Up to this point I have used this blog to post my longer, more philosophic, essay-like ramblings. It was my own little universe and I did not feel the need to post daily diatribes on the state of the universe, trying to one up other bloggers on some scoop of political dirt. I had posting permission on another multi-author blog that I used to interject more pithy, succinct commentary on the day to day world of politics into the blogosphere when I felt the desire to do so, and that worked just fine for me.

Recently the owner of that blog removed it from publication. I wasn’t even warned in advance lest I had wanted to save some of my more self important posts to drool over, internally patting myself on the back late at night after checking all my sports chat lines and still not feeling tired. Needless to say I was almost aghast. I say almost because I believe I understand why the blog was pulled. That still doesn’t make me feel any less upset over losing some good material. Oh well, life is an omelet, not sunny side up.

The sum total of all of this is that the tone and nature of this, my lovely blog, pretty blog, angel baby blog will change somewhat as I incorporate the timely with the timeless and seek to produce work that is either reflective and deep, or au courant and sexy, depending on my state of mind, chemical imbalance and/or frustration with whatever part of the existence by which I am currently flustered.

This means that not only will I wax poetic, posting marvelous musings no one ever reads, but I will also reveal which candidates turn my crank and which particular issues of momentary import have my dander up. I hope you, blessed reader, gains from this change in direction, this course correction. I trust that it will, at the very least, mean more frequent posting, which will be a boon for all of us, don’t you think?

Let’s see. Suppose I were a new age conservative strategist working at a conservative think tank like the Cato Institute and I was being handsomely funded to solve a persistent problem. The public schools are turning out too many liberals. What would I do?

First I would squeeze the federal monies going to education by claiming that the states know better how to fund their own education systems and nobody likes the federal government telling the states what to do with their own money anyway. Then I would pass some stringent federal education standards because “too many of our kids are failing” and allow the funds to help the states meet those standards be cut off in committee, creating an unfunded mandate which squeezes more school funds.

Second I would squeeze the state monies for education by claiming that the local school districts can fund their own local education systems better than the state and besides who wants the state running local education. This would force local school districts, facing massive cuts, to come to the public with the only funding method left to them, the regressive, highly unfair property tax. The public knows levies are only for capital improvements, brick and mortar funds, and begin to mistrust the school boards, believing that their unwise, wasteful use of funds is the real problem and they are asking the overburdened taxpayer to bail them out. The taxpayers have had enough and inherently understanding that they are being played. They vote down the levies.

More and more levies fail and the schools begin to crumble under the weight of insufficient funds. Prominent conservatives point their fingers and say “See, the public schools are failing. What they need is some good old honest American competition. Our tax dollars would be better spent in vouchers that will give poor kids a choice in the schools they attend. People should also have the choice of giving their tax money to a private school if they wish or keep that money to home school their own children”. Sounds pretty good on the surface, real American ingenuity. But consider the ramifications.

Certain select poor children will be “anointed” and given good conservative private school educations. This will result in less liberals coming out of our schools, especially the poor who tend to be more liberal (when they choose to vote that is). Double whammy. Public schools will fail and their administrations taken over by private concerns (think Sylvan Learning Center). This sad fact is a part of No Child Left Behind, read the provisions. More children removed from the horrible liberal influence of the real problem, the teacher’s union. God forbid our teachers actually get paid a living wage and have meaningful benefits. After all they are only poisoning our children. These children will also now get a good conservative education. Fewer liberals still. More folks are disgusted with the state of education and home school their children at great personal cost. Some of these people are liberal and their kids get a liberal leaning education but most are conservative. Even fewer liberal kids. See the pattern. This is one good strategic initiative.

My supervisor at the Cato Institute will be thrilled. I have solved a big problem and now instead of producing liberals with critical thinking skills our newly privatized schools will produce good little consumers who are just skilled enough to operate our corporation’s systems but too dumb to know they are being screwed. The other poor kids who still go to public schools will make good fodder for our constant wars.

The Cato Institute is giving me a raise.

While contemplating my first Mother’s Day without my Mother, in the midst of sadness I remembered that the original idea for a “Mother’s Day” grew out of a desire for peace and disarmament. Women, Mothers, have a deep connection with humankind’s empathic nurturant nature. They innately understand that peace is desirable, at all times and on all levels. It is primarily men who promote the idea of violence as normal. This is not to say that women cannot be coerced and co-opted into accepting male ego based violence and it’s most cherished son, war, as acceptable means of resolving crisis.

