TO VOTE OR NOT TO VOTE

        no


On the verge of deciding not to vote this time, I'm thinking of joining the left wing, the half of the population that does not vote, the ranks of the indifferent. Everyone deciding not to vote has their own reason for indifference, same as among the voters, each with a reason that inspires the choice made. Mine, before, has been that a democracy requires voting. Voting is the sacred act of democracy. Several years ago, when I saw our American democracy had been subject to a corporate coup, I thought of voting as an act of protest saying: one digit wants democracy. It means nothing as protest the same as it means nothing toward deciding who wins the election, whatever the election. To vote in this time is the same as saying nothing. In a state that is 75% repub and 25% demo, it means nothing, whatever county I vote in. The republicans are rigging voting machines, which won them the 2004 election saving the Supremes the embarrassment of nullifying two elections in a row. They showed us with lucid clarity that we do not have democracy in America, no need to beat it into our heads with a hammer. If we don't get it, all the better.

Vote rigging means nothing, same as voting means nothing. The corporate system of government we have now doesn't care which side wins, both sides are bought and totally controlled. I've been observing with Obama that he has approved the continuation of the "Patriot Act," the constitution of the police state, and in his first two years when he had majority in congress, he conceded to the republicans over and over, Joe Lieberman style, though pretended not to. Gitmo? The Reagan Junta's strategy of divide-and-conquer has grown until the Corporate State put in a black man for president to further divide us. By now, thanks to half a century of propaganda that grows more sophisticated each decade, just about everything we believe politically is false and we've been divided unto maybe likely civil war. While the 99% are divided and focusing on the division, the 1% goes about their business of robbing the working people unnoticed. Investigative reporting is of the past, same as reason. Racial divisions are being used for smokescreen to keep our attention off the Corporate State, keep us pre-occupied. If we don't fall for the smokescreen, prison will take care of it.

American government has become OF, BY and FOR the Corporate entities now called people. We, the actual people made of meat instead of money are being shut down like the Tibetans in western China, regarded the lower class out of sight, the peasant class, in what was once their own world. The Obama administration bailed out the Banks that wrecked the economy and returned to them the resources they lost in overzealous attempts to rob working people. Among the millions of people who lost their own sustenance, thanks to the Bank's ruse, what do they get? It was government supported robbery on a massive scale. One major step toward fading the middle class into the peasantry. The kick that sent the ball between the goal posts. If I were to vote, I'd have to vote for Obama, just because my entire being would not allow pointing my attention to Romney. Yet I know one will give us the illusion he's for "the people," while the other is up front that he's dead set against "the people," the non-corporate people. Any way we vote, we vote against our own interest as human beings. To vote now is to participate in the great deception as a player.

I'm undecided in this way, to vote or not to vote, though I understand that not voting amounts to voting republican. Whenever my mind returns to thinking a vote matters, I remind myself that's how I want it to be, not how it is. I want to vote in local elections, because a vote sometimes matters there. I could vote locally and leave the rest blank for the voting machine to fill in republican. Maybe there will be a libertarian to vote for, but I haven't seen one on a ballot in NC in a very long time. Or maybe I don't notice. How I vote does not matter more than whether I vote. It's as meaningless as saying I don't want my country to be a police state, but that's like saying Dick and Jane ran down the hill. Nothing. Maybe this corporate police state is the karmic payback for the white and black people coming onto the continent uninvited, killing the entire continent of people living here, putting survivors in concentration camps called reservations for over a century. Whites came onto the continent shutting down the cultures and ways of life of a whole continent of people in the most violent way, killing. Americans have become the most murderous people on the planet, far and away the greatest prison population on the planet, and continually creating wars in poor countries. The wave of killing Indians from east coast to west coast kept on going and turned inward where land ended, the white and black populations killing themselves when killing Indians was over.

Our national karmic debt would have to be big. Wiping out an entire continent of people by killing them is no small thing. Now we kill each other. We've had one disastrous civil war and it feels like another is brewing. Evidently, it didn't matter karmically that White man had God on his side. We American white people and black people have been a deadly force against ourselves all along the way. Surely the American appetite for killing one another has its karmic root in the manner of collective takeover of the continent. Whatever the payback, it would have to cover the entire continent and be a mortal danger to ourselves. In this time we see our government turning on us as the enemy. We The People have become the Indians. Targets. Our guns can't save us, like their arrows failed to save them. The only reason I would choose to drop by the Whitehead schoolhouse on Tuesday the 6th would be a social gesture with the people I live among who still believe we have a democracy. I remember in Lillian Hellman's JULIA, early anti-fascists are never understood. So what's the point of attempting to be understood? I can't change anything but my own mind. No need to attempt to do otherwise.


