Category Archives: Political Commentary

Playing From Behind Again

Yesterday’s assignment was to write a blog post saying exactly what we want, to the person or persons we really want to talk to. We were also to include a new element in our post, one that we have never worked with before. I have never embedded a photo into my blog posts so I will attempt to do that a bit later in the post. Here is what I really want, without filter, to say.

There are lots of people I really want to speak to directly, under the illusory protective umbrella of this blog. To choose one group out of many is a somewhat daunting task, but today I’m feeling like speaking to those who proclaim themselves Christians, and miraculously, devout Christians.

Not all, but many of them, by my humble moral standards and mandatory incomplete understanding of scripture and the Christ, love to slavishly quote the Bible without having the foggiest notion of what it really tells us.

Thank God for Martin Luther. These people will still have a chance to gain heaven through their faith alone. For their works are not only not good works but are often cruel and damaging works, and can also include disdain for and the absence of good works. Yes, they are charitable, but just as they cherry pick Bible verses to support their profound misunderstanding of their role as Christians, they cherry pick whom to be generous with. Like the Pharisee in the parable of the Good Samaritan they judge who is and who is not deserving of their charity.

Somehow they believe that because they are more pious and devout and “Better Christians” than others they somehow deserve most favored VIP status here on earth and extra compensations from the divine coffers. They demand that absolutely everyone accept certain of their doctrine, while personally ignoring other of their religion’s precepts. They malign those religions whom they accuse of violently forcing everyone to convert, while expecting everyone to accept that theirs is the only true religion and thus the only moral arbiter.

They advocate for an American theocracy, claiming Biblical law supersedes Constitutional law, while condemning other theocracies across the world as authoritarian fanatics.

I could go on.

Before I go let me illuminate just one hypocrisy I see in the western, predominately racially white, Christian Church. Jesus was undoubtedly a Palestinian. Had he been tall, white and blue eyed he would have been suspect and likely would have had a difficult time convincing his Jewish followers that he was the messiah.

So, did Jesus look like Barry Gibb?

picture-jesus-greg-olson

Or like a common era Jew?

gallery-1450102902-screen-shot-2015-12-14-at-91810-am

I’m not sure this second guy would be real popular with the TSA. Not to mention he would be persona non grata to certain other currently newsworthy persons.

I thought we were created in God’s image, not the other way around.

 

I’ve Had It Up To (Even Higher) Here

Ok, here it is. I have claimed before to have given you both barrels. But this comes from an even deeper place inside me. This is the gatling gun of my consciousness. I may not be able to say much for awhile, after these words. I may need to process things for a time.

As I most often do I have allowed recent events to simmer in my heart and mind before responding to them. They have commingled there with many events from over many years, yielding a stinging stew, too salty with tears, and too bitter with anger. I have reached that place where I must say exactly what is in my heart and mind. In America we are allowed the freedom to speak. What follows is my truth. I won’t allow my fear to let it embarrass me any more.

About recent terror, domestic and international, and the accompanying ignorant responses of all kinds. This is not meant as revealing the specifics of defeating al-Dawla, or racism in America, or transgender revulsion or any individual issue of justice. Those are conversations that must be held. But this is about the essential battle of our time, the battle that encompasses these things.

It is no longer enough to tweet that the friends and families of victims are in our prayers. It is no longer enough to put a translucent french flag over our Facebook profile pics. Or rainbow flag. Or post clever and inspirational quotes over idyllic scenes of beauty. Or admonish each other to think positive thoughts. It is no longer good enough to say that islamophobia and all other xenophobia is wrong. It is unacceptable to analyze, criticize, and then sign off, unaccompanied by any alternative.

However good those things may be, and most are good and worthwhile things, they are not enough. They let us off the hook by allowing us to feel good about ourselves. We talk a good game but those flimsy actions let us avoid the real work of destroying violence as the preferred way of resolving conflict between humans, and between groups of humans. That’s hard work. Sorry to offend but it’s much harder than posting a tweet. As good as many of those previous things are we need to stand, like at Tiannanmen Square, in front of the tank, instead of in the relative safety of the crowd.

