Indeed, one of our esteemed Congress persons recently said of Russians, simplifying complex International Relations to something his constituents could digest in a way as to produce the desired excrement of reactions, “they're still Communists.” He nor they care about what the word “Communists” meant, just like the word “Socialist” is just as inappropriately thrown about these days without concern about the little things, like what the words actually mean. Meaning is irrelevant now, most neither know nor care. Simpler to say, “bad people, those people, bad. Grrr. Hate hate hate them, they hate you.”
That's always good enough to get you elected or rile people up even if you don't have elections or honestly count the votes if you do. For the record, Estonians are now the “good guys,” Russians are still sometimes the “bad guys” depending on if Russia is not doing what the American government wants recently, and the world “Communist” applies far more to China (in which it is actually) which is now so rich and powerful that no American politician would dare point that fact out in a negative way to his constituents if he thought it might get picked up on, any more than one of them might criticize Israel these days. They own us, or at least them. And through their corruption, now they own us.
Now if we had what Reagan entertained was possible, and many neo-cons wish was still possible, a “limited” nuclear war in Europe, Estonia, now our allies, would still be just as dead. Only now, if we survive, we would put up a monument or a plaque somewhere to say we feel bad about losing them in the war and what a shame it was and all that. They have, usually without consulting their public's opinion about it or due to any of their actions, been “good guys” to us at times, and “bad guys” and back again. And usually likewise, off and on on how bad we would feel if we felt we had to “obliterate” their lands with nuclear weapons.
Slowly the world may be learning it doesn't matter where you might live in the world, you are just as irrelevant. No matter which side you choose, and you usually will not get a choice, you are ultimately on the frontlines and will be just as dead as those countries literally on the frontlines and traded back and forth every couple of generations as to which side would mourn you or feel worse about the fact your whole country was incinerated, which inevitably it would be. …
Not that I could read his mind, or see things as he saw them, but the answer that came forward seemed to me self-evident. He was buying time. Each of the reforms, though ultimately making things worse for the survival of the Soviet Union in the long run prevented catastrophes imminent in the short term. Buying time does not get you monuments usually, nor heroic songs written about you, especially when your country is no longer there at the end of your term. But it is the best thing one can really ever achieve. More time makes everything else possible.
The myth is of the great and final grand victory over the enemy ushering in a final peace. That is the greatest bullshit story of all time if you look at history. Peace gives way to more wars, and sometimes not long thereafter. We, especially in America, celebrate the “Warrior” far more than any “Peacemaker.” Buying more time is what most people do collectively. It is not glamorous, not earth shattering or earth healing, but it is what each person in a society can contribute to equally and enjoy the benefits of equally. To keep things on track to go another day, live another day to die a different day. It is never ignoble and sometimes the best you get. And it is far from insignificant. …
And it is in that seeming miraculousness about dodging such bullets that keeps us from ever learning. It is the blindness humanity never seems to overcome. We can say before something happens, it can happen any number of ways and be prepared for many of those equally. But after a few years, then a few dozen or hundred, it becomes fated. We can look back at history and say, “See, wasn't he stupid for not seeing how it was going to turn out?” Literally, we say that thinking God ordained that it must or would have turned out that way.
One of the most disturbing notions to me about how America has slowly become immunized to the horrors of torture, how it has become debatably reasonable to do, that even a Supreme Court Justice can feel no shame in publicly saying that there is nothing illegal about torturing people so long as you do not charge them first, was that Americans began losing sight it could be any other way. That it should be any other way. Day by day, year by year, whatever atrocities are going on become less and less shocking and more and more normal. Its just, after awhile, how the world is. What can you do? …
It seems crazy when directed at the future, to many people. The future most believe can happen differently than these people expect. But after a few generations, in those instances where the world was not destroyed, they look more sane every day. Surely, we will think, such things were necessary to “keep us safe,” that they were vindicated merely by the fact that we still exist, and that “our existence, our children's new existences” were divinely inspired and occurred on schedule, and happened all according to “God's Plan.”
The flip side of that coin is believing, silently, those who were killed, tortured, raped, murdered, villages wiped out, lands stolen, peoples and cultures wiped out to extinction or near extinction were necessary for our “higher” cultures to replace them. And that bias is in every single fiber of our cultures. We no longer see them or are aware that such biases exist. …
It may seem too obvious to need to state, but if one believes that the future can go in any number of different ways, it should not be much of a stretch to think that the past could have happened differently as well. Those who did the horrors of the past ought not to be given an automatic pass after a few generations, that they were doing God's will. That it had to happen that way, that it was fate.
