Category Archives: Religion

Several days after the Rapture didn’t happen….

Education, News, Politics, Religion, , , , , , , , , ,

There are a lot of people congratulating themselves on predicting the predictions of the crazy religious guy were not going to happen. Atheists laugh because it makes them feel, well, more justified in their belief that nothing exists, religious leaders feel better knowing that they still hold all of the cards (people can’t determine religious events without relying a church), and everyone else breathes a sigh of relief because Saturday didn’t end with a bad Buffy the Vampire Slayer season finale-like moment in reality. As we in the academic community like to ask, was there a teaching moment in all of this?

I’m going to venture that the answer is no. We didn’t learn anything from this, and chances are pretty good that when the next nutcase comes along, the media will hype his drivel insanely, and in the end, they’ll act like they were the sober ones all along. In other words, we’re never really going to win.

But I did want to ask a rhetorical question just for the fun of it: What if the rapture happened, but no one actually observed it? Think about that for a moment. Everyone talks about how the Rapture is going to be some fire and brimstone moment, but in reality all religious tellings tell us is that it’s going to be a moment when God brings all the worthy up to Heaven to avoid the eventual destructive battle that will take place between Satan, Jesus and, well, the rest of us. But we make a massively interesting conclusion that because the event didn’t happen in a way that was televised by Fox News and CNN that, therefore, it didn’t happen.

What if it did?

What if instead of a big, televised moment, the “worthy” were actually brought up to Heaven and the rest of us are now about to go through the rest of the story? I mean, how many people are really “worthy” to begin with? Think about that one for a moment, just on the semantic principles alone. How many people go to church every Sunday (or whatever day that organization holds its religious functions)? Of those, how many are actually living their lives in true, Christian morality, as opposed to the kind of morality that uses the thought process of “well, I generally do what I’m supposed to do, but it’s so easy to sin, and, well, it happens to everyone”? I ask this because even priests molest children, and their churches don’t hold them accountable, which means even their institutions of religion are seriously corrupt. So, if someone had to actually go out on a spiritual limb and say, who amongst you is truly devout and truly submissive to your specific religion, I argue that there really aren’t that many to begin with. I’m assuming there are probably so few actual idealized indivduals of this nature so that if the Rapture did take place, maybe no one would have noticed because so few people would have been brought up to Heaven in the first place. I figure, thinking generally, that the major numbers of the population all fit into the not so perfect category so that chances are pretty strong that when the Rapture happens, it’s going to happen in such a way that very few of us are ever going to be brought up in all its spiritual wonderfulness. If you buy into that sort of thing.

So if there really is a Rapture, maybe it happened, and the majorit of us turned out to be unworthy of the honor. If you think hard about it, it’s probably not that hard to realize that such a possibility is massively, scarily true. Remember, if you believe in that sort of thing, to the point where religion is that significant to you, how hard is it to make a leap of faith that might point out that an all-knowing God isn’t going to miss any of the nuances that make it possible for the “perfect” religious soul to be lacking in all things necessary to make it worthy of ascendance. I’m just saying.

So, like I said, maybe the Rapture happened, and so few of us got brought up to Heaven. I’d be more interesting in doing a missing persons search to see if a few people went missing that day. I’d argue that they probably live such unimportant lives, unfilled with the morass that we package as fame and fortune, so that so few of the rest of us would ever notice they left. We focus on famous people, celebrities, and the very wealthy, all of whom I would argue would never fit into this category of the person who would be brought up to Heaven for a moment like the Rapture. Oh sure, they’ll protest and get their throngs of followers to condemn such a thought, but no matter how many times Charlie Sheen talks about #winning, it’s really not winning if he’s as corrupt (or worse) as the rest of us when it comes down to the cosmic, spiritual questions.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think I”m one of the good ones either. I mean, I’m here, right? No angels descended, grabbed me and brought me up to Heaven, although a very attractive convenience store clerk did give me the eye the other day, so maybe I just missed the sign. I mean, I have as much experience in this sort of thing as anyone else, including the Pope, who would love to convince the rest of us that he has a direct phone line to the Almighty, but in reality has to stand in line like the rest of us; he’s just a lot more comfortable standing in line.

Now, having said all that, the odds are pretty good that we were bamboozled by yet another charlatan who tried to get money out of his many followers by pretending to be something he wasn’t. And chances are pretty good that another one will show up shortly after he disappears from fame and will do it again. And we’ll fall for it again because we’re stupid humans who don’t know any better. I mean, we play the Lotto in hopes of winning and have fights over baseball and football games that sometimes lead to serious injuries and death, not because we’re brilliant, but because we’re generally really stupid people who only can claim advanced evolution beyond primatives because we’re capable of making cell phone calls on our weekend and nights data packages that we pay extra for.

Unfortunately, I don’t have any answers. No one does. But we’ll gladly pay money to anyone who lies to us to convince us there are more answers than we can ascertain by looking up at the sky and seeing that the stars haven’t changed one bit in the last thousand years.

So What if Tomorrow Ends Up Being the Day of Rapture?

