Guns

So I've got to weigh in on this gun debate given the rash of large scale shootings that seem to litter the news every other day now.   At what point are we going to stop saying that these are individual actors acting singularly and in isolation?  There is just too many of them:

"More than 32,000 people in the US die from gunshot wounds yearly—five times the number of US servicemen and women killed in over a decade of war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Another 70,000 or so are wounded by guns presenting the troubling statistic of an average of 280 Americans shot daily."

America has a societal problem, and it's of epidemic proportions. We have a society that is rotting from the inside, and practically handing out the lethal tools to act out our angers and aggressions.  But, this issue is so much deep than the economy or guns, its about a country and a society in decline.

Lets just take this most recent rash of incidents.  A doctoral student reportedly to have schizophrenia loses it and kills/wounds over sixty people trying to watch a movie.  Then a white supremest kills another six "dark people" while they're trying to exercise their religious freedom and go to the equivalent of church on a Sunday.  Today, a man starts firing indiscriminately when someone tries to show up to evict him from his home?  Doesn't take much to put together pieces of a decrepit puzzle together here.

I have a cousin with schizophrenia that lives in Colorado.  The care is atrociousness.  He just can't really get any.  He hasn't been able to get on disability, can't keep and income or a home, has gone after his mother with a knife, and was found naked in over a foot of snow having walked up a mountain in the Rockies.  He thinks he is Jesus Christ, King James, and himself all together as if time was nonlinear.  But even with all that, he can't get proper care.  He's tried going to Minnesota and California but still can't sort it out.  I wonder what kind of care the Aurora shooter was getting?  I also wonder how much student debt he had (or that his relatives now have as it can roll over with death).  What do you think his job prospects were for when he finished school?  Or those around him that he cared about?

Fast forward to Wisconsin and we find a white supremacist trained by the army to kill, and perhaps even trained in the army to kill "colored" people.  A whole army base becomes notorious for issues with basically breeding white supremacist communities in the nineties, yet has anything been done about it?  And what about his life now?  He lost his home not to long ago, foreclosed on of course (at least he didn't shoot the people that came to kick him out - they were probably white).  How did this happen?  He couldn't stick in the army long enough for a pension, reportedly due to his racist tendencies (but maybe due to spending cuts). So he's thrown out to the wolves, but he's trained to kill, he should be fine, right?  So he struggles to make ends meet as a truck driver, ends up down on his luck.  Hate fostered deep within him, a scapegoat right around the corner, and what it seems he must have thought was nothing to lose.

Now what about Texas today?  "You aren't gonna evict me from my house!"  I can just hear him yelling out the window.  How do you think he felt about his luck?  About his prospects for the future?  What do you think his socio-economic situation was?  I'm pretty willing to bet he wasn't so close to the 1% (despite apparently living on George Bush Blvd).

It's pretty obvious here people.  What we have is a society in decline and disrepair.  Disparity of incomes have sky rocketed over the last several decades, poverty is rampant - 15% of the population, almost 50 million people (most of which are children).  Unemployment nationally is above 15% when you include everyone not working that  wants to, but some places like California have unemployment rates over 20%.  All these numbers are pretty similar to the numbers of people that have no health care.  Sadly, these are not all the same people in each of these statistics.  House after house is being foreclosed upon, job after job is being shed, a drought stricken heartland is collapsing while the government subsidizes making fuel out of corn to feed our car addiction, our inner cities are seeing rising poverty levels, epidemic crimes statistics, brutal police repression, and overflowing prisons, while everywhere is seeing shrinking service programs for the needy and plummeting education budgets.  Yet our "leaders" go on vacation while their approval ratings have flirted with single digits.  And lets not even get started on 20% of our GDP going to servicing a national debt mostly owed to China and various middle eastern enclaves that we claim we need to defend ourselves from, or on the walls we are putting up around our boarders, or definitely on the rich sitting on their verandas buying political power.

This disaster is of course all happening while we are bombarded with useless distractions throughout our daily existence.  Billboards pollute our eyes with visions of uselessness, TV's fill our ears with aimless chatter of "real" world scenarios that none of us will ever live, medications "alleviate" joint pain only to cause, dry mouth, headaches, runny noses, occasional aches and pains, impotency, possible cardiac arrests, insanity, and in "a very small percentage of test cases" death.  Advertisements for giant manly trucks help dry up the Midwest, toys, clothes, bags, TV's, video games, cars, boats, whatever!  We don't need them all, but our whole lives have become about obtaining them all - consuming them.  The message is all sitting there directly in front of us.  Obtain everything, you need it.  It will help distract you from all the things that suck about the world we live in.

