Tag: Friday Night at 8

I don’t need anyone to tell me that injustice is immoral.

I don’t need to hear that intangibles like justice and morality are nice when you have the time for them but during this political season it isn’t pragmatic to use those intangibles to deal with present problems.

I don’t have to organize a community or canvass a neighborhood or contribute money to candidates or even be politically savvy to know this and to act upon it.

I am a citizen.  As one individual, I am as powerful as I allow myself to be.

Justice and morality – without being mindful of those intangibles we will simply continue to go on as we have been going, pessimistic, angry, watching others suffer and seeing no change in that suffering while those persons of privilege continue to enjoy their good fortune.

I am happy for those folks who enjoy their good fortune.  I do not believe their good fortune takes anything at all from me.  I’m funny that way.

But I don’t consider it good fortune to see other human beings, my brothers and sisters on this planet, suffer – and to turn away is equally as painful because in order to do that I have to block off my own heart.  That is not good fortune either.

It’s intangible, you see.

Eventually our sages in government will legislate something on health care and it will either be written into law or go down in flames, once again a failure of government to serve its people.  Even amid all the turbulence, though, I feel fairly optimistic we will get a bill President Obama can sign into law and it’ll be something we don’t hate too much.

We’ve been told the next thing our country should turn its mind to is immigration reform.

I have to laugh.  I really do.  I’ve heard more than once that one of the reasons we shouldn’t prosecute torturers is that it would cause such a terrible uproar, the Repubs would think we were revenging ourselves on the Clinton impeachment, it would “tear the country apart.”  Like it’s real woven together right now?  Like we have great cohesion and unity?  Anyway, that’s not where I’m going with this essay.

Immigration reform.

The only way to view the political circus nowadays is to put your shades on first.

Seriously!

Don’t want anyone to recognize me!

My mama told me to stay out of places like that.

And it’s worse than she said!

All I can say is it’s a damned good thing we didn’t get health care legislation passed before the August break!  Look what we would have missed!

How can something so utterly serious be impossible to take seriously?

The circus has come to town ………………………… hall.

My political commentary for the week.  It’s fucking Friday and I’m gonna put on my cool shades and go prowling down some particularly fine back alleys.  Hope all is well with Dharmaniacs everywhere and Happy Weekend!

Some music to prowl by …

… it’s coming up to that time of year again.

From YouTuber maedgen’s notes on this tune:

Filmed in mid-2005, this is a glimpse into life on the French Quarter’s lower Decatur Street before Hurricane Katrina.

Originally written by Ray Davies of the Kinks, this track is performed by the Preservation Hall Jazz Band featuring Clint Maedgen on vocals with a guest appearance by the New Orleans Bingo! Show in the video.

It was an episode from the original Star Trek.  Kirk and his Enterprise crew were in the grip of psychic monsters who fed off of their fear and anger, which made everyone act like lunatics.  So Kirk finally figures out the way to fight the monsters was to laugh and laugh and not feed them.

And that took care of the monsters.  Not an original plot, but I particularly liked watching Kirk and his crew laugh and laugh.

You have to think kind of well of yourself to do that particular trick, of course.  You need a healthy sense of self-esteem.

I don’t have much to write tonight, the dominant zeitgeist theme thingy this week was everyone exploring their adrenaline levels at the thought of great (scripted!) faux battles with our neighbors at town hall meetings, like that Twilight Zone episode where neighbors are turned against each other by outer space malicious life forms, mwoo ha ha ha ha.

All they have are smoke and mirrors.  I guess smoke and mirrors can be scary the first or even tenth time around.

But after eight years, it’s not such a surprise any more.

For some Americans, it’s been far longer, it’s been hundreds of years.  They see the smoke and mirrors very clearly indeed.

I’d like it if so many of the folks who were not allowed to return to New Orleans after the Federal Flood were invited to a town meeting and we could see and hear what they had to say.  That would be something.  ‘Course some of those folks have died since then, some of them made sure they were buried in New Orleans even though they weren’t allowed to return there in life.  They voted to demolish public housing, you see, in New Orleans, even though the housing itself had not been damaged by the Federal Flood.  The Ninth Ward didn’t do all that well either when it came to helping families return to homes they owned outright.  It was only a coincidence that so many black families, folks who had worked in NOLA for years, for generations, were so disproportionately affected.

It would be interesting indeed to hear a town hall meeting with those folks, hear what they had to say.