News, Religion, , , , , , ,

Doomsday predictions predict that tomorrow, Saturday, is supposed to be the day of rapture, when God takes up all of the good people and leaves the rest of us to deal with Satan’s return, Armageddon and all the theatrics that entails. Most people talking about tomorrow completely get it wrong and think tomorrow is Armageddon, but don’t realize that it’s only the day of Rapture. My understanding is that it’s followed by four months or so of hell on Earth and then the final end.

As expected, most people are laughing at the predictions, mainly because they come from a crackpot guy who supposedly has predicted Armageddon six times before, and not surprisingly, he hasn’t goten it right yet. So, the confidence people have in him being right the sixth time isn’t all that strong. Therefore, it’s being treated as a big joke.

But what if he’s right? What if the Rapture happens tomorrow? What do we do then?

Well, most people aren’t considering that because once that happens, it becomes a bit too late. But the possibilities, and that narrative of the story going forward have always fascinated me. I mean, the argument is that after God takes up all of the good people, he leaves the planet to everyone else to fight over. But my question has always been: “Who is fighting whom?” I mean, if all of the “good” people are gone, once Satan returns, who does this final battle take place with? The apathetic? The undecided? People who suddenly turn good because they realized the Rapture was true and that has made them sudden believers? That part has never really made a lot of sense to me from a narrative perspective.

So that means that after Saturday, if a large segment of the population disappears, there should be a whole bunch of people left over who should suddenly become instant believers. I mean, what more proof do you need than to see it actually happen? Would someone really remain an atheist if subjected to acts of God that are so obvious and present that there’s no disputing it any longer? And then, does that mean that God would then punish a whole bunch of new believers because they didn’t sign on before it was too late? Questions of this type of religiosity have always plagued me because it means to me that we have what can only be considered an unjust God, and if that’s the case, then it negates the very wonderful nature that religion should be in the first place.

Unfortunately, tomorrow is most likely going to be a day as uneventful as the next. Except a bunch of people who were devote believers are going to be faced with the fact that their beliefs were taken advantage of by yet another deceiver who used them for personal monetary gain and a quest for power. As these people would have to be seriously devoted believers, this means that they put their faith forward for the wrong reasons, which means, to be, a total waste of such great devotion that seems truly unfortunate, because it’s hard enough to find anyone with an ouce of faith in anything these days. And once someone of such devotion has had his or her faith dragged through the mud once again, that can’t make the next leap of faith occur just as easily, which means that where faith has become forlorn, what is left for them to believe in? And will they ever believe in anything again?

I think people who do this disservice to them do the ultimate disservice to mankind and the better nature of humanity. But they are NEVER held accountable for it. Instead, they will hit replay on the calendar and start recruiting more devoted followers to follow them down yet another rabbit hole of future despair and ultimate depravity. Sadly enough, those they follow will claim the ranks of the truly religious, of highest faith, and in reality, they will destroy the very foundation of which that faith was first built.

And no one will ever question it well enough to keep it from happening again.

Even in America, we have newspapers doctoring the truth

News, Religion, , , , , , ,

Religious paper cuts Clinton from iconic photo

This is a copy of a newspaper that was printed in New York.

Here is the same photograph on CNN:

President Barack Obama and his national security team watch updates on the mission to capture Osama bin Laden on Sunday.
Notice a difference? Well, in the first picture, someone went through the work of photoshopping all of the women out of the picture. Turns out an ultra-Orthodox Jewish religious organization doesn’t believe that women in a picture should be included, because it would then be “sexually suggestive.” I’m not making this up either. It might have been possible to get away with this if the picture in question wasn’t such a talked about picture in the first place (whether or not Clinton was reacting in a strange way to some mysterious event that could have been about Osama Bin Ladin). You know, without the whole Hilary thing, there wouldn’t have been a story in the first place, SO WHY INCLUDE THE PICTURE IF YOU CUT HER OUT OF IT?
Okay, let me get out front and say this before continuing on. I have nothing against any specific religion, or promote any religious organization (or anti-religious organization either). However, having said that, I think we do a serious blow to any idea of organized religion whenever we try to pull this crap over the eyes of any followers. Censorship, or doctoring the truth, is NEVER a viable alternative to the truth. EVER. Lying means dishonesty. I have yet to come across a religion that advocates lying is the right course towards anything good. Ever.
The sad thing is: Anti-religious folk are now going to use this to cripple religious organizations. And then anti-Jewish groups will use this to insult Jewish religions. In the end, the only thing that was served was we promoted more hatred, more dishonesty and ruined the chances of honest conversations in this country and the rest of the world.
Good job, dishonest newspaper. Score one for Satan. (All apologies to Satanists who weren’t involved in any of this dishonesty)

When it comes to issues of sex, America does not understand redemption

Education, Movies, Music, News, Politics, Religion, Television, , , , , , , , , ,

I’m not one to latch onto another story and then write about it, although I admit there are a lot of bloggers who do that sort of thing. But this was one issue that I found to be so significant that I felt that it needed further attention, and perhaps even more perspective. An article appeared today in Salon.com that contained a personal narrative from Melissa Petro, a woman who had previously outed herself as a former sex worker and stripper before becoming a school teacher. As a result, she was hit hard by the conservative channels of the press, and then right after that by practically every other channel of the press as well. Even the governor felt it necessary to chime in demanding that she be fired. In all, she was completely railroaded out of the teaching profession, and by reading her personal story, you can also get the sense that she pretty much has a difficult time today of getting a job anywhere.