But we don't seem to be able to put two and two together.  To recognize that we have created a cycle of disrepair and disrepute.  This sordid society is eating itself from within, and giving itself the tools to do it more quickly - guns.

Personally, I think a gun is too much power for one person to hold in there hands at one time.  I don't want to have the power to so easily kill in my hands.  A simple twitch of a finger and you're dead.  Not for me.  But I also, who am I to tell others what to do and how to think?  I can only lead by example and express my views with little or no expectations.  So, I'm not going to tell you not to have your guns, but I am going to tell you that you must live with the repercussions of a society foundationally infused with them.  In a perfect world guns could exist, no one would use them.  But we don't live in utopia.  We live in the the real world, and that world is falling apart.  People are desperate, they want, they need, and they can't have - they just simply don't have the means, and it is becoming entrenched.  As a society we are no longer moving up the class ladder in ways we did in the past.  Real wages have been dropping for decades, yet we've learned to live with the expectations of a society built decades ago on different parameters and with different rules.  We have become full of desperate, hungry, angry, disenfranchised people and are having problems with it.  But you give all those people access to guns, and you've got a massacre.  Just like in Aurora, Wisconsin, Texas, and every major city in the US everyday. 

And this is the saddest thing about the society we've created.  There was on average 280 people shot today in America.  But we only heard about seven of them.  This shit happens EVERY day, all the time, yet we do nothing.  70,000 people a year don't act alone.  They are not isolated individuals.  They are a large part of a society that glorifies guns and criminality, and then gives people every reason and desperate desire to resort to crime, anger, and despair during the last desperate moments of their struggles.

Yes, I AM for much stricter gun control, draconian control actually given the way our society is today.  And maybe it wouldn't always have to be like that.  Maybe someday we could live in a society without the desperation and hopelessness that we see more and more today.  A society that's taken the desire to kill away from people.  If the Aurora killer had proper medical care and didn't think he had to get an advanced degree he couldn't pay for to get a job he believed he had to have to be able to survive, would we still be in this place today?  Would I still be awake writing this crap?  Maybe, because we'd also have to stop creating killer after killer in the name of controlling oil wealth and mineral rights across the world with desperate "volunteers" from our failed education and economic systems.  These issues are so big, so intertwined and never ending.  What the biggest thing I'm for is a country that starts realizing that WE are the problem.  Yes, us, our country, our society, and our choices are creating the images and society we see in the news and the individuals that perpetrate this news.  Is individual choice and culture so different in England where they have 58 something gun murders a year?  Or what about in Germany where the police shoot 85 bullets PER YEAR IN THE ENTIRE COUNTRY!!?!  In America we can drop that on one "perp" in one night.

Our society is sick.  It is sick at it's core.  And just as it is rotting away from the inside, we must heal it from the inside.  We have to focus on the sick and gangrenous parts: the unemployed, the destitute, the impoverished, the uninsured, the indebted, the marginalized, the hopeless.  Because they are in fact our brightest asset, the part of America with the biggest up side, the most talent and aspiration left unfulfilled.  Now of course there are a lot of different philosophies on how to do this.  But I can assure you that if we don't start there with every ounce of our efforts, it doesn't mater what we do with taxes, marriage equality, abortion rights, or even guns, we'll go straight downhill no matter what - just like we are right now.  The problem that we're having within all this though, is that we're neither controlling our anger and despair, or what we do with that anger when we are consumed by it.  Until we can figure out how to support and provide for our entire society, we can't allow people the means to so easily take others with them to the deepest depths of their despair.


Oh, and that cop that got shot today, yeah, he had a gun on him - didn't help him much though did it?

The Return of the Least Interesting Man

So it has been quite some time since The Least Interesting Person in the World reared his ugly head in these shark infested waters... but he is back, and in full force!!  No job, no prospects, lots of ambition, big dreams, and no outlet for any of it!!  Hi Ho Silver!! He rides again...  But this story has a little different twist to it...  a true sense of irony.  "This, as most any story, is about a girl..." So says the spectacular Peter Parker.  And he's right, it always is... Our fearstriken anti-hero, Captain Disinterest, has just gotten unwittingly caught up in a game of "challenging love" and come out the worse for wear...  I don't know if anyone will remember this concept.  The idea that we strive to challenge ourselves in everything we do in life, except romance.  We find one person and are no longer allowed to spend time comparing, remembering, why it is that we truly care about 'the one', and why we are with them.  We never challenge our heart, we never indulge in a moment or two with another - challenge our feelings, seeing if they are still strong enough for us to stay, or weak enough for us to go.

