Both Can Be True,& Americans have Difficulty with That & Why Do We Have Be Nice,When America Have Not Always BEEN NICE? Like Other Powers in the World, Dirty Laundry Time!.. WOW 
Isn’t interesting who does the laundry or the clean-up, the ordinary
folk who are just doing their best to live a “Good Life” in Peace?
I have found this to be an informative piece of background on the current situation:
Of course, the biggest winner in all this is the weapons industry (and the political elite).
And here’s Chomsky—looking very, very old, like a true wizened sage—bringing his unparalleled critical/historical perspective to bear on the conflict, just a few weeks before the war started:
“It goes deep,” he says…
I have become a pessimist in recent years for different reasons but I too like to entertain hope and keep a little spark of it on the back-burner to avoid bemoaning the tragedy of human civilization to excess. Innocence in our culture has been drowned out by experiences, perhaps many unwanted.
I have my own reasons for saying the mental health system is a disaster but I think those who say it is broken are mistaken. I don’t think it was ever a functional system and I hope for the system to be dismantled for all the harms and injustices it has forced upon the people they treated and had contact with. These days I find myself moving away from support of western medicine but I don’t know much about the alternatives. John, you might like to read “Anatomy of an Epidemic” by Robert Whitaker, about the mental health disaster, which is now on my list of books to read.
I was resisting getting the vaccine but eventually conceded when they started saying the unvaccinated couldn’t attend public events and so on and so forth. I studied science at university level and I was against getting the vaccine because of possibly long-term side effects which they clearly did not test for when testing their vaccine. The vaccines have not existed long enough to do any long-term testing on. And I have also read an article about the virus hiding from antibodies because the receptors on the virus will literally bend away from antibody and vaccine receptors so that they can’t bind. I think humanity is in a terrible situation with corona virus and people should be praying it doesn’t mutate into something worse. I know people are tired of mandates and restrictions but the alternative where people simply accept that others will be killed by the virus like the flu is scary. (covid is not like the flu because clearly the mortality rate is higher.) When a virus is killing people in the moment, I would say restrictions take precedence over toxic waste and top soil and fossil fuels. The world has been in a bad state for a long time and people are too hyped up on technology to notice or care. Humanity isn’t exactly a bright species. I picture us a little more like lemmings being led to the cliff by a variety of pied pipers. I have read about natural immunity being too difficult to come by and not enough immunity developing after infection and the infection supposedly being worse in those who aren’t vaccinated.
If you want to change people’s ignorance you probably have to educate them instead of just sitting by the wayside as they are misled and misinformed by the news agencies and other information outlets. Information that spells out the risks of human behavior and inaction might prove to have some effect because small numbers of information consumers tends to snowball into larger readership and lasting-power of information assuming the information is legitimate and credible.
Again, I’m a pessimist too but I think that people’s ignorance is managable on some level and can be dealt with by information. The problem is creating content and curating content and getting that content out there. Maybe it could be possible where credibility isn’t based solely on people possessing university degree’s. I think you have to admit, the information taught by universities is much more concise and focused than self-learning materials. University level courses tend to be fairly dense and heavy compared to anything of a “self-taught” variety.
