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 |  Opinions are like Blogs, everybody's got one |
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Every so often I have a thought or two, I might as well write them here...they may be political thoughts (I hate war, polluters and thieves), or thoughts about American culture (which I wished we really had) or even religious thoughts (I don't play favorites)...but you're invited to see these thoughts of mine right here. Comments are welcome... |
| Pro-God, Pro-Life The other day I saw a bumper-sticker telling me the bearer believed God was Pro-Life. That was one bumper-sticker, there were two others with the same sort of message, namely abortion is wrong. The car also bore one of those fish-things, for Christians (Sermon of the Mount? Because Jesus hung out with fishermen? Go figure.), as if I hadn’t got the message already. I heard Jack Nicholson one time explain why he was against abortion, it was because his mother was unwed, making him what used to be known as a bastard. If his mom had gone to Mexico he’d have never won an Oscar. I think the same thing applies with Christians. If Mary had gone to Egypt and had an abortion, Christ would never have founded the religion bearing his name. Think about it, the second coming of Christ might be under the same circumstances as the first, an angel getting it on with a mortal girl, unwed mothers and virgin births, yadda yadda. And who could blame them? Some cracker girl from a double-wide in North Carolina gets chosen. All the locals think it’s her dad or her uncle, but no, it was the arch-angel Michael (if he gets the duty again). Mom goes to work with the clothes hanger and God goes back to the drawing board. Armageddon is delayed, and probably all Hell breaks loose (like that’s any different from any other time in history). One thing all the anti-abortion nutcases have in common in this country is they are all Christians (and you could maybe add the most infamous of the nutcases are also from Kansas according to the newsreels). So far these Christians have killed nine abortion doctors for Jesus, counting Dr. Tiller, the latest who was gunned down inside a Christian church during services (in Kansas). Not to change the subject but when the twin towers came down, the online magazine “The Onion” carried a message from God (who coincidentally, despite right-wing, fascist, conservative radio talk-show meatheads, is also the same God worshipped by Christians, Jews, and followers of Islam), asking the perpetrators (now in Hell) ‘What part of Thou Shall Not Kill don’t you understand?” Therefore I’d like to impart a safety message to everyone out there who believes in this same God. If He tells you it’s okay to kill someone, take a deep breath, count to ten, or a hundred, or even a million, and then wait for the ecstasy to pass. According to the scriptures (New Testament, Torah, Koran, you name it) God isn’t now nor never has been in favor of settling disputes that way. And even if you claim the Devil made you do it you could, as a result, eternally regret it. No. Don’t use sticks and stones. No NRA or Kalishnikoffs. No explosives in trucks or body-wrapped. No bunker-buster bombs. When will you believers finally get it? God ain’t in favor of executions. Truth is, He’s probably not so fond of smart bombs either, or water-boarding, in case Dick Cheney is listening. If I was God I’d be throwing up my holy hands about now. Maybe it’s time for another Ark and stuff, these folks aren’t paying attention no matter how I put it. If on the other hand God doesn’t exist than all the killing makes perfect sense, being soulless jackasses and all. But hey, don’t blame God then when you mow yourself and everybody else in the market-place down to a bloody pulp. It ain’t His fault you’re a murdering waste of protoplasm. And even though I don’t believe in the Judeo-Christian-Moslem God, I hope if you believe and decide to kill somebody anyway you rot in an extra special area of Hell reserved for the worst of the human race. You don’t deserve any better no matter how your lawyer pleads. |
| Ups and downs at the Flea Market In the previous blog entry I mentioned an old mining town in Oregon named Sumpter. During the winter Sumpter has a certain success hosting snowmobile enthusiasts, that is when the winter is bad. This year the winter was good, so the business was bad. But during the tourist season Sumpter is home to a pretty big flea market three times a year, Memorial Day, the Fourth of July, and Labor Day. I decided to try my line of Kitchen Art among the flea market crowd (handmade wooden frames with reproductions of antique fruit-crate and can labels). My brother convinced me it was a good fit and about a month before Memorial Day took me up to Sumpter to look around. We had breakfast at the only restaurant in town that serves breakfast (there is one other restaurant in town, there used to be more but they’re closed and for sale). The waitress was chatty, the décor was log cabin, the biscuits and gravy not bad. Then we walked up the main street, past cute old cabins for sale (apparently every piece of property in Sumpter is for sale), to what looked like a fort. A fellow named Howard built it, calling it the Sumpter Stockade, complete with guard towers manned by armed mannekins. Howard rented spaces inside the stockade for the flea market so I reserved one (he and his wife Rita also run a motel there, similarly rustic but comfortable with all the amenities including wifi). I showed up a day early to set up, got myself