The Cross-hairs of Mass Protest: the Ordinary and Extraordinary of Lines Crossed.

     I gotta say, speaking of crossing lines of defense—Trump crossed a fundamental line by encouraging violence against those that criticize him. He's a racist tyrant that lost the credibility and right to represent a peace loving country. So his "line" is null and void, and just as every scoundrel deserves to be shamed Trump deserves every bit of vitriol that comes his way.

Law enforcement's credibility is crippled as well by crossing the same sort of line, its use of excessive and lethal force, whether in response to a single person or groups of unarmed individuals. 

On the topic of looting it's just proof a threshold was reached—the result of compounded anger and suffering, the threshold for withstanding more than a century of economic oppression, racism and murder was reached. So it's not something one can rationalize away by ordinary criteria, the dispassionate standards of one not oppressed. It's the temperament of revolt and revolution!

These are indeed extraordinary times for the sufferer wherein the vector of what is ordinarily acceptable behavior is flipped and thus destruction of what represents the privileged abusive culture becomes the only viable path to release from virtual bondage. 

The same sort of definitive flip occurs for the soldier who must shut off their ordinary revulsion of violence and murder in order to traverse the extraordinary territory of war.  How does the sufferer continue to remain ordinary, nor orderly, when the conditions of survival have become so extraordinarily unbearable?! 

S/he, is something other than a mere "protester"; s/he without need to rationalize is now transformed by this extraordinary necessity into an extraordinary being... a revolutionary protagonist whose means for change have been reauthorized.

On the topic of agent provocateur's and the destruction of property it could be said that as with war there has been pillage, traitors and propagandists. But perhaps we should be thankful that our true "protesters" are not the rapists or cold-blooded murderers!

I'm saddened that so many don't have a clue what's underlying all this violence... on a simple level you could say some of us have a lower tolerance for suffering and indignation. 

But it should occur to us that none of us deserve to be shamed for suffering emotionally or physically at any level nor have to answer for the shameful way our president and some "peace officers" have acted. But it should occur to us that none of us deserve to be shamed for suffering emotionally or physically at any level nor have to answer for the shameful way our president and some "peace officers" have acted.

But aren't we all as members of a supposed democratic society responsible for promoting the opposite, the behaviors that are laudable? This would be the ideal that should have us wanting to see that no one suffers! How do we recreate that empathy?!

It could also be said that some of us have a lower tolerance for having to think critically or empathetically. The indignation in such cases is misdirected. Let's correctly assign our focus then on a legitimately unbiased dignified love of humanity by providing a leveler standard of living and healthcare for everyone. Make it a national, state, city, neighborhood, corporate and natural person's mandate. For to obviate responsibility by cordoning it off as only family and religious organizations' job to provide this nurturing is to fail at maintaining a democracy. The language and protocols we use in every single one of our endeavors can support this fundamental principle... if we truly wish to do away with localized and pervasive suffering and least of all expect everyone to behave rationally from the streets to the Whitehouse. Never mind insisting illiterate followers of a foul leader read between the lines—we can't all be on the same page if some of us haven't access to the book.

Dropping the flag as “dropping the ball”

Kelly O’Hara, the USA women’s soccer team player that picked up the dropped flag.

I have to say, you can still love your country and its flag even though your country’s ideals have been challenged by ignorant or repugnant  elected officials. I don’t equate the flag with ignorance or repugnance. The flag represents an ideal Democracy. Democracy may expose its weaknesses when public figures lose sight of those ideals, but it retains its strength through the activism of those who maintain its true strength. Pride in an ideal trumps the distaste for our failures.

By the way, bending a knee during a sports event national anthem is not the same as dropping the flag. The former calls attention to a failure of our ideals and demands we do something about that failure, while reckless dropping of the flag expresses a vanity and in fact the same attitude that leads to our failures—as in, “dropping the ball”!

Forbidden fruit and the beacon: an exegetical primer to defining pre-historical paradise; or language as a de-evolution of sublime understanding

 A shining beacon will fail to be a beacon once too many crowd around it competing for its light. Such is the fate of a crowded planet much less a democratic nation promising prosperity and freedom.

Some will be blinded, some trampled; some will choose to live in darkness and others will never know the light existed. All will be exemplary proof that knowledge of where to find the forbidden fruit of self-awareness becomes a fallen tree, that all are then forever exiled from a numinous life in paradise.

With out having mined the Peer journal literature on this subject of biblical exegesis and paradise I’d like to suggest that the reference to the knowledge of good and evil is more in fact a reference to success and failure with the result being pleasure or pain (a correction derived somewhat from Plato’s Gorgias where Socrates reveals that “pleasure” is not of necessity, the “good” nor “pain” equivalent to the “bad” or evil ). 

