“and after all, we’re all just ordinary men”

I am normally a person who is very much caught up in an “us and them” struggle. I come quite easily to hate and “despision”. Even when I was much, much, younger and really committed to changing my paradigms I was only able to sublimate my fear and hatred, not cut it by much, and certainly not eliminate or to use the more fitting terminology, cure, it. I am so, still, not cured. However, this new job, has provided me with an un-looked for, surprising, opportunity, at a time when us and them rhetoric is so bitter and pervasive, to get a better understanding of where that dichotomy falls flat in my own psyche.

You see, the gentleman that I work for is a dyed-in-the-wool, old school, white, southern, (possibly Baptist), racist. He’s a Mason and a misogynist. In short, a possessor of oh, so many, of the qualities that exemplifies “them” to me. He barely reads, he’s crabby, picky, demanding, and so very all knowing, with no hesitation in saying whatever shitty, peckerwood thing pops into his head.

But here’s the weird, crazy, and I guess I have to think, great, teaching to me. Not only do I find him lovable but I want to make sure he feels loved and cared for. He is old, he is sick, and life is slipping away from him, while he is simultaneously watching his wife of about sixty five years disappear as she keeps wandering farther and farther down dementia highway.

I now have the perspective that most of “them” is just a whole bunch more of these folks. Life is hard, and they are scared, tired, and baffled that they did just what they were told to, yet things just didn’t turn out at all peachy, or rosy. They did, and do, the best they are/were able, or else they would do/have done better.

I suppose that feeling so threatened by the “thems” is a feeling of looming, oppression by the weight of their historical dominance. The childhood hurt of always being the other. The anger at being churched against my will. Being stared at, talked about, ostracized, it all builds up like keloids. I will keep (at least) trying to calm and cut that hatred.

I will though, reserve the right to feel completely alienated from, angry with, and diametrically opposed to the other them. That cabal of black magicians whose God is the actual mammon, and who have clearly shown that they will throw anyone or anything into the pit to remain our owners.

Fuck you guys. You are the aliens. And I will always fight you in some form, as someone very much wiser than me says, “just because you’re a Buddhist doesn’t mean you have to be a doormat”.

Bus ride blogging

I think I have figured out why I have been a complete wreck, for months, about this election. I’m thinking it has taken the weight of the oppression beginning to lift off to get some clear vision about it.

Call me paranoid or cynical or even nihilistic (the latter of which I would aver strongly) but I have been living under the apprehension and conviction that at any moment, jackbooted thugs (or as Nigel points out, innocuous looking, civilian dressed, death squads) could potentially come kicking my door down and I could just “disappear” merely for thought crimes, for just being who I am.

One might think that perhaps I shouldn’t read books like “1984” or “The Handmaids Tale” or magazines like “The Objectivist” because apparently, even more so than when I saw “Night Of The Living Dead” unedited, at night, at a theatre when I was 10 or 11, and then had nightmares about it for like, 15 years, these socially apocalyptic books apparently have infiltrated my thought stream on the very subtlest of levels and work around in my gizzards when I don’t even realize they are festering so deeply.

In my pamphlet I’ve been working on, about proverbs and lies, one of the first lies I wrote down was “people don’t just disappear”. Because they do, indeed, just disappear ALL THE TIME. It just happens a lot less here than in say, Brazil or Darfur or China. And I think the likelihood of it happening here was increasing every year that the warlock/criminals calling themselves Republicans were in power. Another lie which Frank Zappa reminded us not to believe was “it can’t happen here”.
So, I really hope that with all the flowers and unicorns and sunshine everyone is grooving on (which I don’t blame anyone, it does feel really good at the moment), that we all brace ourselves to do the work, to try to accomplish what needs to be done to try and make this a country where at least it happens here less often.