A THOUSAND YEARS OF PEACE

      snow flame



Close to the end of January and we still haven't had winter. The temperature gets down to freezing and hovers back and forth over the freezing line; above during the day, below at night. However, I dare not jump to any conclusions, because the big one dumps snow on us in late March, when all the blizzards of the past have occurred. So far we've had a couple of quarter inch snows. We don't mind a mild winter at all, except wondering what lurks ahead. With oil prices ascending to out of reach, it's a good thing the winter is mild for the people on fixed incomes and working class wages, especially the people out of work.



I'm feeling a need within for a change . The change I think is staying home more. Every time I go to town, it costs money. Of course, I only buy things I'll need next week if I don't get it this week. Food, gas, utilities, etc, gobble up everything and not much is left. None, in fact, is left. I've come to where I don't even think of it as money any more. A certain number must come in so a certain number can go out. I'm just the transfer agent, a messenger, passing it from one account to another. It comes and it goes, all in the same day. For me, it's nothing. Yet, because of it I'm able to eat more than I need, drive anywhere I want, within reason, live in my house. It's always been the way. Intake - exhaust. Take the nourishment and pass on the leftover.



In my school years we had a collective notion about civilization as a great thing we held up high. By now, as a result of science, 30 years of greed cut loose, increased communication with every part of the earth, wars for the sake of wars, seeing how wealth tramples poverty, seeing how Christians don't care much for the poor, don't like them, don't want them around, don't want to see them. "Anybody that wants to work can find a job!" So afraid somebody (an African-American in particular) might take advantage of food stamp programs. Somebody poor might get something for nothing. Can't let that happen. It's their own fault they're poor. Time has come, it appears, for karmic debt collection. The pursuit of the American Dream has turned its back absolutely to the poor, pretending to be Christian going to church, smiling all the time like a Zoloft commercial, but when somebody poor walks by, nobody notices the unmentionable buried in denial. The way capitalism is going, the middle class is soon to be the peasant class down there with the working class, those people that wear white socks. I believe the karmic thing is when you got it and you overlook the ones without, you won't have it long.



The USA has been a monument to Self, self-interest held high. It's the western divide of self-first-others-last, in relation to the eastern part, others-first-self-last. I've an idea in this time of rapid change in civilization, one of the major changes occurring is the people of the east taking more interest in self, and people of the west taking more interest in others. Coming into balance. I'm seeing these changes occur collectively around the planet, watching films made in every part of the world, seeing changes they're going through in rural Italy, Istanbul, Bangkok, Beijing, every country, both urban and rural. I'm seeing that all the rest of the world is going through the same changes from generation to generation as we're seeing here in the Appalachian mountains. The old people that are in nursing homes now wore the bibbed overalls, work boots and a hat with brim all the way around. The women wore long dresses and had long hair. Next is the guys in tshirts, bluejeans and workboots, the girls in tight bluejeans Barbie girls. Next, the ones that dress like kids in California, white guys with pants slung low, looking like tv, the girls a legion of Britney Spears look-alikes. It's all around the world now.



The 20th century was a traverse through the unknown. Ever since the 1950s we've all accustomed ourselves to living in a world that can go Big Bang any minute. and the time we're in now, even more. It's like the unknown is in the past and we're off into quantum space, anti-matter, words we have no understanding of, concepts unimaginable a few years ago, entire ways of seeing changed. My grandparents grew up listening to string band square dance music. My parents listened to big band orchestra dance music. I grew up listening to rock & roll in the 50s when it was dance music. These are the changes forecast in the prophecies down through time telling of a new world entirely unlike the world before. We're close. My guess is that when the sequence of events is such that it's time to have a big clean sweep of all that went before, the event called Armageddon evidently will be the climax of the change.



After that, a thousand years of peace. Armageddon will be the end of capitalism too, because there can be no peace in the world involved in the capitalist economic system. I'd say capitalism is doomed on that alone. If we're to have a thousand years of peace, it will have to be an entirely different economic system. We'll have money, but a more realistic vision of it as a tool, a utility. Capitalism is not the god America has made itself a shrine to. I imagine in a time of peace that many years, following a time of war that goes all the way back to before we left the trees, will be a major shift in how we humans view our world and each other. I can't imagine what it will be like. People relaxed toward one another. A great reduction in population will get the numbers back to where it was before oil and electricity.