The manna bearing tree then is reference to information embedded in an ambiguity, a forest where our early ancestors learn how to map one’s way utilizing a kind of loose topographical grid, enforcing a gradual step by step pattern memory of the way to sustenance, which ultimately is pleasure and therefore a specific logical type of success. 

Because an early language is surely lacking in an array of explicit descriptive language one would have difficulty today to see through to the intended meaning from their broadly cast view, and so I wonder whether might we not err by projecting back to them the gift of being able to harness the complexity of symbolism and thus wield an as yet to develop mode of communication?

—unless we are willing to believe that language easily progresses as a step down from numinous awareness into the symbolic domain, an entropic state of token images and referents increasingly complicated by the clutter of adverbiage and the great spectrum of qualities and the jagged surfaces of in-between unproductive collisions, mistaken likenesses and false fruit; in which case we must flip the hourglass as it were and accept that perhaps language is a de-evolution of our understanding of our synchronous place on this miraculous sphere that orbits about that which we should indeed worship, our sun!

allies v axis powers

The word "allies" compared to the phrase, "axis powers":

"Allies" conjures an image of arms linked and sharing the force of purpose like a broad wave front; while "axis powers" depicts individuals as spokes dependent upon a primary universal bond and source of power, around which they are bound to eternally rotate (making the swastika a natural choice for a symbol)

Truth in Blue, lyrics sans chorus

When the sky is no longer blue

I Find myself thinking of you

Did you know how it feels

(feels like sunshine)

Feels like sunshine held captive in the dew

Let me tell you what is real?

You said "I love you" through the window pane

Window mullions crossed that heart again

I think we perched upon high tension lines

(Thoughtless, we were)

Piqued wounds in the air, dark birds unaware 

We are chambered, between x and y

When the ground no longer has a hue

I lose myself thinking of you

But did you see me standing there?

(look through the glare)

Looks like shadow, where my heart reels,

Censored glistening amber fields.

You said "I love you" shifting up the gear

Street lights chipping at my belief again

I think we pieced together two fault lines

(Reckless lovers)

Piqued wounds in the air, dark birds unaware 

They are chambered in frames of strobing night

Time beads up the sweat of truth in play

Nor's there time to melt the frosty veil.

But it sure glowed as you drove away

(look through the glow)

Spiral logic belies a pearly truth

Black ice concealed beneath drifting snow.

No one was ready for you to pass that way.

Why didn't you take it slow?

Old enough to know better...

"...old enough to know better." 

Now there's a phrase I have a problem with. If all parents raised their children in exactly the same fashion and under the same conditions we might be able to say we all agree on a level of maturity such as "old enough to know better". But we don't. And levels of maturity vary greatly at all grade levels. (I can confirm this from experience watching k thru 5th grade children interact at recess) --- in fact there are too many children these days who don't get enough supervision or the opportunity at home to witness how to compassionately treat other people. Too many children witness adult frustration and anger, and sometimes terrifying examples of resignation, addiction and violence. In this way socialization skills and the quality of our overall togetherness is increasingly challenged today.

A child by the law may be expected to know better by say 16 or 18 but if they were given no firm guidelines nor given a proper social perspective, they will likely often cross behavioral boundaries, inflict damage upon others and property and in the course of events upon themselves as well; and this because of a fundamental lack of decent parental nurturing in the formative years of early childhood. 

This lack of a parent or decent supervision is not necessarily the fault solely of the parent. I believe for many it's the financial conditions that create a rift between the parent and child. This same rift is what becomes the prison pipeline later in life. It is a path towards self destruction that is not determined by teachers, school administrators or government who find themselves looking for solutions afterwards for what is more a symptom of what is wrong with our system which itself neglects to sustain a healthy workforce and their families. Too many families have become "externalities", and the institutional entities which purport to be educational and social services merely propagate and exacerbate the neglected students' circumstances by isolating them and thus perhaps sealing their "anti-social" fate. Finally, we may fairly say we are witnessing the birth a nihilistic generation... and a new dark age of feudalism...

energy dependence, 2/8/2014

This phrase "energy independence" that we keep hearing in defense of oil, coal and fracking rests upon a logical fallacy and is a red herring. Every extraction or expenditure of earth's resources for "energy" depends upon the actions of many determined or otherwise ignorant persons and has innumerable life threatening effects which are not at all beneficial to life on earth. We will never be truly independent, even with solar or wind power. And we'll still be plundering the earth for her other privatized "commodities"!