A Saturday Soapbox

 

If someone paid me enough, or otherwise incentivized me, perhaps I could buckle down and weave whatever kind of narrative my captor's audience would like to hear. Notice I said captor's and not captive. I feel I'd be the captive and my audience would demand from me a song, a dance or whatever's clever from the court jester. 

In short, would I sell out my principals and individuality for the guarantee of comfort and protection. Mmm, sure, why not? What good are principals and ideology when you are dead? I can always use clever code words to reach the enlightened few, dog whistles embedded in a text conveying an outwardly different message. 

Internal conflicts, I’ve had a few. But then again, too few to mention.

I'll shut up and let everyone enjoy their moment. But I'm thinking of a meme that should look like this: a picture of Hillary with a worried look on her face and the caption: "We're gonna need a bigger basket!"

 I will be supremely in awe of Donald Trump's growth as a human being if he can just utter the words, "I lost the election." Sadly, I don't see that happening. But that would be monumental. Paradigm shifting. It would mean that no human is beyond redemption. 

I see in DT all my own worst childlike tendencies. Not an innocent child, but a baby brat 4 year old, or 8, wherever on the spectrum kids can be the most obstinately frustrating. I see a person stuck like that, and I feel a shred of empathy, from one narcissist to another. Maybe I'm more of a closet one, since I'm aware of how odious that makes a person to the general public, and I try to hide it.

But inside each of us, it is there. The "I-me-mine" ego principal. How we dress it up may be different. It isn't inherently bad or good. It's just there. It's part of the hardware of being human. Perhaps we can call it firmware, or even an optional component, but certainly each of us humans has the capacity, or an expansion slot for it on their motherboard. 

Some would argue that ego is vital, like the CPU, completely integral and indispensable. Others would say it is the principal obstacle to enlightened thinking, more like malware, or an overreaching pre-installed operating system. I just see it as one more of those things that I will endure working with while trying to understand it, just so far as it helps me to get on down the road (whatever or whoever the "me" is who is trying to get to wherever the road goes).

How about we all just take a moment to cleanse our pallet? We have been binge watching a reality show called America Gone Wild 2020. We should be feeling dirty. Let’s take a minute to breathe some fresh air, unscented by any sort of political aroma. Just a raw, unfiltered moment. 

Good luck with that, by the way, it’s damn near impossible to do these days. It feels like were all just staring through different ends of the telescope and so naturally things look different. We each feel we are on the “right” end of the telescope. 

But my telescope, for the metaphor’s integrity, is built differently. One side does what a normal telescope does, magnifies distant objects. The other is for drawing back, and gaining a wider perspective. Not sure if real telescopes can do that, so this is my caveat. Anyway, both ends of a spectrum have validity and purpose, but neither of them is all right vs. all wrong in a moralistic sense. 

Looking at things without any lens could be considered optimal, but who among us could even claim that ability? As humans, our nature is to view things, process and assimilate ideas and beliefs about those things and use that to determine our best course of action in this world. Lenses. We need ‘em. 

Perceive the world through the “threat” lens and you will set the mind to working on how to protect yourself from various threats to your existence. That can be helpful in certain situations, where your survival depends on it. I’m not going to go into "tigers and how we need ‘em" here. Digression. But extrapolate that threat principal downward into your day to day life, and let’s see how it plays out. It’s like being in fight mode all the time, or flight, depending on the size of the threat. 

Now, I ask you—is that any way to live? Perceive the world through the peace and love lens, and you might fail to give enough credit to the powers of darkness, which certainly do exist and have their own innate characteristics. I don’t know if I can go so far as to ascribe “rightness” or “wrongness” to either side, dark or light, but I know which one feels better, generally, at any given time. 

Sometimes, I feel the need to be dressed all in black, FTW -- and all that hostility drama. Other times, I feel like, “Oh, no! We gotta root for the cute puppy dogs, we just gotta!” Then there are the times I just feel like, “I’m getting too old for this shit. Beam me the hell up, Scotty.”

Also, for there to be complete integrity, I feel we all need to own our own hate. Whether it is hate for hate (gotta love that paradox) or just a plain old everyday “I don’t like you because of XYZ,” we should, without judgment, take ownership of it. 

Don’t build a world view around it, but recognize the tendencies when they crop up in their various forms. Do you just go along with them? Do you ever question them or put them on hold, to wait for the final count, so to speak, before rendering judgment? 

More and more, I’m trying to adopt a “wait and see” approach to life. At the same time, I’m trying to be free to act in the moment, spontaneously, erroneously at times, unwittingly or intentionally deceiving myself and getting lost in the drama, like everybody else. 

Who the hell said we have to figure it all out before living life? Wing it, right? Fuck it, we weren’t given an instruction manual at birth. We have to write our own. Where am I going? I don’t know. I don’t even know if I’ll be me when I get there. Maybe we’re all on that journey. 

Maybe we should just try to let that sink in before dispensing with vast segments of the population to the wrath of hell. That’s what I propose. Before lowering the basket, think: what if things were reversed, and it was you that was being lowered, however unfairly, into the judgment of damnation? Canceled. Begone, Satan! 

So, I say, sympathy for the devil, yes, why not? When it’s all said and done, in the end, we’re all gonna need a whole lotta sympathy. ~Peace

 

 

 

 

Who knows, God may be a French poodle with an attitude problem, in which case we are all in trouble.