TWO VIEWS OF REALITY

This week's laugh in the news is Nuttin-honey-yahoo scheduled to speak to Congress, the cement-heads this side of the Atlantic, bypassing presidential approval. Another news ruse scripted by the Heritage Foundation. Some of the democrats are saying they won't go. Nuttin-yahoo won't show for sure. Three billion a year for military at stake, Mr Nutty will not take the risk. Who cares if he does? We the people are so separated from our government, concerns we have bear no meaning. We are given ruse news by way of corporate control, creation, and production of the ongoing serial of the worst things that happen around the globe in the course of a day. The journalist's creed, if it bleeds it leads, is predictable. And conflict, the stuff of drama. No time left for anything else. It takes gunshots and explosions to keep hands off the remotes. Why do I want to fill my head with the worst events of the day from around the world? It's called keeping up with the real world. Whatever that means. It means my life here at home and the lives of the people around me are not real. What's real is conflict someplace else, much of it created for the news. Reality is always someplace else. It is never where I am. I live in the non-existent working class world unheard of on the news and unacknowledged by government, except as the criminal class. It's either the 1% or the middle class. The talk is of the sinking middle class. Every time I hear it, I think, the working class already sank, been sunk throughout my lifetime. People of the working class are taken advantage of for their modest educations, easy targets for propaganda, guided with a ring in the nose away from their own interests, don't even know what their interests might be.  

I'm happy to report, attention I give to the news is waning fast. I turn it on for five minutes, top of the hour, NPR, a time or two a day. Not that I think NPR is better than the others. It's absence of commercials appeals. I'd rather read the cartoon page of any newspaper than the front page stories. Editorial cartoons are about all I care to see on the editorial pages. It takes a certain kind of clever wit to conceive editorial cartoons. When I had my first computer, discovering the internet, I found sites of editorial cartoons, looked at thousands of them. To tell a story in one picture and a few words comes from a certain kind of thinking I don't have. It's a beautiful art form, concise and clear as a Zen haiku. Sitting at the coffee shop I'll pick up the paper and look at the editorial cartoons, go to the cartoon pages and work the Jumble puzzle. Much more interesting than reading something about what somebody supposes Russia is doing in the Ukraine, WW3 in embryo, or conjecture why Seattle didn't run the ball when they had a human tank. Whatever. I've seen a quote attributed to Mark Twain saying America has wars for geography lessons. This leads me to believe our government was attacking poverty-stricken defenseless countries in his time too. Like whoever heard of Vietnam before USA set out to annihilate its people. Fear of communism. Now we're doing fear of terrorism. Then, our troops were killing slopes and dinks. Now they kill towel-heads, steeping impoverished countries in ongoing war to keep the oil corporations flourishing and American "defense" contractors in the right country clubs. Closer to home, when an interstate route is planned through a city, it goes through the neighborhoods of black and working class white, the people without recourse.

   
Talking with an aunt living in Florida on the telephone a decade or more ago, she asked if I'd heard about Conway Twitty dying that day. I had not yet heard the news. She let me have it for not living in the real world. I was told I need to get out of these mountains and back in the real world. Real world? Conway Twitty? Television? City? What I hear and read in the ruse news tells me the "real world" is evidently the world of media and malls, commercials, the world of money. In this "real world," value amounts to money and money only, like getting a great value at a close-out sale, 50% off, or buying a new car at three thousand dollars off the showroom price. Wow, really saved some money. Saved money by spending twenty thousand. I love the enigma of how I can save by spending money. I get junk mail telling me to throw my money their way for something discounted 10%, and save money. These were the questions that made me crazy in transition from sheltered by parents to figuring out how to be an adult by trial and error. I continue to have a hard time in this "real world" making out what the reality might be behind the deceptive front, whatever that may be, last week immigration, this week immunization. One is about keeping poor people out of the country and the other about killing poor people already in the country to get them out of the way. In that "real world" we have War on Poverty, which increased poverty, and War on Drugs, which increased distribution and funded much of it. These wars on, fill in the blank, criminalize the American people. Now we have police state regarding all of us criminals. This is hard to live with. Real world? I lost faith in the world of commerce as the real world before I withdrew self from the real world to what is evidently known by way of media to be the unreal world.