It is precisely this concept of viewing violence as normal which leads us, to my mind, to any number of the societal ills which have befallen us in both the distant and recent past. This concept is the primary causal impetus behind a perpetual and pervasive worldwide cycle of violence, a quagmire from which we seem unable or unwilling to extricate ourselves. It is most unfortunate that this idea has a so-called “natural” element to it’s composition, which fuels the notion that it is inherent to our nature and unchangeable. The argument that violence is elemental to our humanity bolsters those who support violence as normal, who see war and violence as intuitive methods of resolving conflict, and therefore correct.

There is an element of truth to their statements which makes it all the more difficult to reveal violence as the mutable, relative concept it truly is. The violence as ingrained biological truth position stems from the most basic fight or flight reflexes which all animals display to varying degrees. Men seem selectively capable of denying their animal realities but this part of their autonomic response system is ostensibly universally accepted. Although man’s alleged evolution from caveman to Homo Sapiens is glorified by our constant efforts to deny our prurient animal sexuality we fully accept the fact that we are programmed, as animals, to respond violently to crisis situations.

I have always felt that these contradictions in how we appreciate our animal natures were simply a function of how closely the “natural” attributes served certain political motivations. It is easy to claim that a homosexual can “override” his biologic programming through mental discipline but it is often the same people who throw up their hands and assert that “we will never overcome our tendency to violence”. I believe it is exceedingly difficult for us to override biologic imperatives, but it is possible, especially when a new understanding of truth creates a more compelling reason to change than the original situation the programming was meant to address. This is evolution at it’s most basic, an imperative to manifest an ability that exceeds our previous abilities.

Addicts are able to overcome destructive, biologically driven, behaviors through mental discipline and a clearer understanding of the consequences of their behavior. They have understood the deep truth that what their bodies have been chemically programmed to do is damaging, and efforts to supersede that programming are worthwhile.

It is time for mankind to admit that our ancient instincts to fight when we feel powerful are damaging to all of us under most circumstances. These intuitive responses can still be valuable when we can consciously affirm the instant instinctual decisions and realize we are without options to violence. Defense against an unrelenting enemy who clearly threatens our lives and from whom there is no escape from violence will always be a regrettable but appropriate response. We should never open ourselves to exploitation. Eastern Martial Arts are clear on this concept. They promote peace through strength. But we HAVE evolved and we CAN temper our instincts for gore with a deeper understanding that our chemical hard-wiring can, should, and must be changed for the good of the world’s societies and people.

As has been posited by Gene Roddenberry in ‘Star Trek’ we can move society past the place where violence is necessary or even viable and move the world toward a level of peace that will allow us to concentrate on using our boundless energies to help each other achieve greater heights. It’s not far fetched. It’s not out of the realm of possibility. It should be the goal of all civilized people, to remove our bondage from continued reliance on violence as a normal and acceptable means to resolve our differences. Only when the idea that it is PEACE and not violence which is the norm for human beings, when that idea permeates to the deepest, most impenetrable, segments of society, will we ever be able to imagine a world of prosperity where all people have a good chance at a meaningful, successful life.

And why would anyone connect the recent Don Imus flap with the more recent and tragic Virginia Tech murders? First let me rant by voicing my objections to the media’s constant use of the term “massacre” to describe Seung-Hui Cho’s murderous rampage. Although an accurate word to describe the carnage, to my mind it elicits a powerful hot button response from most people, which is perhaps desirable from a cutthroat journalistic point of view. It smacks of the same type of media manipulation that creates the scenario of competing news outlets running footage of banal interviewers asking meaningless questions of strictly ancillary figures simply to prevent viewers from changing channels in the rare circumstance that a competitor might be broadcasting anything more germane on the topic. The major “news” media broadcasters will run 240 straight hours of a story in fear that their competitor might run 241. A massacre is easier to sell than a murder, even a mass murder.

Primarily the term massacre focuses on the act rather than the perpetrator. This has some level of merit. Ultimately, though, it implies that the perpetrator, to the media, is only valuable in terms of the act. He has no value as a human, only as perpetrator of a massacre. When perceived as a murderer, the act and the perp take on a more balanced level of importance. A murderer is still a human. By focusing on the act rather than the actor the media can run feel good stories of how wonderful the victims were while reducing the actor to stock interpretations of sickness and depravity. It makes for good theater but does little to address the societal problems raised by the act that must needs be addressed by maintaining the humanity of the murderer in balance with the humanity of the victims. Enough of my rant.