Ha.  Like that’s going to happen.

That would be real.  We can’t have that.  No sirree.

The sad thing about all the troubles we are going through fighting against the greedy and ignorant, is that it gives us a feeling of poverty in the midst of endless abundance.

I read the blogs trumpeting the big fights to give everyone the benefit of healing when they are sick.

We have an embarrassment of riches when it comes to knowledge of how to heal — and I’m not speaking here of simply taking a pill and curing a particular illness, but of truly being healed.

It’s an experience that heals both the person who is sick and the person who heals them.

We have all the great achievements of humanity at our fingertips and so many folks around the world who have the answers to the big questions of how to alleviate needless suffering.

Right now we could all be rolling in clover.

We’re headed into the dog days of summer, so no matter how rapidly events seem to appear it doesn’t matter, still have to go sloooooowwwwwww.

I read somewhere in ancient Chinese lore about a soldier, he was a general, I think, some big honcho in the court of the Emperor of the time, with all that power, subject to all that intrigue and anyway, the reign of that particular Emperor ended and the soldier had to flee the palace.  From various oracles and just his own intiution and supposed political genius, he knew someone would come along to restore the dynasty but it would be like 40 years or something until that happened.

So the soldier found a place to go fishing.

When he was in his 70s the young man came along who he was supposed to teach, a young man who would end up being emperor.

Well I may have this story all wrong, but that’s how I remember it, and who’s to say something like that never happened?

Title of tonight’s essay is taken from the Declaration of Independence, to-wit:

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.  But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

I imagine the revolutionaries of the 1700s were equally dismayed to see their countrymen willing to accept despotism rather than declare independence.  Human nature, and all, we’ve seen it so many times — and seen it many times in the history of the United States of America.

Zeitgeist, June 2009.

All the irony has been used up and hip is coopted in its pre-embryonic stage, wow.

So the hippest parts of the hippest philosophies are released into the cybersphere and general world culture through various other means and all sorts of people grok this rain of wisdom not just from group endeavors like named spiritual paths but from crazy mystics visionaries witches artists maniacs that emerge individually from their travels in existence.

And coyote howls in the full moon night at the sacred Four Corners in the West.

The old ways have been hip enough to change with the times.  We see it in the blogosphere, new forms for old hidebound traditions.  Dusting those treasures off.

Kerouac, there’s a video somewhere of him describing what “hip” means.

Imagine the beats, it’s right after World War II and in America there’s the boom of imperialism in the air and folks can finally have their own homes with labor saving appliances . . . . and the beats just dug something else entirely about America and about being a human being.

They swam against a merciless tide … them and a nascent musical movement, rock and roll, race music that left no mother’s child unchanged and of course that was the problem, wasn’t it.

Cultural misappropriation.

Old R&B saying, “If it’s in you, it’s gotta come out.”

So it keeps coming out in new forms everytime the old ones are stolen and coopted and twisted to material ends.

The form is only important because of the content.  And the content is love.

Happy Friday to all.  Summer has arisen here in the Big Apple.  I hear our public transportation system infrastructure is not doing well around the country.  As a rider of the W and N trains, in solidarity, I salute and wish courage and good luck to all public transportation riders across the land!

How can it be described, the feeling of a trail freshly blazed and taking that first walk upon it?

A path you created for yourself with all the wonders of the world at your disposal!

I call that Liberation and Freedom.

Casting off the shackles of conditioning that have oppressed every generation since human beings learned they could oppress each other.

Casting off the shackles is exhilirating in itself because the load feels so light!

Whoo, those fucking shackles were very heavy!

And then for the first time, moving around without the fucking shackles.  Wowzville.

Free.

(Phoenix Rising from Elfen Harmonics)

First time moving as a free human being.  That first step a big rush of pure direct experience, removed from words and concepts and thoughts in the totality of being, the reality of liberation.

Today Malcolm would be reviled even more than back in the day, even more, because he was change, the real deal.  He ought to be in the history books because his is a distinct American lesson.

‘Course we don’t teach about race in America in our schools and we sure don’t talk about it in our mainstream culture, so it’ll be a while before the rest of the country ever catches up to Malcolm.

His life embodied change.   He believed strongly in each phase of his remarkable life, his father taught him about black pride before the term ever came to be, and this in the Jim Crow south, and Malcolm just learned, he trusted each step in the way that he knew what was going on, he lived each phase of his life fully and completely the good and the bad.