A thousand years of peace would mean tremendous collective devotion to God after having our collective consciousness raised to such a place that we who are able assist the ones unable to care for themselves, allowing them a reasonable quality of life. No need to punish them for being unable. Where'd the crime go? Empty prisons could be altered into regional art galleries, theater and dance complexes with schools for all the art forms. I imagine an art boom like the entertainment boom we're in now, a balance to this time where nobody much knows anything about art. Today on Wait Wait Don't Tell Me, a Saturday radio show with people from the audience and people by phone answering questions about events in the news over the last week, the stumper was a question about the vision of the Fauve school of painting. Everybody was stumped. Nobody knew what Fauve was. Long silence. Too long for On Air. Finally, the questioner explained and gave the answer. I imagine in the thousand years of peace everyone will know the answer. The art of the 20th century will be the classical age for that time.

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A 21st CENTURY THANKSGIVING

     composition in gray

Turkey day came and went. It was a good day. Our weather could not have been better, high 60s all day, sun out, pleasant. Spent noon to 6 with friend Jim Winfield, who is scheduled to leave for Thailand soon, waiting for flood water there to recede in Bangkok. We watched a little bit of a Noam Chomsky talk and put the tv on National Geographic documentaries about seals, another about salmon and sharks, without sound, visuals only. I know sharks are a threat to humans in the water, but that doesn't really concern me, because I stay out of the ocean. I figure the ocean is full of swimming things that are all looking for something to eat. Made of meat, I'm fish food when I'm in the ocean. It is for swimmers that get their oxygen from the water. I get my oxygen from the air, and can't help but think that up here in the air is where I belong.



I used to have feelings of fear when I'd see a shark. I see it something like a swimming lion. With me not in the water, I think sharks are great. I've learned so much recently about the endangered nature of the sharks, looking like ten more years and the shark population will be down to where it's unable to recover. I feel sorrow now when I see a shark, reminded of how necessary they are, how their population has been reduced considerably for their fins. The people that catch them cut the fins off and throw them back in the water to wiggle to the bottom and lay there wiggling until they starve to death or sharks the trawlers missed eat them. Shark fin soup is good luck, served at wedding receptions all over Asia. About all the fishing for sharks is pirates out of control, cannot be stopped, who have no more concern about taking the last shark out of the ocean than a Wall Street CEO does.



Seeing the sharks on a film made probably a few years ago, I could assume the sharks we saw have had their fins removed by now. We are both people who used to love to talk about matters of opinions at length. By the time we're in our own 60s, we've become less talkative. We like to talk, but tend to speak in shorter sentences now, single world exclamations, even silence. If we were Cubans we'd be good domino partners. We have known each other 35 years. I knew his dad before him. He's a Buddhist now, even a devout Buddhist, and likes to go to Thailand for the Buddhism there. He's been to Bodh Gaya, the tree where the Buddha found his enlightenment, a place of pilgrimage for Buddhists everywhere. He was there among thousands of Asians at the holy of holies. Werner Herzog made a film with a hand-held camera of the Bodh Gaya gathering (Wheel of Time, 2006), Tibetans everywhere, or people with the look of that region from Nepal, Bhutan, Southeast Asia. Beatific people. Serene.



This is how I would like to see the world of the future on the other side of this period of tribulation we're in, the promised thousand years of peace. We may have a spiritual revival like the world has never seen. Surely, the Jerusalem religions will be subdued, brought down out of their warrior minds imitating the Old Testament wars. What comes after this Jerusalem religions apocalypse, will have to be something on the order of Buddhist inner stillness, the Way of love. It can't be religions of people browbeating others to win everybody over to the Lord. If we're not to have wars in that time, surely the motivation to war will have to go away of its own accord, undermine itself by what ought to be embarrassingly too much. But nobody is embarrassed by war excess, except the people who pay attention, the ones called intellectuals, the first targets of a police state. They don't assassinate much anymore. They discredit, destroy reputations and credibility. The low down slime element of our government since November 22, 1963, when the Texas Oil Cartel took our government by coup, I thought they could not go any further. I've thought that before. There was a time I thought there was no way we'd make it to 1975, a time in the future it looked like everything would come due at once, meaning it's been like this for at least half a century.



It won't be like this in the thousand years of peace. It will be like at Bodh Gaya where people are happy to be together, communal food, the center of the universe. I've an idea we'll enter that phase of our collective evolution by sequence of events in my next lifetime. I remember in December, 1989, lawyer Lorne Campbell was in his last weeks, seeing the news of the Berlin Wall coming down and Boris Yeltsen announcing the end of the Soviet Union, the Russian experiment with Communism. Campbell said he never thought he might live to see the fall of Communism. Now we have people saying it was better under Communism. Like the time in the 70s when Russians were allowed to leave the country. A good many came to USA, New York mainly, and other cities. It wasn't long before a large number of them went back. They liked it better in post-Communist Russia.