However much time is bought now or by others in the future, I cannot help but feel sometimes it is wasted if we never learn this most simplest of lessons generation after generation after generation. The past did not have to go the way it did. There were other roads. This way was not necessarily the best nor the most just nor the most holy nor the most right. Learning that, feeling that, living that belief every second of every day is the best assurance that new routes will be taken and new patterns of behavior will become better norms, and that the worst of history which we repeat every day and every generation helplessly, will fade out of us in time.
Newer more uncertain ground and a wider variety of pasts
April 15, 2009, Jared DuBois
Truthrevival.org / Polsci.com
One day when I was probably 10 years old or younger, my mother confided in me that she was having nightmares every night. This was an unusual turnabout for me as it would have been for most children. It was usually the other way around. I would go and tell her about a bad dream I had, and she of course would comfort me, say it was just a bad dream and that everything would be Ok.
These dreams were serious, and how she told me impressed that upon me. She was losing sleep because of them. My mother at that time had two or three jobs, plus several small children to take care of. Her not getting sleep was not a good thing, in fact very dangerous for her health. Due to an extremely bad financial situation, she had a full time job, a part-time job, and occasionally a second part time job on the weekends.
She told me at that time every night she had the same dream, everyone and herself dying horribly in a nuclear war. I really did not know what to say to that. As a parent to a child, the answer is simple: you simply lie. You would say, its just a bad dream, that won’t happen, don’t worry about it anymore. But to lie, at that age, to my own mother when she was worried so much as to let me in on something so terrible, it would have had to had been as she would never normally show such fears, so to do anything less than be truthful in response was unthinkable.
As I mentioned in a previous post here, ‘The Positive Potentially Transformational Aspect Of Music ( IZ good ),’ I did not particularly like being lied to and generally liked people to be as literal as possible. If I said to someone at that age that I thought I was going to die in a nuclear war and they said, don’t worry, that can’t happen or won’t happen, I would instead ask: “How do you KNOW that won’t happen. You don’t KNOW, you can’t KNOW, therefore YOU ARE LYING!” Or at least most likely something along those lines.
I knew I wanted to be reassuring back, to try to tell her don’t worry, its just a dream, it won’t happen, but also how to do so and not be lying at the same time. I listened, was sympathetic, but really did not know what to say to that. I thought about it for a long while, probably hours before I had something to say to that. My response, which I am still proud of to this day was, “It doesn’t always end like that.”
For her, that was correct. She lived far longer than she ever expected to, into her 80’s and died surrounded some of her children and grand-children. She did not die horribly in the aftermath of a nuclear war. She did not live to see the devastation in her dreams wrought upon the survivors. So, to many people, they might think I could have said and not been wrong, “Don’t worry, that won’t happen to you.” Yet I still feel now, even at that age as I did, that that would have been lying even if it did not happen from this present’s point of view. They think, wrongly I believe, that because it did not happen, it could not have happened.
I had to wait years to write the post quoted above, my “Higher Ground” post alluded to in November 2005. That me and my government might yet agree to meet, or at least not be so much at odds, one day upon higher ground. I did not have the whole thing written out in my head exactly as written, but I knew then what I wanted most to say in it, should one day I be able to write it, circumstances permitting.
It does not HAVE to be this way. There are other roads besides the perilous psychotic one we seem to be fated to be traveling upon. That everyday that goes by that we do not turn around, correct our course, that we believe was fated, that it had to be that way. Maybe they are not the religious fanatics they seem. Maybe the future can go only one way. But as I have stated before, that is not the world I perceive.
As I put it 2 years earlier than my “Higher Ground” post, in ‘The World We Inherited, The World We Will Leave Behind,’ I closed with the following…
Quadranine is moved up on the site because it is the best one I did and it is now restored to its original form. In the last thing written in that notebook was the following line, "A survey of the belief systems people have and the courses of action these beliefs impel them to take." It says little to others perhaps, but to me, that sentence speaks volumes. We are set on courses of "fated" destinies because of what we have bought into, and cannot reconsider while moving. The faster we are moving, the less perspective we have and eventually those movements and those "ends" are all we see and know. I know nothing is fated and all "ends" can be changed. Ideology is what makes us human, separates us from other species, but it is ultimately to be chained to past ways of thinking at the expense of the future and of freedom.
