt.

But manifestly, there WERE and are many Communists among us.  They may not use that word, but no Communist does until they feel safe in doing so.  Ponder, for example–as I have asked you to do from time to time for several years–how the FUCK a guy who voted for the Communist in the immediate aftermath of the Vietnam War gets INTO the CIA, much less comes to run it?  Put that into your pipe, and smoke on that as long as it takes to do the math.  Most reasonably, you should not need a pipe, and you should not need time.

But Tailgunner Joe was a net benefit.  He was pointing to a real and pervasive problem.  Those he falsely accused might be viewed as Collateral Damage in a real war, being fought with real enemies.

And hatred among ourselves is a price those who have not joined the cult, who have not become Headless Ones, pay when we do not moderate our emotions properly.  This is a hard thing to do.  It is hard not to hate people who hate us.  It is hard to turn a cheek to someone who considers you, entirely unjustly, and entirely as the result of effective brainwashing, to be some sort of monster.

Wars are ugly things, and ugliness cannot but be an outcome even of a Culture war.  None of us become truly better.  The best most of us can hope for is not to become the monsters they truly want us to be, so they can justify their hatred of us.

How does one fight such a war?  Well, this blog is my effort at an answer.

If we were to take at face value (which no sane person will ever do, but which I will attempt here for rhetorical purposes) the claims of the Left that they want to get rid of racism, as a means of healing wound of the past, then we could make with equal validity the claim that the children of alcoholics will only be healed when alcoholism is ended.

This claim, of course, is ridiculous.  Adults know that, as Eleanor Roosevelt (who incidentally apparently carried a gun with her everywhere she went) said (approximately), “no one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”

You don’t claim your own power by forcing the world to bow at your feet.  Not if you are psychologically healthy.  You claim your power by charting your own path through it, one where you are not bowled over every time some little thing happens to you, or some little person says some little thing to you.

Even in the time of the actual KKK and actual lynchings, black people found ways to self respect.  They found ways to honor one another, and to live with dignity and as a community.

Now that public racism has to be invented–because it no longer flourishes in the wild, and has to be grown, like hothouse plants, from the seeds of willful misrepresentation, the abuse of language, intentional misunderstanding, psychological projection and outright lies–the black psyche, seemingly, rather than becoming more resilient in the face of declining contempt, has become weaker, more needy, more helpless, and more depressed and angry.  This obviously has been the intent of Democrats all along.  They don’t want a black class that is predominantly middle class,  and thriving without them.  Where would they get their reliable votes?

Always question people who want to do for you things you can and should be doing for yourself.  In this country, it is almost like the mass of urban blacks are 33 year old boy-men, or girl-women, who never left home.  Their parents never encouraged independence, and on the contrary did their best to foster permanent dependence.  They made the world seem scary (Republicans want to KILL you), and provided all sorts of excuses not to take command of their own lives.  So the recipients of this “caring” and “generosity”–both figuratively and in many cases literally–spend their days watching TV and playing video games.

I am glad people like Candace Owens and, in another generation, Thomas Sowell, are out there.  Come to think of it, I haven’t seen Allen West in the news recently.  Or David Clarke.  I’m not much of a consumer of news, though.  Contrary to the knee-jerk first reaction–usually but not always before being called a racist–of most Leftists to encountering me, I don’t watch Fox News at all.  I cancelled my cable not long ago.  I got it for the 2018 Winter Olympics, and found myself wasting far too much time watching things I had not planned to watch.  I like Tucker Carlson, but have my doubts about many of the rest of them.

Be all that as it may, you don’t get ahead by waiting until the world becomes exactly the way you “need” it to be.  The charge of racism, obviously, is a form of political assault, intended, through barrage tactics, to force all dissenters from the Left Wing Shock Troop Goose Stepping Mob Agenda to keep their heads down and their mouths shut.  Fuck that.

If I might borrow from an old story Christians tell, if they ever start arresting people for believing in freedom, the perfectability of human kind through both individual and collective effort, and in common sense and common decency, I hope to have provided them a plethora of evidence of my guilt.

