Church Shootings, South Carolina, President Obama, and Podcasts

There is a line I quote a lot, but it’s because like many quotes, it’s a truth in it that endures, and is applicable to many. And it is definitely applicable to me.

I’ll quote it here again…

“You writers live too much out of the world.” –Graham Greene’s THE THIRD MAN.

Here’s the thing about the world, there is always some new atrocity the 24 hour news cycle is waiting to feed you. Someone’s misfortune that, with crocodile solemnity, they are eager to spread before you like some banquet, some forbidden feast, for you to put your snout in and snuffle.

I know people who make a home in-front the TV when the latest atrocity breaks, and they ‘tsk’, and ‘cluck’, and they make the expected exclamations of “horrible” this, and “what’s this world coming to” but you get the feeling it is more rote than real.

That ‘real’ left town many atrocities ago, and they have yet to notice that what remains is something that watches for reasons less altruistic than information, and more hungry than concern.

I can’t do the 24 hour news cycle. I gave up on networked TV a long time ago and haven’t looked back, or particularly missed it. Too much of CNN or Insert News Station here, and I have to get away, I have to move, I can’t watch people suffer.

I’m old school that way.

I believe in heroes to rescue maidens, and Knights to slay dragons. And I’m fool enough to believe we can all be heroes… all of us. In small ways, and personal ways, and local ways.

But the 24 hour news cycle inundates you with a world’s wrongs, many wrongs too horrific and large and endemic for you to change.

So there becomes a war within you between the desire to change what you can, and the 24 hour news cycle that indoctrinates you, numbs you to a world beyond your time, or means, or scope to change… a news cycle that tells you “relinquish hope, relinquish the idea of days without horror, relinquish the lie of action, be a spectator, be a consumer. Live in the world we give you, the way we give it you.”

And reduce all your rebellions to a tsk here, and a shake of the head there. That’s what the 24 hour news cycle says to me if I watch it too long.

I have to pick my battles. I have to pick my fights. I have to narrow my atrocities. And some days I have to have no atrocities at all. It’s the only way I can live without rage all the time.

I have to have the courage to change the things I can, the strength to accept the things I cannot change, and the wisdom to know the difference.

Not being a part of the 24 hour news cycle, using the Internet to consume news in my time in my way, means sometimes, if I’m embroiled with my life, and the people in it and around it, the real news, then I may not consume another man’s definition of the news… for days on end.

I find I’m a better man for not being suckled every moment on the teat, and rage, and hate, and horror of Rome the metaphorical. I find I’m a better, calmer man, and people find me a calming, even soothing presence, and it’s because the nightly news is not on the back of my eyeballs when I look at them, I look at them without the media’s biases or fears, I do not fall asleep to Rome’s tirade, and I do not wake to her gnashing.

And that has made all the difference.

I think too many, especially the young, who not yet having learned the value of their own life much less anyone else’s, internalize Rome’s madness, drink deep and long of it, and adopt the American past time of mass murder; as if it was no more than a fashion you could put on. Killing for hates handed down to them like ill fitting suits, and reasons not understood by them, killing with no real sense.

No real sense.

Not understanding really, that killing is easy, but the hole it leaves is large, and affects so many. That every life… even the most paltry, took a million million miracles to breathe air into, and you can never know how even the most unworthy life, might, if no more than via tangential fate, give us a painter or poet or astronaut or hero. And with one bullet you can unwind innumerable tomorrows, kill innumerable tomorrows, and we are all the poorer for all those doors closed. All those lives changed. All that unneeded pain, piled upon all our souls.

We are all… by these atrocities, broken and put back together, broken and put back together, broken and put back together. But each time there is less of us, and less of us, and less of us.

Until, we are so removed from every step we took toward the light, we find ourselves mad, hopeless animals, penned in a coliseum, screaming for the fall of blood. Our souls are fragile things, that can bloom or wither, depending upon what they are fed.

So resist the 24 hour news cycle. Resist assumptions. And seek out things that will feed the better angels of your nature.

You might find the link below, a thing for feeding your soul. I did.

I must first state I am not a President Obama apologist. As an Independent I have taken him to task for what I feel is the dismantling of Liberties, and his paying back his corporate backers by selling generations of Americans into debt, to bail out a stock market comprised of companies that should have been allowed to burn.

That said, even with those we disagree… we must find that common ground where we can, so if we can not agree with their choices, we can at least perhaps understand the making of those choices.

If we can relate to each other as more than ‘them and us’, see politics as less bloody warfare, and more people all honestly looking to make their home, their neighborhood, and their nation better… if we can see ourselves as tied by our commonalities first, then our differences become strengths rather than sticking points, ripping our nation and our world apart.