Now, I’ve written before about how I used to go to school with a lot of women who were sex workers while paying their way through school. At San Francisco State University, in certain disciplines, it was practically a right of passage. I couldn’t tell you how many friends I had who used to ask me to come see them dance as a stripper because at the time they were actually proud of what they were doing. Not all of them were, of course, but at one point in someone’s life, there is a sense that this is a perspective of freedom that not many other occupations can allow.

Unfortunately, that occupation is now competing against the sense that mainstream America has that anything involving sex is bad. And if you happen to work anywhere near children, it’s almost a given that you should be tarred and feathered and run out of town like the wandering gypsy you are. I won’t even get into the dichotomy issue of how most of the clients of these women tend to be the same men whose wives are horrified that these women did what they did; there’s always this sense that these “bad” women come from some place that has no interaction with the rest of society. And once they show up, they have to be run out quickly, or little Johnny might grow up to be a bad person, or might be forced into sex with her, or whatever bizarre hyper-fictious ridiculousness seems to be the fear that emerges in these situations.

The simple fact of the matter is, these women are all products of our society and civilization. They were churned out by the system at one time or another, and if we all want to go into this “they’re all bad for doing what they did” then we should take some sort of responsibility for putting them into those positions in the first place. We can’t have the luxury of just assuming that people are bad by nature, and therefore it was their fault that they chose to do those kinds of jobs that the rest of ridicule and condemn.

But even saying that, there’s an immediate assumption that stripping or sex work is bad. Is it really? What is so wrong about someone who does that sort of activity? What makes that person any less “moral” or less worthy of normal civilization than any woman who has carnal knowledge with a man as part of a relationship? Discounting the whole “it’s only okay in marriage” sort of nonsense that predates 1950, “moral” people don’t really make all that much of a fuss about people who engage in sex in relationships with each other. Granted, they don’t wanted specific details, but they really don’t care. So why is someone who is engaged in this activity on a normal basis considered someone to be less worthy of belonging to our daily civilization?

Over the years, I’ve known a lot of women who existed as sex workers. For a time, I got my start creating web pages for professional dominatrices, mainly because they were the ones who really fed the business back then when the Internet was started. Strangely enough, my main clientele were professional dominants and churches. And quite often, the references I received crossed both demographics (meaning that quite often my professional dominants contacts came to me from the web sites of churches I created or maintained, and the other way around as well). We’d like to think there’s a serious disconnect or separation between both avenues, but there isn’t.

What’s really concerning parents these days is not the sex worker “problem” but the belief that sexual activity is starting with people at a younger age, and they need a criminal to point to in order to feel better about the situation. But the reality of the situation is that by compartmentalizing sex outside of acceptable parameters, we make it so that younger people see it as something to explore out of the attention of parents, and then families pay for the consequences. Most young people are getting their sex information by watching Hollywood and the music industry sexualize every woman who has anything to do with entertainment so that the expectation is that it’s something good and to be pursued. There is absolutely no connection between a stripper and a music starlett, yet conservative media condemns the stripper and hypes the product of industry. Yet, if you really think about it, the stripper caters to a clientele that is strictly adult, whereas the music industry and Hollywood will take anyone with access to an MP3 player or a dvd player.

And with all that said, I’ve kind of wandered off the topic of the original person herself, Melissa Petro. In her own words, she actually felt herself empowered by her experience as a stripper and sex worker (well, more as a stripper than as a sex worker as she didn’t seem to say too many good things about the latter). Unlike most stories of sex workers, we’re told of horrible conditions and how they were forced into the experience. She came to it on her own, and it was a productive environment for her until she found her way out. And then she made something of her life, becoming a teacher who works with children.

We should have been congratulating her, not condemning her. If we accept the erroneous argument that sex work is bad, she got out of it and came back to us to live a more productive life. She should have been the poster child for how to win through horrible circumstances. But she wasn’t treated that way. She was eventually fired, and she has little recourse of ever working again, in any job. Her own narrative explains how she moved in with her boyfriend to survive.

What bothers me most is that no one else seems bothered by this. We’ll go on with our lives and criticize her for having made the mistake of revealing her past to the rest of the world. In other words, her was a teacher giving us a teaching moment, and none of us learned a thing.

The Logic of People Escapes Me Sometimes

Politics, Religion, , , , , , ,

I just read that in Afghanistan, a bunch of people rioted and attacked the Friday UN because a Florida pastor burned the Koran in a protest last month. Doing so, the rioters killed 12 people. Part of me is left shaking my head in astonished amazement at the outright stupidity of people (both the pastor and the morons who attacked the UN). I mean, honestly, attacking their local UN is like me slapping the girl who works at the Hot Dog on a Stick shop because my girlfriend broke up with me a month ago. In other words, it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. The UN had nothing to do with some moron in Forida who basically thinks he’s superior to the rest of the human race. Yet, for some reason, stupid people felt it was important to back up the stupid actions of a stupid person by doing something massively stupid.