Like planets on a collision course, the United States and humanity itself are going to reach a point to have to choose to rethink everything and alter and postpone the "inevitable" collision of cultures and countries, economies and armies. That sidestepping is easier than anyone thinks, and even if it not successful, it will probably begin soon because otherwise it would be unlikely to be meaningful. And as anyone who has ever contemplated dinosaurs trying to dance, win or lose, succeed or not, it is at least good for a laugh, and hopefully for all others and for our own sakes, life itself will remain good for a laugh, and not a Greek tragedy. Mahalo and Aloha.
I covered the same ground in a recent post at my other blog, about “events” in covering the notes from 2005…
The stronger peoples' beliefs are, the longer they have had them, the more integrated they are into different aspects of their lives and relationships with others, it is like an object moving faster. It takes more time frames, longer, to change direction even when they see and know they are wrong, or leading them toward disaster. If those beliefs are so firmly a part of their identities, they will close their eyes to anything which might make them reevaluate the possibility they might be wrong, push it out of mind, and brace themselves for the tragic results they believe are unavoidable, because they are without the ability to rethink or question what is to them unquestionable. With more time or if they can be taught to slow down faster, they could adjust courses to miss collisions more quickly.
Everything in the Universe is under the momentum of events. Ideas of self, what they are, what they want, all set up to include them and all they can be, see, and know. Can only alter courses along preset prescribed ways or directions. I contemplate dead stop, reset button, where any direction of anything becomes possible. Direction is not only physical dimensions, but (also) tracks of events which are probable because of how the board is set and the pieces senses of identity, goals, and purposes.
As I put in my most recent post there, 'Einstein as Newton: God or Gospel only for awhile, Super Bonus Days 41 and 42,' most people really cannot say what I mean by “events” or “direction” but that was probably intentional. For me going over these notes in the present and doing so, trying to guess how they match up with things going on in the present is like peeling an onion backward in time, then forward, then backward again.
In many ways in the middle-east, the risk of a nuclear war is not only increasing, it is meta-sizing. I have been slow to criticize President Obama, outside of the mainstreaming of torture and drones, because I understand like Gorbachev, he is doing the best he thinks he can to buy more time for the world. And as I mentioned above, sometimes that is not the main thing, sometimes it is the ONLY thing.
But things fall apart. Whatever he thinks he can do to alter an increasingly wobbly “center” I hope he does soon, as the view from the cheap seats is excrement soon meeting air circulation device. Kennedy said in regards to the Cuban Missile Crisis, “I don’t think the people in that room understand, if we make a mistake, 200 million people will die.” I would not say Obama would naturally fit in with those in that room, but the body count has long gone above 200 million with the potential for error.
Planners for what is going on now, though, have no idea what that means. Not that some would call me risk-adverse, but our war planners have gotten punch drunk that because the world has not yet been blown to sh*t, if we keep doing the same stupid things over and over again it will not be. That “God” has our backs. That our monumental f*ck-ups were fated, part of His plan. The road is running out on where that mentality can take us. You can only play Russian-roulette with the fate of humanity for so long before the odds catch up, and there are no do-overs.
As mentioned above, I know the importance sometimes of buying more time. I did a lot, wrote a lot, to get to this point, much of which was not always easy to explain. I am not perfect nor would I ever claim to be. On many a day I have to try very hard to give a damn whether humanity lives or dies, rises to the troubles confronting us all or continues to hide our heads in the sand and think it is not our problem, that when it all blows to hell, it was not our faults. That there was nothing we could have done.
On a “good” day, you can count me in on that group of blissful lemmings just waiting for a cliff to throw ourselves over, so long as we are doing what we are told, unquestioningly. Unfortunately, sometimes I get it in my head that there is something I could try to do about it. From what I have written above, just because sometimes these ideas are not as moronic or suicidal as they might otherwise have appeared if things did not turn out as well as they did, it is not to say they were not, truly, as crazy as they appeared to be. But a chance, any chance however slim, is sometimes enough when you are staring into a complete loss of control of events, and watching an otherwise attractive species and planet about to go down the drain.
The time for rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic is nearly up. It is too bad the world seems to be controlled by those, not only with little sense of morality, humanity, but also a very poor sense of time.
_____________________________________________________
They say the sea turns so dark that
You know it's time, you see the sign
They say the point demons guard is
An ocean grave, for all the brave,
Was it you that said, "How long, how long,
How long to the point of no return?"