Stay thirsty my friends...

 So as it is, The Least Interesting Man was a player in this game...  He was the challenger, the man who comes in and gets caught up in the moment.  He doesn't know what's happening, nor does he question it.  She doesn't know what's happening, nor does she question it.  Lost in a moment, lost within each other...  But still, innocent as everyone is, every moment has an end.  And in these situations, interests and priorities always find their way home.  Love was challenged, and it won.  And the Least Interesting Man lost, again...


This is a tough time for Captain No Job.  He ran off to Africa to change the world and came back less interesting than before.  Now he's trying to set up his own world changing organization, yet can't find an interested person to help him.  And in love now, he is, once again, not interesting enough...  So what must he do?  He keeps working, keeps trying, but even his mother has lost interest, warding the ladies away with a magical rebuke!!  He has so little to offer that it is entirely comical!!  Ha!!  Professionally, personally, he has been everywhere, done everything, but who wants to know everything when they can only know one thing?

He is reminded of another uninteresting person's words:

Boring...

"Stop thinking, and end your problems.
What difference between yes and no?
What difference between success and failure?
Must you value what others value,
avoid what others avoid?
How ridiculous!

Other people are excited,
as though they were at a parade.
I alone don't care,
I alone am expressionless,
like an infant before it can smile.

Happens everyday...

Other people have what they need;
I alone possess nothing.
I alone drift about,
like someone without a home.
I am like an idiot, my mind is so empty.

Other people are bright;
I alone am dark.
Other people are sharper;
I alone am dull.
Other people have a purpose;

Nothing to see here...

I alone don't know.
I drift like a wave on the ocean,
I blow as aimless as the wind.

I am different from ordinary people.
I drink from the Great Mother's breasts."


Our Anti-Hero is as interesting as the letters that make up these words, as interesting in life as is the piece of paper his life story is written on.  We are all lost, we are all found, but never at the same time...  Being interesting is the same thing in the same way, but again never at the same time....

A place for nothing...

What is it that the world is made up of, what got us here, and what keeps us going?  Some would say it is God, others Allah, multiple deities, the quest for enlightenment, immortality, internal spiritual understanding, or to some perhaps even nothing.  Much of history has shown that humanity is always searching for an answer to this question.  But in recent history much attention has been paid to the last thought - nothing.  For the most part, loosely termed Atheism by most people.  A believe that there is no God, there is no supernatural.  But what does this belief system entail?  Is it even a "belief system?"  Many would argue it is not, that these people are soulless and without any guiding light.

I have long considered myself an atheist, yet as you read these pages, would you say I have no belief system?  Would you say I have no soul, no deep rooted inner purpose or feeling?  I wouldn't think so.  I would say I am probably far more guided by a moralistic belief than most people.  This intrinsic feeling and motivation actually consumes me and encompasses every breath I take.  You can see post after post of respect for all living things, equality, opportunity, individual and collective, etc.  My heart weeps compassion and caring.

Where does this belief come from?  Does it come from a spiritual entity that drives me, that creates and moves me?  Or does it just come from within?

Life as an atheist is not an easy path in America.  It is a constant defense.  People here believe in a God, and people here are very set in their ways.  It is why "religion and politics" are not polite conversation.  People are also quite judgmental and (for the most part) pretty misinformed about a lot of things in general.  Religious understanding of this nature does not always take such a different path.  Most people believe that without the merits of a religious experience there is little to get out of life, and no purpose during or obviously after it.  This is a position espoused and promoted by political, cultural, and especially media - "the establishment", headed mostly by religious (and christian) men and a few women.  "Godless" people are seen as infearior, as missing something, or simply to just not have figured "it" out or to have seen the light just "yet".  Religious institutions (not the religious people themselves) are perpotrating a dislike and condesending view of Atheists in even the educated.

But what is an atheist and why are they so "bad".  I saw a video in a sociology class that quoted a preacher saying - "I'd rather have an Atheist that behaves like a Christian, than a Christian that behaves like an Atheist."  I used to take strength and solace in this quote.  You see!!  I can be a good person!!  But then I realized that it was really a bit of a slap in the face.  I realized that this whole line of 'defense' was an effort to prove people wrong.  It was an effort to battle against the general notion that atheists are bad people.  I mean, how does an atheist "behave"?  This man was making the assumption that Christians were good and Atheists bad, and that they behaved as such.  It assumes that automatically, because of a lack of belief in a god, that atheists are devoid of moral characters.  That these people can only be redeemable if they behave like a christian. 

