Choosing Rightly

It’s a hard thing.

Choosing rightly.

A planet of nigh onto 8 billion people, and still the hardest thing in this world… is to choose rightly.

To find the person you fit together with, in something approximating… cohesiveness.

Not perfection.

Not even love.

I’m very non-western and old world when it comes to people being together.

I believe marriage is something fundamental between a man and a woman. Not just fundamental to them, but fundamental to the clan, to the tribe, to a functional society.

I’m not making any stance on this for other people, not throwing stones at alternative lifestyles.

But for my definition, marriage is a simple thing, that binds a complex woman to a complex man.

And when it works it is a rarity.

And when it works it is a wonder.

And I think it would be less rare, a working marriage, if we went into it less programmed by 20th and 21st century obsession with self and things.

Something a young lady once told me.

Odd to find I have not forgotten it.

I think the person who marries only because they are ‘in love’, is like a fool and his money, someone who in the fullness of time will be parted from it.

I believe in lust, I believe lust has gotten more people wed than love, but fine let’s call that chemical high you’re feeling… love. That will fade… that chemical romance, that explosion, that madness… so if that’s the feeling you’re counting on to be your definition of love, and to be there always…then you are someone heading for, like too much of western civilization, disappointment… and divorce.

Love is not the promise of the wedding, it is the dedication to the journey.

It is to take that lust, and that like, and mortar them together with duty, to each other, to those who came before, to those who come after… to the journey.

And it is in walking this journey together, haphazardly at times, inelegantly at times, but ultimately taking that journey together, and helping each other walk it… and it’s in the walking of that journey… walking that journey well… that you can begin to truly speak of love.

Duty and Sacrifice.

Dirty words in the ‘me’ generation. Which no doubt is why bastardry is all the rage. A taboo-less society, and I say this being more sinner than saint, it has been tried before, and it has always failed.

It has always ended in burning Gomorrahs.

The reason is simple, the only things that ever endure in this world, do so because of men and women who believe in duty and sacrifice. Even above their personal needs or desires or whims.

And a nation devoid of such people, is a nation on the road to being unmade.

I have no real idea where all that came from. Save perhaps as someone who has loved, neither well nor wisely, finding myself for whatever reason tonight… looking closely at the mistakes, and seeing something I had quietly overlooked…. the miracles.

Odd bit of blather to be going on about, I grant ya.

Aye, but what’s a blog for, if not to ramble incoherently and occasionally… about the journey. 🙂

God, whatever God you bend your knee to, keep you all safe.

Enemies of the State, Young Alexanders and Multi National Corporations

Ohhhh

theres got to be more
on this
road of life
there’s got to be more
than this
horror and strife
oh hhhh
there’s got to be more
On the
Road of Life

oh
there’s got to be more
than this
horror and strife

oh
there’s got to be more
than this
horror and strife

Ohhh
there’s got to be
Mooooore
on a
Road called life

–copyright 2011 HT & this blog

So I lit into Microsoft a post or so back, and deservedly so. But, while they are one of the more egregious examples of power corrupting, there is culpability enough to go around,

President Obama and the FBI- earn my unhappy face for an administration that unfortunately differed from his predecessor’s only in eloquence. In the real nuts and bolts of what he signed into law, he continued the rape of the American citizen in the interest of big business, and the expansion of both the domestic and global police state, and the dismantling of civil liberties.

Sweeping into office on the dreams and quotations of better men, men who fought FOR civil liberties, his administration, as I feared (go back to my pre-election posts) has been a staggering betrayal of every election promise, and every election speech.

But even I, am surprised to the degree, that he has utterly sold out the American people.

He is the living, walking embodiment of the talking android from Ishmael Reed’s seminal MUMBO JUMBO (get the audio book, it reorders the text and is actually an improvement). Something designed to speak the words, and have the appearance of the common man and liberty, but underneath serves those who would see the bulk of men in chains.

His latest betrayal, not just of America, but the world, is signing into law Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. Which basically gives media empires sweeping, unmitigated powers to shut down anything or anyone, anywhere in the world, with the full military might of Herr Sam backing them. It’s a blank check for tyranny.

Another one.

God, seriously, I get the idea of money, I even get the idea of power, and I know Obama, and the various acronym-ed agencies, distant step-children of the Nazi SS, are but pawns for massive multi-nationals, but I don’t get the pawn part.

I mean, I don’t get the trade-off of power and money for liberty and justice.

I don’t see the value of much, if you have to give up those last two things to get it. I don’t see what good money and power does you, after you’ve betrayed every single thing and every single one.

I don’t know how you look anyone in the eye, your children, your family, when they ask you how your day was… and you have to dodge around the fact that you spent the day eliminating liberties.

Not seeing the upside to that.

To surrender one freedom, to back pedal on one liberty, to erase one right, is to spit on the sacrifice, and blood, and suffering of countless people. It is to make a mockery of every war fought, and every life lost, if the purpose of all that blood, is but more efficient tyranny.

Is that really the job you signed up for?

More efficient tyranny?

Be it warrantless wiretaps, warrantless isp, email, vehicle and cell phone monitoring. Even usage of social networks, such as the whole Cops twittering fiasco. Any liberty you think you have online, law enforcement is using as a weapon.

Every single one.

How is Nazi Germany wrong, if a Patriot Act America and an Apartheid Israel can be right?

How? What did we fight for, if we surrender everyone of our liberties to people who live and die, by every tide, and every atrocity, we fought to stem.

We fought Nazis, only to become Nazis? And we fought slavery, only to become enslaved?

Not acceptable.