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TAKE ME TO YOUR LEADER

     robert motherwell


Another shooting incident in Milwaukee, this time several Sikhs at their temple. The white guy with the gun took the Sikhs in turbans for towel-head Ay-rabs. What's the difference? Immigrants. Not white. I saw a posting somebody put on facebook a few days ago of an American Indian with words to the effect that we're concerned about immigrants coming in and taking our land away from us. The man doing the shooting, an adult white male, was bagging some towel-heads for Rush Limbaugh. This morning on the Diane Rhem interview show on NPR, she had some yoyo talking about we have to stop this phenomenon of surprise shootings by going to the source. That is lone wolf white men. Single white men who have been to Vietnam, though not necessarily. Now single white men are preemptive suspects. They need to be "surveiled." I'm thinking it needs to go deeper than that for the cause. Like if we want to cure the problem, let's do away with ignorance. That's not going to happen. It's too late. It's not going to happen anyway. This looks like a time of steady increase of ignorance instead of decrease.


I keep on thinking of a cartoon seen several years ago, a lot of years ago. Two little boys. One tells the other he saw a flying saucer land and a little man came out. The other little boy said, "What'd he say?" "He said, Take me to your leader." "What did you do?" "Nothing." "Why not?" "I didn't know who my leader was." That's how I've felt all my adult life. I'm not sad about it. I'm glad none of the politicians in the country can be called my leader. Not in any way I could tolerate would I call any of them my leader. What a travesty it is that we only have politicians to call our leaders. They are not anybody's leaders. They couldn't lead a pack of dogs by pushing a meat wagon. Some people might think of some of them as their leaders, but I can't imagine who they'd be, unless they would be obedient corporate execs. I feel the same sorrow that possessed Gore Vidal in his last years, sorrow seeing what has become of the home of the brave, the land of the free, all that uplifting belief system we learned as children in school, along with the honor of dying for country.


These shootings by white guys that happen more and more frequently inspire no sociological or psychological investigations into what it is in the society that inspires this behavior. Like Charlton Heston said of American history in Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 911, "We have a lot of blood on our hands." Karma. As a nation, we have killed freely all the way along as if it were our righteous duty as a nation "under God," whatever that means. I can't help but see these surprise "random" shootings as karmic return on a major part of the American character, the right to kill. I see this guy in Aurora, Colorado, entering the exit door of the theater and shooting people by surprise, like I see General Custer with horse hooves covered for silence in first light charging a village with snow muffling the horses' hooves for surprise. They charged in quietly and killed as many as possible, killed their horses. Reading in American history what General George Custer did to the Indians, I couldn't help but be satisfied he met his end at the Little Big Horn. As is said of karma, he had it coming, in abundance. Before he went down, he had the opportunity to see his regiment was being wiped out. How many villages had they wiped out?


On the ship in the Navy, it could be said the captain was my leader, but in my heart and mind, he was not anything to me. He was a player in a game I wanted nothing to do with. In the time of the Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, "crisis," when some communists were making a play for power and the fascist government couldn't handle them, calling on the Americans for assistance. My ship was sent there to "patrol" back and forth across the harbor in front of Santo Domingo. It was a beautiful city from the sea. On watch at night I could see The King And I, the Yul Brynner version, playing on the drive-in theater screen with binoculars. It wasn't like I was distracted by it. Had it been La Dolce Vita, I'd have been distracted for sure. The thrill running through the officers was the chance that we might be able to lob some shells into the city and do some damage. Americanista power. I prayed the whole time we were there that we not fire on the city. I could not tolerate being a part of the American war machine shooting up the poor section of the city. Of course, that's where the terrorists are hiding; in that time they were called communists.


Without public health care, without public psychiatric help, the people needing help don't get it when they're of the working class and can't afford insurance. To politicians that's ok. The working class is the enemy, potential rioters, strikers, the thick-fingered masses. Plus, they don't have any money to give the politicians, who are even worse than preachers at asking for free money. If you're not a source for free money, you don't exist, even if you tell good jokes. I'm glad I don't exist to them, like I'm glad I don't exist for the Jehovah's Witnesses. The last time they stopped here, I ran them off permanently. Nothing here of interest to you, just an old set-in-his-ways heathen. The new people to go around in the cars browbeating people in their own homes are told when they pass my house to keep away from that old man, he might shoot you. I don't know that for a fact, but I do imagine what they say is an exaggerated version of whatever it is I said or did that they understood all those years ago. Whatever it is, it keeps them away. No need to question a good thing.


We have such a hard-edged martial society where big college jocks on steroids bash into each other in mosh pits to hard-core punk at concerts. There is an underlying hostility between men who go around with chips on their shoulders looking for anybody to knock one off by looking at him wrong. In Glade Creek several years ago a man had an acre of ground covered by 55gal barrels standing above the ground on posts with a gamecock attached by tether to the barrel that was his home. Chicken prison was all I could think. I felt sad for those poor chickens having to live. Something like that makes me then feel sorry for all the domestic animals around the globe that are regarded without soul, without consciousness, without feeling, without emotion, without even awareness. Then it gets so immense I can't handle that thinking any more and have to let it go as something beyond my mental capacities. I accept on a deeper level how things are. Acceptance is what I want more and more of in myself. I find the more I accept the context of my life, the easier my life can be.


