From Religion to Compassion

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZ7IAhLLw28

Misogyny And Mental Health

 

Would it be trite to say hate is the seed for violence?

Who do you hate?

Men? Women? Children? Animals?

Does the colour of your flesh

dictate your mental health?

Did you spend ten years

in a classroom

with your arm raised

until it ached

because your teacher refused to acknowledge you?

Was that teacher a woman?

Did your tight lipped teacher

sound authoritarian?

Were the male teachers relaxed

made jokes

loved getting laughs

as though he needed you

to like him?

Were your feelings

generally the same throughout

your school life?

Was your mother loving

was your father too busy to bother

with you

or

did you learn that a woman's voice

was simply a temporary

thing to endure?

soon you would go to college

where all the teachers were male

who dismissed the ideas

of female students?

Did you pick up the deep tones

of prime ministers

their short rebuffs

the attitude of ridicule?

Did the dulset tones of authority

make you feel

as though you were rising up

to the adult world?

Was there a time in your life

where it seemed

masculine was natural

and feminine temporary?

Or did you just seek the truth?

The Big Beautiful Mind

Asks how can we fix the traumas that headline every morning. We live in a world where bad news is posted more than good.  It's like guns. We pay attention to violence and the threat of violence. America has claimed the bully pulpit of the world.  It's greatness depends on how many people it can hurt, how much control it has over the survival of humanity.

Who is 'humanity?'

The habits and needs of one species which also includes its needs for food, air, and water.

In patriarchy it seems to stop there as we are told we are isolated units competing for earth's resources. In "Uhmurika" these are what we compete for and the ones who have easy access to these needs have money and guns.

Normal folk have what they need. At least that's how the myth works. Those who have money have worked for it. Those who don't are lazy.

THAT'S A LIE. THOSE WHO DON'T HAVE MONEY ARE EXPECTED TO WORK FOR A PITTANCE, SLEEP IN DOORWAYS, BEG FOR CHANGE.

But wherever they go the public calls for their removal. It doesn't look good for the country to see a mob of homeless souls. It doesn't look for society to see people going hungry. It causes problems like 'what sort of civilization allows for some to earn billions while the majority don't have a home. What kind of special is the billionaire class? Look it up. Check statistics. Sign up for Democracy Now!

Are you still with me? Or did you have to have breakfast first?

I am preaching and its not the best way to reach others.

Begin Again

Each day I wake and worry about where our species are heading.

My days are filled with listening to podcasts, radio shows, articles on the human condition. In the background is the sound of the dryer pushing clothes around and around. Sometimes I hear  birds chirping or arguing with one another. 

But all we have is our ability to judge and as long as we can admit we do not have the key to truth we have the responsibility to work from what appears to be true after we have read and thought about what's happening.

The notion that we cannot know anything is worse for our health than the notion we know everything. We plod along questioning and thinking, comparing headlines with news reports. We have the ability to judge when someone has distorted the truth for their own benefit, but it is just a judgement.

Some of us are better than others but we are not holders of the only truth. Who benefits? We all do.

Every age has its dangers. People like Martin Luther King Jr. dedicated their lives to the greater good even while they are imperfect. Finding truth is the task we all have to do.

Better Than Nothing? Eh?

 

https://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2025/06/19/Influencers-Conservative-Politicians-Misogyny/?utm_source=weekly&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=230625&utm_term=builder

Misogyny is more than hatred for women. It's in fact hatred for vulnerability in ourselves and those we rely on.

Men have been traumatized to believe they must be strong, choose the right response fast, avoid second guessing and compassion because it asks you to think too much.

What happens if we are led to believe by an authority that's hard to dismiss, we are isolated units competing for the most of what each of us wants. 

We choose entertainment about men defending the frontier, willing to kill anyone who might be a threat. To even think about social justice and peace makes us strangers to this land. We have created the warmonger hero and called him God. He is very useful. He can fix cars, save those who are drowning, narrow down the future to win or lose, strong or weak. We are choosing to destroy this planet and all its inhabitants. 

Trump, Hitler, Mussolini, have been created by patriarchy. Silence the doubt, the questions like where did we go wrong? Read Hannah Arendt, Martin Luther King Jr., Maya Angelou, read poets, The Talmud, the Bible, John Lennon -- be afraid but not frozen. The winner is dead.

Money is power, war is god

 

Once upon a time there was a planet called earth. It was small but beautiful. Full of trees, air, rain, wind and climate which supported life. Thousands of years of humanity, patriarchy, civilization and science by 2025 we (thinkers) loved power more than anything else. We had destroyed our future not just by our habits but our religions like capitalism.

Humans had become so vain they focused on how they looked, what they owned and where they stood on their inherited pecking order. When I began working as a clerk typist, a friendly man wanted to help me. He said its all about the pecking order and where you sit on that. It was a large engineering company, most people were politely kind. This meant to me, we are civilized.

What I couldn't see was the effort it took to civilize our world. As years passed I learned the pecking order has no morals. Capitalism was organized by the principles of the economy. But I believed we were becoming civilized because we moved away from glorifying the wealthy and powerful and talked about serving the greater good.

I believed we knew too much to allow Hitler or Mussolini to bring back authoritarian rule. We were calmed by advertising and the use of the idea of "we". America was very powerful even more than Great Britain. The power was in the money though and I didn't see capitalism as having the will to control everything. I had swallowed the idea that democracy was here and safe. We had learned to get along as a member of the greater good.

I read some of Carl Jung, and other wise people whose ideas were stacked safely in the local library. I went to church and listened to a man preach on Genesis. I was pregnant with my first baby then. The man was a bishop and he quoted the story of eve and how women will always suffer in childbirth because Eve disobeyed the "Lord".

This was a new perspective for me. I thought mothers were revered because they incubated the embryo that would become civilization. I saw it as a sign of honour not punishment. So then I left the Anglican church which I had always thought as advanced in its theories.

Fifty years later, having joined the Unitarian fellowship I was aware that power was available to us all if we lived in peace and love. And I learned things I didn't want to learn.

Patriarchy is a constant influence.

The Collapse of American Empire - YouTube

 https://youtu.be/4RfKnQBvXF4?si=DczzI4uI1v8BQrx0

by Noam Chomsky