a nice corner with twelve-foot high sharpened logs at my back and began my flea market experience. In one corner of the main building Howard had built a saloon in keeping with his theme. He never sold alcohol there, mostly bottled water and ‘pop’ (as sodas are known out here). He’d also built a smaller building from old barn wood inside the stockade calling it a ‘mercantile’ and originally a local artist named Lynn Bean had used it for her gallery. Now she had moved to the larger saloon and was my nearest neighbor in the stockade. Her work is beautiful and can be seen at www.lynnbean.com. The other occupants of the stockade began to arrive. The first to show up was Phil, from Idaho, with a trailer full of every kind of junk known to man. It would take him the better part of two days to set up. He had old farm implements, branding irons, railroad lamps, old postcards, all kinds of glassware, lunch-boxes, you name it, Phil had it and knew what it was worth. He’s been doing flea markets for forty years all over the West (since he was in his early twenties) and if all that time has taught him anything it is there is no reason to hurry. He was very supportive of my efforts and welcoming, something I appreciated being a greenhorn, so to speak. Phil did a lot of business, it seemed like everybody who came to Sumpter walked through his display of tables hoping for that Antiques Roadshow find of a lifetime. We would also had a kettle corn booth in the Stockade, two affable brothers-in-law, from Idaho. They had a professional-looking setup and wasted no time producing ‘bales’ of carmel corn and kettle corn, filling the air with the heady popcorn aroma. For them this was a part-time occupation, they both had jobs to go back to after the holiday. I thought they were a little optimistic making so much product so quickly, but they had no trouble selling it and in fact had to work hard to keep up with the demand. It’s hard to imagine the quantities of their popcorn product that was consumed by the hungry crowd. Across the street was a kettle corn operation and a block and a half down the street there was another. For all I knew there were two or three kettle corn stands up by the fairgrounds, too. One other vendor in the stockade had brought wood and various wood products all the way from my neck of the woods. I would end up buying some of his wood, an African wood called Khaya (African mahogany). A friend of his from Baker City, Oregon, displayed some of his woodwork too. It was their first time at the big dance (just like me) and neither one of us would make much of an impact. My frames generated some interest, but very few sales. People were impressed with my woodwork, just not enough to part with any cash. Perhaps it was because of the state of the economy and people just don’t have any spending money for trifles like Kitchen Art, but if I was hoping it would pay for my trip over I was going to be disappointed. I was even more disappointed Saturday afternoon when it clouded up and rained an inch in about twenty minutes. The thousands of people who had come got back in their cars and left, but that wasn’t the worst part. For my product it was a disaster. The awning I’d bought was water-resistant which is not nearly the same thing as waterproof. Rain was coming down so hard it created a mist inside my booth, that moisture ended up messing my frames up bigtime (although I didn’t know the extent of it at the time). The next morning I realized how screwed I was, the finish was ruined on about sixty frames, and in some cases the matting would even have to be replaced. Thankfully my undisplayed frames were in waterproof tote-boxes, so I had something to display anyway, after I packed up the ruined ones in tote-boxes labeled ‘rework’. I’d put out my best stuff and it hadn’t sold much, now I was down to whatever else I had and it didn’t sell either. Sigh! But I wasn’t depressed. You’re probably thinking I’m a nutcase eternal optimist or something, but that isn’t true. After my disastrous day Saturday I went down and had dinner at the other restaurant in town, Morello’s. I ate in the bar (the restaurant was full) and after I was done I decided to play some video poker. Oregon has a state-run gambling entity that provides keno, scratch-its, a couple of lotteries, and video poker. I don’t play it much, but Saturday night I thought why not? I had a bunch of five-dollar bills I’d brought to give change with (which I realized now I wouldn’t need after all) so I started feeding the machines. Normally I play the minimum, which is a quarter bet, guaranteeing if I hit a big hand I won’t win much. Actually my luck was pretty good, after an hour or two I’d won enough to break even. Then I won some more and was about to quit. I had a number of points on the machine so I upped the bet to a dollar and a miracle happened, I hit a royal flush and won five hundred dollars. Suddenly my trip was paid for, in spite of the disasters of both weather and market. Go figure. Maybe I’ll do more flea market stuff, I’ve got the set-up now, but I don’t think I should expect to get bailed out like I did in Sumpter. Perhaps I need to start smaller at the local flea market and work up to the big time, or maybe my market is someplace else entirely. I don’t know. I do know I enjoyed my experience and got to meet a lot of nice people. I came away with a nice print of Lynn Bean’s of a horned lizard to frame for myself and some Khaya to frame it in, and I also got a quart jar of some very excellent honey with a flavor you’ll never find in a store (the man lives in Mt. Vernon, Oregon, but puts his hives up on a natural prairie in Eastern Washington state). I met some local people and got to learn some local lore. I didn’t really explore the town or the flea market in general, my smashed toe made walking a bit uncomfortable and besides I had to stay at my booth in case somebody wanted to buy something (I’d hate to miss such a rare event!). There’s something appealing to me about a town like Sumpter, I could picture myself living there, feeding the stove all winter and making frames out in the shop heated by a potbelly stove. The tall pines, the quaint locals, the great outdoors. Then I think of cabin fever, my own children and grand-children hundreds of miles away, the lack of any real amenities (like a local coffee roaster), the stacks and stacks of firewood I’d have to go cut and haul, and I think maybe Sumpter wouldn’t be so great after all. I’ll let my experience percolate for awhile. There’s no way I could do the Fourth of July (the other vendors said it sucks anyway), but maybe Labor Day if I’m not busy and feel flush enough to test the water again. Maybe the economy will improve to the point my frames will be a hot property! Maybe all it will ever be is just an expensive hobby, which it certainly has turned out to be so far. In any case I’m glad I did the Sumpter thing, experiences are good even if sometimes they stray into the occasionally unpleasant category of ‘learning experiences’. |
| Gold fever I’ve recently had the opportunity to explore sections of Eastern Oregon and Western Idaho. It’s staggering how much country is out there. For white people the history is not much older than 150 years or so, with the discovery of gold and the availability of cheap land to homestead. Little towns sprang up, thrived and then disappeared, leaving only graveyards to mark their existence. It seems to me to be remarkable that the whole area has less people living in it now than in the past. And it also seems remarkable how much vast and wholesale destruction can be done by men greedy for gold. The area around Sumpter, Oregon is a good example. Sumpter is located in the beautiful Powder River Valley in sight of the Elkhorn Mountains. It’s quite a nice spot for a little resort community, but the reason the town exists is because gold was discovered in the Powder River. I wonder what the valley looked like before, because now it is just piles of rocks stretching up and down the river’s course. The entire valley has been scooped out and turned upside down. A huge self-propelled dredge was constructed for the purpose, kind of a tourist attraction now. I guess it was pretty loud, but apparently the townspeople didn’t complain too much, there wouldn’t be a town there without it. Silver City, Idaho is another town that has survived, though I doubt it will ever thrive again. There may be one or two people who spend the winter up there these days. Back when it was a boomtown people lived up there all year. At six thousand feet of elevation you can bet it got plenty cold, but of course none of the remaining buildings were insulated. The graveyard contains a good number of headstones labeled ‘unknown’, and way too many infant children. It was a hard place to live. But it won’t find a way to thrive because it’s too hard to get to and once you do there isn’t a lot to do except walk around the town. There is talk of turning the old hotel into a bed and breakfast. By the look of the place they’re nowhere near close to opening. A lot of rebuilding needs to be done. It could work, though, if seasonally, they could appeal to the mountain-bike crowd, or the ATV folks. On the road from Silver City down to Jordan Valley (in Oregon again), there are crumbled signs of mining (in this case what they call hard-rock mining, where mines go back into the mountain). Great talus slopes of tailings show how much hard work went into it, representing again to what lengths greedy men will go. With the price of gold and silver at an all time high I’m sure there are people looking into reopening those old mines. New processes can extract quite a bit of gold and silver just from the tailings. The problem is they have to do it responsibly now and clean up after themselves. The lure of gold and precious metals is still powerful. While in Sumpter I met some folks training to use the metal detecting machines they had bought. One of them even found some small nuggets, along with bullets and various metal objects (a hoop from an old barrel). The only problem with the machines is they don’t dig the objects up too, but talk about the possibility of buried treasure! A story I heard concerned a guy finding an old buried pressure-cooker full of silver dollars. I’m glad I didn’t catch the gold fever. Those old places are interesting to visit, but I’d hate like hell to live there. |