So I ask you Republican, You Democrat, You Independent, You Man, You Woman… to listen to the following pod-cast.

And take away from it, the parts that will make you better.

I was feeling such insufferable rage in the wake of the Church Shooting and what I saw in the media’s handling of it… However, I listened to the below pod-cast, and the easy grace a President of the United States brought to a moment devoid of all grace… and I could breathe again, easy deep breaths. And I could see beyond the pumping of my own rage.

A long term fix? No.

But only death is long term. In life we must take the fleeting moments of grace when we can find them. And use that grace to empower us to end atrocities one person at a time.

You might find in the below pod-cast something hopeful.

WTF_-_EPISODE_613_PRESIDENT_BARACK_OBAMA.mp3

Colorado and the News and Monsters

“The Quest is the Quest.”
DR. WHO: UNDERWORLD

Colorado.

I’ll be brief, as the media has flapped their lips much, and as always said little. Nothing of use. And I have spoken before on Americans massacring Americans. The unchecked carnage and irrationality, of a population that cheers the death of people and nations it does not know, coming home to roost.

Machine men
with Machine minds
Killing in these Machine times

I was traveling when the news of Colorado intruded.

That’s the only word for it.

The 24 hour news machine/propaganda agenda… lives nowhere as well, as in places we go to… travel away. Lives nowhere as completely as plane, train and bus stations. Almost like an oft repeated mantra of programming to blunt any true travel, a mantra of… ‘this be the world… forever…there is no escape’.

Something oppressive about the 24 hour news cycle, I have always found.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t be informed of tragedies such as Colorado (What a beset state), and immediately informed.

What I am saying is the media seems to want to inform us of nothing else. In a day when pilots averted plane crashes, and good Samaritans saved hikers, and countries at war found moments of peace, none of that good news rated even a footnote.

I’m saying the news is not the world, it is selective showcasing of the world, and perhaps if that selection sought to gleefully make stars of something beyond tragedy and mass murder, there would be less sad, pathetic young men, seeking to make their mark with the media… by giving it what it wants.

Murder.

I’m saying I listened to reporters almost salivating over every detail of a dozen dead and dozens more maimed and scarred and changed for life.

And I did not hear the victims in all that endless parade of lipsticked Fox whores and well quaffed CNN pimps, putting on their sincere faces as they sought to poke wounds for blood and wring eyes to elicit tears. I did not hear the victims at all. I heard ghouls, almost vibrating with the joy of a juicy, salacious story.

Vibrating with the joy of a new boogie man and court case to make their names with. Perhaps book deals and made for TV movies for all involved.

I am saying one man chose to change many lives, do not let him change any more. Do not give him… the stage. And reasons? I do not care of reasons. Reasons do not raise the dead, or replace eyes or limbs or livers. I do not care the reason people cross the line, it is enough that they cross the line.

And that they must answer for it, in such a manner as to make the next man see naught but misery in the repetition.

And the talk of insanity is and has always been an invalid one. All crime is insanity, so it is never a case of innocent by reason of insanity, it should always be a case of guilty by reason of insanity.

And in no way should monsters profit from their crime.

No book deals, no interviews, no made for tv offers. Make it illegal to profit from a massacre, whether you are the perpetrator, or a tv station, or a movie studio.

Sure you can write or create a documentary etc, but any profits go into a fund for the victims and their families. NO one profits from a massacre, least of all the perpetrator, becomes the new law of the land.

His name is removed, is vilified, is lessened, his likeness done away with, and everything he was reduced to a bland label such as: ‘”pathetic impotent eunuch BH” stands trial for his crimes.’

And throughout history, that is the name and the manner of man that shall be remembered.

Do that, and then see how many will seek that path for glory!

We must stop glamourizing mass murderers, those who take the easy road to their media promised minutes of fame and infamy. Because to continue to glorify and profit from such massacres is to be complicit in the crime, and worse to be complicit in future crimes, by continuing to romanticize a society of monsters.

All that went through my head in the 15 minutes total, over the course of a weekend that I could stomach to listen to the news whores and pimps, in their glory. And to my horror I found them, all the reporters, far more sickening than the man who walked into a theater… to get their attention.

America will not have ground to stand on with any other country, in judging their atrocities, till this country first owns up and manages our own boiling over evils.

I wish for those affected, an end to the monster that caused their pain, but more than that, I wish an end to the monster-makers… which our news media is no little part of.

Here endeth the Lesson.

Liberty’s Great Lap: The Fort Hood Texas Shooting

I have very little to say about the Fort Hood, Texas massacre.

