Category Archives: Political Discourse

How do you feel?

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Four words, a construct of social interplay designed to initiate an exchange between two people. It’s up there with Good morning, How’s it going, and Hey there. It’s a question asked and a question answered with equally uninformative phrases like: Doing good, not bad, or I’m okay. Many add the required: how about you, for which round two concludes in the same innocuous manner.

Such lackluster exchanges point to a deficiency in emphasis and genuineness. As a whole, we’re good at the former and not so much the latter. How do you feel? If you stop to consider the question, it’s not a greeting, but an invitation. If you apply emphasis on the last word, how do you FEEL, the asker is being genuine, as if they really want to know. It’s then incumbent on the askee to be honest. That’s usually where the bond crumbles. How often do you pose the question, just to break the ice in greeting, really hoping that you get one of the standard answers from the list? After all, who wants to be the recipient of someone capable of grabbing your ear for an hour on the subject? How often do you avoid the answer because you simply believe the other person is just being polite, or you don’t feel comfortable bearing your soul, or you simply haven’t taken inventory of the real answers? You could ask yourself the question to step away from being two-dimensional, but let’s face it; we’re not really adept at being honest with ourselves either.

There’s a reason therapists belabor their patients with this question. Feelings, something that humans try to usurp as being one of the hallmarks that set our species apart (a blatant fallacy) are what drive us. A feeling is the steering wheel that turns us in the direction of action. I suspect many of our actions derive from a superficial sense of feelings we haven’t adequately analyzed, for if we did, would we truly be racist, or homophobic, or hateful? How can we expect the world to behave better if we individually act from a perspective of inattentiveness to our own feelings? Feeling is the one tool that drives empathy, and empathy breeds tolerance and acceptance. To ignore feeling opens a channel to destruction and hate. If Omar Mateen had stopped to consider the intrinsic value of seeing two men kissing, that the simple expression of love was of far more worth than hate and murder, he would have been able to override the nonsensical and bombastic canon all religions foist on their followers and seen the truth of that moment. He would never have pulled the trigger.

We’ve become too used to spouting words devoid of genuineness. The other morning, watching news coverage on the Pulse Nightclub shootings, the anchor opened the stage to a local journalist on the scene. As the line of communications opened, the journalist began by saying, “Good Morning”. My only thought was, no, it’s really not. The journalist wasn’t trying to be insensitive; he was using a salutation that was simply polite, even though it was horribly inappropriate to the moment. It speaks to the notion that we do so many things by rote.

The element of global danger is escalating at the speed of sound. Many hear the nauseating rhetoric of Donald Trump (the man who would set our society firmly on a path to the dark ages) and react to his hateful invective because on the surface he offers a solution to the issues that strike at the heart of what angers us. He garners support on the principal of mob mentality. The polls suggest an uncomfortably titanic number of people are stupid enough to fall for it. News reports of death and devastation abound everywhere; the United States is not the only target and is frequently the aggressor of the same destruction we rally against. We emphasize our thoughts and reactions from the standpoint of anger and hatred, but fail to infuse our thinking with intelligence. We employ the inelegant methods of a club-wielding troll. We do need to act. We do need to consider how best to dial back the ability of those who seek to do harm. We do need to change the way the country operates. Politicians are, for the most part, useless individuals at best, malcontent enablers at worst. They refuse to act on issues based on truth, honesty, and necessity; instead, they tout party lines, willfully ignorant – to our detriment. Most frightening to consider is that our elected officials lack the essential aptitude needed to deepen the quality of our country. They stand in positions to serve with bought and paid-for elections and by the grace of great campaign managers. So, they serve the masters of finance and corporate greed selling out the American people like the good puppets they are. We stand by and let it happen, time and again. Vote they say. That’s all well and good, but when the offerings are as useless as deciding what flavor of yogurt to have for breakfast, there is little opportunity for any significant change. Never has there been a time when it was more important to close the distance between what we feel and how we act. Not six months or a year from now, but RIGHT NOW.

Dig in, ask your friends, your family, people you work with: how do you FEEL. When someone asks you the same question, think hard on it. Tunnel down and figure it out, then tell them. Your challenge is to find the best method of delivery to effect a change. I’m a writer, the only tool in my arsenal is written expression. You must find your own way; don’t shirk on this responsibility. The only rule of the game is to consider all sides. Test yourself by asking if what you feel really makes sense. There was a common theme of apathy in movies and media in the 1970s; it clearly lingers in the 2000s. Don’t fall prey to that. I don’t care, nor is it important who originally coined the axiom, but it bears repeating: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing”. I’ve said it before, there is no cure for what ails us as a whole; there is a rising tide of terminally evil people. Sprinkling your dose of honesty and well-considered feelings on an expanding web of well-thinking and well-meaning people might abate the disease long enough that cooler heads prevail as we search for the elusive, and likely unattainable goal of peace and understanding.

So, how do you feel?