Americans are complacent people it takes a lot to rouse. It's easy to rouse small groups, but it takes a lot to get people to come out and protest all day every day for weeks, now months. Conditions in the working class and middle class get worse year after year since 1980. You never hear anyone using the word Progress anymore. I've not heard it since the Reagan Revolution began dismantling all the progress of the previous half century. By now, we're back to Depression times. In the 50s, 60s, 70s Progress was an important optimistic belief system. By now the 1% have 70% of the money in USA. The 99% are an awful lot of people to function with 30% of the money. The Banks are strangling us. Our government is helping the Banks. It's not helping us. It's taking from the 99% and giving to the 1%. Our government functions for the 1%. The 99% are quickly declining toward a condition something like the serfs in Czarist Russia. Our American complacency appears to be making a turn toward action, as predicted by our rogue government in the light of absence of regard for We The People. FEMA has built concentration camps all over the country. They're ready for occupancy. The cop with the pepper spray may be just the beginning.




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GOODBYE WARRIOR MIND

the age of oil



Since I've become aware of the thousand years of peace the other side of all this that we're going through now as one of the waves in civilization, perhaps the biggest one ever, I've come to see what I "knew" was the case anyway, it all has to be. The industrial revolution goes with oil. An age of mechanical gadgetry goes with oil. The wealth a few people accumulate would not be there without oil. Oil is limited in amount. We're at a place now, today, where humanity has used half the oil available. It took about a century and a half to use up the first half, and it's looking like the 2nd half will go a whole lot faster than that, 50 or less. The educated projections are less than that, like ten and twenty. Asia has become an economic factor in the world. Cars and industry are new there. They are not going to pollute any less than we already have, because we already have.



When oil goes away, the entire economy created by oil will go away. Like during the consumption of the first half of the oil on earth, we gradually learned to live in the oil economy. By this time the glut of what we've come to believe we need is beginning to drag us down. Just the weight of it. From here on, we'll be learning to live less expensively, without jobs, without cars, without tv, without. It won't happen all at once. We'll have time to figure a lot of things out. We already have the knowledge we need for a time without oil, like making electricity without coal or natural gas. There will always be electricity, but not like now. For one thing, it takes rubber insulation around the copper wires, insulation. Computers are jut about all plastic. No more Barbie dolls. Artists will have to learn to make their own paint again. Everybody will have a garden, perhaps all available land around the house, formerly the yard.



What's wrong with that? People who keep gardens often keep flowers too. Stuart and Myrtle Taylor in Whitehead have a beautiful flower bed beside the road with their garden. Now we don't have time for flowers except to buy them. They'll be back. When somebody learns how to grow things, growing flowers becomes part of it. Maybe every house would have flowers on the table during the growing season, most of the year. It wouldn't be sissy, because we wouldn't be ruled by warrior mind any more. That mind will have had its time in history. The world has at least as many peaceable people as war loving people. That thousand years of peace will be the time for rule by the way of peace. Like the earth turns, day and night, "opposites" take turns in this world of duality.



We live pretty well in peace here where we are in the mountains, losing friends and/or relatives in war the only real connection we have with the wars that the warlords keep outside our borders--unless the South goes to acting up again. But our societies are still ruled by warlords all over the globe, which determines an awful lot about our cultures that value the warrior's ideal. The shit boys have to go through growing up that's supposed to make you tough, makes boys and girls so angry for life they can't do anything but flail about fighting and abusing from insatiable anger, keeping wife miserable, kids miserable until they gradually learn it's their place to take it. It's not that way with everyone, of course, nor even nearly everyone. There's enough of it going around in the working class, the warrior class, to create a culture of anger in the next generation, the next and the next for at least 6,000 years of recorded history, and several tens of thousands before that.



Nerd boys (good name for a band), the ones whose souls are meant for peace, grow up picked on by the boys getting the shit beat out of them at home, expressing their anger picking on kids who want to be left alone. Columbine et al happened because the schools enabled the bullies. School systems don't like nerds either. They like jocks and tough guys, people fit to be successes in the warrior society that pays the principal, administration and teachers, who want to live in peace too, but understand it's our warriors that keeps us free, actually living in peace. It's how we have to do it in a world where everybody needs an industrial military complex for backup, which we call "freedom." Like the invasion of Iraq called Iraqi Freedom. I wonder how many Iraqis would call it freedom besides the ones on the American payroll.