We need to act. All the isms must die. All the boundaries between us must fall. If we must fight this war, this war against the ills fostered through ignorance, of all kinds, in all places, we must fight with the weapons of truth, knowledge, power, and love. Truth is knowledge, knowledge is light, light is power, power is existence, existence is life, life is love, love is wo/man, the mental being. Our culture of violence has a genetic component which makes its cycle of brutality powerful. It can only be fought by extra emotional and extra physical means, in other words, by us, with mental weapons of love. A weapon is simply a tool with a particular destructive purpose. But it remains a tool.

The tools of love work through our minds and bodies, operating together as coordinated by the heart. The battle plan begins mentally, in the mind, worked into a tool, truth into knowledge. It is transformed into a weapon and repurposed, in the heart, through power, as a weapon of creative destruction. The weapon answers only to love, destroying ignorance, creating a vacuum into which the collective body of wo/man can manifest an evolved world, where we can live in accord of thought, word, and deed.

To be honest, wishing for world peace is futile. Universal peace is unattainable, at least since Adam and Eve were banned from the garden. But with inner accord we can act truthfully and reach not a compromise, but a synthesis of action that satisfies everyone, if only to the degree that it is acceptable, without residue of rancor.

I’m tired of holding back on explaining this stuff. I have been ashamed of who I am for years. I have been afraid of who I was as well. I have recoiled from my ego’s dominance over me. But the time needs what I can give, so I surrender to the will of the time and speak, openly, and reveal myself. WAKE UP. I repeat, WAKE UP. Wake up and accelerate your evolution by opening your mind to the winds of truth, which fan the flames of love in our hearts.  Which flames rise to burn away the veil that distorts our sight, and which opens the real world to our eyes, which can then see clearly.

Do not run from what you see. You will recognize those others who see with you. Come together and act, by love, with them, throwing away attachment to ego, throwing away false divisions, throwing away the petty desires of self. If you have eyes to see and ears to hear you will heed this message. There are only two directions, forward though evolution and backward by de-evolution. The way past the wall of ignorance is not though violent revolution but through loving re-evolution. We, the evolving, are remembering who we really are and recognizing who our friends and loved ones are as well.

This is “a” way, not “the” way, but a way thats points us to real change. Not bumper sticker change, not one step forward two steps back change. And not the false feeling of change we get from being funneled into an untenable corner, by the apparent power of the moneyed and greedy, who reign over we, the apparently defeated.

Now I must heed my own words, and act. Act to discover my own ugly weakness and transform it into love and self respect. Act to not only hear, but understand the voices of the oppressed, to hear them speaking the word. And the word was with God and the word was God. And following God, a God of all people, we will destroy ignorance wherever it peeks up from behind the facade. We will create a place for the truth of the downtrodden to blossom, revealing to us what we have known heretofore only in dreams.

This new world is not only possible, it has happened before. We are caught in the process of remembering it and awakening to it. It is easy for us to become impatient. But this new, cleaner world’s fruit will ripen. And its fruit’s taste is sweet.

My need to walk my own talk, or more rightly the fear of it, has undoubtedly been what has kept me from talking about this for so long. And held me from walking in enlightened shoes. Many have said God speaks to them. God has never spoken to me. I have simply heard what God has said to the universe. I can’t listen anymore without doing. Forgive me my faults. Brand me if you will a heretic.

But humor me and listen.

I swear there is value in it.

Had it up to HERE

I usually wait longer than a week to chime in on major events, so I can get a reading of how the wind is blowing and respond in that very arrogant all knowing way I am prone to. The event in Charleston SC, though, has blown me away, and all of my above it all superiority has melted away in the fire of anger and disgust. For me this is the last straw.

This is not about Christianity. This is not about gun control. This is not about mental illness. This is not about race. This is not about isolated “lone wolves” abandoned by their society. This is not about crime as anomaly. This is not about terrorism. This is not about meting out justice. This is not about the law or government. This is not about partisanship. This is not about the Confederate flag. This is not about the death penalty. It is all of these things and none of them.