Look, I understand the Koran is a holy book to a lot of people. And I understand that people might be understandably pissed off when someone disrespects it. This isn’t even about religion to me. I totally understand that some people completely believe their physical book is more important than their own well-being. But what I don’t, and won’t, understand is how anything got accomplished by attacking the office of an institution that has absolutely NOTHING to do with the people who committed the offense in the first place. The people injured in the UN office in Afghanistan weren’t even Americans! So, if they wanted to try to make that kind of causality argument, they didn’t even get that right. The people killed were UN workers from completely different countries that have no ties to the US AT ALL. Five of the murdered, and yes, they were murdered, were Nepalese UN guards.

What really bothers me about this is that nothing will be learned, and nothing will really be said. Instead, we’ll go back to putting our heads back in the sand, and somewhere down the lines another ridiculous incident will happen, and no one will bother to hold ANYONE responsible.

What is wrong with this world where people randomly kill other people because they’re upset over an action that happened which had no connection to what they did whatsoever? If we want to make this world a better place, THIS is the kind of crap we need to work on. And as long as it continues happening, we’re never going to have peace, friendship or understanding amongst any people.

Now excuse me while I go beat up a Best Buy employee because Chevron raised the price of gas again.

The Whackjobs Are Making the Rest of Us Crazy People Look Bad

Music, Religion, Social Networking, Writing, , , , , , , , , , ,
The Shania in all Her Wonderfulness

Most people who know me also know that I am a big fan of Shania Twain and her music. At one point, in my numerous writings and articles, I wrote a joke story about how I created a religion completely around Shania Twain, calling in Shaniaism. Since then, I’ve often joked about how I’m obsessed with Shania Twain and she won’t return any of my calls, even though I’ve maintained a collection of all of her restraining orders out on me. For the record, I’ve never contacted Shania Twain ever, nor would I ever, but it was today that I actually found out Ms. Twain actually has a stalker who has been trying to get close to her, sending her flowers and even showing up at engagements trying to get close to her. It kind of makes joking about such things not as funny, and obviously I’ll probably have to stop this line of humor, even though I have great respect for the Goddess Shania and all things that her religion entails. Oh, sorry. Kind of went off the deep end there again.

The point of this post is to address the fact that it’s getting to the point where people are starting to have to actually be very scared of each other. In the era of Twitter, Facebook and blogs, celebrities are now very much out in the public, trying to maintain their celebrity status while appearing to be very accessible to that same public as well. This has introduced a huge problem that I don’t think was ever intended, but we now have a public out there that thinks it’s actually worthy of interacting with those of celebrity, even to the point of misunderstanding the personal nature of celebrity contact with actual beliefs that an invitation has been offered, when obviously none has ever been suggested or imagined.

We should have probably realized this was the direction where we were leading back when some nutcase killed John Lennon for no other reason than he was obsessed with the musician. Over the years there have been people overly obsessed with famous people, who have gone and done some really ridiculous things, all in the name of believing that somehow they are living a part of that celebrity’s life, convinced that if that star or starlett just got a chance to know them, everything would work out smashingly. That’s always been a part of the joke of my Shaniaism, which in case you haven’t figured out was more a criticism of organized religions than an actual worship of the Great Shania Herself. Years ago, I thought of actually sending a copy of my published article (it was originally a newspaper article) to Shania Twain herself but then decided against it, realizing that if I was a star and some unknown person sent me something that indicated that person saw me as some kind of deity, I might not understand it’s a joke or analogy, and it might freak her the hell out. So I never sent it to her, figuring that she probably had enough on her mind as it was without having to worry that some professor across the country was going to show up on her doorstop hoping to worship her in person. Unfortunately, she’s already got an alleged nutcase that’s doing that already (and he’s supposedly some well-to-do person himself, which brings me to realize that these antics aren’t limited to crazed loners who live in their parents’ basement).

So, I guess my point that I want to make is that we really need to be cognizant of the fact that there are these people out there who have a limited grasp on reality. And because our communication mechanisms these days are designed more about bringing the celebrity closer to the audience, we have to realize that some of these audience members are probably going to think that the star is actually talking directly to him or her. You see this sort of thing in strip joints a lot, which should probably have scholars studying them nonstop, if it wasn’t for the fact that I suspect scholars would gladly do so but then actually not do any academic work while visiting strip joints on university dimes. But the point I was going to make is that quite often audience members will actually think that these women working in these places are dancing specifically for them, thinking that they actually have a chance at hitting it off with the attractive woman who is really there for the sole purpose of earning a living. This often leads to a lot of antisocial behavior, and quite often it leads to a lot of misunderstandings as well. But it is so easy to see how this same type of behavior is exactly the same kind of behavior that is taking place between celebrities and their audiences. It doesn’t matter if the celebrity is in front of them, on television, on the Internet or even in a magazine. The dangerous fact is that a lot of these audience members see themselves as the direct recipient in the funnel of communication, not realizing that the funnel broadcasts to numerous audience members instead of just the one person who sees himself/herself as the sole recipient.