I like her.  It’s odd that she ditched her name and in some respects her culture, but what I’ve read of her seems authentic, unlike the only about 5-10 pages of Marianne Williamson I was able to get through before deciding something was really wrong.

I remember reading Erich Fromm’s book “The Art of Love” many years ago, and taking away from it that love is work.  Perhaps I got my idea of love as the summation of individuation (one thing becomes another) from him.  I don’t honestly remember.

Leo Buscaglia is another I tried to read, and failed, but he was just too perky for me.  I didn’t get the sense he was a fraud, just that he was far too distant in personality from me.  I need people much closer to being assholes.  I’m not implying Chodron is–she isn’t, as far as I can tell–but she does live in the frozen north, which makes her much less Italian. I’m not at all Italian.

Thinking about her, she seems like she would be an Oprah type, who dispenses lots of advice about marriage and parenting, but who has never been married, and who never had children.

I was correct about the former, but wrong about the latter.  She has one child, in what sounds like an accidental pregnancy, and which, if the media decides they like her, you will never, ever hear discussed again: https://www.lamag.com/longform/the-new-age-of-marianne-williamson/2/

“My daughter lives in London, and that is about as far as I will go in discussing her,” she says. “So be it.”

Was or is their relationship close?  I very much doubt it.  I think she is much too involved with herself, with her work, and with her, as she calls them, audiences.  She chose to keep the child, perhaps in part because at the time she thought she might actually want her.  I’d be curious, in any event, to see what her daughter has to say, if anything.  Her best play is most likely to keep all this at arm’s length.  She is most likely already on the other side of the Atlantic for good reason.

Abstract love is not love.  And in general the people who talk the most about it seem to actually feel it the least.

The whole Democrats slate, with the possible exception of Tulsi Gabbard, who Google is even now trying to torpedo, is nuts.  I honestly think Joe Biden is a full blown psychopath.  What we see in all those pictures is just the tip of the iceberg.  Think the movie “Spartan”, and what I recall as the unseen politically powerful Senator, with Val Kilmer.  Kamala Harris literally got her start in politics on her back and on her knees.

It’s unbelievable.  I would be extremely embarrassed if I were a Democrat.  The party has not always been without ideas, and without leadership.  But it is now.

Again, the plan was for Obama to set the stage, and Hillary to close the deal.  Electioneering was supposed to be unnecessary by now.  They were going to legalize all the illegals, crack down on conservatives right to enter the public space with dissenting speech, and facilitate cheating as widely as they needed to.  But she lost.  Thank God she lost.

Maybe one day we will finally see the criminal trials we all voted for.  It’s past time.

Edit: also from the article:

I looked forward to hearing her ideas every week, but she was like an egomaniac control freak,” says David Wenger, a current church member 

The thing with narcissists is that they are often extremely charismatic people.  They are frequently very passionate, and if they are intelligent, they have a lot to say.  Everything they believe, they believe fully, and for anyone who has doubts about life, they will dispel them with absolute faith and certainty.  This particular Personality Disorder is well suited to religious leadership.

To say she would make a horrible President, though, is the understatement of this year, for me, in all likelihood.

I tried to read “Return to Love” perhaps 5-8 years ago, right around the time I realized both my parents were most reasonably labeled narcissistic. I was seeing narcissists behind every tree and stone. And I concluded she, too, was a narcissist, and stopped reading.

I might now be more open, but I doubt it. Here is my thing: she talks about love, but views as evil, as “demonic”, people who question the motives of people from countries suffused with violent radicalism, and who view traditional American values of mutual respect, diversity of thought, tolerance and common sense as essential to a vibrant and healthy national life.

In effect, by framing things as she has, she has cast her lot in with the emotionally detached zealots, cultists, and aspiring terrorists.

This, itself, bespeaks to me an emotional shallowness. She uses the words, like love, but they are abstractions to her. This implies people are abstractions to her, which to my mind validated my initial gut instinct. My gut instincts are usually accurate, even if in the spirit of competence I am always willing to question and scrutinize them.