This IS about systemic violence used as a bridge to cross the gulfs created by divisions in our society; divisions created through any number of social ills; social ills created by deeply ingrained ideas of privilege and class structure; social ills created by contending norms of race and wealth and status and political ideology.

This violence is not only that of the physical. It is that of the emotional. It is that of the mental. It is that of the spiritual. That said, it is physical violence, appearing as it does in the densest plane of existence, the physical plane, that is most apparent and observable to us. Therefore it is physical violence that we most relate to and respond to when grieving and mourning the descent of civility into the morass, into the pit, into disintegration. It is physical violence that shoves our weakness as a species into our collective face.

In this culture, the American culture, more than any other, violence is an accepted means of resolving conflict. In fact it is the primary means, the most revered the most glorified means. Let me say that again. Violence is the preferred means of resolving conflict in this our America. Daddies teach their boys that to “be a man” one must learn how to fight, that the best way to settle differences with the other boys is a hay maker to the jaw. Government is made up primarily of those very boys, not far removed from the grade school playgrounds where they learned and perfected using violence as a tool to get their way. They tell us the best defense is a good offense. They tell us might makes right. They are like the husband who thinks he is strong because he can beat up his wife.

We spend an ungodly amount of money on machines of violence, so much more than on assuaging social ills and solving the many other problems that afflict us. We can read the words alright, but cannot seem to actually beat our swords into plowshares. Most of our great spectacles, professional sports, reinforce the message of violence, either overtly or covertly. We continually endorse this ideal of violent conflict resolution through the glorification of violence in all media, and in our blatant acceptance of it’s value.

The constant assault on our civilized sensibilities, at the expense of our mortal souls, and the resulting continuous and senseless destruction of those we love, this is the visible result of consciously or unconsciously applied physical violence. It is the part of the iceberg we can see. But, for me, it is the other forms of violence, the hidden violence of emotion and mentality, that cut society the deepest. Families slice each other up with focused, hurtful words. This too is violence. Businessmen step all over each other in the vicious battle we know as climbing the corporate ladder, the race to the top, rung by bloody rung. Political rivals, sporting rivals, romantic rivals, are not to simply defeat their opponents but kick their asses, to destroy them. We compete not to win but to annihilate. We do not call our rivals opponents but insist they are enemies.

We most readily use violence on ourselves. The fuel that propagates violence is hate. Hate is not the opposite of love as many may say. Hate originates within. It is the self loathing all of us experience somehow, somewhere, sometime, in that place we won’t let anybody see, that gives birth to hatred. Hatred is learned and we can only first experience it through hating something we ourselves are or do, something about our own selves that disgusts and mortifies us, something that holds us back from shining the light of our true, loving selves out into the world. Only then will we see those things in the “others” and hate them too. We begin to see anything that frightens us, or threatens us, perceived or real, and hate the “others” for it.

We use this hate of self to perpetrate violence on ourselves in myriad ways, some of them so subtle as to be nearly invisible and unreachable. These internal wars are the basis for the psychological, spiritual and/or intellectual violence that is so deadly to us and our culture, because of its ability to hide in places we can’t reach, like a virus in our bodies, waiting for that moment of weakness when it can emerge and strike swiftly and with blinding force.

As it is in the microculture of our own consciousness so it is in the macroculture of our relationship to the world. We cannot possibly be the decrepit creatures we see when we look inside. There must be some reason we fail. It must be that other, whoever that other might be. What the world teaches us is disgusting is in the other. We will assign any disgusting failure we want to the other, as long as it makes us feel better, as long as it stops the pain for just a few moments. Hatred and violence is the morphine of painful and failing lives. If we cannot shine our light then nobody can, especially the other, in whom we see ourselves mirrored so clearly. But we mustn’t let anyone know how alike we are. We must destroy the other before anyone can find out.

We need to look deep inside ourselves to find the buried vault of our hatred. We have to remove the multiple locks that bind the vault, one by one, regardless how difficult and wrenching. We must then take what we find there and search deeper yet, to find where it came from, from what decrepit fountain it poured forth. We must dive into that fountain of filth, swimming through the putrid bile of our own, hidden self hate to the source, the pump that forces the hate into our hearts. It is primordial.