Not because I have become numbed to massacres by dint of long sojourn in America, that bastion of massacres, though surely some of that is in my reaction and the reaction at large. I feel for the loss of life and loved ones in this atrocity, as I do every atrocity. Those we endure ourselves and those atrocities we impose on others.

I feel them all.

No I have very little to say, because it was largely said by better men than me, before me.

“I don’t know who I’m going to shoot, you put a rifle in my hand”

and

“This is chickens coming home to roost”

America for a while now, has worn herself thin declaring war on every darker, non-christian country from Haiti to Liberia. Waging what amounts to the bloodiest religious crusades in the history of the world, while being tactful enough to keep the idea of crusades and ethnic cleansings out of the television reasoning for such expenditure of lives and dollars.

At a time when America would be best served by shoring up her own crumbling economic, moral, educational and cultural landscape we instead invest our time in destroying these things for other countries. And the oddest thing is, we get other disenfranchised people to go out and disenfranchise other people.

It’s a cycle we’ve been engaged in since the Revolutionary war. Making of victims, our victimizers.

The Irish became the American police force, because Ireland had become a fucking killing ground. And disenfranchised soldiers flocked here to find something… better.

The Buffalo Soldiers, escapees of enslavement, won renown by being efficient cleaners of the plains, killers of Native Americans.

Latin Americans escaping in some cases decades of bloody totalitarian regimes, often supported by US Dollars, augment today’s dwindling American armed forces.

And the cycle continues.

Our victims today, America will turn around and make (when they have no other jobs to accept) her victimizers tomorrow. That type of duplicity and juggling act is no easy feat to keep going.

In fact it’s damn difficult and dangerous.

And the concept of diminishing returns being a reality, it is costing America.

America has by hook or by crook, pushed, grabbed, cajoled, threatened anyone it can…. to garner the manpower to continue its endless war. In many cases that has meant the armed forces being more than happy to augment its forces with the less than stable. From well documented cases of soldiers with Autism, to convicts, to out and out psychopaths.

America doesn’t care who they put on the front lines, as long as you will kill for them. It doesn’t care what you have to lose to go someplace and kill people you have no beef with, as long as you do it. As long as you will be their gun.

The problem with that is, every so often, people get shot with their own guns. Particularly irresponsible people. And America is an irresponsible nation.

It is an irrational nation, that breeds this in their subjects, demands it even. Demands that you accept the most irrational reasoning, the most irrational justifications… for that which can not be justified.

You ask of people to kill for your lies, to weigh the life of the other… cheap. For no other reason than you say so. To surrender personal moralities, religions, codes, ethics, humanities… to the ever shifting dictates of the state.

And at some point teaching people to weigh other lives cheap means the ability to weigh all lives cheap.

Do you understand?

You can not spit horror into the wind, and not ultimately end up swallowing it yourself.

I do not know this Officer Hasan, beyond the sound-bites that his life has been reduced to. But as a psychiatrist, he was obviously an intelligent man, more intelligent arguably than those who now debate him, and as a psychiatrist understanding of the strange landscape of the human condition.

So to try and right this off as a dirty muslim, killing good Americans would be inept.

No, do not put that lie upon your soul.

Officer Hasan perhaps was never more American, than in his massacre of other Americans.

It is after all, the American past time. Ask any number of Post offices, or Shopping Malls, or Schools, or McDonalds.

No my dear beloved child, you lay that butchery at Fort Hood, where it belongs… with you.

And with me.

Hasan was the bomb, but we as America… were the lit and burning fuse.

Officer Hasan was by occupation aware of Abraham Maslov’s Hierarchy of Needs, and Berger and Luckmann’s Social Construction of Reality so he understood better than most the foilbles and fallacies of the human condition, its pitfalls, and yet he himself fell into them.

Looked too long into the abyss, and found it sweet.

What hope have the rest of us?

If a man whose occupation it is, to deal with pressure, himself crumbled under the pressure of America, how much more these 18 and 19 and 20 year olds that we send into the killing fields?

How shall they come back to us? Us… we who gleefully do send them out to kill, in unjust wars to unjust ends, if not changed and ready to show us… what lessons they have learned at liberty’s great lap.

Oh yes, what they have sown abroad, we will surely in the fullness of time, reap the harvest of at home.

You and me and all of us.

Unless we stop this train wreck direction America is on, this rule by sociopaths… then our Fort Hoods are waiting for us.

All of us.

This is what is to be learned from all that pain and anguish and calamity of Fort Hood. That it is America… unplugged.

Chickens coming home to roost.