Unfortunately, I don’t really know the solution to this problem as I believe the problem is only going to get worse as we develop more and more technologies that put us closer and closer to our celebrities. Perhaps the interaction will eventually create a back and forth conversation between an avatar that is disassociated from the original celebrity (thus being more of an android-like participant), but that still leaves the audience member believing that he or she is sharing an intimate encounter with the celebrity. We see this similar action with music quite often, when a musician plays a tune, and the listener feels that he or she has shared an experience with the musician, even though the experience may have been a recording or an encounter where the two entities are not even in the same location. Because the recipient has experienced an emotion with the deliverer of the message, there is a sense in that recipient that both shared the encounter, leaving a potentially awkward future encounter should the two ever meet in person, as the deliverer of the message never experienced the initial feedback to understand how a shared experience could have taken place.

So, I’ll break with that, figuring that the future will probably fill in a lot of the detail that I do not yet have to share. Perhaps the Goddess Shania might bring me the answers in my sleep. After all, she is all great and holy and all that. Isn’t that how those things are supposed to happen?

Finally, Pornography Will Have a Presence on the Internet

Business, Politics, Religion, Social Networking, , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Yes, after years and years of nothing but clean, wholesome information, pictures and overt religiousness, the Internet is FINALLY going to be able to show pornography. Up until now, as we all know, there’s been a huge dearth of porn-related information on the World Wide Web, but thankfully forward-thinking individuals have figured out how to bring us smut, sex and all things of the prurient interests. It seems that the .com addresses have made it so difficult for pornography to make it way to the mainstream, so entrepreneurs designed what’s called the .xxx address to showcase specifically porn-related information.

In all seriousness, what’s interesting is the current debate over whether or not the inclusion of this address for online pornography will just provide an ability for companies and nations to just block the .xxx site completely, which will lead to x-rated content being pushed right back to the .com and whatever other addresses they can think of to circumvent the censors of various governments and private individuals.

However, what’s also significant to point out is that those who advocate pornography on the Internet are also quick to mention that by adopting the .xxx address feature, this will allow adult websites to operate in an area where they can circumvent a lot of the negativity that also tends to migrate aongside pornography sites, like trojans (be nice…you know what I mean), pop-ups and a lot of other illegal activity.

Years ago, when I was first designing web sites, back in the days when there weren’t a lot of web sites yet created, the first group that moved onto the World Wide Web was the adult industry. A few of my early clients were tied to that industry, ironically enough attracted to my work that I had done designing a few church sites (the porn people came from those churches, seeing the advantages of this new technology). Ever since those days, there has been a tendency for unsavory types of tag alongside the adult community (not necessarily because they were part of it), and it has been very difficult to separate such folk from those who were just interested in providing adult content without the illegal activities as well (the gangsterism, not the illegal stuff that is deemed bad because of moral beliefs).

Personally, I don’t see the .xxx feature being all that productive, as that industry is constantly mired in bad behavior from the lazy criminal elements that see it as easy money. Believe it or not, there are two groups of individuals who make up that industry, and quite often the good people who are just interested in providing material for consenting adults get overwhelmed by the illicit behaviors of those who are out to separate people from their money at any cost. Unfortunately, that unsavory element is the one that always provides a bad name for those who are not like that, and no matter what the good people do, they’re always tainted by the crap pulled by those who have no qualms about cheating, stealing and doing whatever it takes to make a fast buck.

When the Revolution Comes Back Home

Politics, Religion, , , , , , ,

 

Revolutions can sometimes look like this

There’s been a lot of talk of revolution lately with the whole Egypt thing. I find it interesting that when we were talking about Yemen, my first thought was that Yemen would probaby be the tipping point for other revolutions because that’s usually what happens, and people didn’t seem to get what I was talking about. My point was that revolutions tend to spread revolutionary ideas to places where people aren’t expecting such ideas to take hold, and when it happens, it happens fast before anyone can see it coming, and usually faster than anyone can make it stop.

Mubarak realized that too late. He saw the waves of revolution coming at him, and instead of responding with an immediate jump into the current, he fought back against it, never seeing the wave as the tsunami that it was. And that’s what normally happens. When the US revolution happened, some French chick told a bunch of peasants to go eat cake. Next thing you knew, she was losing her head in a guillotine, and the monarchy of France was gone. Okay, for history’s sake, Marie Therese may have said the whole cake thing, and not Marie Antoinette, but most people don’t know that, and she still gets the credit for the sentiment, so I’m sticking with that. Rousseau was known for taking a bit of liberty with history, so we’ll just let it go there.

The point is: Mubarak never saw it coming and was so inebriated by his own power that he never saw the end coming. That’s generally how most revolutions play out, quite often with the masses rushing the bastille at the last minute and the monarch/dictator no longer able to hold session with the masses listening to every word, unless they are the “last” words before a beheading.

But this isn’t really a missive to communicate the aftermath of the revolution of Egypt. For all we know, there’s another that might have to take place once the army gets drunk with its new sense of power and ends up never giving it up. I can’t predict those events, so I won’t even try.

