Moderates United

Sometimes in life, it occurs to me that the best metaphor is a ship sailing from one port to another, from one “destination” to another.  I think sometimes many of us–this applies certainly to me–panic when we don’t know immediately what is next.  What’s coming.  What’s over the horizon.

More ocean, then something else.  You will know when you get there.

It doesn’t hurt to have a daily plan, and goals of all lengths, but much of life consists in just continuing to show up in various ways, and much of what happens, we didn’t see coming at all.  Be open to change.  Look for it.  Welcome it.  That is how exploring is done.

I think the key to forgiveness is touching the “Judgement Day”–by which I intend our authentic core selves, the ones we cannot leave behind-/and realizing how often we have inadvertently hurt others, through stupidity, reflexive emotionality, stubborn pride, or some other variant of the madness which dwells amongst g us all.

I will be throwing small bits out here and there in coming days.

Thought: substance “abuse” supports the pretending made necessary by the inability to relate to others authentically.  When you get tired, you can always find comfort.  It is an authentic friend, even if one which does not love back, and which poisons you.

This is the real crime of substance abuse, that you medicate the hurting, and make building nearly impossible.

But for many of us, what building is possible on thin air?

I say this as someone who maybe, possibly–I’ve threatened this before–may have gotten drunk for the last time.  I seem to be melding the selves.  It is difficult work.  As I’ve said before, my average night would scare the shit out of most people, and certainly make keeping a girlfriend quite difficult, unless she was extraordinary.

I do feel I made a heart connection last night though.  I allowed energy to flow out through my heart.  This is a new thing for me, which is a little scary, but which I recognize as important and good.

Not sure the world has a whole lot of fucks to give as to how I’m doing, but I’m doing well.  That weird energy with the eclipse squeezed me and squeezed me, and I held on, like I have for countless hours over most of my life, and now I”m feeling pretty good.  The Neurofeedback is really starting to have an effect. I am starting to be able to more effectively utilize calming strategies I have long known about, but somehow not integrated in my daily life.  Work has slowed down, and I’ve dealt with the issues I had.

I am not feeling like philosophizing.  I feel the emptiness of talk far more than I have before.  God knows I will never shut up, but for now I am just trying to be present to my work and the people I encounter.

Politics, what can I say?  Trump continues to be attacked on all sides.  ANYBODY but him would have folded by now, and many continue to hope he will.  But why would he?  I think he LIKES good fights, and this is a GREAT fight.  You risk big, you win big.  That’s how he’s always played.

The dreams of true, deep change might be fading a bit as he gets corralled by everyone, but here is the thing: he continues to appoint judges, continues to reduce regulations, he pulled us out of Paris, continues to work to improve trade deals, is taking North Korea seriously, and basically will continue to kick ass in all sorts of ways that will never be reported or seen in this country, but which matter.

Nothing will change my views on Trump, in all likelihood, short of him starting to act like a pussy.  He has done his level best to keep all his promises, but the fucking Congress refuses to cooperate, and with all the leaks he has had, it has been hard to conduct coherent policy of any sort.

We got three more years folks.  Sooner or later, he will get the range and start firing for effect.

I read 92% of these Antifa children live with their parents.  I don’t know how anyone would know, but based on actual surveys of the usual suspects in these sorts of things, that sounds about right.  Everyone else has a job.

The deal is that they want to create a reaction which promotes recruiting.  It seems that virtually all of Charlottesville was false flag, but they still got a national reaction.

They only gain strength, though, when opposed violently.  That is why they had to engineer a violent confrontation, so they could claim innocence, even though they showed up in masks with baseball bats and 2×4’s.

Here is the truth: ordinary Americans occupy the moral high ground.  This consists in moderates of both sides, but since they are not attacking people with D behind their names, it means in practice political conservatives and anyone who calls themselves a Republican (obviously, there is some overlap, but distressingly enough, not as much as there should be).

Non-violent resistance is the OBVIOUS answer to all this.  Yes, of course MLK Jr. had the media, and we don’t.  But every time we feed the fire, it gets worse.

Trump remains President.  He has been attacked viciously and often all his life.  I’m not sure he likes it, but he certainly does not shy away from it.  Even though Congress is acting in a morally cowardly way, we do still have both parts of Congress, and absolute majorities in over half the States in America.

This is no time to panic.  This is no time to let anyone dictate the game to us.

It annoys me that they attack these monuments, but the fact of the matter is that they don’t matter to most of us one way or the other.  Most of us have never met anyone who had anything directly to do with that war, because it would have been a grandfathers grandfather.

We can’t let them get our goat.  Yes, violence is an easy answer, but it is an easy wrong answer.

The simple reality is that these are cowardly losers being funded by psychopaths, who want nothing more than to foment conflict they can exploit for political gain.  This is a harder game we are being asked to play, but fuck, we are not the whiny losers.  We are the winners.  And we are winning.  Let’s stay on track.

Edit: I am presently suffering compassion fatigue.  I think it was the nails one of them put on their 2×4 in the Boston protests, or perhaps a group of them accusing a veteran of being “Nazi scum”.