I don’t consider myself a pessimist. I have a wide range of response, from joy to despair, and often I am optimistic because it is simply more interesting. I osscilate quite a bit. I am pessimstic about our medical system as practiced in USA. It seems Canadians and the UK are smarter than we are and yet I worry that the Canadian Trudeau and the Dictator Putin have much in common with Donald Trump. There are degrees of difference and similarity which changes my views from day to day. Dr. Fauchi, who heads the NIH, I declare is a total fraud. He was in control of the AIDS epidemic and he is in control of the response to the current Covid crisis. He is a master of deception. In the 80’s I heard a doctor tell a group of gay men to take the experimental drugs for they should be willing to sacrifice their lives to science. I rejected this science. In those days, gay men had no civil rights, and much to lose by coming out. I never got tested for the virus, I never took a drug, and I made up my own mind about who I related to and how. The State is not a partner in such negotiations. But for others, who took the experimental drugs, there were agonizing mistakes. Many of those deaths I believe were produced by Big Pharma and blatant homophobia. I also knew of a friend, Bobby, who had been mis-diagnosed with AIDS but luckily refused the Medical Protocol. Ten years ago, it was recognized that the symptoms he had, Karposi Sarcoma, was clearly not caused by the HIV virus but is a form of herpes. This discovery came twenty years after the fact but informed me of how epicemics and pandemics are socially constructed, and are not following a schedule based on solid facts or evidence. A syndrome is a collection of symptoms, statistics, metaphors, and false assumptions. But do the syndromes change? No, they are frozen through the massive delusion of professionals who do what they are told for fear of losing thier license . We ,who resisted treatments, and took personal responsibility for our health, rather than defending against viruses with risky drugs, are still alive. I have great respect for my immune system. It is much smarter than I am. And certainly much smarter than anyone with a medical degree, who know nothing about nuturition, ecology, or mind. These are not taught in medical school. There are smart doctors who are very critical of medicine as practiced and they are treated with contempt and punitive measures. We need a mix of short term and long term but we have thrown away all caution and this rides upon rigid heirarchies of vast assymetries of power. I’m not hopeful in the short term but I am optimistic in the long term. We can learn from mistakes. As the current culture wars around Covid are minimized by the rising threat of nuclear war we can sense many resonances between these tragic melodramas. I think these two debacles have much in common. They are world events, complex and unstable, that are being treated as if there was a quick fix that can preserve an unjust status quo.
I agree. Pessimism turns into self fullflling prophecies and covers up a deep nihislism. We all go through this, if we are lucky. On the other side of that ocean of nihilsm is an awakening process that I expect will be unmet by most persons. It is true that we live for convenience. Unearned wealth is dangerous and even more dangerous is unearned pleasures. We want that dopomine hit right now. Deep pleasure comes out of work and effort. We want instant gratification and we suffer enormously from the pursuit of shallow pleasures. I don’t miss, because of mandates, the opportunity to socialize with vaccinated people in thier cafes and theatres. I find many of them are very shallow people who look down on those with a different view of things. With a good internet connection I can commune with strangers ( as I do now) and if the internet crashes I have a house full of good books I have yet to read. I will use candle light. Solitude and a large book collection is the antidote to great suffering.
I have very little confidence that I can change anyone’s ignorance except for my own.
Again, I register a distinct difference. I am a college drop out. I am not, however, self-taught, exactly. I got my higher education through weekend workshops and life experience. I have worked with many persons with PHDs who were in low-level mangagement positions like myself. I had a similar postion within society but without their debts. I am referencing USA educational system which is different from other places. Education and Medicine are in a mess. Joining forcees with small groups who share concerns seems to me an alternate way of education, an Invisible College emerges, as more vibrant networks happen. Knowledge is obsolesced so quickly, now, that going for an advanced degree is not ecological for everyone. There are some curriculums that you can make up on your own. I come from a tradition of do it your self.
That is true of some of humanity but Helen Keller, Shakespeare, and Maria Callas were humans, too. And there are the nobodys like Emily Dickinson, who wrote her great poems in secret, and died unknown. I am drawn to these folks as they are the outsiders who created a world of their own.
And when lemmings..and entertain hope…and a little spark.. what do you want to have happen, now?
I urge all of us to contemplate health rather than disease control as a new way of orienting to the future of nature. I seek and I find ways of tuning into Nature/Self. These ways are very available now to those who are searching. Seek and ye shall find. I commune with the interiors of a future humanity who have have succeeded where we have failed. Even our failure is a learning experience that we should celebrate.
I am also a pessimist about the medical system, but I am pessimistic about the medical system in Canada. There are aspects of the medical system that I am finding unjust. Problems in the American system also exist but there are at least 50% of states where such injustice isn’t an issue because people’s rights and freedoms are never taken from them or infringed upon. I was an optimist and I naively thought the systems and powers that be were fair and ethical and then I was rudely and violently awakened to the fact they are not. There is much injustice when you are poor. There is much injustice when you are falsely accused of things. There is much injustice when you do not have higher credentials than the people in positions of authority. There is abuse of authority and power in Canadian systems and after reading a little about Eugenics and Women’s rights I’m convinced that the world hasn’t really changed all that much since the 60’s and 70’s in many ways. Like racism, people learn how to overtly suppress socially unacceptable behavior but that doesn’t change a person’s mind or heart or bias. I just borrowed a copy of ‘Anatomy of an Epidemic’ to read and I am looking forward to the writer’s perspective and research. I think there are places in Europe that are quite a bit smarter than North America. If there are some aspects of Canada that are better than the USA, they aren’t to be found in BC. BC has showed up several times as committing extreme injustices against people and even now there are some procedures and policies that leave BC as the only province barbaric enough to take away people’s rights and freedoms if someone become tangled up in their abusive system.