It may be true, as many say, we are violent by our nature, it will never change, it’s in our DNA, it’s useless to try. But is that any good reason to give up, to stop trying, to throw up our hands and say it’s bigger than us, we can’t win. When has anything ever been bigger than a human heart full of love. If we truly believe that love conquers all then this is the time to prove it. This is the time to break the chain of violence. But it will take men and women and children with profound love and of unyielding courage, in action, the action of both warming the feet of the frightened and holding to the fire the feet of those both self righteous and only selectively human.

I speak to myself when I say we need to DO more and TALK less.

Americans believe in faith, even if it is the faith that no faith exists.

I have faith we can bury hatred and it’s weapon, violence, under a mountain of love.

Join me.

Different Blokes for Different Folks

Since we’re on a roll posting about the differences between liberals and conservatives (or is it conservatives and liberals) I thought I’d go at it from a slightly different tack. This treatise (getting a big head are we?) is based on only one concept, how each faction (more like each segment) defines power and its use.

Politics is about power. It always has been and always will be. Government is power in a practical public sense. Government forms, secures and enforces public policy, which power to do so is given to it, in a democracy, by the people, through their constitutional right to vote. (One of these days we’ll look into the difference between constitutional rights and god given rights) (Are you tired of these not so clever parenthetical asides yet?)(OK I’ll stop).

So it follows that one difference between liberals and conservatives would be a difference of opinion about what power really is and who truly wields it. Since goal 1 of the politician is gaining office, i.e. political power, and goal 1A is maintaining it, differences in the perception of power inform a great deal of what politicians are about, both in theory and practice. Starting with how they wage campaigns, all the way through how they formulate policy and propose legislation, their ideas about power are an important aspect of their ideology and it’s promotion.

I reference no science here. I know of no studies or research on the subject of political power and it’s party specific dynamics, although I’m sure there must be some. Unlike other nameless actors in the media play, I have no desire to claim my opinions are science. These are solely my opinions, forged through observation of both the say and the do on the bridge between hypothesis and action. Because of the apparent death and rigor mortis of non partisan cooperation in Washington, and many state houses as well, I’m sure my opinions can only be speculative and not viable. I wish they were. And, as you will see, unfortunately, I am horribly biased as well.

The primary conservative vision of power is the acquisition and application of money. Money is the thing they value most. It gets them the things they want. Money has traditionally been the standard used to confer social status onto the wealthy. This status imparts important things to the rich person, things they need to imagine they are happy. Other people, often poor people who also value money above all, look up to the wealthy and aspire to be wealthy. They covet what the wealthy have and what they can get. They gladly hand over their socioeconomic and political power to the wealthy, feeling the rich have proven their ability to wield that power, based on the benchmark of their ability to accumulate wealth. These folk see the wealthy as superior but their egos tell them they are also superior and will someday be wealthy themselves, thus proving their superiority. In essence they worship the rich. This worship can easily give the wealthy a false sense of superiority and cause them to resent those who criticize them. They feel they are above criticism and scrutiny. They need the worship to give them a feeling of self worth. They are frightened people who are scared of change, of losing their status and the power they value that goes with it.

Conservatives also value the power of authority. This comes primarily from their belief that a hierarchy of authority, whether through the power of money or of wisdom or tenure, keeps society disciplined and morally in line. People who need discipline and need an external source of ideas, also display worship of authority and think their leaders as superior. They follow unfailingly those arbiters of the acceptable, whether familial, religious, political etc., because, once again, the authorities have proven their moral superiority. They depend on their leaders to tell them how to live. They are happy to abrogate their power, the power to discover their own set of values, to the authority figures and their prefab values. They are also scared, frightened of doing wrong out of wrong thinking. They don’t trust themselves to grow and progress any further than their ancestors did. They wait patiently, until they have their own families and own status in the community. They are then handed the power of authority, power they can wield themselves, over their own particular fiefdom.