People have been invoking the name of Christ for 2000 years.  Some for the greatest and most passionately kind things ever, others for some of the most horrible atrocities ever committed.  So what does a Christian behave like then?  It would seem they behave like a lot of things.  So what then does an atheist behave like?  Who knows... but, I know what I behave like, and I'm an atheist.

For me, I think that humanity is wholly complex and amazingly different.  I believe that every person finds their own path to happiness, or in the quest of happiness.  I tried so hard when I was younger to "find the lord".  I wanted to.  Do you know how much easier life would have been?  Ridicule, contempt, arguments, fights, a father's love and respect.  But I just couldn't find it within my heart, I couldn't find the faith.  Instead, over time I found within me a belief system that was wholly human and did not seem to require any external influence.  I look at another person and I don't see a man, woman, or child, I see the soul of a living breathing being that is simply trying to find their way through life.  They want the same things I want, to be loved, to be happy, to be secure, whatever.  When I see a living thing in pain or fear, I want to help.  Not because of a commitment to a god or a divine being, but to myself, to that other person, to that deep seeded emotionally charged response to the suffering of another.  I believe it comes from within me and from the lessons I've learned in life.

Now some people would say this is the divine working through me.  That is a theory, and it is not one that I am going to say is wrong.  I don't know, nor does it bother me that I don't.  And that is my point.  In my heart of hearts I can't find belief in the religious doctrines that have been written to describe what happens within and around us all.  I only know that I can wake up each day and find a way to make the world a better place, and not because of an external entity or reward, but because I simply find it within myself to believe that that is what humanity is about.  Compassion.  I care about others.  Yes, as I see it, this does not come from a supernatural entity.  Yet who am I to know?  Who are any of us to know what exists beyond our own selves?  I am very happy to have each person find their own path and explanation for life and their place within it - no matter whether that includes divinity or not.  People's happiness is what I care about, not necessarily the explanation used for how they found it.  

There are forces that exist in our world that we have been looking to define and explain throughout all of human history.  Personally, I chose not to try to do this.  I look within myself and I feel intrinsic forces - a soul, a spirit some may say - I see these forces, I work with and threw them, yet I do not find the same definition as others for their origins and avenues.  I just think they are part of me and the physical world we live in.  Which to me includes notions of a spirit and a soul, emotional and intrinsic instinctual responses, body and mind, etc.  Our bodies function within the world in a way that I can explain within and to myself.  I don't feel any external supernatural hand other than that of society itself.  That is enough for me.  But this does not make me a monster any more than someone of any other belief system or religion.

Atheism itself carries such a negative connotation, perhaps if I called myself a Secular Humanist people would respect it more.  But, I prefer to just be me.  As most good kindhearted religious people, I have never gone on a crusade or physically forced someone to believe as I do, and I have certainly never told someone they will suffer eternal damnation because they do not believe in life as I do.  I simply try to live up to the high standards I've set for myself.  I try to love everyone and simply allow life to be lived as it comes to me.  I hope you can respect this as I respect you.  Which I think deep inside, you already do...

Normalability

Gotta say that over the last however many years and days I have been feeling like I must not be a normal person.  Society is set up a certain way and in a certain direction that I don't seem to be able to follow.  From the time we can remember we are inundated with images and conceptions of families and children, jobs and careers, houses and yards, things and things, night and day over and again, etc. This is what we see and this is what we are programmed to expect.

So why didn't it sink in to me?  Why don't I want these things?  Or more to the point, why is it that despite an interest in aspects of these things, they just are not my priorities...??  Somewhere deep inside all of this life of mine I took a wrong turn down the road that most people normally travel.  I want to change the world, I want us all to be able to live a different life, to make a difference.  So what?  There are a lot of people that say this and want this.  But the key to them is that they all just end up doing it within the system.  They look at it and say they will change it from within.  They end up, making a career out of it - academia, non-profit work, civil servant, etc - they settle into life and work, raise a family, buy a home...  What is wrong with that?  They are doing what they want to...

To them, yes.  To me, no.  I am not normal.  I don't see this as the path to change.  I don't see sitting for years and pluggin away in someone else's game for someone else's game as productive.  Forced to play by their rules, and within the confines of their parameters.  Even within this world we are told to think outside the box that contains our little board game.  We are however, not taught to think outside the room that we are sitting and playing the board game in.  Outside that room is a wide open world - blue skys, distant peaks, a night full of stars - there are no barriers outside of this room.  But outside of our proverbial box, we are still confined to our rooms.