I looked at the window and saw Jenny with her back end pointing this direction. She raised her tail, opened her back legs and let go an astonishing stream of donkey urine. I thought: what a bladder. She was ready to drop some biscuits when Jack wanted to play neck-wrestle, Jenny preoccupied. She let her tail down and took a few steps toward the meadow. Jack stepped to the spot she'd wet, sniffed and sniffed. He raised his head to the sky with curled upper lip in a kind of goosebump spasm. Jenny walked on into the meadow to graze on the day's hay. Jack watched her, then walked behind her to join her grazing. This is where I find the real world. Out another window, buntings and snowbirds pick up sunflower seeds I threw on the ground for them. A chipmunk fills its cheeks. A red squirrel sits up holding a seed with tiny fingers, biting open the shell for the kernel inside. My real world is about people living their lives, working, having opinions, beliefs, doing what they can to get by the best they know how. My real world is knowing donkeys as conscious beings with minds. My world has no value in the world of commerce I've come to call the unreal world. In that world it is not important who a human being is, or any other conscious entity. Learning the doctor I went to for thirty-five years did not know me at all, it told me he was from the world "out there," the unreal world where who someone is bears no relevance, none whatsoever. The doctor I go to now is from my idea of the real world. He is interested in his own humanity and the humanity of others. He is also interested in lab reports and readings on an EKG or MRI. First doctor told me years ago, "We are chemical machines." My Pee Wee Herman within thought, I know you are, but what am I? I knew he would not get the reference, and thought, A doctor telling me I'm a machine? He lost a great deal of credibility. I understood what he was saying. I had a problem with consciousness left out. He told me I'm a what, not a who, a meat-coated skeleton, a file number.

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TRUST AND RESPECT

beverly pepper

A couple weeks ago I was knocked off my track and have not yet found my way to get back in the flow. It came from trusting someone I found too late to be fickle. It's a valuable learning, though it didn't feel valuable at the time. I'll never count on this individual's word again. Good learning. Disillusionment equals enlightenment. I have been enlightened by said individual. I must get over being mad about it. It's an anger I can do nothing with but to learn from it, which frustrates the anger unable to express, then depresses me and saps my energy, turns a fun project into sour experience. I get mad at myself for getting mad. This leads to telling self to go ahead, be what I feel. Go ahead and be mad and let it run its course, let it wear itself out. Just don't get stupid. My mind is in a gloom, stays in a gloom. I actually spoke it out loud today that I could start crying any minute. I call it impotent rage. Nothing I can do about it but let it be a good learning. This isn't the first and it won't be the last. It goes with living in this world. We learn by trial and error who we can and cannot trust. Burnt a good one, I don't go back for seconds. I keep it as a rule of thumb that I give the people around me the benefit of the doubt. Learning to withhold trust from particular individuals is one at a time, and it hurts every time. I've found that people who cannot be trusted small cannot be trusted big. I don't need to cut off association or even do anything to show my displeasure. I know to withhold trust. I can go on and be like usual. I'll never be as friendly as I have in the past. That part's dead. When I can't trust somebody it colors a whole lot. 

beverly pepper

I've even been asked, in the coffee shop, where else?, why trust is important to me. I couldn't answer. I couldn't imagine somebody who asked the question could understand an answer. I said something to get out of it, "I'm just peculiar like that." Respect is another of those words that have little meaning outside the world of the mountain people. Actually, it's from the mountain people I learned to value trust and respect. I was not always trustworthy. I came here with a city fickle nature, unconscious. I found that here in the Blue Ridge trust is absolute. It's all the way or not at all. It took me a little while, a few years at least, to become truly trustworthy. In the time I knew friend Jr Maxwell, I learned much about trust. He was someone who could be trusted absolutely. When I needed Jr's trust, I had it with assurance. I strove consciously to be as trustworthy to him as he was to me. I couldn't ask him if he trusted me. I had to show him I can be trusted in small things as well as large. At the end, weeks before leaving the body, before his mind drifted away, he told me I turned out to be the only one he could rely on. I was heartened I could give him someone to count on in his last year. I felt I learned about trust from a Master trust was important to. The one at the coffee shop, who questioned the importance of trust, wondered why it was an issue for me. Like what am I hiding, like something on the tv show, Law & Order. Trust is important to him; therefore, he's hiding something. Like in the Fundamentalist religion: rational thought equals doubt equals Satan. 