What I care to espouse is the relationship I perceive between Don Imus and Seung-Hui Cho. The sociopathic acts of each involve mental disorder and the first amendment. In legal circles the presence of a mental disorder in the perpetrator of an offense cures a multitude of ills. Mental “illness” is in and of itself a viable defense strategy. There is a tendency in American society to create distance between the actor and the act by any number of means, the least of which is certainly not the insanity defense. In its most benign becoming it manifests in the ” I didn’t mean any offense. I was only trying to be funny” defense of Don Imus and countless other bigots before him that point to a momentary insanity, a lapse of taste rather than the expression of systemic hate it nearly always truly represents.

In this instance the perp is already famous and seeks to pass himself off as “I’m only human. If I wasn’t so famous you would have never known about this. What about everybody else who did this?”. The offense was, to the perp, a nearly non existent short blip on the screen of perception, barely registering at all and not worthy of the symbolic scrutiny it is subject to.

In the second instance the shocking remarks are “ex post facto” relative to the shocking events. In this case the revelations are from someone who has, through extreme force of will, made themselves famous through the heinous act they retroactively justify, “nobody understood me, I was abused, why didn’t anyone listen. See how powerful I really am”.

In both cases the fame of the speaker, whether earned through tears, sweat or blood, moves the acts into the realm of the symbolic exemplar. They are both individual expressions that project into our collective consciousness to the degree that we see both ourselves as individuals and ourselves as a corporate culture within them. We relish in examining at length the rationales and motivations. Unfortunately we mostly concentrate on how different they are from us instead of how closely they resemble us.

One could say that the primary, and quite significant difference between the two acts was that in the former case only a few women’s pride was hurt and in the latter over one and a half score of people lost their lives with the accompanying ripple of dramatic effect on literally thousands, from loved ones through vicarious acquaintances. Death, however, does not only transpire on the physical plane, as dramatic and painful as that may be, but also on the mental and spiritual planes, to as consequential effect.

Such transgressions of the heart, and not the body, may not have the same initial impact as the violent removal of many lives from this mortal coil, but have virtually the exact same effect on life wholly considered, when we realise that the reality of ideas is the only possible precursor to the reality of physical existence. That is, when ideas are murdered it is only a matter of time that the loss of those ideas brings a meaningful and measurable loss, a murder, to the real world. Left unchecked, if Don Imus’ comments had deterred even one of the Rutgers basketball players from becoming the doctor or teacher or lover she was meant to be, because of shame or self doubt, it could be considered a type of murder, especially from a Christian concept of that soul’s value to the corporate body of Christ.

Although it is very much less easily perceivable than in the Imus case, the Cho situation marks an issue relevant to the first amendment. That the statements were made by Cho after the fact does not mark his remarks any less in the purview of the amendment than Imus’. What is relevant about each is although both were, are, and always will be, under the American Democratic Republic’s Bill of Rights, free to say what they said, they are also, implicit in the sense of “to each right a responsibility”, responsible for the consequences of their remarks. This is the soft underbelly of human rights, the concurrent and immutable responsibility that accompanies that right.

It would suit us to consider the responsibilities that coexist with our rights. Second amendment rights would include dialogue about the appropriate use of personal firearms. Instead of absolute arguments over punitive measures dialogue on the issue would center on appropriate use, a positive response to the use of weaponry having a real chance of discovering something that may contribute to the advancement of society rather than the personal gain of politicians and/or the lobbyists who are so often their puppeteers.

There will always be a gap between the appropriate nature of the relationship of a right to it’s mirror responsibility. This is the price of freedom. We cannot prevent 100 percent of improper gun use by citizens with the implicit right to use them. But a clear national discussion of the coexistent responsibility of rights would go a long way to identify potential opportunities for abuse, and that national dialogue should carry the same weight as that addressing the parameters of the right to begin with. The considerations of balance between the individual and the state are often dependent on the balance between rights and responsibilities and privileges and duties.

In essence, both Don Imus and Seung-Hui Cho have personally suffered the consequences of their expressions, to varying degrees. What cannot be lost in the accompanying dialogue surrounding each case should be the complicity of society in creating the circumstances allowing such egregious affronts to our allegedly civilized nation. Both of these “crimes” one civil, one criminal, reveal substantial flaws in the current fabric of what passes for society. It is my contention that the “crimes” are equally damaging to the planes they directly effect, i.e. physical and emotional, and should be treated with an equality of concern.

