DOTS AGAIN

glade valley presbyterian

In the years of my adult life knowing some 4 leggeds well, studying them to understand them, I find them just like us in about every way but the human way of moving things. We humans move things that are in our way. A dog or a cat never seems to imagine it's possible to move something. I've seen them all watch me move things, pick something up and take it out the door, like that, and I've seen them watch me move something out of the way to get by it. I wonder if it's clicking for them that they can move things too, but it never does. A dog on a chain that circles the post until the chain has no more length and the dog can't move, it will sit there until somebody comes along and walks the dog back around the post to unwind. No matter how many times you unwind the dog, the dog never gets it. It's something a dog's mind doesn't seem to have a place for.

I've recently finished a book of the science of studying entunement between humans and animals. It was quite interesting, worth the read. My only problem with it was the loyalty to the scientific method. It's a good thing, and I appreciate that it has brought civilization a very long ways in a short time as the method for understanding this world. I'm all with that and am glad it's the way it is. Only problem for me was, the science method leaves out the poetry of being. At once I appreciated the writer's allegiance to never overstating or misstating, appreciated it very much. The way of science sees us as bodies with consciousness. I see us as consciousness with bodies. Big difference. I don't believe one is right and one is wrong. It's just different ways of seeing the same thing. Two sides of the same coin.

It surely was my saturation of fundamentalist church throughout childhood that rendered me uninterested in facts, most interested in understanding. Sometimes I tell myself the only thing I got of any value from growing up under that cloud is that it made me turn my back to religion and go my solitary pilgrim way. That's not entirely so, but when the preacher's in the pulpit coming down on communism in the McCarthy era, something aint right. It means he's a sucker for propaganda like the people he's talking to. I don't remember him getting excited about what the Nazis did to the Jews when the images were being released by Life magazine and other sources around that same time. I'd have thought anybody with a heart would be moved. But it's ok. They're Jews. They don't have souls. Or they're Ns. Or card carrying liberals. Or readers. Or birdwatchers. Easy targets. Gentle people that don't fight back. It's a good thing to kill them. They're Godless. Not like us.

I paid attention to things like that in my childhood. I was 12 when the pictures came out of the concentration camps. I was in the 6th grade and also learned the word dictator at school that year. I think the teacher saw those pictures too and was touched like I was. She told us there's no word in the German language for love. Later, when I took a course in German, love was one of the first words we learned. Those pictures had a powerful impact on me. My parents subscribed to Life magazine and I about wore the concentration camp pictures out looking at them. It soured me on Germans and Germany really bad, for a very long time, science too. Until I went to Germany and saw they were just like us except for some cultural differences and language.

I knew that if the same thing happened in this country, a right-wing takeover of the government, we'd fall for it the very same as the Germans. And we did. Seeing the parallels kept me anxious throughout the nihilist Cheney era. I wondered what group of easy target people they'd fire us up against here at home. Immigrants. The boxcar thing doesn't work a second time. Lone gunman has been blamed until nobody believes it any more. Now they do character assassination and private plane crashes that nobody can find a reason behind.

Political hardball strategies have been crippling our government since the Nixon era. The right wing's revenge for the impeachment of Nixon has been a serious problem for the last 30 years. They've set out to destroy our government and take over the military. And you may be sure they will turn it on us, the nonbelievers. Anybody that thinks they're about democracy is comfortably numb. But Americans don't want democracy anymore and a military dictatorship may be the order of the day. I hope by then I'm dead. If I'm not, I like to think when they start lining people up to shoot them, I'll get in the line by my own will. I don't want to live in their world. I'd call it a shortcut to gloryland.

But that's not going to happen any time soon. May never. Like I've said before, and will say again, I'm no prophet. Me saying it is evidence right there that whatever the prophecy is, it's not going to happen. It might be a near accurate guess for the context as it is now. But 10 years down the line context has changed many times and nothing is the same any more. I'm no Nostradamus, nor was meant to be. When I get going like that, I tend to think of it as connecting dots like a constellation. Connect the dots and it's Orion with his bow. If you don't know about Orion, it's just a bunch of stars, which it is if you do know about Orion. The Orion part is in the human mind only. The same as when I connect the dots. It's in my mind only. Somebody else would connect the dots a different way. And somebody else yet another. I'm trying to get over excitement about such subjects as the right-wing assault on democracy. There's nothing I could do about it one way or another. I want to keep my mind more focused on what I can do instead of what I can't do.