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Tuesday, July 8, 2014

Is there a connection?


                                                              Is there a connection?
(re-released from 1 year ago. Sadly little has changed...)
 

            Is there a connection somehow how my mind is wired this morning?
     Is somehow, the 1%’s, what happened at Lightning in a Bottle, Trayvon Martin, Fracking, the Middle East War, somehow all connected?
            For those of you that don’t know Lightning in a Bottle: it is just a music festival held in Southern California for around 15,000 dancing fools. No thefts, murders, stabbings, fights or really any violence occurred at previous Lightning in a Bottle Festivals, just 15,000 people of all makes and models, dancing in the dirt and watching flashing things and for a few moments, surfacing on some other plane or plain or just surfacing wherever.

A friend described once that the 1000 or so people gathered to dance to the music, all simultaneously had a experienced "a moment."
 
                Just a moment, where they all seemed    connected, all of the same spirit. All on the same plain.

     Look, my friend is my age and is not taken with descriptions of "Being in the Now" or cosmic anything, but that night, under those tress, surrounded by 100's of like minds, those dancing fools experienced something. Whatever it was they experienced under those trees, someone felt it necessary to call out the troops so that sort of thing didn't happen again!
            But this year at the fair, something was radically different. Police “Agencies”, uncover hippies and the like moved in for the sole purpose of taking away a bit of the flash from the blinky lights. 100’s were arrested and detained, primarily for asking strangers to share their drugs and once they shared BOOM.

     The bad guys freely sharing their drugs were grabbed up. Of course, we all felt safer.
            I go down to watch a friend at a drum circle on Venice beach that has been taking place there every Sunday for probably over a decade. The Drum Circle moves well off of the Venice Boardwalk, but like clockwork at 5 o’clock P.M. , local police cars with sirens blasting and lights flashing, descend on this group and disband their pounding on drums and banging on bells.

     I suspect I should feel safer then.

     What are they doing? I’m not sure I get it. I would think the more pounding on drums they do, the less breaking and entering, rape, and just general crime they would be committing.
            I watch on the news about how a young man who had been unable to join a regular police agency was allowed to purchase a handgun, follow a teenager until a confrontation occurred and the child, armed with skittles and teen anger was eventually shot dead.
     There was a verdict.

            But I don’t think the verdict should have been about the two people struggling with the gun. The verdict should have been against us. It should have been against us for letting this ever happen. For giving one power over another for whatever reason by giving him a weapon.

     It should have been a verdict against hate and fear and what we as a fearful nation have become.

     Like the woman in the Grandstands at the Town Meeting cried to the TV Camera, “I want my country back!”

     I suspect we want 2 different countries though.
 
    Later this morning, I thought about the horrible blast bombing in Boston, injuring so many innocents. But what struck me was the response. Tanks, weapons, assault squads, heavily armored vehicles, all sent out to save us from further danger: but it was all too late. The damage had been done. The psyche of the people had been bloodied and everyone looked beyond the fact that there was very little that anyone could do to save or protect us. The armed Assault team could locate the Terrorists and kill them. On TV. While we watched.
 
     Even with the devastation of the Twin Towers, we could only respond to the action after the evil had already taken place. Even though we had been warned repeatedly from multiple sources that this danger was beyond imminent, we were only left with our response to a situation that had already transpired and wiped out so many lives in a horrible televised morning extended newscast.
 
     Wasn't there ANYTHING we could have done to avert these tragedies? Do we have any plan to dilute this hatred and anger today that was not in place yesterday? Have we made a single move to reduce the chance of slaughter of the children of Newtown, or the babies of Oklahoma City or the people of Boston and of the hundreds of young black men like Trayvon Martin? (are we sick of hearing of this and now want to move on to Kim's baby or the Royal baby or whatever is the latest gruesome murder trial?)
     Sorry, but what is wrong with us and when did it go so horribly wrong?
 
            It should have been a verdict against us for allowing the fear, the racist thoughts, for spending our money on fruitless exploits in foreign lands, instead of providing our own people with a false and always to late safety.  

     It should have been a verdict against our hearts.
            I don’t have much to say about Fracking except that I just watched Gasland II and it just seemed that people, salt people, earth people, simple people had been rolled over by the things they had surrounded themselves with to protect them from oppression and evil. Politicians seemed to load their pockets and bags with money, Police protected the Oil Companies and the people were just rolled over.
            Right, wrong, progress, capitalism, Big Business or just people: something seemed wrong and horribly out of place.
            Wall Street is another example. The Banks and traders just rolled over us and no one ever seemed to pay the price, but it seems we were all robbed. They stole from each of us, from our savings and retirements and equity and the 1% made trillions and we had little to nothing to do. The warning again had come to late and even the money that was spent to defend them so they wouldn't fall too far, confused us. And schools closed and hospitals failed to open and bridges crumbled.
            Do we know why we even killed 10’s of thousands in the Middle-East? Do we understand how much of our money that could have been used to build roads and schools and spaceships and solar panels and cures for everything, had been wasted and handed to companies who spent it on the pursuit of wars most of us don’t even understand why they happened in the first place.

    Except that we had to kill those people who looked different than us. I don’t know this answer. But children died and fathers and mothers were slaughtered on all sides and I don’t know why it is OK.
            I am not calling for anarchy. I am not calling for the end to Government or leading the march of the masses to Communism or Socialism. Maybe I am calling for an overhaul that starts at birth and to create a generation that sees the world a little differently.

     There is so much love and wealth to go around, but somehow we need to have a haven to protect us from the powers that would crush us for their bottom line.
            Somehow we have to learn that we can see a kid in a hoodie and just see a kid in a hoodie.

     Somehow we have to see that we must learn personal responsibility. It starts with us as individuals and moves up, group by group until it pervades our entire society.
            Utopia? I don’t know. Maybe. Am I that isolated from the real world that it just seems as if something is wrong and if something doesn’t change, a spark will become an ember, an ember grow to a fire and the fire will bring it all down to the ground?
            (I still have work on things, but as usual, I welcome your comments. I just had to get this up. I will be back to clean this ramble up!)
           

 

1 comment:

  1. I wanted to share what someone said on another site:
    Anon:
    While I had fun, I will never go to LIB again. It is a perversion & capitalization of burner culture, although many wonderful people do attend.

    ReplyDelete