| I had a little boo-boo Wednesday morning. We are installing a couple of informational kiosks for the Forest Service a few miles south of Crater Lake. After we did the excavation (a nice rectangular hole) we needed to pack in about a foot of gravel before we installed forms and poured cement. The way you compact gravel in such a case is by using a tool called a 'Jumping Jack', sort of like a jack-hammer with a square pad bamming up and down. It takes a lot of bamming. You spread gravel about three inches deep and then bam it, add some more, bam some more. And that jumping jack really does the job, bam, slam, bam, just don't get your toe under it. I was lucky it only caught the very end of my big toe, so I only have one broken bone (broken in four places), a dislocated toenail (resewn on to preserve the nail bed in case another nail grows), and a brand-new orthopedic shoe since my gauze-wrapped toe won't fit in any of my regular shoes at the moment. The good thing about it all is there is not nearly the pain I thought there'd be, which is nice. The other good thing is I got to come home early so I have time to make even more Kitchen Art to take to the Sumpter Flea Market next weekend in Eastern Oregon. I need to just stick with carpentry and leave gravel to those who like it, I don't have to compact picture frames...sigh!! If only picture frames paid better I wouldn't have to risk my remaining extremities for an hourly wage. Of course the two extremities I've injured so far were both on-the-job workmen's comp claims, therefore not paid for by me (in money anyway). First the end of my thumb got cut off building a cabin in Alaska, now the toe. And making frames requires the use of saws too, so I got to be real careful, since God knows I can't afford to pay to have things sewn back on all the time... |
| Open the doors for Cuba For fifty years now we’ve kept up an antagonistic attitude toward Cuba. We’ve tried to bring them to their knees through embargoes, poorly planned rebellions and unsuccessful assassination attempts. As far as America has figured it we won’t be happy until Cuba crawls back, showing its belly, because we forced them to, leaving them with no bargaining power whatsoever. Does anyone else find it odd that in the last fifty years we have opened the door to Red China, called for the Wall to come down in Berlin, and then watched as the Iron Curtain collapsed in a rusty heap. Yet none of the forward-thinking presidents we have had would deign to pardon Cuba. And when I say pardon Cuba, I mean letting the populations of South Florida and Cuba have some family reunions. Letting rich Americans spread some of that wealth on the beaches and bodegas. All over the Caribbean there are examples of countries who have figured out how to get the tourist dollar, Cuba would have it made, being ‘unspoiled’, which I think means not having high-rises all over their prime beaches. So I’m glad Obama has deigned to allow more contact between Cubans, wherever they live. But I don’t think it’s enough. I think Barack should open Cuba to their Western Hemisphere brothers, namely the good old U.S. of A. It’s about time we quit punishing Cuba. J. Edgar Hoover is dead, Joe McCarthy is dead, Dwight D. Eisenhower (on whose watch Castro overthrew the Mafia pawn Batista) is dead, a lot of the Presidents who have followed a lock-step Cuban policy are dead, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Reagan. The Presidents still alive shouldn’t be proud of their own efforts either, especially the Bushes and Clinton. Carter might have done something if anyone had let him. But I guess you can’t really blame all those Presidents for impoverishing a neighbor like they did, let the Cubans come to their senses, throw the bum Castros out. In spite of all our Central American ‘training centers’ our CIA has not been able to get the old ‘Regime Change’ job done in Cuba. Sure we’ve kept them poor, yet they still have almost universal literacy, a fairly decent health care system (and yes, it’s a socialist system but still superior to ours, no child, no parent, nobody left behind, what a concept!). Apparently we are still trying to enforce our American rule over Cuba. We want to open relations with them if only they will free a bunch of political prisoners first. What a silly game our well-paid diplomats play. Wait! If our diplomats were able to solve these puzzles wouldn’t they be out of a job? Hmm. In North Korea we castigate the renegade state for launching missiles everybody else around them have already launched, a tactic they employed anyway because we reneged on a previous agreement. Going even further back in our national memory, weren’t there a lot of treaties, agreements, etc., with the Native American population that we as a political nation disregarded to those people’s decided and deadly detriment? History is a brand, burned in to our national skin, lipstick don’t change a pig (don’t get me wrong I got nothing against pigs). So what I’m getting at here is not what we do or don’t do. The better way we could be as the king-pin in all the world, America the Alpha-Nation, is to let be what is. Have we asked ourselves what a cancer we’ve bestowed on Cuba in the form of Guantanamo Bay? Are we unsullied? We should stop trying to control other folks, we don’t do very good controlling our own. North Korea’s population is on the brink of starvation, lets feed them. Without conditions. Iran wants us to stop acting like a bully, and if we quit bullying them they could very well become our friends, why not wish such a thing to happen? And Cuba, they could be our friends too, all we have to do is take the first step, instead of requiring them to walk our line. We’ve seen the progress hard hearts have made, namely none. And the historical narrative has America with a soft heart, hmm, what if the narrative were true? I hope Obama figures it out. What a coup! “Let’s tear down the walls, Mr. Castro!” None of us here in America will be hurt by opening the doors to Cuba. I can’t say that I’m without my own angle, either. I’d like to see open trade with Cuba. For years I’ve smoked contraband Cuban cigars whenever I’ve had the opportunity. I don’t care that much about their sugar-cane, I do like the music, but I love the cigars. There’s a number of Presidents (I’ve listed) who have denied me good Cuban cigars. Let not Obama be another in the number. If Dubya had been smarter when it came to Cuba, he’d have had at least one thing positive in his quest for a legacy. There’s a lot of countries out there we’ve been stupid about, and being a child of the sixties let me quote Sly and Family Stone as they asked the musical question, “Why can’t we be friends?” The only thing stopping us from being a better nation these last fifty years was ourselves. Hmm. I hope we start doing better, for our own selves and for the world. Because if you believe your country to be one of the very best throughout all history, then you should expect it to do the right thing, and if it doesn’t, then it is our duty, your duty, my duty, as we are all citizens, to set it straight |
