“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”.

Palin

Of course she is “the star” of the new GOP. She is the prisoner who has been Stockholmed so thoroughly that she will gladly put her head in any noose she is told to. Of course there is no resemblance at all to any Muslim woman who would strap explosives to her body. If she was a prisoner of the CIA's they would be trotting her out at funding meetings to justify black budgets.

She is a terrific example that the Christian Right’s techniques, having adopted the indoctrination tactics of cults, (the most basic of which is to control ones environment in order to love bomb them when they are good, and isolate them when they are not), which have been being improved on daily since the fifties, work very well.

This is why my friend, after being locked down in the Moon-y camps for 15+ years is now completely free to roam at will, doing Papa Moon’s work, and his children were born, and remain, totally, already, in.


Note: I realize I generally avoid politics like the plague, but this is more about women, religion, psychology and sociology which I feel like I have some actual credentials in.

Oh My Freakin’ God

That Duggar woman is having her 18th child.
Lady, it’s a VAGINA not a clown car.

The Good News Bible

Ha. Didya think I was gonna come back and explain my absence by saying I just got out of a camp and I’m ready to spread the good word? Not a prayer.

I think that whole “good news” movement was an offshoot of the weird, christian, “go thou amongst the hippies and convert” thing that happened in the 60’s and 70’s. “Oh you feel lost? Confused? Well did you notice how much like a hippie Jesus was? No? Well let me tell you.....”
I think that that is a devilish part of some of the “religious issues” we are experiencing these days. A lot of those people got evangeled pretty hard core and became pretty hard core themselves, then married hardcore and bred hardcore and there you are, right down the line to Jesus Camp.

Anyway, no, it’s finals and that’s all the excuse I have.
But I thought I would drop by and relay that I just got word that I received an A in Poli. Sci. Which means that technically I earned my degree today.

I know there are plenty of other people, with plenty of way better sounding letters after their names from plenty of way prestigious universities, but, it feels real weird, tingly, exciting, pretentious and slightly embarrassing to be a little giddy about saying to myself, “hey! I’ve earned a degree”. Oh and I earned hell out of it Honey.

The other thing that is noteworthy is that today I am trying to make a major inroad in the reduction of the amount of nicotine my body expects daily. Having stressed myself up to over a pack, something aggressive needs to be done. So I got me some Zyban and a kitchen timer and I’m pulling serious Mrs. Lafayette DuBois action. 1/2 a cigarette every 50 minutes today, then only every hour tomorrow. Then Weds. I am in class or on the bus for almost 12 hours straight anyway. So by Thurs. I might be able to get it down to 10 a day. I bin watchin’ that timer so far today though....