TURNING AWAY FROM THE FALSE

 

Frequently, almost daily, on facebook I see people and organizations with agendas telling me to get angry because the ocean has become a sewer, because the bees are dying, because the trees that make oxygen are being mowed like grass, because we have been hoodwinked into accepting police state in place of democracy. As you know, it's an infinite list. I choose not to get angry. It's the same as cussing at the sky because I didn't get my way. A month or more ago, I resolved to pay less attention to the news and commentary, not as a New Year's resolution, but because I mean it. I hear the news now, but give it no more response than, "Of course." Stupid results from stupid decisions? Of course. I saw "eco warrior" a little bit ago pressing for action to stop polluting the oceans. Like I can stop international corporations from doing anything, or I can stop Japan from shooting whales, or I can stop Florida from legalizing murder, or I can stop China from invading Tibet sixty-some years ago, or I can stop racism in Russia, or I can get democracy back in America. It's not even a matter of powerlessness. That's only perceived. That mind only takes my power when I give it my power. My power is my attention. I withdraw my mind from the false. First thing I do when I want to clear my life of false influences, the news is the most obvious first deletion. I'm not talking about not hearing the news. I mean hearing it with such dispassion I don't even laugh. I hear about another law made by our corporate supreme court, another nail in the lid of democracy's coffin, I receive it the same as hearing Silvio Berlusconi was caught in Italy partaking of the privileges of power.  

 

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I mentally embrace Obama because the racists hate him so much. I can tolerate looking at a picture of him about as long as I can tolerate a picture of Dick Cheney, a nanosecond. It's not the news stories themselves or the individuals involved as much as it is the entire belief system they advertise and embody. I'm not of that mind, so why pay attention to it? Why get angry about it? There is never anything in the realm of "the media" that is from happy instead of sorrow. When they do happy, it's false, like Duck Dynasty. I've been questioning myself over the last months for giving attention to the world of mass manipulation by way of media, even just watching it from afar. I can't realistically want anything for the world at large. I can be one of many praying for peace, which I believe works. It's just that the train is so long it takes a very long time for a habit of mind that goes all the way back to pre-civilization to slow its momentum toward stopping some time in the unforeseeable future. The world that the world of media focuses on is not my world. It is a members-only mind that I don't want to be a part of. It's about money, greed, power and the rest of the "seven deadly sins." By which I mean it is simply false, all of it. I don't care to have people like that in my own immediate world of people I know and interact with. So why should I pay attention to them because they have a spot in national news? It's only the false people media pays attention to. I am not attracted to people I think of as climbers, always wanting more money, groveling for it, kissing ass up the ladder. I stay away from those people in my everyday life, so why give the ones on the news my attention? Their world is not my world.

 

 

 

 

An image I saw a week or so ago stays with me symbolic of the false that is the whole media circus. American television pop star basketball egomaniac, Dennis Rodman, drunk, sings Happy Birthday to Kim Jong Un of North Korea, who watches with contempt in his eyes. Nothing but fakery going on. What can I do? What's the point of even having an opinion? Opinions are as nothing as a dream of sugarplum fairies. The best I know to do when I see something like Rodman and Un is laugh and let it go. Beavis and Butthead. A cartoon in everyday life. Dysfunctional people famous for their dysfunction. What do I care? I know someone who puts up links on facebook, several a day, to every sorrowful cause in the world. I think she must google something like sorrowful causes. I knew plenty of sorrow was going around the earth, but nothing like the catalog she's found. Girls and circumcision in Africa, Walmart sweatshops in Asia, are only the most obvious ones to come to mind. How righteous it has become to be for gay marriage; now, for raising the minimum wage; next, for marijuana legalization. It's like the Fifties beatnik slang, Be there or be square, forefingers of both hands indicating a square. If you're not into legalizing this month's pop cause, you're nowhere, definitely uncool. Where did that come from? This pop zeal for getting everybody to think alike. It's new in American conformity. Now evil is being attributed to racists. Phil Robertson of Duck Dynasty cannot hold my attention for a minute on his tv show or on the news. What do I care what he said? What do I care what's the latest you-gotta-or-you're-square belief? That's for the people who voluntarily want to pay attention. Whatever it's form of media, it comes with an on/off switch. I have a choice. I don't have to turn it on. My car has an excellent motor I would rather listen to than anything available on the radio, unless Diane Rehm is interviewing Ralph Stanley again.  I listen to the monitor kerosene heater's fan at home. It sounds like crickets in the distance. Or maybe it's the field of crickets between my ears.