beverly pepper

What I mean by trust is basic. I buy fifty bales of hay from somebody who says he'll deliver it Thursday. I like to know that the one I'm talking with actually will show up on Thursday. Some do, some don't. First time is trial and error. Hay turns up the following Wednesday with, "Somethin come up," and I buy hay from somebody else next time. He brings it when he says he will and I buy hay from him next time. This is what I mean by basic trust. In the years of revenuers raiding stills and arresting people for making liquor, it became a code among everyone in the mountains you don't rat on anybody for any reason. The code doesn't hold anymore, the culture is gone. In the old hillbilly way of life, you kept what you knew about what somebody else was doing to yourself. It was so pervasive it became culture. It's a prison code, but I like it. I like that I've learned to live by it. I'm grateful to God I have the experience of learning about trust, living in a culture where it matters. People come in from outside and it's a foreign culture to them. It was to me. I took an interest in the culture and dove in head first. It took a little while to learn about trust in the absolute, but when you fall into a culture, it's like learning French living in France. I'm grateful I had the experience this lifetime to study the importance of trust. And I'm not talking in terms of money where trust is understood, but in everyday life, living in a world of others, every one unique in every way. I find it valuable to know who I can and cannot trust. I find it valuable to be trustworthy, too. Word gets around in a community when you can be trusted. It becomes part of your name. An old, old saying of my great grandpa's generation: a man is only as good as his word. It continues in the community of the mountain people who live at home. 

beverly pepper

The old mountain ways are gone, but they continue to live in the younger generations. My friends just turned thirty continue to value their grandpa's and grandma's ways. I like it when I see the lines of influence from the old mountain ways into the newer television generations. The old-time morality is long gone, and that can be a good thing in many ways. It's the time of breaking down of traditions all over the globe. It's the change that is the end of the world as we know (knew) it, the beginning of the world to come. I've learned to accept television as a quickening of the process of completely tearing down the old, making way for the new. It is shaping an international mind. The cell phone generation seems like as great a break with all that went before, history, the works, like the Dadaists did in 1915. The one I mentioned above who disappointed my trust is a twenty-something and from someplace else, who, I imagine, can spell trust, but knows nothing else about it. Span of attention of a cat chasing a laser dot, or so I've come to see what I thought before had foundation. Here I am holding a twenty-something to a code I live by for myself, a code I learned from people I respect for the human presence they were in the time I knew them. They became models for me. They were the age then that I am now. I listened to everything they said. Whether I agreed was neither here nor there. I learned about respect from the people who were the last of the old-time ways. I had the treasure in life to arrive in the mountains in time to see the tail end of the old ways, the people who grew up and lived the early part of their lives before electricity. Last week I said to my doctor, laughing at myself, "I still go by Nineteenth Century values." I gave so much attention to the values of the old ways as they were going out, I cannot expect the people around me, who are evolving away from values of any sort, to share my interest in such values as trust and respect. They're gone, but for in particular individuals. These are the people I like to know.    

beverly pepper herself

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THE WORLD WOULD BE A BETTER PLACE IF ONLY

 

 

Yesterday I heard somebody start a statement, "If everybody would (fill in the blank), the world would be a better place." In another context, I saw a meme on facebook that asked for comments on what I'd like to see change in the world. That one threw me. Like nothing is changing? Change is the nature of existence. What would I like to see changed? Racism was the first word that came to mind, but it's changing. Years ago, before I quit talking with anonymous phone calls telling me what to buy, one asked for anything I'd like to change about the evening news. I said that would take going all the way back to the beginning of humanity, too much for me to cover. I can't change it and I wouldn't change it. I think of Jesus saying love one another. Or even liking one another will do. Or even treating each other right . That was 2,100+ years ago, and his zealous fundamentalist devotees are practicing hate, preaching hate, parroting hate. And that was Jesus "commanding" we love one another. His voice has more authority than mine, and his fervent fundamentalist followers have turned to hate. Among his followers love is a four-letter word. It means fornication. Sin. Besides, love is wimpy. Real men don't do that shit. Like the saying, "Real men don't eat quiche," it can be added that real men don't love. My experience throughout childhood and youth in a Southern Baptist (fundamentalist) church in Kansas, the word love was only used in quoting verses, not meaning it. Mention the absence of love as a value, and the answer comes back: Of course we love. What's wrong with you? Supposed-to equals doing it: Of  course we love. We're s'posed-to. God commanded us to love one another.
 

