Dysfunctional Planet

Sometimes we are so blinded by the bigger picture that we fail to notice it's made up of small pieces of exquisite and painful artistic moments that pass for our collective lives. And there's nothing like a death in the family to bring everything to a flash of blinding and humbling clarity.

For me, my mother's death and the circumstances around it painted a very clear picture of the world we live in. We are one large dysfunctional family who desperately need to change our relationship to each other and the planet if we are to survive as anything but wounded automatons. Within each of our own families are the families that occupy this planet. Within each of us and our respective villages lives both the cause and the cure. We have to open our eyes and our hearts and set aside the divisions or it's the end of us as a species worth anything but a scornful footnote in the passage of time.

Think carefully on this because it means our survival. Think of the last decade, the Bush/Cheney/Rove years, the divisions, the taking of sides, the losses, the rage, the despair,  and apply it not only to my family but to your own, and then apply it to the planet.

Look and see how expertly our fears and hurts and disappointments were and continue to be manipulated by those who can see what we no longer even recognize in ourselves anymore--that we are being led to the slaughter by those who care nothing about us other than the material sum of our parts. We are used by the politicians, the churches, the greedy until there's nothing left inside us that is our own anymore. We belong to them and they use us and then toss us aside because there's a continual replacement for us when we no longer suit their needs.

They are able to do this because dysfunctional is the new normal when it comes to families. How many of us have family members who don't speak to each other over something that happened years ago, something that I doubt most people can remember in complete details anymore if asked to explain it to someone else. All that remains is the gaping chest wound of misunderstanding, of division, of taking sides, of the us and them that divides us all.

How many of us have people in our lives from broken relationships that fester in pain, that isolate us and them from the heartbreak of loss? How many shattered friendships do we have that can never be repaired? How much of our lives are taken up by avoiding people instead of welcoming them? How much hate grows inside us like an evil little seed waiting to destroy everything in us that can love?

When we are like this, we are weak instead of strong. The users come along and find easy pickings. All they have to do is put on a TV show that gives us images of those we fear and then play upon that fear. Why, in the 21st century, do we still allow manipulative and evil entities like Fox News and its hateful talking heads, the Rush Limbaughs pushing drug-fueled hatred, the politicians who are beholden to corporations instead of people, to define us?

Can anyone on this planet who swallows that crap on a daily basis explain to me in anything but slogans why they hate someone? Or is everything now a talking point written by someone else, reduced to a sound bite with no substance, with no purpose but to divide us from one another?

How far back in time does someone have to go before the immigrant becomes the invader? When these hatemongers talk about taking our country back, who do we take it back from? The Native Americans we stole it from, the Mexicans who were disenfranchised from it because white people wanted it without having to pay anything for it? The Canadians whose boundaries crisscrossed our own so often we can barely tell each other apart?

Where are the papers of those who invaded this country and filled it with hateful white people? Under what justification did those same people enslave other people based on the color of their skin and think of it as anything but the most evil of actions another human being can perpetuate on another?

When did religion become an excuse to hate, to divide, to conquer? Do these haters even bother to read the Bible and its message sof love, tolerance, and acceptance? When did unholy intermediaries with hateful agendas become humanity's direct link to spirituality and connectedness with nature and each other? And why in this supposedly advanced civilization do we still allow the same people who believed the earth was flat to define who we love and marry? What the fuck is wrong with us that so many swallow this crap so easily?

I think the answers to all these questions lie within our own families, our own relationships, our own discarded and destroyed friendships. We are the small pictures within the large picture and we need to take a very close look at it before any hope of a better world for those that come after us, dies with us. Will our decade be the one that destroys hope for the entire planet because we were so obsessed with our own wounds that we failed to see how deeply others were wounded too?

I'm asking people to start within themselves and heal at least a small piece as a precious beginning to a new world. My own family never had a chance because war took their humanity before it had a chance to grow into something strong enough to fight against the divisions. But that doesn't mean I can't heal at least a small wound in myself that is there because of their wounds.

Maybe by doing so I can forgive those who hurt me so they won't continue to hurt me by taking up permanent residence in my heart. I understand all too well my parents were victims of things beyond their control but that doesn't mean I have to follow on that path. I have options they never had and if I let those options go to waste, then what was the point of their hurt, for nothing exists just to exist. Something gives it birth, something feeds it to make it live, something makes it grow strong and powerful.

I've said over and over again that working for peace is not for the weak. It takes strength to move forward when others view it as wasted idealism. It takes courage to look war in the face and say I will defeat you. It takes setting aside the divisions and working together to stand up to power and say we are stronger than you. It takes finding the place inside yourself that wants peace and making it strong enough to defeat hate.

That place is there inside us all. We must find it. We must ignore the noise machine of hate and work together for a better world, one where corporations don't destroy our planet in their greed to satisfy our own greed. We must simplify what we believe and how we live. We must reach out to each other and stop putting up walls, stop blaming others for things that are our own fault. We must grow up and be accountable for our own actions and quit using Bibles and religions and dead friendships as excuses to be complete and total jerks. We must embrace our humanity or we will lose it forever.