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AMERICAN INTOLERANCE

I'm not interested in the gun rights argument the same as I'm not interested in capital punishment issues. Capital punishment is set and gun laws are set. It is a truth that the American passion for guns is a bit out of balance, but then so is everything else. Now the guy in the movie theater playing dress-up in a SWAT outfit walks into the movie theater and blows away as many people as he can in a given time. How American is that? It happens here so frequently, it has become a particularly American "crime." Who is surprised anymore? If the American populace were aware that there is a valid world beyond American borders, we'd be collectively ashamed. But who is? A lone gunman who doesn't represent anybody but himself. Whatever. I can't argue with the availability of guns and ammo. Guns are American as Barbie.


I've wondered for a long list of years about American collective karma, like what is the return on the wholesale slaughter of a continent of people? What about the return on the slaughter of the buffalo? What about the return on willful ignorance? What about the return on the collective attitude---if it's living, kill it? What about the indifference of the corporate world in the well being of the peasantry? What is the karmic return on white people keeping black people down? These random public shootings by frustrated people strike me a return so particularly American as to have a great deal to do with our collective karma. I'm thinking these particularly American crimes against humanity have their collective return, like identifying the natural world with the devil, looking at everything living a target. The return would be particularly American too. And the arrogance of the white man? What kind of return does that bring to the white man? Contempt from other races, for sure.


In 1972, I was riding a train through (then) Yugoslavia, (now) Bulgaria, the only American, and behind the Iron Curtain. Pushing the boundaries of my comfort zone. Sometimes, people in clusters talking a language I didn't know would sometimes say to me, "President Nixon," and everybody laughed with derision at the American stooge. They were not friendly. Not hostile either. I realized they were subject to propaganda through news media just like we are. It would not have done me any good to say, and have translated, that I dislike him more than they do, for what he's doing to my democracy. If it were an American train and a Russian who didn't know English, I've an idea he would have been outside his comfort zone too. Such experiences are memorable. There is nothing like being looked at with suspicion by two Eastern European men in dark olive green coats to the floor, black boots, green hats and a red star on the forehead, black gloves. Kinda intimidating. They meant no intimidation. I was an outsider passing through.


It was inwardly exciting to me riding a train across a corner of the Iron Curtain that was once the Ottoman Empire, the only trace I was aware of being the scent of Turkish tobacco in the air from Trieste east. From Trieste west, the scent in the air was Virginia tobacco. I knew very few people who had been behind the Iron Curtain. In the time of the Cold War, it was not a fashionable place to go. It was a part of the world with a history I knew nothing about. The signs were in both Yugoslav and Russian. It was the most foreign environment I believe I've been in. Mexico is awfully foreign, but in a familiar way. Those people were not allowed guns and they lived in a police state. We are allowed guns and we live in a police state. What's the difference?


Americans are held in contempt all over the world now. In the Fifties, we were the Ugly American. Since then, we've gone through the hideous American, through the Reagan era of starting civil wars in 3rd world countries to keep them under control. CIA ops all over the world have grown into what we now call "terrorism." Poor countries with minimal resources and no defense are reduced to the civilian population becoming militarized. We drop bombs from the sky and that's called a good thing. They make IEDs, plant roadside bombs and that's a bad thing. What do we do? We go on watching television and wanting more things. A war on the evening news is essential for keeping the right wing pacified, has been throughout my lifetime. Our passion for guns is turned inward on ourselves. In Michael Moore's film, Bowling For Columbine, he asked some Canadian teenagers why they supposed the murder rate by firearm is so incredibly much higher than Canada's. One boy said, "Americans must not like each other." That rang a bell.


I'm recalling a visit with someone I've known a few years. His living room window overlooks Main St and a big parking lot. Periodically, he'll complain about people making noise at 6am or some odd time. He makes a mock gesture like with a high-powered rifle, a sniper to take care of the problem. I mentioned a couple of good Tom Berringer Sniper films. He said, "No, man, I'm not into violence!" I had to laugh. I said, "Every time I'm here, you talk about sniping people making noises at odd hours. I thought you were ok with violence." I don't think he's seen himself get into a minor emotional passion acting like he's sniping offenders. He's not the only one. It's become commonplace to exhibit intolerance toward anyone not self. How quickly we call somebody an idiot or stupid for something so minor as to be unworthy of notice. In America, the right wing has been so provocative over the last 30+ years and so divisive, so intolerant of anybody not a Limbaugh devotee, they're activating the people they hate into hating them in return. Karl Rove's Alice's Tea Party is division for the sake of division. The right wing is so aggressively fascist that sometimes it looks like civil war is where we're headed. Why? It makes good tv.  


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