You are Part of It

FDR serving for 4 terms showed us the necessity for imposing limits for terms served related to physical health and accrued political power.

JFK’s assassination and the following period showed us the necessity of having a reasonable structure to remove and replace a president from office outside the process of impeachment.

Donald Trump’s presidency shows us a new need to safeguard the country from damage due to a President’s mental health issues rendering them unfit to exercise adequate judgement to be trusted with the powers of the office. Let’s open the Overton window to developing proposals for an amendment regarding Presidential mental health.

I see You, People of Good Heart

Everywhere I look you are there, looking back

You are everywhere

Step forward so I can see you more clearly

Step forward with the clarity shining in your eyes

The tears dripping strongly from your cheek

You are everywhere

Step forward so I can see your face

Women, men, gay, straight, black, white, all shades

We of good heart must steep forward strong

When a wounded hater harms

Step one, then another, another again, face them

Watching last night’s debate between two male vice presidential candidates I was struck by how much I disliked the look, sound and feel of Mike Pence. He is like all the other Republican men I have watched perform on the public political stage over the last 20 + years. He is hard and cold, damn sure he is right, and very exaggerated in his evaluation of external threat and his ability to prevent that threat from causing mortal damage. Another commonality with these guys is that they are obsessed with the surface appearance of things, themselves primarily.

I wrote this for a project, corporate Zombie revolt, I am working on with a friend. I wanted to capture the experience many people have during frustrating meetings and I thought what would Dr. Seuss say if he came to a frustrating meeting. Over time the project I'm working on will produce games, forums, t-shirts, comics and stories related to the frustrating nature of work in a culture increasingly dominated by the left hemisphere corporate mindset. Visit the site, http://corporatezombierevolt.com , periodically and see what we are up to.

We meet in a room
Shut door, shuttered blinds
The invited players
All soon arrive

The agenda is crisp
Roll call is complete
Everyone settled
Into their seat

I open the blinds
To let in the light
More is revealed
You seem uptight

I look out the window
Describe what I see
Not on the agenda
But important to me

It seeps into us
Like water into a towel
Through all of our
Connecting places
Gradually or suddenly
Saturating our cells

The loved one
Inhabits our watery
And fibrous being

With us
Sometimes briefly
Sometimes a long time
They remain forever
Inhabiting the cells
Of those
Who
Loved them

We fall from the sky
Distilling out of apparent emptiness
Our foundational chemistry
Spread thin but gaining form
Pulled together by gravity
Clouds, Ice Crystals and Rocks
Moving much like our parents
From their birth to ours

A rocky planet, pressure heated core
Receives the space dust, ice and rocks
The warming planetary embrace
Quickens the dance of life
A sun respectfully close
And time for growth
Make space and planet
A father and mother

I have been reading The Master and His Emissary, the Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World by Iain McGilchrist. I'm about 1/3 way through the book and am tremendously excited by the insights presented in the book. The poem that emerged from my reading is a plea from the holistic right hemisphere to wake the reductionist left hemisphere to the primacy of right hemisphere, perceiving, feeling and thinking. Song is the province of the right hemisphere and preceded the development of speech on the left. 

The machine gone deaf
Now thinks a world apart
Making power
For its own sake
Can’t hear our beating heart

The science now is in
You should surely know
Our singing first
Your words came late
Then they both did grow

I don’t remember the date but it was a spring day in the mid 1960’s when I decided to do the thought experiment that changed my life. I had been reading about General and Special Relativity and was curious about the idea that the Universe was finite. The way I thought Einstein portrayed it was that gravity curved light and a beam going straight out from my house would curve and come back to its source in something like a circle. I’m not sure why this was important to me but I began the experiment by laying down on my bed, closing my eyes and imagining that I was heading out into space as a point of light in a straight line. I imagined my direction beginning to curve under the influence of gravity but then I began to wonder what if I resist the curve, what would stop me from doing that. I imagined a brick wall that prevented me from turning and resisting the curve. Then I thought; why can’t I just break through the wall? 

The reason the media fail to recognize the message of the Wall Street Occupation Movement is that they don't know what the rest of us know. They are part of the corporate ruling structure and it isn't at all obvious to them why people people are so worked up or what they want. It is an expression of a dawning realization that our whole system is rotten. Now, the rottenness of the system is not going to be universally perceived, just as the revolution will not be televised, thank you Gill Scott-Heron. The truth is known by everyone in a primal way. When they call us consumers and consume us at the same time, we get it. When they say they are the source of all that is good and that we rely on their brilliance and creativity while they destroy our public education system through propaganda and ever decreasing funding, we get it. When they are eating us for lunch and telling us we should be grateful, we see the self serving lie. Yea, we get it.

Leonard Cohen writes and sings this mood of eyes wide open recognition of perpetual betrayal. This seeing through the lie is what is going on and why the elite don't get it. As Cohen's lyrics put it in Everybody Knows;