Moderates United

I have more than once seen dogs attack one another, if restrained from attacking some other perceived threat. Tonight, I saw two beagles, restrained by a fence from responding to something they thought bad, attack one another viciously, as if the other one–one they spent every day with, and had for some years–were their worst enemy in the world. I tried to break them up, but finally the energy waned, and one put its head on the other, as if to comfort it. Both dogs were shaking, and stood there for some minutes, again unafraid of one another.

Do we humans not do this? Do we not break things we love, attack people we love, when under the thrall of some discarnate spirit of violent arousal? Do we remember who we were to one another in the end, like simple dogs?

I think we are certainly more clever than dogs, in many ways, and certainly stupider in some ways.

Connect this dot: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvTvnltNmfc

Fear is blasphemy. Concealed fear is hypocrisy. Fear faced is piety. Courage is virtue.

I have not been posting much because I have made the determination to invest some time actually processing emotions. Thoughts are inevitably a substitute for this, and the reason that I refer to them as machines. They are useful, but not living.

It’s unclear if I have any eager folks who closely follow this blog, but I thought I’d put that out there.

One can never describe a sunset–or a sunrise.

Clocks: what if there were a clock that only measured time spent in a state of heightened awareness and pleasure, which we commonly call “living”, to distinguish it from our ordinary time? What if there were a clock which only measured time spent in misery, and what if we defined that as “potential learning” time? How would those clocks compare to one that counted our ordinary time?

Trains: I was watching a model train set at the Museum of Science and Industry the other day, and found it strangely soothing. The trains just go in the same loops over and over, day after day. I remember the trains in Switzerland, which would start moving the very second the second hand on the large clocks on the platforms hit the minute of departure.

Trains go in tracks. They do the same thing every day, at the same time. Is their quality of “living” different than that of horses, or shoes, which travel all sorts of places? Are the contents of the trains not different every day; or, in the case of the model trains, are not different eyes on them every day? Is the exact content of their work not different every day? Is the difference in the fact of work different between trains and shoes? Is the quality of life radically different between someone who lives “artistically”, moving erratically and unpredictably, and someone who is an insurance examiner, who works precisely between 8 and 5 across decades? Not intrinsically.

Sometimes I think we ask too much of life. Trees have their work; squirrels have theirs. The stars travel in their paths, which change only across millions of years. If we treat the fact of work as a given, and choose not to remain attached to one way of being relative to another, I think the sort of work, and the regularity or strangeness with which we choose to do it, matters far less than we supposed.

I am a bit hung over, certainly living “artistically” today, and will offer that as explanation for the oddity of this post, which is intended to express linearly some “cloudy” thoughts–sentiments, really.

Years wind slowly by:
Nothing’s done, impatiently.
Somethings await birth.

One of my favorite movies is Battle: Los Angeles. It took me some time to convince my kids to watch it, since they are not normally too big on aliens and violence. I pointed out to them several times that the movie is not about aliens, but about courage, duty and honor, which is in my view entirely true.

In one scene a civilian father picks up a gun he is not trained to shoot out of necessity, and gets shot, and later dies. My youngest especially was sad, but I pointed out it was a good death.

This concept of a good death, which I first encountered in “The Last Samurai”, is one with a great deal of value, in my view. First of all, it accepts openly the necessity, the inevitability, of death. Secondly, it implies that as there are different ways to die, there are different ways to live. Do you face what you fear? Will you die on your feet someday, staring down that which is trying to destroy you? Or will it chase you down, and grab you from behind, at a moment beyond your control, and in a way showing you the utter powerlessness and cowardice with which you have chosen to live your life?

Based upon the evidence I have shown them, which is copious and readily available in the public sphere, I have I believe convinced both of my children that there is no need to fear death. Last week, in discussing the sundry problems facing humanity and the United States in particular, my oldest said “I will be glad when I die and am in heaven”. My response was “how do you know that you did not come here on purpose? How do you know that you were not in heaven watching all the useless suffering on Earth, and decided to come here to help fix things? Wishing to be somewhere else would be foolish if you came here on purpose; and I believe everyone does.”

I truly believe this, and even if I am wrong about how the world works, this belief is in my view still useful.

I have one quote on my refrigerator: “Happiness comes more from loving than being loved; and often when our affection seems wounded it is only our vanity bleeding. To love, and to be hurt often, and to love again–this is the brave and happy life”. J.E. Buchrose.

I would suggest that any of us would be lucky to die heroically–trying to pull a kid from a fire, defending the innocent or defenseless or otherwise trying to do the right thing–but what we are plainly faced with daily is the opportunity to face down our inner demons.

What did you do with this opportunity today? If you fight this battle often enough, then even a death in bed is a good death.