Trudeau is not like Trump at all. And I definitely don’t think Trudeau is like Putin. Trudeau was criticized originally for being too young when he became Prime Minister but he was raised with politics in his family and I think the political system in Canada is still vastly different than the political system in the USA. I genuinely think he wants to better the country and while I know he was onboard with mandates and restrictions I think he was doing so for the interest of the greater good. I don’t think Trudeau is a bad guy but I haven’t been following any smear campaigns against him. I don’t know too much about Fauci but he can’t be held responsible for the actions of some doctor telling people they should be willing to sacrifice themselves for science. That’s ridiculous. Even in Canada, the drug research facilities they have pay people for testing drugs including HIV and AIDS drugs. I was a guinea pig for awhile but I would never test anything as strong as HIV or AIDS drugs. I tested generic pain killers and various relatively innocuous drugs. You were paid for your participation as a research subject. It was a choice and none of them would dare say people should be willing to sacrifice their life for science. Being a pharmaceutical guinea pig can be quite lucrative financially sometimes apparently but I would never test something invasive or dangerous on myself.
Women had no civil rights. The mentally ill, disabled, Natives, and minitorities and mentally challenged were considered undesirables and had little to no civil rights. There’s still major issues with the mental health system in terms of voluntary and involuntary status.
And yes, the human body is an amazing piece of ‘machinery’. The bodily systems are set up to self-regulate and typically do so quite well without human interference or neglect. I would say nutrition can be taught as I learned a little about this in some biochemistry course or other… maybe human biochemistry, I can’t recall which course. And the mind they attempt to teach about in psychology, which I also took a few courses on. Although I have not studied ecology but I’m taking a guess that they have courses in ecology as well but none of the courses I listed are likely required as breadth requirements for a pre-medical/undergraduate degree.
I think we should not have to learn from mistakes. I think people have minds and the faculties of reasoning and should be able to avoid the disastrous mistakes that leads to injustice and abuses occurring in healthcare and political systems. If our minds and bodies are not for forseeing and predicting problems and difficulties and dangers then what on earth do we have minds and logic for?
Why do you think unearned wealth is dangerous?
As for the things restricted by mandates, I tend to be a social loner a lot these days. Introversion and such. They are just convenient meeting places that are indoors when you can’t or don’t want to impose on someone by going to their home to talk or be entertained. There are shallow people but then there are also people who aren’t shallow and vaccinated (and I tend to count myself among those with depth in spite of being vaccinated). Just like there are crowds of uncritical and complacent individuals and then there are critical minds that want to do good and want to speak out against injustices but may lack the means or groups to do so. I’ve read that books can be of great comfort to the lonely but the only difficulty is sometimes you find yourself talking more to dead people than to the living. Eventually you find yourself conversing with more dead than living as time plods on. People used to be quite bright at young ages. Doctors and scientists finding success and being hailed as young geniuses and successes. These days it doesn’t seem to be that way so much. There are so many people and so much more obscurity to get lost in.
Luckily you likely don’t need confidence to change ignorance. Although technically it’s up to audiences whether they want to expand their minds or not. But you can create reservoirs of knowledge and information that could be used to reduce ignorance. I think they are sometimes called books or blogs.
I was a drop out for awhile but I went back for another degree and I finished since I was already 3 years in by the time I was considering dropping out again. Lucky you to be without the debts. It has been more than 10 years since I graduated and I haven’t made much of a dent on the debts. I never knew what I wanted to be… I joked about my 5 and 10 year plans involving book writing and curing cancer and making children but I never really knew what I wanted to be then and I still don’t. I wasn’t born knowing the path I wanted to take. This worries me some but at least I know I am not alone on this. I was never pushed or prodded to succeed and there weren’t any lofty expectations placed on me. Where I got, I got based on sheer interest and self-motivation. I am working beneath my education level currently. I am haunting a small town and finding that the work opportunities are less than fulfilling but the option of trying to make a living in a city is fraught with challenges due to the “housing crisis”, safety and violence, drug and homeless issues, cities being epicentres of covid outbreaks, and the problems with not being able to keep up with the standard of living in a city. I think the world is a disaster on many fronts. I have liked do-it-yourself also and have some books on various subjects but time is the thing I cannot make out of nothing.