| So I've pretty much made the box, sanded it until I am proud. The pattern in the wood hearkens to me like Egytptian hieroglyphics, maybe. And maybe I go on too far. At any rate I've made a beautiful box and folks will be both despairing and blessed to bury it. Because it is beautiful, because part of us wants to display that kind of beauty, part of us will despair the box isn't placed where the light will catch the fiddle-back of the Myrtle-wood. And the other part of us knows how permeable the wood is to moisture. It isn't some kind of cedar or yew which withstands ground contact. No, this box I made is very temporary, if temporarily beautiful...kind of appropriate, if we're lucky. I mean if our life, which is temporary, also shines with beauty. The world goes on, time in its measurements goes on, seasons are not altered by our passage. Few of us make any mark at all in passing. I could have saved myself a lot of labor whacking out a rough, ash-filled box, made out of pine. That I didn't is to my credit, no, to my heart's credit. This kind of box should be made with care and all the wood-worker's talents. This blessing of a box is for them, my son and daughter, and a father gone but still remembered fondly, May all our passings invoke the same response... |
| Reflections on the building of boxes I’m not sure if it’s an average, but I’ve been told the ashes of a man cremated measures at two hundred square inches. Apparently there is a custom of building a box just to fit the ashes, which is then buried, perhaps not even needing its own plot. I’ve been commissioned to build such a box. As I visualize the shape of the box I can’t help but see it as a rectangle. Perhaps if the man whose ashes will fill the box had been Native American, I would build it square, like the four winds and the directions and the zodiac. But I visualize this man’s box as a rectangle, because I see him as being of European extraction, by way of Argentina, to settle and finally die in Oregon. The Oregon part is important to my daughter and my son. She was born in Oregon and this man I build the box for was her father. Now I am the only father she has. A father given an honor, to build a box, she wants it to be made of Myrtle-wood. And I, who’ve read so much history about my state, remember other burial rites with other Oregon woods. Chinese men who died over here were shipped routinely back to China to be buried, and the coffin of choice was Port Orford cedar. A lot of Port Orford cedar was milled in the nineteenth century for this purpose. The wood is very aromatic. But the Myrtle, too, is aromatic. The source of bay leaves, its other name is Bay Laurel. The scent permeates the wood, sawing and sanding releases the odor to the grateful carpenter’s nose. But the pleasure doesn’t end there for the carpenter, the grain has depth and light and rays, like a wooden gemstone. It is my favorite wood, it takes hard work and much sanding to reveal it, but the results satisfy my soul. And so I hope the box I make will satisfy my counterpart father’s soul. I met him only once, at the wedding of his daughter and my son. We raised a glass of wine to them, our children, spoke Spanish and English together, I felt we bonded. He was gracious in an Old World way, a gentleman, glad to see I too could play the part. Now it is up to me to build his box. I want it to be beautiful, for my daughter’s sake, shining, lovely and appropriate. A pity, really, that it won’t sit on a mantel someplace, gleaming in all kinds of differing light. A rectangular, wooden urn, something to dust but lovely when you do. No, this box will be buried. And isn’t that life, really? I want my ashes to be scattered at various places on the trail up to and at the top of Cascade Head, a promontory out in the Pacific Ocean. But maybe I should now, instead of one box, make two, one nailed closed for all eternity, one free to be lifted off. If it weren’t too spooky, my empty box (once it was cleaned good) could be used for notions and knick-knacks after a while. Myrtle-wood is a good choice for a box, and already fairly rare, as we speak, aren’t we all? I’m going to a mill a ways out of town tomorrow. If they have the stock, maybe I’ll buy enough wood to build two boxes. |