What is important is to focus on the wave itself, because revolutions don’t happen in a vacuum. They tend to overwhelm entire areas and spread one after another on the sentiments of rich, glorious freedom. Right now, Iran is shitting a brick because of the revolution that just took place in Egypt. The leaders there are condemning ANY attempt at celebrating or protesting in the name of Egypt or any other country because they’re scared to death with what might happen there. The public stance is that the revolution took place with the overthrow of the Shah in the 1970s. They don’t want to even think about the fact that there might be pissed off Iranians right now who are thinking about freedom. But if that happens, it will overwhelm them, and they’ll never see it coming.

Aren’t revolutions cool?

But what we should be focusing on is something NO ONE in the United States is paying attention to: The United States. We like to think that revolutions can’t happen here, but we’re exactly in the kind of atmosphere where one could spontaneously erupt, and no one will ever see it coming. Half of the country continues to use rhetoric indicating it hates the other half. It’s no longer gentlemen’s disagreements anymore. Half the country hates the other half. And the other half isn’t too fond of the first half. We’re either ripe for a revolution or a civil war. We’re just too sophisticated to believe that such a thing might ever happen here.

Well, I’ve got some bad news for you. More people in this country live in poverty than ever before. There is no direction out of it either. The country itself is heading towards bankruptcy and there’s no solution for that either. The rich and powerful own most of the production and money in this country. The majority of the country consists of people who have nothing and really have very little to lose. Right now, the only thing holding back an insurrection of horrible proportions is that the majority of the people who would participate are on invisible opium, a sense that there’s really nothing that can be done about anything. If these people start to tip in any one direction, you have all of the ingredients you need for an out of control movement that has the capability of becoming all sorts of things unimaginable.

The only thing separating us from that is this facade of “it can’t happen here” which is backed up by a fantasy called “the American Dream.” We’re basically surviving off of a fantasy that’s more believable in Santa Claus and slightly less believable in various variations of God. It really doesn’t take much to push us over to the other side, and all we have to rely on is, again, the idea that it can never happen here, backed up by the history of “it’s never happened here”. Well, at least not in the last hundred years, because it did happen here once. It doesn’t take much for these people to get riled up and start killing each other. For some, it’s a colored flag. For others, it’s an idea. For even more, it’s a realization that there’s nothing left to believe in.

That last one’s scariest of all because even after revolting, you generally don’t end up with a solution that satiates that one.

Either way, it’s been an interesting few weeks lately. Just remember that democratic movements come in waves, so always make sure you have a decent surfboard and lots of sunscreen. The sun can be a real bitch sometimes.

Watching the Right Television Shows to Come up with the Right Political Answers

Economics, Politics, Religion, Television, , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The current state of these United States of America shows us not very united in the states of America. It’s pretty sad because for the last two hundred and some years, we’ve weathered some pretty strong storms that should have only made us that much stronger. You know the old line of “whatever doesn’t kill me only makes me stronger” which ironically is the only thing I have left from the woman I once loved named Marisha; it used to be her favorite line for reasons that are neither important nor all that interesting. Well, that line isn’t working anymore. We seem to be much more about divisive politics than any concept of working together for a better solution.

George Washington is the one on the right

The political writer, Morris Fiorina once wrote a brilliant book called Divided Government. In this book, he argues against common sense in that he shows through statistical examples that when our government has been divided, we’ve actually accomplished more in Congress than when we’ve been under united government. Unfortunately, his analysis wasn’t forward thinking enough to project what might happen when divided government becomes an unworkable government, when the divisions between both sides might turn out to be the destruction of government, rather than the process that allows time for “cool and deliberate reflection,” a concept once deemed that would lead to the “real voice of the American people” by George Washington in a letter to Henry Knox on September 20, 1795. Right now, we’re in a weird political process that is completely destructive and causes very smart people to act petty and stupid. When looking for leadership, which is what people do when surrounded by annoying destructionists, we’re finding all of our leaders have become ten year old children who think that pointing at the other kids and saying “he did it” is somehow what America is looking for in its leaders.

If one were to look for allusions and metaphors to explain what is going on today, I can find no better example than that of television, which is often referred to as either the “idiot box” or the mind-numbing device that causes people to stop thinking. Why should we be surprised that what we’re receiving from our leaders is nothing less than the ridiculousness that comes from stupid television shows anyway? Unfortunately, the metaphors that make sense indicate that we’re watching the wrong television shows in hopes of finding some kind of mechanism to lead us to a better tomorrow.

Right now, we seem to have leaders who have latched onto some of the worst television metaphors to dictate the types of actions they are emulating in our government. If you watch any type of television news, like CNN, MSNBC or Fox News, basically all you’re getting from commentators and pundits is analysis that sounds like Howard Cosell or John Madden describing some kind of football game where players are trying to create brand new plays by doing stuff that people have been doing for decades, yet seem to think that it’s all original. During the election, it was like watching professional wrestling, where oversized behemoths yelled “I’m going to get you, Hulk-man!” as they rip off their t-shirts and promised bloodshed of the like never seen before. But we have seen it. It’s called bad politics, and it leads to bad government and horrible representation. What these types of metaphors really show us is that our leaders are playing another zero sum game with each other where no one actually wins because each side is only focused on winning, not on what they get out of winning in the first place.