Adele has a song “rumor has it”, which tries to captured the mutable nature of rumors. I always get the last line wrong as to who is leaving who for whom, but one that popped in my head today was “rumor has it he’s the one I’m leaving me for”. I thought this quote apropos relative to a female friend of mine who is wrestling with her attraction to a narcissistic man who was quite awful. He was cheating on her, and trying to cheat on the woman he was cheating with. Some people are like that.

Corollary: it is sometimes appropriate to lie to others, but never to lie to yourself. I was going to publish that as a self declared bon mot, but will leave it here. I would call this my credo when it comes to the perceptual breathing portion of my “ethical” framework. Quotation marks because my ethics has no rules that govern anything but the inside of the individual’s head.

I have said this before, but I can be an asshole sometimes. I can rationalize it, as anyone with talent can rationalize anything, but that is the naked truth.

In my current living situation, I have a lot of black people around me. None of them scare me because they are ordinary, working people just trying to make it like me.

I will say, though, that I do get why black people feel oppressed sometimes. I was talking with a black guy in the bar today. He was the only black guy there, and I could just tell he was trying to blend, trying to belong. We had a nice conversation about Illinois football and basketball, and where he was from. Turns out I had driven through there earlier in the year.

In my comments on race, I want to be clear that there is one burning idea: if you are going to claim you are trying to improve the world, get the fucking thing right. Do it right, or get the fuck out of the way and let someone else lead.

The current people speaking for black Americans are not only not getting it right, they are causing an INCREASE in suffering. This suffering is very real. It is tangible. It is tears set in stone and forgotten and expressed in self destructive anger directed at they know not who. It is tears cried, and unpacified. It is fear, pervasive fear, inescapable fear, eternal fear, for which there is no ready solution.

I can be cold, but I am not cold. I want these problems solved, and it infuriates me to see lies told to cover up incompetence and indifference.

As I say often, it is as important to look for things NOT said, as that are said. You see, it is very easy to direct dialogue that exists in such a way as to prevent dialogue you don’t want.

In 2009, some 42 black kids under the age of 18 were murdered just in Chicago, most of them by other black kids. Premature death due to murder is an old story in the black community. I doubt things have improved under Obama’s ballet dancer with a fondness for the F word. The numbers were roughly the same when I lived in Chicago back in the mid-nineties. I personally heard one murder. I was already on the phone with the police to report a fight, when I heard 4-5 gunshots, and saw kids running. In this case, it was self defense, as the kid who got shot had attacked the other with a chain.

My point, though, is that in the last month or so since Trayvon got shot, it is statistically likely that just in Chicago 3 or more black kids have been murdered.

Who is talking about this? You will note the story above is from a British newspaper.

One would think that a man like Barack Obama, who was without evidence presumed to care about ordinary black Americans–whose experience was entirely foreign to his own–would be interested in the things that might actually help black people improve their lives. You might think that he would, as an example, address black on black violence, that Michelle Obama might be traveling the country encouraging young black kids to stay in school, work hard, and not get or cause someone else to get pregnant.

I’m not seeing it. What I see is a very cynical desire to use the few scraps of actual racism that still exist to ignite fires of anger that he can USE to distract people from the fact that in almost every respect, life has become WORSE under him. Obamacare won’t help the poorest of the poor: they already had Medicaid. His handouts will run out, and his overall economic policy is going to cause a disaster here which will hurt poor urban blacks the WORST, and FIRST.

There is no leadership in the black community that is effective because there are so many “liberals” whose sense of self and whose jobs DEPEND on their collective continued failure. They shout out, drown out those who want to say “we can do it”, “we can solve our own problems”. They call them Uncle Toms for what? For NOT wanting free handouts and preferential treatment. For valuing hard work and delayed gratificaiton over dependence on the Welfare Elite.

Did you know that “workers”–people who worked in factories–only constituted some 15% of the Russian population when Lenin led his coup?
[Edit: that is not much more than the 12% of our population that is black, and the principle involved is identical] Yet what he called his “revolution” invoked them. He needed them for propaganda. When he had them under his control, he smashed their unions, lowered their wages, increased their hours, eliminated what few safety standards there were, and sent to the Gulags anyone who disagreed with him. If you were tardy more than a couple of times, that alone was enough to get you sent to a labor camp.

People like Barack Obama PRAY–make that “wish fervently”, as I would assume Obama is actually an atheist–for the resurgence of the KKK and similar groups. This Trayvon Martin case enables him not just to avoid dealing in an actually substantive way with black issues generally, it also mobilizes support for him on an issue that is of no intrinsic significance even for the BLACK community–since most of their violence is black-on-black–and which distracts from his colossal failure to justify his calls for people to follow him in the name of hope.

Even more generally, we borrow $120 billion or so A MONTH and there are no plans to stop this. Only Ron and Rand Paul have sane proposals on the table. The rest is bread and circuses. This month it is Trayvon Martin. Next month it will be something else. What it will NOT be is relevant to the actual problems of any but a very small group of Americans.