9/11: Never Forget…

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9/11 Memorial

As each anniversary of this horrific event rolls around, there are the reminders to never forget. We renew our resolve to never forget the people who perished, the loved ones who continue without them, and the people who are still dying from the diseases contracted on that day and during the clean-up of ground zero. I believe that one of the tacit reasons we challenge ourselves to never forget is the underlying desire to strike back at the perpetrators of 9/11. I know that I am guilty.

That said, I must also remember to rise above my desire for revenge and to never forget that we have also been the perpetrators of obscene acts, as have the Germans, and the Japanese, and the North Koreans, and the Jihadists, and…well the list could, and does, go on and on.

The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor to eliminate our interference of their imperialistic goals and to end the oil embargo we had put upon them. (Just as a side note, we are now contemplating doing this with China as they flex their imperialistic muscles). They chose a military target and of all who died on December 7th, only 103 civilians were killed. A little more than three and a half years later we unleashed a new era by dropping two atomic bombs on Japan. We chose to drop these weapons of mass destruction on largely civilian targets, not military ones. Even though the battle for Iwo Jima ended almost four months before Hiroshima, all remaining civilian population had been removed from the island and bombing that instead, might have proved just as effective a demonstration and prevented a civilian death toll 75 times greater than 9/11. Just consider the fact that the bomb on Hiroshima was considered by some a failure because it yielded only 1.7% of its capacity during its release. Imagine if all its fissionable uranium had been used.

The United States has also bombed places like Libya and Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan along with 23 other countries. I believe much of it was justified, but if one were to add up the number of civilian casualties obliterated by American bombs, it becomes a little easier to understand the steadfast hatred leveled in our direction.

War is an abomination, but it would seem we will never be free of it. It’s in our DNA, and we suffer from ideologies of such extreme polarity that there is no hope for establishing a middle ground.

So yes, we must never forget. But the lesson is, we must never forget the extent of just how low humanity can morally descend and remember to seek the higher ground whenever possible.

Hiroshima Memorial

Hiroshima Memorial

The Flying Fickle Finger of Fate Award: The Polar Divide

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In the late 60s and early 70s, an enormously popular TV comedy show, Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-in, routinely awarded the Flying Fickle Finger of Fate trophy for such things as Congress being unable to pass gun control legislation (click on the link – 47 years ago and we’re still talking), or for cops who sleep on the job, or once for the state of California for passing a law that allowed car dealers to disconnect odometers until the vehicle was sold. Though delivered within the context of a variety comedy show, most recipients were chosen for a more derisive purpose.

So, the Polar Divide. I say polar as in opposite as well as something glacial (big and cold) in nature. It’s what we’ve got. Here’s a short list:

Republican vs Democrat: budget and debt, education, the environment, immigration, and tax reform go through endless yet inconclusive debate.

Congressional Voting

Congressional Voting

Gay Marriage vs Heterosexual Marriage: though the LGBTQ community has finally received legislative support, the debate and posturing continues ad nauseum.

marriage merge

Ban the Confederate Flag vs proudly flying its colors: racist or heritage – an amazing example of how people can be insensitive and egocentric

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For those for Obama vs those Against Obama: more like Democrats vs Fox News

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White Supremacists vs Jews and anyone not white: the ugliest face of America

white pride

1% vs 99% (Government, Wall Street, and the wealthiest Americans): the definition of unbalanced.

99vs1

Freedom From Religion vs Religion (State vs Church): Bible thumpers, atheists, governments, all circling around the mat, pulling quotes out of context, misconstruing the truth, and morons like Pat Robertson claiming we’re all going to be having sex with animals soon because of gay marriage (apply this comment to the marriage item above, as well).

freedom from religion 2

Police Brutality vs Black People: it’s hard to ignore the fact that more unarmed black people are shot by police than any other group, but people also forget that uniformed police officers are often moving targets – when your life is on the line daily, it’s hard to imagine that you don’t overreact sometimes. Unfortunately, an underlying sense of racism fuels the fire, and it’s not going to get better any time soon.

police brutality

American Jihadists against anyone and everyone. As I said in a post a couple of months ago, the war is here, and it too won’t be getting better any time soon.

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I’m sure if I thought for another three or four seconds I could augment this list with another dozen examples. Such a huge percent of the news I read and the meme’s I see (I also create memes in the way cartoons try to illustrate the ridiculous, but I do attempt to be truthful) are so heavily laden with finger pointing that things have escalated to the point where truth has been left behind; in fact it’s unrecognizable. Our political candidates are, and always have been, the worst of the lot. They just don’t get that we don’t want to hear what the other guy did wrong; we want to hear what they’re going to do, instead.

Wars often bring a people together (Vietnam notwithstanding), but I don’t see how in the face of these polar divisions we will ever be able to conquer our domestic foes (hell, our own Civil War only had like four major fundamental factors), not to mention those that are ramping up their military overseas: Russia, China, North Korea, and the indecipherable mess that is always the Middle East – loyalties, hatreds, vendetta’s, alliances; they shift faster than the sands of their dunes.

So, on this fine morning, I hereby present the Flying Fickle Finger of Fate award to the Government of the United States and its people for being so addle-brained, capricious, and ignorant that the nation now has a seemingly unsolvable divide and for setting the nation rolling down the hill to oblivion with no emergency brake.

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