I’m going to include another television reference that can explain where we need to be going and how we should be looking at our current political dilemma. Before I do so, I apologize because I’m going to be calling on my geek nerd credentials to do so. But in the end, it will be worth it, so stick with me on this. I promise. It will be worth it.

The show I’m referring to is one that was developed by J. Michael Straczynski called Babylon 5. Without getting into all sorts of geeky crap about the show, I’m mainly interested in one of the races that was developed during the series, called the Minbari, a race of balding aliens who were also deeply spiritual. What made them significant in the show was that they were running around the galaxy for thousands of years before humans took to space, so they had a lot more time to really mess things up. Their government was run by a 9-member council that was made up of 3 members from the religious caste, 3 from the warrior caste and 3 from the workers’ caste. During the seires, the Minbari ended up in a civil war between the two more powerful castes, the religious and warrior. Why I’m discussing them is because their spiritual leader realizes at the end of their war (and the way to solve it) is that the religious and warrior castes had completely forgotten the most important caste to their civilization: the workers’ caste, the one that created all of their ships and buildings and was the one caste that suffered the most during the war fought between the two vying for power. As a result of this realization, their leader then elevated the workers’ caste to more positions on the council so that they would then be the dominant caste from that point forward.

These aliens didn't get along either, so their people ended up killing each other. Nuff said.

We have the same problem right now. We have two political parties who are fighting amongst themselves for power in our government, yet the ones suffering the most are the workers, the common citizens who don’t actually have a seat at the table, yet are the ones who are victimized by whatever decisions the two political parties make in their name. But these two parties have stopped being representative of the people a long time ago and now only really represent themselves, but claim to represent everyone else. But they do so in name only. Look at the events that have transpired over the last decade and that should be readily apparent to everyone. We’re fighting two wars that were picked by people in power who cared zero for what the common person thought about these wars. Yet the people fighting these wars are the common folk who make up the entire organization of the military that has no voice in the decisions the government makes for them. During this last election, the people were angry and spoke by using the only voice they have (the ballot box) and threw a whole bunch of people out of office because they haven’t been listening but speaking rather than listening. So a new group of people are now moving into office, and they don’t seem to get it either. Rather than realize the people sent them to Washington to get things done, their leadership thinks the people sent them to Washington to continue fighting with the government and again, getting nothing done.

So, let’s look at this from a different angle and treat government as a hospice where our goal is to treat the situation as triage. Perhaps if we look at it that way, we might realize what needs to be done to fix this problem. But I suspect that even with such an easy allusion, they still won’t get it. Or they just won’t listen. They’re pretty good at not doing that. But this triage is a blueprint to what people actually want done, even though I realize no one is interested in actually listening to the people. Think of this triage as Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, where we take care of our basic needs first and then work our way up to actualized desires once our struggle to survive is taken care of.

1. Our people need jobs. That’s been hurting us from day one. This means that the first thought should be to getting people to work. This doesn’t mean fast food jobs or retail jobs. We are a post-industrial nation that has a high-end technologically driven citizenry. This means that we need manufacturing jobs that develop high-end concept materials, like electronics, medical needs and computerized knowledge. This means government needs to help these types of industries grow and grow in our own country, not by farming out the manufacturing to third-world countries so only executives of these countries have jobs. We’ve done enough outsourcing as it is. We need stabilized positions in this country, which requires a serious focus on technological education for a workforce that has grown stagnant in building 20th century technology that is now being taken care of elsewhere. We need to focus on the 21st century and beyond by satisfying that market in a way that only our workers can do it. That means constantly being at the forefront of these markets like we used to do back in the early part of the 1900s with the previous markets of technology.

2. Once jobs are stabilized, we need to focus on making sure that people have money to spend. I’ll let you in on a little secret that government right now has no clue about (because they certainly don’t seem to get it). People don’t care about the budget. Politicians and government wonks do, but the average person doesn’t care about the budget. What the average person cares about is that the government doesn’t keep taking more of what they bring home from the jobs that they do have. This means that this whole budget mess that Obama, the Republicans and the suddenly backbone finding Democrats are fighting over is pissing off the average American. Right now, those out of work are about to lose their unemployment benefits that were about to be stretched out further. The fighting means they will now receive nothing. That pissed off a lot of people who still can’t find jobs (see number one). The second plank of the problem is the Bush Tax Cuts. People don’t really care that the rich are getting them, too. They only care that when January comes around they don’t end up paying hundreds of dollars more in taxes that they weren’t paying before. If you want to piss off the bulk of the American people, let those tax cuts expire.

This is the wrong time for the Democrats to suddenly rise up against their own president. They somehow think that people are going to believe they’re now on their side because they want to punish rich people. The average American isn’t going to agree with that. He or she is only going to see a smaller paycheck and then be really pissed off at the government. If you want to lose any mandate you think you have, that’s going to do it.

3. People want to see their government getting along. They don’t care that one side wins over the other. Most Americans aren’t that tied to the fight that they care. When they are suffering and see infighting, they see a system that doesn’t work. That makes them go nuts during elections, kind of like the last one. If nothing happens as we move towards the next election, people are going to revolt again. And when they start to realize that revolting doesn’t actually change anything, they’re left with one of two choices: Ignore it and become apathetic, or revolt the way people have done historically. That second choice seems like such a wild card that no one in government believes it will ever happen. Almost every revolution that destroyed a previous government came from nowhere and happened almost overnight. NO ONE sees it coming. And that’s what makes them so scary. So, continue to ignore the problems and hope they’ll go away, or do something about it.