Time is on our side.  The optics on all this are horrible, and cannot but play to Trump’s strengths.  It doesn’t matter, OBVIOUSLY, what the media says, and it does not matter what the polling says.  All we have to do is stay in the game to keep racking up points they can’t match.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PY9DcIMGxMs

In this lecture he references a study of rats and addiction.  Gabor Mate–who seems to have written the best books on addiction also references this study.

In the study, a solitary rat, given an option of water, and water with cocaine, will choose the latter until it dies.  From this, it was assumed that something in cocaine was inherently addictive.

But rats in fun places, surrounded by other rats, rarely or never get addicted.  They are enjoying themselves too much.

Here is the interesting question: how is it that people feel so alone, when surrounded by people and opportunities, that they act like the solitary rat?  Can we not posit that even people who shoot heroin in groups still feel alone?

Ponder.

I feel this morning that substance abuse in any form–and more broadly that compulsivity we call “addiction”–is really self abuse.  It is a form of cutting, of denying, of saying no to something.

And what are we saying no to?  Positive feelings.  You might feel, when you are drunk, or high, or fucking another stranger, that life is good, that everything is wonderful.  But you also know that you will come down.  And you know the darkness that awaits you, the helplessness that awaits you.  You know the weight of the world.

And so why would any sane person not want to go back up again as soon as possible?  What sane person would want to live in the dark cage of their life, when there is another possibility?  Is it not the case that there is no need at all to explain this behavior, that it is utterly rational and predictable, for people with certain sorts of wounds?

And I feel the critical pivot point is trust.  We need other people, but some of us find it difficult or impossible to trust life and to trust other people.  We have been betrayed too often, too early, and felt too much pain.  So we create half of what we really want, but create it in a way we control.

What we suppress is a natural sense of open wonder, of spontaneous affection, of joy.  All of these things, we have learned, can be sucked up, used, and spit out by others.  So our addiction is really in important respects a barrier against authentic happiness.

I am slowly awaking from a long dream–and dream, not nightmare, is the word, since my numbness kept much of it from being too unpleasant–and seeing possibilities I never guessed were there.

For my part, given the strangeness of our world, I feel little surprise that so many people escape through work or sex, or alcohol.  I feel no wonder that opiates are surging through our alienated world.  Why would they not, when we have lost the ability to speak, to share needed truths, to feel who we are, to connect with ourselves and everything around us?

I have now managed to watch numbers 4-10, which are all that are available on NetFlix.  I will have to buy the rest.  I just want to say that I am a lifelong film buff, and no film or series of films has ever moved me more, or better probed deep human issues than this set of short films.

Because of his style and his spirituality, Tarkovsky will remain my favorite director.  But for dealing in nuanced, non-reductive and sympathetic ways with complex moral and emotional issues, for my money Kieslowski has no equal, and very few even come close.  He is–or was–one of the world’s truly great film directors and writers, and it is a shame he is not better known.

I suspect a primary reason for this is that his films are work.  They are so emotionally evocative I find myself weeping at the end of nearly every one–7 in particular was very difficult, and of course the music doesn’t help–and have to work myself up to watch them in the first place. This DVD has been sitting on my counter for two weeks.

This, however, is genius.  All of us need to do the adult work of understanding one another and ourselves, even though it is often painful when done properly.

My sense that I am good at breaking down complex issues into simpler narratives, without reducing them in a manner harmful to truth and effectiveness, is I think well founded. I am intelligent. I am a good writer.  I am talented in some ways.

But what I am feeling right now is my essential inhumanity, my coldness, my distance.

These people marching in the streets–Antifa, BLM, et al–they are frightened.  What they need in their hearts is for someone they TRUST to quiet them, and tell them its all going to be OK.  You can calm down.  The future is not going to hurt you.  The world is not your enemy.

What they need is honest and heartfelt nurturing, of a sort I suspect most of them never got.  Most of us, any more, in this mechanical and passively hostile world never get what we really need.  Their parents were working.  Their culture values them mainly for their capacity to contribute economically, and goodness is close to being equated with wealth.  They were raised with computers with no souls.  They were raised without profound and soul-level music and poetry.  They were raised without communal dance and rejoicing.

We have no real festivals.  We rarely or never meet Life together and with good cheer and optimism.

The image I get is villages where, when you cannot sleep, you get up and go to the center–which is not far away–and meet others and listen to stories you have heard many times, which quiet the soul, and eventually inspire refreshing sleep, and a spirit of openness to life in the morning when the Sun comes up again, as it always does.

It is of course a truism to say that most of us are separated from nature, but it is even more obvious we are living in manners which separate us from one another.

I for one am continually drawing lines. I can tell you why psychologically, and cannot yet tell you how to stop, but this important reality needs to be acknowledged.  There are many like me.

This is a day, for me, for dreaming.  I will not share all my dreams here yet, although the broad outlines should be clear enough.  But I will say that I do feel a sense of destiny, that all my suffering has been for a purpose, that if God wills it, I may have a role to play in helping all of us out of our collective nightmares.

Judgement Day is when the full truth is told and cannot be avoided.  It is when you feel fully what your actions have done in the world, what effect they have had on the lives of those around you.