| What our current “Repression” means Most everyone agrees we’re somewhere between a recession and a depression, the line is muddled between the two, perhaps the difference is only semantic. But as a way of moderating, I suggest coining a different term for our current state of economic collapse, namely we’re in a “Repression”. I mean just look at the big banks’ response when we flat out gave them $750 billion dollars to stimulate the economy (before Obama was President), money supposed to keep credit flowing, and the banks just sat on it, snakebit by previous foolhardiness, they repressed the money. And the economy slid downhill, with no credit available to anyone. $750 billion buried in the backyard. There’s no point now detailing how stupid congress and the previous administration both were to dole out so much money with no guarantees from anyone that the banks will do what you want them to do with it. But I don’t think this is the point of why I’m writing today. Instead I’d like to point out to my readers how incredibly rich we are as a country and people, in spite of the stubborn greed inherent in our capitalist society. What a stroke of luck it was for me to be born an American. I mean I could have been born in Togo, or Sri Lanka, for crying out loud, Sudan, you name it. But my fortune was made by being born in Idaho, U. S. of A. And our family was not what you call rich by any means. Both of my parents still bore the scars of growing up during the Great Depression. I learned survival skills most folks never had to know, like how to grow food and process it (rather than buying canned goods at the store). How to take game and use every bit of it you could to feed hungry mouths over the winter. So I didn’t grow up in any lap of luxury, and yet I was far richer than I ever imagined, even in the middle of strivings just to make ends meet. There is so much we take for granted. We turn on a light switch and the lights come on, well, if we’ve paid our light bill. But how rare and rich is that compared to countless other places in the world. Another example is having potable water flowing from the tap, I mean not only does it flow when you open the tap but you can drink it without getting a number of water-borne diseases. And following on down the infrastructure you can flush your toilet whenever you want and the stuff goes away someplace. Live someplace where that’s not the case and you get my drift. Ever have to dig a hole every time you took your daily dump? See how rich you are? Not to say we don’t have our homeless, cardboard sign-wielding people living on the edge, panhandlers, and soup-kitchens, because we do. But they really are insignificant in actual numbers, per capita, not to downplay their obvious need, but to show they are a tiny minority in this, our rich, country. When I visited Lima, Peru, it was listed in the guidebooks as a city with seven million inhabitants. There actually were ten million, three million living on the edge of the city in abject poverty, in what they called ‘new towns’ situated around the circumference of the city proper. Nearly a third of the population was what we’d call ‘homeless’ and totally without electricity, water, or sewers. Living in card-board shacks, or roofless adobe houses (it hasn’t really rained in Lima in three or four hundred years). Compared to that we don’t have much of a homeless problem after all. Even in other cities in South America, where electrical lines were strung and water-pipes in place you still couldn’t count on any of it working at any given time of the day. The water might flow a couple hours in the very early morning, in which case you better be ready to stockpile all of it you could. Even so, you’re better off boiling the water before you drank it. Turn on the lights and it was a crap-shoot if they came on. You get the picture, we are very rich and don’t even know it since we’ve experienced nothing else but richness our whole lives. I mean, my being in South America was symbolic of my wealth. I was essentially an oil-well walking around, all the locals had to do was find a way to tap it. And I was traveling on what I considered to be a shoe-string budget, no fancy hotels, no gourmet restaurant meals. Bare-bones. But what I came to understand was if I was not rich than how had I come to their country in the first place? And there’s no way to deny it, I was there, I could travel, I must be way richer than they were. And they were right, though I knew I wasn’t really rich. Hell, I had to learn how rich I really was. Something most Americans just take for granted since they never go to poor towns in Mexico, or travel to Africa, Asia or South America. We ignore the log in our eye and strain at gnats. So all that being said, let’s go back to my original premise. How we’re in a “Repression”. Which I think is a state of mind, rather than anything real. What are the chances our infrastructure will fail? That millions of people will die of starvation and neglect? We’re whining because our 401K’s are down, that we’re unemployed temporarily, that we have to sell our toys, our RV’s, our boats, motorcycles. We cringe when we fill the gas-tank of our car, even while we pay less for fuel than anyone else in the whole wide world. That we can’t buy a new car, a new home, a new TV complete with the latest cable package. How sad. We’re pitiful. Because we are the richest country in the history of the world and apparently it’s still not enough for us. Like Jim Morrison wrote in the song: “We want the world and we want it now!” We’re spoiled children who by luck happened to be born in the right place. We got a lot to learn. We’re so much richer than we know and even when we are down we’re still far ahead of billions of other people on this planet. I’ve been trained how to survive. I know how to grow and preserve so as to make it through the winter. Do you? Study up, if things actually get bad for us you’re going to need it. True wealth has everything to do with turning on the tap and getting a drink. Think about it and then thank your lucky stars. Things could be lots worse, like for ninety percent of the other souls inhabiting our planet. Repression or not things could really suck for you, especially if you didn’t have the good luck to be born in America. So wipe your whiny teary eyes, blow your whiny runny nose, throw the tissue in the toilet and flush it. And then get over it, because no matter what happens you’re still going to have it better than everybody else. |