Nerds may rule in the thousand years of peace and the boys of warrior mind will be the outsiders like the nerds are now. Nobody wants to be a warrior. You just can't help it if you're born of warrior mind and it makes you such a misfit the nerds pick on you. "Your mind destroyed the world, Mister!" The warrior-minded from birth who can't help it have to learn to live in a society that doesn't allow for them. Warrior mind is old-fashioned. It's what people used to do. Seeing this as the next turn of the wheel of fortune where all of us are concerned, it makes the noise I hear on the news less urgent. I see the time we're in as the end of warrior mind as a social force we all must kow-tow to for our acceptance in the world around us. It will be good to live in a time when Peace is valued as something other than a Christmas card cliche. At least it's kept alive somewhere.



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THE HORIZON: THE OTHER SIDE

horses in whitehead


Continuing to ponder the thought of a thousand years of peace not far ahead, not in my lifetime, but heck, I'm used to living in a world that operates on an economy fueled by war. We know no other way. I can never forget the time I went through the Philadelphia art museum with a black friend who was a Muslim, American. He asked a black guard a question, they set to talking, the guard was from Ghana, and when they found they were both Muslim, they hugged and were instantly brothers. That's how we live in peace. Didn't Jesus say something like that, love one another as I have loved you. Alas, Jesus, we humans are slow to learn how to override our evolution as warriors all the tens of thousands of years we've been humans. Even chimpanzees have wars. It's deep in us to thrive on conflict, all the way back to insect.



Genghis Khan made wars to plunder and take wealth in all its forms back to Mongolia via the Silk Road, by which the Mongols also transferred the plague from China with fleas riding yaks along the Silk Road to destinations all the way to Europe. In the Age of Oil big countries plunder helpless countries to take their wealth in the form of oil. The ones plundered are compensated by collateral damage taken lightly. The Mongol hordes, or the Tartars, about put an end to civilization through the region of all the -stans that have never really recovered from the pillage of the 13th Century, all the way over to Ukraine. The Mongols plundered unbeatable everywhere they went, killing, destroying entire cities, Old Testament God giving Saul instructions to kill em all. The American Army in the Indian wars got fired up by chaplains preaching Old Testament wars telling the boys to kill em all. Now it's done with machines and the highest of high tech gadgetry, tanks that can shoot a tank out of sight over the horizon. The Mongols and the OT Hebrews used knives, swords, spears and arrows. It was up close and personal.



I've always been of the pacifist stripe, thus have always been frustrated because of ongoing war, or one after the other, however you want to look at it. Half full or half empty. By now I've learned it's what we humans do. In what the preachers call the world is always duality, opposing opposites, going round and round, perpetually. I've chosen to go the way of Chinese poet Han Shan, go to the mountain and stay there. Outside of society, what Patti Smith called a rock and roll nigger. In society, our leaders lead by example, self-centered taking from the people they're hired to represent and end up representing corporations against the people, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and getting big perks for remembering their true loyalty, to money only. This is a time of Biblical proportions: the Revelation.



In the thousand years of peace we won't have California grown oranges in Florida grocery stores. Grocery stores may be farmers markets like in the middle east. We'll probably eat according to what grows in whatever regions we'll be living in. I suspect communities where people farm in new ways that have been learned after a century or more of scientific study of how things grow best. Instead of tractors making rows and hoeing-in lines of seeds, it will be probably with more attention to compost, raised beds, hydroponic, and it won't be grown on factory farms, but consciously. We'll eat better, much better and be healthier. I expect arts to flourish, not by getting hundreds of thousands per piece, but living with aesthetic considerations in everything, as we now have aesthetic consideration in very little but cars and commodities. The Mexican restaurant in Sparta is entirely decorated aesthetically. It's the only place in Sparta that is, anyway when Chris Davis doesn't have a shop in town.



Japanese director Akira Kurosawa made a film called DREAMS. It is half a dozen or so imaginary places that are symbolic of passing cultures in the 20th century. The final scene, after atomic devastation, is a gentle scene of a stream, a foot bridge, trees, modest houses, flower beds everywhere, people content within. That's where I, too, see us headed. In the 20th and 21st centuries all the old cultures, religions, belief systems of every kind, even to child raising, are breaking down. Traditions and customs of all varieties are going away. Perhaps when they're all gone, we'll start over freshly and evolve new traditions over time, which will become calcified after a thousand years or so when traditions are held sacred by some and not by others. Sunnis and Shiites. Catholics and Protestants. And here we go again. It's the calcification that needs breaking down. Traditions have turned to chalk and don't function in the culture they pertained to any more.