If one truly wants to do things differently, they must do things differently.  They can't just grow up, go to school, go to the next school, and the next, and then just start working and making babies.  That is what the system wants us to do.  It wants us to tweak it, to alter it a bit.  A shade here, a dot there... but it does not want us to change its course.  We steer around the iceberg rather than turning away from the icy waters entirely!!  That is what life and education do, they put us into a life and a school building and teach us to play that board game.  The imaginative find ways to chat, flirt, tease, and tickle their compatriots sitting on the chairs outside the box and the table it rests upon.  But who is the one that skips school?  Who is the one that cuts class and ends up outside running barefoot through a field of dandelions, headed for that deep blue yonder, scaling mountains, gazing at the stars? 

These are not normal people.  They are bold people with something different inside.  They stood face to face with "normal", and "normal" blinked.  "Normal"  saw "abnormal" looking back at it as "normal".  In their own world, in their own heads, "normal" was whatever they saw inside as normal.  Normal came in a different shade of grey, but it was still grey, and it illuminated a different path before them.  A path with different scenery, different pitfalls, and different destinations.  Why can't we teach more people to find this path?  When will my normal and your normal be able to walk hand in hand?

Humility's Place

Humility has no place in the Western world.  Not if you are trying to make things happen and show your worth.  If I want something I have to attack it, I have to take it.  No one wants you if you don't sell yourself to them.  But with the way the world is set up, no one will see you, no one will recognize your strengths, or spend enough time with you to find out who you really are if you are not selling yourself.  And humility, differentiation, and being humble are inherently the opposite of promotion of the self.  Yes, of course, sometimes humility can be a selling point, but someone has to see this, and if you are promoting your humility... are you really being humble?  And then if you leave it to someone else to sell your merits, what recourse do you really have?  Do they really know you, can you really rely on what their true interests are or their own personal motivations?

This makes life difficult for the person working towards a humble life, one where you work hard and let the results and quality of your work speak for themselves.  There is little place for this in today's world.  If I want a job I have to be pushy, I have to go out and show every possible employer how 'great' I am.  My resume/CV has to talk about how 'great' I am, all the 'great' things I've done, and how 'great' my work for them will be.  Now, perhaps I am a good worker, but if I don't boast about it, where then does the opportunity to actually do work come from...??

The lost art of Integrity

Determining what is 'right' is a longwinded question with no real answer at all.  But there are guidelines: taking responsibility for one's actions, telling the truth, treating people with mutual respect and dignity, standing up for yourself and/or others, injustice, fairness, whatever.  But what does any of this matter here in a Western society that no longer values this within ourselves?  

We no longer hold these things dear.  It used to be that a 'man' was only as good as his 'word' and that honesty meant something.  It was all he had.  Now certainly it would be nice to expand that to 'person', as opposed to just a 'man', but the fact of the matter is that it just doesn't mean that much anymore to anyone.  People focus on themselves first, foremost, and even solely; they will compromise what is 'right' in a second if it means that they individually might have to sacrifice.  Would you stand up for what you believe to be 'right' even if it means it might cause you some discomfort or loss?  To what extent?

You live in a small town, you know people there, they know you.  An employer you know well decides not to pay their employee for some hours worked and your testimony could provide justice in the situation.  No lies or anything of the sort needed, simply telling the truth if asked.  Yet that is too much to ask even as the person not getting paid is someone you have loved.  You know they worked there, you know they put in the effort, and you know they have accepted responsibility for their own personal indiscretions.  They simply want to be paid for their time worked.  Yet you do not stand up for them or for honesty or integrity in general but rather simply for your own self-interest.  A self-interest that in-fact promotes dishonesty elsewhere.  And we as a society not only understand that, we condone it, we make it so that this choice is acceptable and perhaps necessary.  This is the most shameful part - this is way life has become us.

Our world has become about nothing more than individual politicking.  We play both sides, we do what we must do to raise ourselves up the ladders of life whether through the course of integrity or not.  Value judgements are placed on when and where we use our concept of integrity.  There are no principles, no stands to be made for what is 'right' or 'wrong', no real care about others or concessions to our selves or our 'individual liberties' in the face of another's.  The only stand that we make is that singularly popular stand for ourselves - even if this happens in the face of compromising ours or someone else's integrity.  This is truly a sad world we've created, and it is a world that - with each stand we do not take - that we continually perpetuate each and every day...   :(