Not if you wrap it in the red, white, and blue, not if you have trumpets blaring, not if you sanctify it in tales of Holocaust.

It is not acceptable.

If you came out of a Holocaust, only to become a holocaust, then you are not acceptable.

And you can call yourself the FBI, and you can call yourself America, and you can yourself patriots.

But what you are, are your grandparents betrayers, and your Grandchildrens slavers. What you are… is the problem.

Money, Power?

For this you sell your past and your future?

Money,Power?

But how much of either do you see?

You young recruit, I’m asking you. Hired to bark on command, hired to put down protestors, and spy on citizens, and kill enemies.

Is the money good? Is the power good?

Not good enough I think.

Because I think even paying lip service to liberty, and justice, you begin to know those words. And in some part of you, you seek more of the American Dream, then the tatters they are using you to make of it.

They are old. And scared. These tired dragons of Woodrow’s New World Order dream, that hire you to protect their money and their power.

But you are young, and somewhere not quite dulled by the programming, is the idea… that we can all be more, than pawns in an old game.

Money and Power.

Those are old ideas for old men. They are illusions of paper and pen. And Alexanders would have laughed at them, and put all these foolish old men to the sword.

All of them.

All the captains of Industry. The plotters of wars. The hoarders of wealth.

Alexanders would have laughed at them, and put them all to the sword.

Liberty and justice.

THESE are words to put air in your lungs, these are words to make your chin rise, and your heart swell. These are words to raise children on. These are the causes you were put here for young Alexanders.

You are not here to be a simpering old man’s dog, protecting his ip and movie rights, and his numerous illusions, you are here young Alexander, in this place, in this time, in this position… to make right the things that are wrong.

To make right, the things that are wrong.

And I so charge you, by a right and a duty that transcends multi-nationals and war machines and orbital weapons, I charge you by a higher duty, your own decency…. look at all this blood… and be moved.

And how you pleaseth God, whatever God you bend your knee to… how you pleaseth God, dispose the day.

This is why old men love wars, because it is a meat grinder for the young, so you can not rise against them, so you learn your place… in the game. Their game.

Be better than that my young Alexanders.

Be better… than them.

They speak of evolution as if it’s a dead thing.

It is not.

You are evolution.

Which is why they are in such a hurry to kill or corrupt you.

Evolve past them, and past their sad little dreams of power and money.

The day is coming, some would say it is upon us, when you will have to choose young Alexanders… what masters you follow and what masters, like rotting oaks, you fell.

Choose well, my lords.

Choose well.

Humanity is a goal: On Science fiction, so-called Zombies, the Space Race and dreaming futures to make them

I don’t think Humanity is a birthright, I think it is a goal. And I think most people in this world, most Americans especially, fall short of that goal.

We have this ludicrous idea, particularly in this country which produces only one thing in quantity, mass murderers and television, that adult hood is something we reach in years. That we hit 18 or 21 and suddenly we are adults.

No. To repeat a trite phrase, but hopefully not tritely used here, ‘age is just a number’. Maturity is something else. And I think with just a quick scan of what passes for dialog in this connected age, what passes for conversation, you can see very few people… grow. While they may grow physically, mentally they stop maturing, in ways deep and dangerous they are immature children, with adult responsibilities.

Mayors, Governors, Police Chiefs, Generals, a whole world full of children in the roles of men, but lacking the conscience of men, the humanity of men.

I don’t think Humanity is a birthright, I think it is a goal. And I think most people in this world, most Americans especially, fall short of that goal.

There was a time when people went to the movies to cheer for the hero, to be inspired by heroism. Today people watch movies, or tv, or play video games to watch the other suffer. To play out vicarious games of aggression and an end to responsibility. It’s part of the reason so-called zombie movies are so popular, because subconsciously you have empty, aimless, driftless, purposeless population, that wants and needs and is angry, but is unsure of what they want, and what they need, and what they are angry about.

It’s just an irrational need, irrational hunger you may say, byproduct of an irrational leadership, an irrational age. Caused by at every path, the higher callings of their nature being sabotaged, by a leadership that relies on ruling ignorant, stupid, misinformed, desperate people.

So a rudderless people see in the myth of the ghoul (the proper name for what western cinema incorrectly misnames zombie), this engine of only hunger and no responsibility, something to identify with. To lose the burden and responsibility of higher humanity, of callings of honor and friend and family and duty, and sublimate it all to the joys of abandon and bestiality.

A consumer nation, a capitalist/tyrannical world, taken to its rudderless extreme.

It’s the reason I have no use for Ghoul ‘Zombie’ films, or torture porn flicks, or slasher flicks. Everything in moderation, but I see in this deluge of barbarity, that in our fictions, do we shape our facts.

The 50s and 60s, decades of science fiction fanaticsm, of the dreaming of stars, this obsession passed like cholera to every man, woman, and child of the age, and the dreaming culminating in man walking on the moon.

Shared idea space, as progenitor to our physical space. Our facts but late fortifications of our fictions. Heady concepts, but well trod ones.

So what becomes of a culture whose obsessions are death, war, serial killers, cannibalism and the crazed dead? God, whatever God you believe in, being always kind, he gives you what you dream of.

He gives you horror, if that is what you are intent on having.

So many have died aspiring to nobler ends for those who follow them, do not sacrifice all the virtues and the hopes they have bequeathed to you… in pursuit of petty dreams of barbarism. Dream larger. Save yourself, and save us all and… dream Nobler.

Dream of a world where wars may be ended, governments held accountable, forests replenished, aboriginal people saved, and lives bettered. Dream of a better world, and who knows, you may become a better man (or woman)… to build it.