Both of these acts demonstrate a failure of society in toto. We have allowed for the creation of an underclass in which the perception of certain women as “Hos” is acceptable. That we deny association with that underclass does not forgive us our responsibility for it’s effects on real people. That we tend to worship “naughty” and/or “cutting edge” entertainment to create a false relativity to measure our own failings against for the sake of finding ourselves worthy does not relieve us of responsibility for the psychic and future fracture of human endeavor caused by our desire to laugh at the expense of other’s loss. That we still cannot, or perhaps more correctly, refuse to see mental disorders as real and true diseases and not as vague but concrete character flaws does not forgive us for not developing effective, socially acceptable and uniformly accessible means of assisting the mentally disordered that do not carry a permanent stigma, a stigmata that bleeds just as in those favored by God, beyond the ability of the afflicted to control. That violence is still widely and uniformly considered a perfectly viable and yes, desirable, method of conflict resolution continues its traditional and child rearing based use, serving as a primary bane to our many attempts to govern in a civilized manner without the constant threat of warfare from the individual fistfight to national efforts to effectuate genocide.

As long as we, as a culture, fail to recognize and address our own corporate creations as causal to the cancers that we widely try to blame on the unfortunate individuals who succumb to the traps so readily set for them, then we will have precious little chance of ever growing out of the amoebic stage of our spiritual evolution both as beings and as a society. It is increasingly difficult for me, and so far as I can tell, many of my peers to withstand the ignorant power of our own shortsighted and often cruel manifestations.

Unchecked, we will continue to chastise the individual practitioners of these sociopathies and not consider the welcome smile that accompanied the creation of the space they occupy. Without a national self evaluation of conscience we will continue to create gulfs between us and those who cannot quite handle the pressures as well as we do. It was they who failed, not us, not as individuals or a culture. Passing the buck to the famous or the dead or both can only serve us so long. It is a petri dish overflowing with the ripest of mediums in which we foster the societal bacteria that fester and infect us, from which we vainly attempt to disassociate or hide with analogous make up and turtle necks.

I, for one, have had enough.

Think of some things you know are important to have under any circumstances, like shoes, cloth, or herbs.

Think of how they are made or grown.

Think of making or growing them without using electricity, sophisticated mechanical devices that need lots of energy or chemical additives that do not readily exist in nature.

From these important things or plants choose several that are special to you and learn how to grow or make them.

Learn how to do something everyone else has forgotten how to do.

Learn to sew, how to tan leather or build barrels.

Learn a physically challenging trade that has a clear and indelible value, like a carpenter, mason or farrier.

Have skills you can barter, even if some people think they are silly and worthless, like songwriting or poetry.

Learn how to do something people need to enrich their lives, like perfectly steaming rice, growing extra tasty tomatoes, or expert wine making.

Learn how to dance without inhibition.

Learn techniques to fulfill your lover’s desires and needs.

Learn how to share and enjoy sharing.

Learn to see abundance in the face of scarcity.

Learn how to grow things that don’t normally grow where you live.

Use efficient ways of moving things and people around, like railroads, boats, bicycles, and animals.

Speaking of animals, learn how to raise healthy ones, animals to eat and animals of burden and, of course, lots of therapeutic pets.

Learn how to draw things that are pretty, practical or both.

Learn to expect God’s grace to manifest in everyone, just in different ways.

Learn how to live off the land, by yourself, for a week or more, without leaving any sign you had ever been there.

Learn to give more than you take.

Learn how to both tell and listen to a good story.

Laugh often and at anything you think is funny.

Learn how to express LOVE in everything you do.

Learn how to forgive and mean it.

Learn both how to care for a child and let a child care for you.

Learn to be humble enough to exalt in how wonderful you really are.

Learn everything you can about baseball.

Accept the discipline of a martial art.

Learn to recognize herbs, flowers, insects and birds in the wild.

Learn to give away the gifts God has given you, understanding that you have more than enough and will never run out.

Learn how to walk tall and always make your friends and family look good.

Learn how to take direction when you need to and give direction when you have to.

Every day, wake up proud and go to sleep thankful.

Be generous with your praise and stingy with your criticism.

Remember that the most important word in any language is LOVE.