As to what I want to have happen, I don’t know. There’s so much going on and and I remember when I used to see philanthropy in action where organizations like world vision would make a plea for donations for starving children in africa and I was in classes that brought up the fact people were donating to help these invisible and distant needy instead of solving the problems in their own communities and countries. I don’t know that all the problems can be solved because new problems are created and sometimes the problems or solutions merely create new problems and injustices or the world is just so steeped in abusive or unjust dynamics that they will not be able to fix those systems no matter how hard they try. There’s too much confusion. There’s too many problems on so many different levels. A to-do list of issues prioritized on level of urgency or need might be helpful. A list of time-frames of futures issues caused by issues that need to be addressed could be helpful. But then injustices shouldn’t be pushed to the backburner just because they aren’t urgent. Every injustice is in urgent need of addressing. Something that connected problems with timeframes and consequences if those issues are not addressed in a timely manner.
And war, a distant war in a country so distant and unconnected to the day to day reality of most north americans that I don’t know what to say about it and my feelings about the war are rather muted. I don’t always watch the news and if I don’t watch the news then I don’t see of or know about the war. I am not a part of the war conversation to a great extent. I do not have an interest in war and far be it from me to think I could sway world leaders on how to deal with the possibility of war on another countries soil.
The ban on the unvaccinated has been lifted in New York. For the first time in two years I was allowed into a public theatre. I bought my ticket, wandered through the maze of the multiplex, and found the auditorium. The auditorium was empty. Where to sit? I found myself a place near the center and waited for the show to start. The film was The Tragedy of Macbeth.
I know the play by heart, have seen dozens of productions. This is a fine performance by some of the finest actors, and a brilliant re-visioning of this awesome script, surely one of the wierdest expressions of the human mind ever conceived. The direction is masterful. The descent into hell is complete and yet the freshness of the black and white imagery, the tradition of the art house cinema is retrieved in this ensemble. I can only remember Bergman weaving together cinema and theater so seemlessly. Coen goes to a new level. I no longer thought of the miseries of the pandemic but of the horror of Ukraine, the weave of Art and Life.
And after such an immersive experience, I walked out of the theatre, onto the streets, in the gloaming, the witching hour, trees, sky, faces, swirling, my perception acute. The power of art has turbo-charged my perception of the world, a world near chaos, a civilization in collapse. The trees, the sky, the persons, seemed transparent and glowing. The world was pregnant with an unsolved mystery, which I will never fully comprehend. Yet, not all is lost. Even in the nihilst ocean the play re-represents there is the stark beauty of the language. I am not alone.
I come home and watch an interview of a young gay man reporting upon what is happening on the ground in Moscow. His boyfriend has been arrested for protesting the War in Ukraine. This brave young man exposes himself to possible arrest by the tyrant Putin. And yet, he speaks, with great clarity about history, collusion, the mistakes we have all made. He accepts that this war will be bloody, a great disaster, and preventable. He is already looking past this disaster towards the neo-human that must evolve out of the ashes. The resonance, I felt, with this wise, young man, and with the splendour of Shakespeare’s depiction of human delusion, was palpable. I sipped wine and made supper, lit a candle. I grieve for all of the broken relational circuits and prepare for the next wave liberation.
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
All I’ve been really thinking of is the old slogan: Keep Calm and Carry On.
This is funny. I googled ‘reasons to reduce screentime’ and it said: Reducing screen time frees up more time to connect with family and friends . Feeling connections with others can help ward off symptoms of stress, depression and anxiety.
Maybe if people learned to interact with their friends and family in a healthier manner they would be warding off symptoms of stress, depression, and anxiety instead of saying the restrictions and all this time they were forced to spend with family is causing them mental health issues.
What do you think is wrong with the way people interact that is causing them to complain about their mental health so much? Something must be wrong with the interactions if everyone is complaining about their mental health.
Did people complain as much about these types of things during the vietnam war? What was the world like during the vietnam war? I wasn’t around yet so I’m hoping you could shed some light.