| Ruminations on eternity Cows, buffaloes, giraffes, hippos, rhinos, etc., all are ruminants, which means, basically, they chew their cuds. People are ruminators too, we just do it differently, instead of a wad of grass for example, all we need is a thought to chew over. Recently a friend of mine gave me a thought to ruminate on. In this case it was the concept of ‘never’. I’d suggested something to the effect of how we may never get the chance to meet face to face and therefore never make love each to the other, I mean physically. She said “Never is a long time.” Which got me to thinking. First I started thinking about if we did get together. Say we did the thing we’d never done before, does that stop never from happening? Hadn’t we gone through an eternity before it happened? And if we didn’t do it again, wouldn’t that constitute another eternity starting then? But as in all good ruminations I found the wad of thought needed to be broken down to it’s core, nutritive, elements. In this case the core element was eternity. Religions make a lot of hay with eternity, we just can’t grasp it, being mortals, so it must belong to God, who being immortal understands what we can’t. I realized our common human stumbling block revolves around the concept of time. Somehow we believe time and eternity are connected. We don’t understand forever but we have a word for it, so it could exist, right? Imagine forever. It doesn’t have a starting point nor an end and yet we’re not afraid to use phrases like “from the beginning of time”, or “to the end of time.” But the bottom line is (and I hate using that term) the measuring of time makes it finite while eternity is essentially infinite. The fact we can measure time means it can’t be infinite. Time is real. Eternity and infinity are concepts, nobody can measure forever. But that doesn’t mean forever isn’t real, it just means we haven’t found a way to measure it yet. In fact it’s more real than we realize. We are willing to believe we have a soul, a spirit, something animating our corpus (and I don’t limit this to humans, or even animals). We are also willing to believe our soul is immortal, either we spend eternity in torment or in the grace of God, according to the religion we believe in. But scientific studies indicate when death occurs, a body loses a tiny amount of weight. It’s not insignificant, it’s measurable. And what that means is our soul is not insubstantial, rather it’s material. Does the soul’s materiality mean it’s not immortal? No, quite the contrary, the fact it is material in origin proves its immortality. Material, matter, is eternal. It cannot be destroyed. Break it down to atoms and then blow the atoms apart and they’ll recombine into more matter. We may not understand how a soul is actually matter, although I imagine some bright scientist will ultimately be able to figure out what kind of atoms make up a soul, but the fact it can be measured and weighed makes it matter. And matter is eternal. Therefore the soul is eternal. So what that means is not only is our soul immortal, eternal, but so is our body. Alive or dead we are made up of immortal matter, indestructible. We are made of things lasting forever, they came together and they’ll ultimately break apart and dissipate, but they will never go away. The ‘Big Bang’ theory, the believers in intelligent design, all think there was a point where matter didn’t exist and then it did. To my way of thinking it doesn’t matter, because what is there now will last forever into the future, and since forever goes both ways who’s to say it wasn’t always there? Even in the hottest furnace of a sun matter isn’t destroyed, but instead is melted and recombined. Eternity isn’t intangible after all. Why invent theories and religions when the proof of tangibility is what we’re made of? I guess the point of all this maundering is to say ultimately, never doesn’t exist. Except in our imaginations. But ever does exist, and so does forever. Maybe that was what she was trying to tell me, pragmatic stack of matter that I am. But in the face of combining and recombining material, is reincarnation such a stretch to believe in? I mean think about it, if eternity isn’t like a train-track extending in both directions infinitely, then what is it? If time isn’t lateral and therefore measurable, then maybe it’s circular and goes around to come around, kind of like matter. So I’m now looking forward to making sweet love to her, body to body. Why not? If not now, then later, maybe we’ve done it already and can’t remember it. No sense worrying about it, shedding tears of sadness and the like. There’s no possibility it could never happen, the possibilities are endless, I limit myself by limiting. I’ll admit it as being a poor choice of words on my part, the use of the nonexistent concept of never. I’m glad she helped me rethink the whole thing, maybe thought is nutritious after all. How refreshing! |