Yesterday I spoke of, I forget how I put it, but in effect plastic, ersatz, superficial love as something I specifically reject. Using words is so easy. Manipulating symbols is so easy. Being your message is much harder, and I would suggest as a general principle that no one who evidences the drive for guruhood that Williamson manifestly has should be trusted.

Anyone who cannot grok the answer to “why Trump” is lacking something essential, something without which it is not possible to be a fully present member of society.

“You begin saving the world by saving one person at a time; all else is grandiose romanticism or politics.”

It’s important not to let trauma pass through generations.  You have to stop it with you.  I think I did a reasonably good job of this.

I think it is very common for parents to use their children for emotional support, to help them meet their own emotional needs.  This is a form of abuse, in my view.  You should keep yourself disentangled from their lives.  Support them where needed, always be available, guide them when you can and they are willing to listen, but take care of your own needs without reliance on them.

Now, the experience of mothers must be different than that of fathers.  How much, I can’t know.  I’m not a woman, much less a mother.  But for fathers at least you have to make your own way.

I would like to grow to be old.  I would like to see grandchildren, and even great grandchildren.  But the loss of one or even both of my children would not put me in state of permanent shock.  We are all heir to the frailties which come with these bodies, and we will all cross that great river, sooner or later.

I don’t think losing your child is the worst thing that can happen.  I think the worst thing that can happen is that you stop seeing the sunrise, stop feeling the life around you, stop being open to new and wonderful experience.  You owe all this to yourself, and I think giving it to yourself cannot but make you a better parent.  You are modelling health to your children.  All personal growth which you undertake for yourself is, in the long run, a gift you give, or at least make available, to your children.

Who you are is what you teach.  This is an important principle.  And in not relying on your children for emotional support you teach them to be independent.  And when they do not feel they need to pull away from you, they are more likely to stay close emotionally.

Neither of my children ever really went through a rebellious phase.  They made mistakes, and no doubt did not tell us everything they were doing, but neither ever went through a period of being a sustained little shit.

I think the necessity of rebellion comes with both clingy parents, and perhaps even disengaged parents.  In the first case, anger and emotional distance are needed to attempt the process of individuation, and in the latter I think the sense of feeling felt is missing, so on some level the child attempts to force engagement through anti-social behavior.

As I slowly thaw, I am feeling the passage of time.  I am getting back sensations and feelings that happened 30-40 years ago.  It is strange.  They were things that I felt on some level, but would not have known I felt, would not have acknowledged.

In a certain sense we are all all alone.  We pass into death alone.  But life can also be filled with moments of connection, too, especially if we do not force it, are not starved for it, and if we allow it to happen.

We all happen to see rainbows from time to time.

I am an “Empty Nester”.  I am divorced, and my children do not come to see me where I live, ever, although I spend a decent amount of time with them, considering that they are in college hours away.  We have fun.  We have a solid relationship, based on mutual respect.

But it is sad, seeing them grow.  It is so tempting to give in to sentimentality, to the “but they were just children yesterday”.  I suspect we all do it, at least those of us who were emotionally involved in our childrens lives.

It occurs to me, though, that this sort of sadness has as its basis the notion that such happiness will never occur again, that feelings that have come once will never come again.

Plants are seeded, and they grow, and they blossom, then they wither and die.  Some of them are just hiding under the soil, waiting their turn to live again above the ground.  Some of them plant the seeds of new plants before they die.  In all cases, life returns, in a cycle.

You cannot prevent tragedy, and you cannot prevent change.  But you CAN prevent happiness.  You CAN limit your life to trees which have fallen, and will never rise again.

Oh, it is so hard to be soft, so hard to be flexible.  It is so hard to retain a child’s spirit in a body and mind like mine.  But it is POSSIBLE.

Letting go is realizing something is done, and something new is beginning, perhaps something wonderful.  And of course we all have some say in this.  We all have voices, hands, feet, minds.

“Life” has been boring into me lately, but what is so painful is most likely that, after living in a cave so long, light and water feel like strangers. 

I am adapting, though, slowly, slowly, slowly.