 

 

 

None of that is my world. My world is the people I know, the people I interact with, people I see in passing, Whitehead, the grocery store, coffee shop, drugstore, highways and the county line for the outside boundary. That line defines my world. My part of that world is Waterfall Road. In my world, I was driving a tenth of a mile from the house and saw a red-tail hawk cross the road in front of me, sailing like an arrow, as they do. This particular red-tail is Justin's hunting friend. It visits him when he is in his deer stand. It will glide to a branch unnaturally close to him, and sit. He said within a few minutes a deer would walk into his arena. The hawk sat on the branch and watched him shoot the deer. It did not fly away. This has happened so many times with Justin that he has come to see the hawk his hunting companion. The hawk sits on the telephone wire that spans the donkey meadow, scanning for mice. The donkeys and the calf graze the hay, their shadows on the ground beside them. A family of red squirrels live in a white pine behind the house, away from the birdfeeders. The red squirrels use one feeder and a family of gray squirrels from the woods across the road go to the other. They evidently have an agreement worked out. The squirrels crawl around the squirrel guards. The guards only stop the chipmunks. If they could get into the bird feeders, that would be it. The squirrels don't monopolize the feeders. They allow the birds some too. I throw a good bit on the ground to occupy the squirrels so they don't need the feeders. This is my peaceable kingdom. This is my world. I'm at peace with everyone I know inside myself. I don't need that world of mass manipulation to bring me down. The world that is my home has a lot of happy in it.   

 

 

 

 

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NO GOOD GETS DONE WITHOUT OPPOSITION

larry rivers

A little bit of thunder in the night, a little breeze to make the wind chime ting one note and another lightly, followed by silence interrupted by a surprise dong-ling-da-ping. Big crack of lightning rent the dark night, rumbled across the sky and fell into the distance. Light rain falling through the leaves of the trees outside the open door, the sound of pure softness, raindrops on leaves. Close my eyes and I see a Japanese paper sliding door from inside, half open, rain dripping off the edge of the roof, banana leaves glossy wet bouncing slightly in the flowing rhythm of the rain. It must be a southern island of Japan. I often think of these Appalachian mountains and the Rocky mountains in the future something like the Japanese islands, which evidently are the upper reaches of an underwater mountain range. Sometimes I think of these mountains a long time in the past, the centuries of people living in tribes all over the continent, hunting by skill instead of power, They didn't fish out the rivers and creeks. They didn't cause massive extinctions. They didn't kill for the thrill except killing white soldiers who had killed their women and kids, mothers and fathers, cousins, aunts and uncles.

larry rivers

I feel a longing to pull in, agitate less mentally over what our stupid republican non-representatives have done and go on doing to us, denying us our rightful status as We the People. Our government has been usurped by corporate money. We the American people have no status, no voice, no influence. Our representatives operate against our interest. They make their decisions according to the will of the highest bidding lobbyists (get the nigger). We the people have no lobbyists, no lobby firm with millions to dine the dumb shits at the top clubs, get them tipsy on Chivas regal, introduce them to important people and flatter them with Nordic babes versed in what a man likes. I'm growing weary of paying attention to such people, having their images in my head, like the crying "agent orange" Boner and McConnell who really does look like a turtle. I will read more and pay less attention to the news and pop culture. We Americans were raised by school in the illusion that we, the American people, are our government, that we matter. Like Yoda says, You must unlearn everything you have learned.

larry rivers

I've actually never known circumstances much different from how they are now. All my life the republican politicians have been the enemies of We the People. I've seen a systematic dismantling of everything in our government that might benefit a nigger. They hate the white poor almost as much as they hate the black poor. Guess what. Racism is unabashedly out in the open in the ruling class. They don't say "the N word" for the real thing. It's only the middle class that says "the N word." When the rich took power by way of the corporations, their intent was to shut down every civil rights "entitlement"(what Scalia calls rights for blacks). Our government, the ruling class, never wanted civil rights for the coloreds, ever. Since Reagan it has been a systematic, step by step, shredding the constitution, taking everything from the "people" and giving to the rich for "off shore" bank accounts where they pay no taxes. It is corporate consensus that the network news not cover the Occupy demonstrations, which are so massive the corporate Darth Vaders don't want them seen. The democrats don't resist. They don't change the laws made to defeat the people when they have the chance, while the republicans systematically shut down the American people by stopping the life blood of the economy. That's called a heart attack when the blood stops flowing. Right now it is severely clogged arteries slowing the blood.

larry rivers

I've never been able to get it out of my head that individual human beings are important in America. We're taught by school that we the American people are individually important in a democracy. LOL. The lol was over using the word democracy like it meant something besides a philosophical ideal of the distant past, a fail. One thing I'm really tired of I've seen all my life is "we the people" blaming ourselves for the major pollution of the earth, stripping the earth of its resources, "fracking," fracturing the Appalachians from one end to the other, fishing the seas empty, increasing extinctions. It is the unstoppable international corporate powers that "we" can't do anything about. I am with the committed people of Greenpeace and the other "radical" groups that are confrontational and hit them back for hitting us without recourse, over and over.

larry rivers

Capitalism has come to its corrupt end, and it's taking the people of the earth with it. Like White Man in America, if he can't have all power to himself then he'll just do like a school shooting, take as many with him as he can, then kill himself. In school, I believed our politicians were competent individuals. In my adult life, I doubt it. Exceptions come to mind, Fulbright of Arkansas, Moynihan of Massachusetts, Clinton of Arkansas, Douglas of the Supreme Court. The Supremes are politicians too. Though the republicans do not represent us politically, they unfortunately are representatives of the American belief systems, racism one of the major ones, all-for-self at the expense of whomever, another major one. The republicans represent the dark side of the American mind, the unselfconsciously self-centered, necessary for balance in duality.

larry rivers

 

 

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