It is not difficult for conservatives to accept authoritarian rule. They accept that the wealthy, or those who the wealthy support, are best suited to rule. They come from a system where dissent is discouraged; because reliance on rules protects the people from themselves. They harbor the idea that if they work hard enough and play by the rules, they will attain the power of wealth and authority for themselves. However, all the time, they are aware that the real way to attain power is to ignore the rules until you have enough power to discard them. But only those with authority have the luxury to do that with impunity.

So conservatives are mostly rich people afraid of losing what they have plus poor people who are scared of failure and desperate for success. They feed off each other, providing what the other needs most. They want everybody to submit to their values, not only because they are completely certain they are right about everything but because they have doubts, deep inside, that they might just be wrong. These doubts need to be buried even deeper in order for them to function. Seeing others who have different values makes them question that righteousness, and they can’t have that. If they can get everybody to accept their vision and their values, then those doubts disappear.

Finally, conservatives believe that power and wealth are finite and scarce. Because of this they are perpetually haunted by fear. Fear of not not being good enough to get their share of the pie, and fear of not being good enough to keep others from taking the share they have. In the struggle to accumulate and keep as much of the scare commodity of power it’s every man for himself. So in essence conservatives are motivated by getting and keeping power, in the form of money and authority. Their politics reflects this world view.

As you may imagine, liberals have quite a different vision of power. To them power is collective. it comes from the bottom up and not the top down. Power is people. It is attained through finding the ever changing nature of the greater good, nurturing and maintaining it for everyone, with equal opportunity for a life of meaning and peace of mind. Liberals worship the balance between the welfare of the self and the welfare of society. Power is not the finite, scarce commodity of money, to be competitively gathered, through any means, and hoarded for no good purpose other than to gloat. Power is limitless and abundant, and comes in many forms, with money being only one among many. Power is accumulated not individually through competition, but collectively through cooperation.

This is not to say the liberal does not value money. Money has real value and purpose. The accumulation of it is not so much proof of an individual’s superiority but more so an application of an individual’s gifts and skill. The power of money is not in using it to get what one wants but to assure everyone gets what they need.

Liberals are more inclined to recognize and respect the value of all people, regardless of economic or social standing. They respect authority rather than worship it. Neither do they worship those who have money and keep it for themselves but rather those who have money and happily give some of it back to the government and the people, so that together we create more of the abundance that gives us the comfort of knowing there is enough for all.

Liberals view the authority of leadership not as a rigid hierarchy of dominance but as a means to make and enforce rules that benefit all. Instead of quanta of the unchallenged influence of authority, through which a young adult can only ascend by the consent of one who must then descend, the liberal youth is simply given the tools to ascend on their own terms, without depending on the failure of others for their success. For the liberal, leadership is about managing abundance instead of doling out scarcity. It is about hope instead of fear.

So liberals are people from all walks of life who value themselves and, thus, others. The essence of how the liberal sees the world is in the individual and collective, giving to back and forth to each other the abundant, diverse wealth created by the power of skill and caring, of everyone working together. This is the model for their politics.

I cannot with good conscience claim that liberal politics in today’s America consistently and accurately reflect liberal values. Neither can I honestly claim that all conservatives reflect such narrow and self serving values. But when so many say the difference between liberals and conservatives is in the succinct opinion that liberals are about people and conservatives are about money, I can’t argue with that in principal.

When asked to explain the difference was between liberals and conservatives with one question, the cognitive linguist Dr. George Lakoff, to paraphrase, asked, if your baby cries in the night do you pick it up. The conservative, who is rigid, insists the baby learn to submit to the power of authority, the power of those who think they know what is best for them. They let them cry themselves to sleep. On the other hand, the liberal, who is caring, surrenders to the power of the child to express its needs, accepting that everyone, even a baby, has the power to ask for what they need. They listen to the child, and without fear of making them weak, pick them up and soothe them.

My question to describe the difference is, “if I told you someone was bankrupt, would you say it was more about morals or about money”? Maybe not the best question, but that is where I see the difference. With one definition comes the fear of being bereft of the power of money, and of being dependent on others. With the other comes the sadness of seeing someone not only hurt themselves but others.