What that means is our government representatives need to start looking at how to govern rather than how to zing the other side. If that doesn’t change, our government probably will. Just not as anyone wants, because changes of that magnitude rarely turn out as anyone actually wants.

‘Tis the Season to be Concerned About Money

Economics, Religion, , , , , , , ,

One thing I can always count on during this wonderful holiday season is that someone somewhere is going to try to guilt me into spending money. If it’s not on a television commercial that is concerned that my loved ones might be very unhappy with whatever choice of present I decide to give them, it’s the actual show itself where the main character will somehow be forced into a Quixotic quest to find the right present so that Christmas doesn’t turn out as horrible as every previous one that character has experienced.

But if I turn off my TV, I’m immediately bombarded by Christmas cheer on the radio. The other day, I went through my preselected channels, finding nothing but Christmas carols and admonishments about what I was buying people for Christmas. Upset at that, I turned off the radio, opened a magazine, and sure enough because it was the September issue of Girls Who Like to Do It, (or whatever magazine it was I was reading), every ad in the stupid magazine had some stupid Christmas theme that told me I was supposed to be spending money. So I walked down the street, and everywhere I went that had a cash register, including some corner parking lot that was selling trees, the topic was everything about selling me crap that I didn’t want.

I’ll let you in on a secret. I don’t really have much of a family. My parents are both deceased, my sister lives in California with her own family, and I’ve never married. My stuffed animals and I have an agreement that we don’t have to buy each other presents, so I don’t really have much in my life that concerns me when it comes to Christmas.

Except that everyone and his brother thinks I should be out shopping for people to buy people presents.

I know this is a common gripe, but Christmas has completely stopped being about the spirit of Christmas. Forget the whole stupid War on Christmas crap. We’re in full mode Buy Everything Under the Sun Because It’s Christmas mode, and it’s really annoying. You see, I actually like to shop for things for myself every now and then, but I can’t seem to do that during Christmas (which starts sometime in July and ends sometime in February) because every clerk in every store wants to regale me about all things Christmas. Some of us don’t celebrate Christmas because we’re alone.

Did you know that suicides happen most often during the Christmas season? Might that have something to do with the fact that a lot of us don’t actually have a lot going on during this seasons YET EVERYONE KEEPS REMINDING US OF IT? There are some days that if I could find a bridge high enough, I’d jump from it, if it would just get people to stop trying to instill Christmas cheer into me when I don’t have anything to be cheerful about.

CNN is no different. Just today, I was reading through articles, and sure enough there’s a self-help article on what to do when you run into a tight budget during Christmas.  How about NOT buying any gifts? That’s a solution, too. If I don’t buy any gifts, I incur absolutely NO financial hardship. Yet, for some reason that’s not an option in our consumer driven mad mania of all things Christmas.

While we’re all worried about how to afford it all, we sort of forget that there are a whole bunch of people who are struggling just to put normal food on the table, regardless of the spirit of the season. Today, in Bay City, hundreds of people turned out for a food giveaway. Dozens were turned away, because they ran out of food. Meanwhile, stores are telling us to spend as much as we can on the family because we need to jumpstart the economy. Well, I’ll let you in on a secret. The real problem is not the economy; it’s the people who aren’t surviving the economy. They kind of get forgotten so we can worry about whether or not banks can recover from losing mortgage payments. If we were really thinking about our fellow citizens, Obama and Bush would have been arguing for a stimulus package that put food on the tables of starving people rather than whether or not we bailed out banks that make very rich people even richer.

If there’s a spirit of Christmas, watching for its message on a television show isn’t where you’re going to find it. I find it interesting that we keep trying to reinvent the message of Christmas with new million dollar budgeted movies when Charlie Brown really got it from Linus every year during the most succinct, fulfilling monologue ever delivered:

Linus says, “I’ll tell you the meaning of Christmas, Charlie Brown.” And Linus, who has worried over memorizing his part in the pageant, goes to center stage, asks for the stage lights, and begins to say, in that wonderful little boy’s voice, “And there were shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flocks by night, and lo the angel of the lord came upon them and the glory of the lord shone round about him, and they were sore afraid, and the angel said unto them, fear not, for behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David, a savior who is Christ the Lord. And suddenly there was with the angels a multitude of the heavenly hosts, praising God and saying, Glory to God in highest heaven and peace on earth god will to men.”

The funny thing is: I’m not even very religious, and that monologue gets me every time. For there are many people who often misconstrue the monologue to be strictly religious, and it doesn’t really have to be. What it delivers to Charlie Brown, from Linus, is that on that day hope was delivered where none had been before. For some, it was a religious moment; for others, it was a moment of believing that perhaps there is more to oneself than just thinking about oneself. And little Charlie Brown goes off and realizes that his little tree can be much more than just the little thing he has before him, and it becomes that much more powerful as a result of his hope and, if you wish to believe so, his faith.

Not once was it about money, greed or the perfect present.