Lots of black and white still shots imprinted in my sensorium. Evening news, only three major outlets, offered scripted propogana but the photos and footage, told another story. We knew we were being lied to. I watched a lot of PBS, saw my first production of Macbeth, on a black and white portable television, in my bedroom. Listened to lots of music on my record player. I studied theater, opera, classical music, painting. And there was Elvis Pressley and the Beatles. All of these memories are somehow in the back of my mind. I was a weird child, and even weirder teenager, into books, reading Dostoyevski , Jean Genet, James Baldwin, reading without supervision, ( thank God!)subversive stuff. Found out about gay movement, and had a good peer group, a small circle of creative friends and learned how to hide my identity, from a psychotic , violent, Southern family, operating within a psychotic, violent, Southern, society. After reading my diary, my father split open my mouth with his fist. He was an Army sargent, who venerated the KKK, thought MLK was an uppity nigger, and demanded that I be willing to die for my country. I called friends, and they picked me up and helped me hide out. Eventually I was able to escape. I came to New York , as a refugee, a young adult, to find my real family, after traveling in Europe.We had a lot of fun! And I am still here, in New York, most of my real family are gone, most of them wiped out by the AIDS pandemic, which was, in comparison, much more traumatic than this current Medical snafu. The same people, Dr. F, and his fraudulent friends, are still in charge of the NIH. Somethings never change. We learned little from AIDS, we learned little from Covid Crisis, as the Ukraine shifts fractured attentions to new threats, the narrative gathers momentum, the Cold War is retrieved. Books, by the way, never make me feel lonely. Idle socializing makes me very depressed. I’d rather stay home with a good book. Thanks for the question.
It sounds like you are quite the fan of theatre or perhaps of Shakespeare in particular.
It also sounds like you value real connection and resonance and shallow connection is worse than no connection at all.
How will you be using your newly regained freedoms in New York? Will your life significantly change now that the restrictions on the unvaccinated are lifted?
I’m sorry you had to endure such violence and lack of acceptance as a youth. That doesn’t sound pleasant at all and I feel for the isolation you must’ve felt from your own kin. Thankfully you had some good friends close-by or the story you are telling would be much different wouldn’t it? I think young people are all a bit weird in their own ways. And ideally they gravitate towards groups where their weirdness fits in or is accepted and appreciated. The world can be a very lonely place without friends and allies. More so these days with all the things we have to be afraid of flooding the airwaves.
Maybe the world we live in has gone insane. People seem to have more freedoms now than they did in the past but I see inklings or ways of controlling and tracking society surfacing in many domains in ways we had never known before and I worry about what is to come. People already give away their anonymity and privacy so easily for convenience… our data is probably being mined even as we type…
I understand your lack of love for socializing for the sake of socializing but I’m being force accustomed to small talk and chatter even though I’m more likely to simply remain silent and enjoy the silence sometimes.
I went to a movie this week and went to the gym today for the first time in two years. I’m thinking about taking classes and workshops. I sat in the library, without a mask, and read the NYT and Wall Street Journal. These are not earth shattering events but are moving towards a new direction. I plan to make some live contact with old friends in the near future. Today, there was more activity on the street, more options. I hope to focus on some writing projects.
I did lots of that, too, and that is very important. I had heart to heart talks when I was young with a wide range of people but as I got older and had to work in a hostile system it became more difficult to find time for depth dimensions. And disasters come and knock you off center and it takes years sometimes to re-organize. I have great sympathy for the young adults who appear in my neighborhood, in large groups, at the park, making contact. I sense they are having to re-evaluate a lot of thier own use of social media, alert to the dangers of giving away power to nefarious forces. I have heard some young folks who are very aware of these traps. There are losses and gains. For example, gay men of my age, shared a real culture because we were outlaws. I see younger gay men drift into online dating and consumerism as more social tolerance has been won. Yet there are lots more pressure for younger people to deal with the uneven playing field, which you, Cynthia, articulate so well. It is my ongoing hope that intergenerational dialogue will stimulate our collective imaginations. I have had younger friends introduce me to many new influences!
HAMAS slaughters civilians
rapes and kidnaps, women and children
teenagers beheaded
hostages executed
babies riddled with bullets
ISRAEL bombs Gaza
iron dome versus open-air prison
two million warned—go where?
land invasion
seeks final solution
US sends warships
Iran building nuclear missiles
BOOM go the Dead Sea Scrolls
Pity the peacemakers
who shall inherit the rubble.
