The War

The war is not about conflict between different beliefs, different religions, or races. Neither is it about the roles of gender.

The war is about maintaining a narrative of supremacy over the diversity of life. The war is about making the masses miserable, anxious and mute. The war is about maintaining the grip of exploitation and oppression on the world by sowing and nurturing hate and fear as endless systems.

When opinionated people believe the "real world" is this one of greed, hate and violence, it is because the tools of oppression have convinced them there can be no other way. Our choices and creative imagination have been sucked out of the sphere of neoliberal capitalism.

Education, nature, curiosity, justice and reason are continually battered by a superimposed doctrine often called "common sense" or "normal" that strangles our own thoughts before they mark the blank page, leaving the system of fear and oppression to govern society.

This is why people like Greta Thunberg still have the ability to follow their own instincts. But it comes with extraordinary courage and we see their brilliance clearly.

There was a time when entering the adult world we had to choose between our own understanding of how the world works in order to fit. Our precious freshness and innocence is given up to avoid the label "naive".

Now we are in a time when the world is trapped in sophistry, the game of thrones. As a civilization we have lost our way. Our institutions are broken or silenced.

But the war will not be won until we re-learn the value of our own imagination, our own contributions to the mysteries and sciences of relationship.

Rape Culture

Sleeping Lion

With the current focus on the Ghomeshi trial and the way victims are being branded through the courts, it would be logical to believe that choking and penetrating someone is far more violent, far more guilty than smiling and being nice.  But in rape culture the purpose of everything is to normalize rape as a way of being. To make every living entity a victim or a conqueror. In rape culture it's far more shameful to be a victim.

We are sent to the forum as gladiators whether we want to be or not. We learn that in order to win, somebody must lose. Everything on the earth is here for the purpose of being conquered by the glorious conqueror.

It's not that we are inherently evil or good.  It is that we have been, through the experiences of our ancestors, traumatized.  We have learned how to hide who we are in order to survive.  We have learned how to entertain ourselves with games that we might win so we don't address the depth and breadth of this oppression.

So it comes down to this - am I the rapist or the raped? Am I the winner or the loser? Am I the user or the used? Will I challenge what I know is wrong or recede behind the door of my home - the only sanctuary where I am allowed to be me. Will I lock those doors so no-one can get in?  Will I allow my children to enter school and the work place to be psychologically raped every time they are compared with sluts, idiots or monsters? Will I learn how to be well adjusted in this world, or if not entirely adjusted, will I survive?

The proof of this rape culture, this acceptance of violence as normal human behaviour, is the way the legal system works and media's acquiescence to power. It is not the rapist that is on trial, examined and interrogated, who must prove he is innocent, but the victim who must prove they never uttered a word, stood, sat, smiled or fluttered in any way that could be perceived as "a come on".

The purpose of rape culture is to blame the victim, to heave contempt on the tender shoots of life, and to turn innocence into powerlessness, to brutalize every diverse expression of life into silence or submission.

Cultures of rape see women as walking wombs, walking threats to man made power. Cultures of rape see men as instruments to serve the system - soldiers, CEO's, policeman, drivers, strategists - they must serve without question - and those who do question will be crucified and forgotten. Human nature is the menace and it must be reduced, ridiculed and discouraged. Misogyny will end when science has created the means to make eggs and sperm in a lab without using what nature has created.

This is the world of psychopaths who have made themselves slaves to the system so that ultimately they might make the world a playground for their egos.

This lion of justice is sleeping. Rape is not about the minds and hearts of men and women at all.  It's about the absolute triumph of the system with all its purchased institutions, over the whole of nature.

If Hate Should Win Over Love in America

The narrative coming out of media has inflamed rage, alienation and despair among the American people, and so the land is ripe for draconian measures. This will ensure absolute power for the tribe who have funded xenophobic movements, government lobbies and media, in countries all over the world.  If the haters win it means a large enough portion of American society is ready for bloodletting and the scapegoats have already been identified.  If the haters win based on their promises it means America has given up on social justice - which is not socialism but shared responsibility through civil society.