| Freedom from religion (or the restoration of hope) The last eight years have marked the rise of what has been called “Christian Fascism”, wherein the leader of our country has claimed the high ground of being the arbiter of what is good and what is evil. He has been enabled in that quest by members of the Christian far right, who have even claimed it was God Himself who selected Mr. Bush for his exalted position. The results of this rise of Christian totalitarianism has a dismal record, both politically, militarily and religiously. Those who bought the conceit, believing the Republicans they elected would further their narrow agenda (these folks include anti-abortionists, anti-gays and anti-“Activist judges”) have found their elected officials went off on an entirely different tack once elected. Instead of the repeal of Roe vs Wade, instead of mandated marriage limits (one man/one woman), the last eight years have brought no progress for the anti-abortionists and anti-gay factions. In fact during those years the unthinkable happened when states allowed gay marriages and narrow definitions of marriage were struck down in court in spite of being voted in by majorities in various states. But while these religious groups’ power existed, and they were able to elect mouthpieces claiming to represent them, our country has crept perilously close to the abyss of Christian Fascism. Now, don’t get me wrong, I didn’t coin the term Christian Fascism. I was raised a Christian, and as a form of philosophy I think it’s a great idea, the Golden Rule alone should be the rule of law in any society concerned with true justice. As well, Jesus’ teachings about how to treat the less fortunate in the society are exemplary. But Christian Fascism, exemplified by Dominionists and neo-conservatives, is a far cry from the teachings of Christ. One simple verse from the Bible should be enough to educate real Christians how far wrong the Christian Fascists have strayed from Christ’s teachings, “…as you have done it for the least of these, my brethren, you have done it unto me.” Why do I say that? It’s simple. The ranks of the poor, the disenfranchised, the communities who lost factories to foreign sweatshops, are at an all time high. You’d think real Christians (as our leaders purport to be) would be more concerned with the poverty they’re inflicting on the electorate than they are enriching their cronies by waging holy war against evil. But unfortunately these neo-Christians could care less about the poor, about the sick and elderly, and instead their focus is trying to bring on “the End Times” as prophesied in the Book of Revelations, or even trying to change the law of the land from a constitutional republic to theocratic totalitarianism (to the extent of enforcing Old Testament law as the law of the land. If they were successful imagine the ratings boost Fox News would get from covering the stoning of “Homos”). With the election of Barack Obama I have hope, for the first time in a very long time, that this experiment in nation-building, namely the good old U. S. of A., could become a better place for its citizens. Instead of providing a trough for the feeding frenzy of corporations, perhaps Mr. Obama can get us back to a government focusing on the people they were elected to represent. It certainly won’t be easy since the government as we know it is in the hands of lobbyists who have written the laws these last eight years and by campaign contributions control our duly “elected” officials, but it’s certainly worth a try and I am hopeful. The “Christian” ideals espoused by God’s own pick for the White House, George W. Bush, have brought us nothing but death, corruption, a lessening of civil rights, environmental degradation and diminished regard from the rest of the world. Bush’s very clear God-given definitions of good and evil has allowed us, in good conscience, to resort to torture, spying on our own populace, and attacking other nations without real provocation (note my use of the word ‘real’ here, Saddam Hussein was provocative, but the provocations cited by the Bush administration during the run-up to war were manufactured for the purpose and were at best just misleading, at worst out and out lies). There is a big task in front of Mr. Obama, many entrenched interests in this country hope he fails because if he succeeds in changing the focus from business to ‘the people’ than these entities used to wielding power will be powerless. Obama’s task is truly perilous to him, money, historically, has easily purchased assassins when loss of power is threatened. But I am hopeful. Hopeful that our country can regain its focus, that the government will again be ‘for the people’ instead of for corporations and lobbyists, and hopeful that the separation of church and state is once more established. The last eight years of Christian Fascism has led me to think the Founding Fathers were misguided when they espoused Freedom of Religion. To my way of thinking we’d be much better off these last eight years if we’d had Freedom from Religion. I don’t want us to be a Christian nation, but even if we were, the actions of the Bush administration do not qualify as Christian ideals in any way. As Bob Dylan said in his song “Masters of War”, “even Jesus would never forgive what you do…” I don’t believe in heaven or hell, I don’t believe I’ll have to account for my actions in some celestial court of law, but I can’t help but wish Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, et al, have to stand one day in front of Jesus and explain how they could ever have thought what they were doing “in His name” was the right thing to do. I’d like to be a fly on the wall for that… |
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