We're moving into a time when we will think very differently from how we think living in Babylon in its full power. We'll read about this time in history books as the most horrific with wars all the time. And especially this time will be known for the new classical age in the arts, a renascence way beyond the Renaissance and the Greek and Roman Classical Age. Way beyond. This time will be looked back to in art as breakthrough into entirely new ways of making art and just plain seeing. The art of the 20th century manifested through creative minds into visual expressions of what we are collectively going through as far as our consciousness being raised radically through this time.



The raising of our consciousness has gone quite a ways by now, and will go on much further before we enter that span of living among other human beings on earth without wars going. Doesn't mean we'll like everybody and probably won't be the end of fights. We'll have treaties and international agreements that are serious and binding. Possibly. Whatever the case, I look forward to future lifetimes to see how such profound peace will be to live with. I'd like to have a donkey. We'll have a new way of seeing God that is so convincing we'll commit to service without penance, self-mortification and self-loathing. That mind is over. It surely will be a fulfilling time to live through. Might even get to be like India with a holy man or woman sitting under a tree with devotees around. When someone attains enlightenment, he's no good for this world anymore and can't make his way in it, needs at least someone to take care of him, and devotees to help him stray in the body, which he could blissfully leave any time.



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BEYOND ARMAGEDDON

goat rock in a cloud

My interest continues to follow the most interesting subject of the fish swimming in the aquarium of the mind. In the Bible prophesies, everybody is focused on Armageddon, the big destruction, the ultimate Bruce Willis movie. I tend not to see it as blowing us back to the stone age sort of thing. Not anywhere near it. Like the Jews waited for the messiah and missed him, Christians, I have an idea, are waiting for something, waiting for their interpretation of the scripture to come to pass, and what they're waiting for has to go on by, because, like the Jews before them, they're not recognizing him, he's not like their (mis)interpretation. So the Battle of Armageddon may be another television war coming up soon. Maybe it will be something more like the Battle of Gettysburg, the one that says: This is enough! No more war! Of course, to say "no more war" in America is subversive.



I can't think of that concept, Battle of Armageddon, as anything but the end of the world as we know it, like the Mayan calendar when it runs out, the end of the world as we know it. The entire 20th century has been the end of the world as we knew it. We went from horses and foot to cars, trains, planes, from sailboats to "cigar" boats that can skim the surface of the water, from candles to lightbulbs. It had been that old way for a few thousand years. That was the world as we knew it. Now we have littered the heavens with satellites and other junk reminiscent of Ed Sander's early 70s album, Beer Cans On The Moon. "Sittin in the geodesic honky tonk, lookin, lookin, lookin, lookin----lookin at the beer cans on the moo-oon." The "world as we know it" is already gone and a new world in its place. Yet, the new world is changing so fast that in this moment of high-tech discovery, even the new world is no longer the world as we know it.



This long process of change once we got electricity, the second fire Prometheus gifted humanity, we've been exploring the possibilities with electricity and with oil. In a hundred years or so, oil will run out. Electricity is made by oil. This means the next hundred years will have to be tremendously inventive years for how to live without oil, specifically how to make electricity without oil. Ways will be found. Ways are already known. We always tend to adapt at the last minute collectively, like we adapt at the last minute individually, cram for exams, stay up all night to meet a deadline.



It's how we do things. It always works. Economy will recede the whole time. It's not like this is going to make a great deal of difference to most people, considering 2/3 of the people on earth live in poverty. Only the 1/3 outside poverty, most of whom are are the working poor, the management class and the ruling class that takes several billion in profits, pays no taxes on it, gets welfare payments from the government, too. One of those multiple billions in profit would bring everybody in unskilled labor, Walmart, up to a living wage. Lord Have Mercy No! This is Capitalism, not Communism.



My mind wants to see into that thousand years of peace after Armageddon. To have peace, USA can no longer be king of the hill, the love of money can no longer be the guiding light, all survivors of the Harvest, perhaps a quarter of the present population, will have to share something deeply spiritual in common, like maybe the Return, if it hasn't already happened. If it has happened, it will maybe be recognized from books by the people who noticed, which will become gospels. That came out of my mind, not out of reality, telling me it will not be like that, but it will be something powerful that will hold everybody's attention in a collective belief system that lasts at least a thousand years. The prophesies say the world will get so greedy, so disgustingly material, so devoid of spirit, keeping up with money and all that it buys. We've already reached that place. We're still in it. We're in the place that must come crashing down before we can have a thousand years of peace. Like an old skyscraper has to come down so a new skyscraper can be put in its place. It will when it doesn't work anymore. It's in the self-destruct mode of Excess on the credit plan. Can't wait. I want to get on to the thousand years of peace.




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