1. Planned parenthood and women's rights will be shut down along with women's voices, as promised by candidates. 
2. Same sex marriage will be banned and the LGBT community will be forced underground or targeted with violence. 
3. Abortion will be made illegal even in cases where a woman's life is at risk.
4. Medicare and social assistance will be stopped.
5. Environmental pollution will rise exponentially wiping out many species through toxic poisoning. 
6. Education funding will run out, public schools shut down and communities will be required to build and pay for their own education.
7. Libraries will be closed.
8. Psychiatry and counselling will be outlawed and mental illness viewed as a lack of morality and self-discipline. 
9. Family breakdown will be blamed on the work of feminists and liberals.
10. Worker's unions will be outlawed.
11. Civic leaders, journalists and liberal religious leaders will be arrested and placed in prisons without trial.
12. All government departments will be merged and the only services funded by taxpayers will be the police force and the military, which will eventually be contracted out to private security companies. 
13. Extreme poverty will erupt in more gang activity, and municipalities will be sponsored by corporations and run by drug cartels.
14. A war will be started with Iran, Russia and China, to employ the frustrated young men who have lost hope of making a living. 
15. Civil war will divide the country.
16. Citizens who build local economies in their workshops and gardens will have their property confiscated. 
17. The one percent will become the .5 percent and they will be much richer than they are now.
18. Current party leaders will not see this coming.

Most Americans would deny this is possible mainly because there are so many community activities built and run by good, hard working, people.  But the tribe who have employed the CEO's, the military personnel  the politicians and the experts, have already managed to erode civil society by alienating humanity from their natural power and re-creating reality through the media they sponsor.  This tribe are so powerful we will know them not by name but by their fruits - totalitarian regimes in South America and Europe since the beginning of the Twentieth Century.

The only way we can take back the power we have is to nurture what sustains us. There is no solution, no ideology, and no guaranteed strategy to fight back against the absolute rape of our psyche through the worship of power. Our hope, if there is any to be had, lies in our practice of compassion and mindfulness.

Oppressive Power Needs Enemies - People Don't

As soon as the death of Osama bin Laden found its way to the media, 'experts' were interviewed to identify the next in line. A new book by James A. Baker (who served under Reagan and George H. W. Bush) was published about a week later, titled Beyond Bin Laden: America and the future of terror.

In Uganda there is a bill threatening to make homosexuality punishable by death. Recently, John Cummins, running for leadership of the Conservative party in BC, said he believes that homosexuality is a personal choice and does not need protection under the Human Rights Act, as if to appeal to socially conservative religious groups who have openly identified as being anti-homosexual.

The treatment of women in Afghanistan, and other middle-eastern nations, makes them public enemies by requiring garments that cover their face and bodies, thereby making the feminine illegal in public. 

Terrorists, homosexuals and women are all enemies created by authoritarian interests. Of course there is a great deal of difference between those who blow up innocent people and those who love members of the same sex. However, left unchallenged to their ultimate conclusion they are treated the same. Enemies maintain the status quo, the justification of hierarchy by creating fear. Oppressive power claims ownership of the world and all its vassals by exploiting human emotion.

We need to revere life, to celebrate it, to nurture it, to create laws and systems that allow it to thrive. We need dialogue, education, music, art, poetry, transportation, work, housing, food and water.  This is enough to fill the air waves with noise as we struggle to find peace through social justice after centuries of dysfunction and violence. The task is overwhelming enough.

We don't need control, we need guidance.  We need thinkers and listeners more than charismatic speakers. We need community more than IPads and game apps.  We need wisdom through experience in conflict resolution as we learn how to live with one another, rather than hours of escapist entertainment.

We need to develop our own counsel more than we need hundreds of news channels, sponsored by a few powerful interests.

We need love, starting with self-love.

Wherever there is a heightened rhetoric around good and evil, there is an enemy-creating industry mandated to keep the masses living in fear and feeling powerless.

Yes this is apple pie, naive, idealism, written millions of times before, like a letter from a kindergarten class. But here is the clue - children get it! What happens to the minds and hearts of those who have been cleverly subjected to propaganda in all its packages, that we think preserving life is silly.