 

A preacher I asked about loving everybody assured me it didn't mean everybody in the world, only "the brothers and sisters in the church." To hear them talk about each other, they didn't even like each other. The thought of loving somebody who does wrong, or loving somebody with more pigment in their skin is unthinkable. We see it in our politics now that the Teabaggers turn out to be American fundamentalism gone political. Their belief system, formerly kept to themselves, except for missionarizing, looks mighty ignorant out in the open. They threaten the rest of us with their venal attitude toward anybody not themselves, their racism, their absolutism. Like Jesus said of the preachers in his time, You make the people twofold more children for hell than you yourselves. They can only live up to it by denial, denying they do not adhere personally to their own absolutist belief system. They call it being imperfect. And they want to hold the rest of us to their folk religion beliefs that have little to nothing to do with love. Now that the republican party is the fundamentalist party, we have police state. I never dreamed American fundamentalism could take over a major political party. The republican party's appeal for ignorance has given us fundamentalism to back up the police state with such a long string of stupid people running for public office that it's unimaginable there are so many people in the country as dumb as they are. I guess stupid people follow party line unquestioning.  Fundamentalists don't question. Doubt is a sin.

 

 

 

 

I've said before that the best definition of evil I've come upon is ignorance. Going by this as the case, the republican party is quick to point the finger at evil. Three fingers point back at themselves. What they are doing consciously with purpose is dismantling American democracy to make police state, which they have already done. The Reagan Revolution was indeed a revolution. They called it that themselves, and to this day few see it. Because it's more interesting to see commercials about things you want, like a new car, new shampoo, new toilet paper, new mouthwash, stuff for the septic tank, stuff for the landfill. I have seen it evolve in this direction over my lifetime, but somehow didn't believe the American people would go all the way to having no values at all but in relation to money. Now it's here. The people who preach moral values do so in relation to money. Politicians can't turn their backs on their corporate owners over something as dumb as principles or ethics. Ethics is a ridiculous word in their world. It's never used. Nobody in that world knows what an ethic is. Also throughout my lifetime I've seen anti-intellectualism go all the way to anti-paying attention. Our educational system cannot work in a society where ignorance is held as the ideal. You think it's not? Take a look around.

 

Several years ago, when I heard somebody make the remark that the world would be a better place if everybody would.... For the first time, it struck me there is nothing that everybody is going to do but the obvious, ingest, evacuate and die. If everybody would love one another. That is out of the question. If everybody would quit smoking. It came to me that my world would improve if I attempted whatever it is I believe the world would be a better place if everybody would do. Even television can't make everybody alike, though it's made a valiant effort. If everybody would treat other people right. Aint gonna happen. However, I can treat other people right. I can function without expressions of racism. It would be a better place if everybody would quit judging each other. LOL. No way. But, I can give non-judgment a go in my own life. The spiritual path is not about making other people toe the line.. It is about finding one's own way a step at a time. That's the only thing it's about. Other people will do whatever they do. I have no control over anyone else, not a great deal of control over myself. Someone I know asked me recently, Why do I want to turn everybody in the world on to what I like? My answer: You're a missionary, a living commercial. It had more to do with his nature than philosophy. After a lifetime of television, he's a commercial for whatever comes up. He spends his life frustrated he can't get other people to be him. You gotta see this tv show, you'll love it! No I won't. You don't know, you haven't seen it. I do know myself well enough to know I will not enjoy a tv show about a serial killer, the good kind, only kills bad guys. Even JFK couldn't make everybody do according to his idea of what was right.

 

  

 

 

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