Your father, he said he needs you
Your mother, she says she loves you
Your brothers, they echo your words:
"How far to the point of no return?"
"Well, how long?"
except from
'Point of Know Return' by Kansas
One day when my mother came home from work, she surprised me with a present. I cannot remember if it was wrapped or not, but probably was just in a store bag. I can remember the conversation though.
“What is this for?” I asked if it was an early birthday present or something.
“Because you are such a “good” boy. Can’t I give you a present without a reason?”
“No really!” Not that it was not true, from a certain point of view anyway. I was generally well-behaved, but as I mentioned above we were very poor and generally getting an expensive present no where near a birthday or Christmas was unusual.
It was a record album of Kansas, ‘Point of Know Return.’ “Well, I bought it for myself.”
“This is Kansas, it’s a hard rock band. You won’t like Kansas.”
She told me to turn it over and pointed to a song on the back. It was ‘Dust in the Wind.’
“Mom, trust me the whole album is not like that song.”
“Well, maybe you can just let me borrow it sometimes.”
And that was how I got my first record album. Not to say that I was ever sure what that was all about, whether she was that mistaken about what kind of music Kansas played. However, I do know for a fact that she had recently seen me staring at the cover of that album for a long time in a store, probably drooling over it enviously wishing I could take it home.
What I was staring at was the cover, of a ship sailing off the edge of the world. I liked album cover art and was so taken with the image I was staring at it for several minutes. Plus I really wanted that album.
When time was running out, before leaving for Europe and all that that trip would entail, the story that I was working on, what I was going to try to buy time for and with, I decided to leave off with that image.
"Just because it could be or be seen that way doesn’t mean it has to be or be seen that way. And if it were true, it is only slightly less weird as multiple 2D Universes or multiple 3D Universes. That objects can exist in more dimensions than they perceive or that Universes can exist around them which they cannot perceive is nowhere near the top of the Universe’s weirdness scale. With an object big as a sun, who could measure how many dimensions it might possibly exist within? Even this 1 meter square cube is an enigma of how many dimensions it can contain. Even with a slight unintentional 4th dimensional thickness, it could even be mistaken for a full 4D Tesseract from 2 views. Looking at it from outside it and thinking we know how many dimensions it currently exists within is impossible without a new math, map, or understanding of its internal structure or order."
"So it’s back to inside matter again?" Assistwo asked.
"Isn’t it always?" Inventor asked back, "By the way have you seen the new motto for my door?"
"Another one?" Assistwo shrugged emphatically.
"Yes, two on each side now, it needed balance," Inventor joked.
Assistwo went outside the door and read, "There are no objects, there is only matter as a whole. There are no dimensions, there is only space as a whole. There are no minds, there is only consciousness as a whole."
"It seems like we have a long way to go still yet," Assistwo said when entering the room again to Inventor who seemed to be getting ready to leave.
"If not us," Inventor said, "then those who will come after us. The horizon to how far we are permitted to go at this time is approaching faster now. We must stop for awhile or risk sailing of the edge of our 2D world."
"I don’t like the sound of that," Assistwo said grimacing. "If possibly not us, then at least tell me what’s over that horizon in case we don’t get there ourselves."
"That the same perspective or space at different times is exactly the same and completely interchangeable with different perspectives and points in space at the same time," Inventor said moving toward the door.
"Heavy," Assistwo quipped. "I hope we are the ones who get to try and explain that one. I don’t like the sound of falling off of or moving out of phase or sync with the 2D world."
"No," Inventor agreed, "that does not seem desirable from any possible perspective from within it. From an outside perspective, who knows?"
As I mentioned above, my mother died surrounded by some of her children and grandchildren. For financial reasons I could not go. It was a mixed blessing. It was a heart-rendering scene I am partly glad I could avoid even though it was hard to be anywhere else at that time. I wrote about that day in an indirect way in “Rise of the Peacemakers,” so as long as I keep my writings, I will always remember the date, not that I could forget the day.
When my father died, I also was on Maui. I drove to a beach and sat on a branch over the ocean and watched the sun going down over the water. Then when it was almost gone, I got it in my head to do something symbolic. At the instant the sun disappeared, I threw a rock into the light above me as hard and as far as I could into the ocean. It had meaning to me, and probably was not that original a thing to do.
When my mother died, and I was asked if I wanted anything special done at the service, I could only think of one thing.
“Please play 'Dust in the Wind' by Kansas,” I said when called back just after she passed away. “I know she liked that song.”