Speaks to me.

There’s No Gold In the Poll Vault.

Most people think opinion polls are pretty easy. Somebody asks you questions, mostly over the phone, and you answer them. Simple. A lot of people also take poll results as gospel. There are polls about nearly everything. Probably the most well known are political polls. There seems to be a zillion of them and close to an election the results of one poll or the other seem to be made public daily. Then the media analyzes them into oblivion. Even the candidates themselves sponsor their own private polls.

Plenty of journalists (I use that term loosely) and pundits, plus individual campaigns, use polls to support their contentions and positions on the issues, as well as their popularity and place in the race. What many people fail to consider is the fact that poll results are statistics, and as such can be manipulated. People and groups with a political axe to grind, a candidate to elect or an issue to support often succumb to the temptation of doctoring, fudging, weighting their polls, using leading questions and deceptive phrasing. This gets them results that are more favorable to their goals, which results are then broadcast in as many media outlets as possible to make people think so and so is behind by 4 points instead of 2 or has 80% approval instead of 65%.

How do these pollsters do their manipulating? Probably the obvious and recognizable method is the push poll, so named because it is designed to push you in a specific direction. This kind of poll borders on the criminal, at least in my mind. It’s not even really a poll, in the legitimate sense. It’s more like a telemarketing call, short and to the point, designed to reach as many voters as possible in a short time. It will start off innocuously enough with simple questions like “are you registered to vote?” or “do you know who these candidates are”. They then quickly move into the push questions which are misleading at best and patently, cruelly deceiving at worst. They use suggestion and innuendo to create doubt in the voters mind, normally about the character of a candidate. These questions are cleverly worded not to be lies and get the message across powerfully.

To exaggerate, but not by much, they ask questions such as “if you knew so and so voted to burn all black cats in Alabama to death would you be more or less inclined to vote for them? There is always the implication that this candidate is hiding something awful that makes them totally unfit for office. The questions are speculations and thus are not legally slanderous. But they sure are effective. Push polls often come very close to the day of an election when a candidate doesn’t have time to respond and refute the faux accusations. The giveaways that you are being subjected to a push poll are the clear speculative markers. These assure the questions aren’t directly accusatory. Be on the lookout for questions that start “if you knew” and “if I told you” or “what if so and so”. If there’s an “if”, it’s a push. Push polls are like defense attorneys. They try to create doubt in the mind of those making a very important decision. And like defense attorneys all they need is a little doubt to flip jurors, i.e. voters, and win.

Other, perhaps less creepy, but more subtle and not so obvious tactics include the small sample size, where the pollster uses the smallest number of polled voters that can legitimately be said to be “statistically significant” and within the standard plus or minus 3% deviation. Frankly, with that small a sample size plus or minus 3% makes the poll virtually meaningless in cases where the race is expected to be close. A small sample size also makes it easier to skew the demographics of the poll by calling at certain times of the day, or by saying a strong republican is a moderate because he voted for a democrat once in college, etc.

One might not think that deceptive political polling is a big deal but it enrages me. It is malevolent trickery at it’s finest, done extremely well by smart people who are paid well. The type of manipulation which enrages me the most is the most subtle and I believe most effective way of getting misleading results. This happens when there are intentionally badly worded or constructed questions or questions with no good answers. An example of a badly worded question is “was your congressman’s vote on xyz bill good for the people of your district?” If your congressman voted yes on a bad bill neither a yes or no answer is really indicative of your position on the matter. An example of a question without an answer is “do you think congress should cut funding for early childhood programs or all day kindergarten.” If you favor funding both of those things, strongly, being made to choose between them makes you disingenuous.

I have gotten to the point in my life where I refuse to answer certain questions on polls, even if they are from legitimate pollsters. And I tell the person administering the poll that it’s a bad, misleading question, not that that will change anything. Even if this stuff does make my blood boil, people are right when they say it’s not a major issue, compared to the litany of truly existential threats to the planet. But it is yet another in a long long line of manipulations designed to keep us divided and diverted.

Heaven forbid we suddenly wake up and realize we only have the illusion of democracy.