Love's Truest Language by orsobear
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Dysfunctional Planet

Why I'm A Political Beast

Someone asked me the other day why I let myself get so wrapped up in politics. It's one of those questions that's nearly impossible to answer because it falls in the category of  if you don't live it as I do, then I can't explain it so you will understand. Because I care about the person who asked, I'll try and explain my passion for this mean and nasty piece of life.

I wasn't always political. What people often misinterpreted as politics was an inner sense of fairness that could never be denied. To me it is not and will never be a complete world until it is a just world. And I really believe we can't have a just world as long as there is war. We can't have a just world as long as people aren't equal. We can't have a just world as long as there are victims. We can't have a just world as long as there is greed, selfishness, intolerance, racism, bigotry and hatred.

It's as simple as that on the surface.  In my life I've learned there are certain things that  need to take place before the world becomes a just place, and they won't happen by themselves. It's too big a job. So I use my talents as a writer, as an artist, as a passionate person who cares about this planet to educate others into what needs to be done.

First and most importantly, we need an end to war. There can be no justice without peace as a foundation for a better world to grow its roots. People tell me it's an impossible dream, that we humans are a warlike species that will never know peace.

I disagree completely. I believe we all begin as peaceful creatures but life twists us around, wounds us, teaches us the wrong things, and we grow up believing we are a warlike species that will never know peace.

We need to walk back from this untruth and it requires the most difficult of all things to even get a grip on the path toward peace. It requires first and above all that we take a good look at ourselves, that we learn who we are, what shaped us, what created us, what gave form to the essence of opinions, dreams and desires we are as human beings.

But to do that we have to set aside a lot of crap. One of the biggest pieces of crap is religion. I don't care what people believe individually. I even think spirituality is good for people, that it gives them a focus, a center from which to evolve. But religion is a different thing all together. It is a business, a giant system of brainwashing large groups of people to believe just one point of view and nothing else.

This is not spirituality. This is mind control for the purpose of using human beings for things they were never intended to be used for. Religion fills the heart with hate instead of love. It creates an us and them world where there is only you and those who believe as you do against the enemy, the outsiders who are bad where you are good.

Without religion, people would question the need to go to war. They would question the need to believe in only one ideology. They would go outside their own safe little reality and explore, examine, and come to understand there are many truths.

But that makes humans dangerous to those who need war, because you see, war is a need. It is what makes people obscenely wealthy inventing and selling machines meant for only one thing: killing people. And that's where politics enters the picture. No arms merchant can sell his death tools by standing on a street corner with a cart and a cardboard sign. Arms merchants need politicians to convince the people of the need for war. And their reward is wealth and power and prestige. For a politician, this is what it means to be a human being.

And that's why I spend so much of my life educating myself and others about politics. I want people to see how they are manipulated, how they are used, how they are controlled  by those whose only desire is to make themselves richer. It's all about money and that is the disgusting simple truth of it all.

I can't fight the powerful with money because I don't have any. But I have a strong sense of who I am from decades of taking a stand for things that affect me but are not me. It is how we grow. We MUST step outside ourselves and look at what's out there from a different perspective. This is my fight, this understanding that what we are and what we believe was fed to us by those who don't really give a damn about us as living beings. We're tools to them and I am offended and disgusted by this.

And since I've never been one to sit around, I let people know about the corruption in politics, the bad people, the hypocrites, the racists, the bigots, the mean-spirited and greedy. I treat them like the cockroaches they are and shine a light on them because as they scatter and run for the darkness where they can destroy the world for their own personal gain, they know that I'm out there, that there are others like me out there, and that we care enough about the earth and those who share it with us to never let them operate freely without fear of being caught. We're waiting to catch them and they know it.

It won't stop them completely but it will slow them down. And since I believe in evolution, I have faith that even the worst in our species will change over time if they have something to change towards that is vital and alive and precious instead of evil, greedy, and dead.

 I am a patient person as is anyone who has ever planted seeds in a garden and waited for them to grow. I know I won't see world peace in my life time, but I learned long ago to content myself with seedlings knowing I  had a hand in their growth. And those seedlings are why I stay aware of politics and politicians, why I'll never shut up, why I'll never stop doing my part to make a better world. Multiply me by several hundred thousand over a period of time and you have the world I know is possible.

Corporate Planet by orsobear
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Why I'm A Political Beast

Godless Damned Degenerate for Peace

I'm the first to admit that my inner beast is a stubborn one. It grabs hold of something and doesn't let go until there's some kind of ending, some resolution that doesn't stink of enforced compromise, or that hasn't been steeped until tasteless through the filter of consensus.

Yeah, that's me. But I'm also someone who doesn't waste my time with lost causes. I have no use for people who have given up on themselves, who have turned their brains and hearts over to some master pulling strings they don't even know they have.

It's why religion annoys me. There's nothing democratic about religion. There's some power-hungry asshat behind a pulpit preaching his biases to a crowd of people who are so afraid of their inner selves, they turn themselves over body and brain.

I hate unfair fights and there's nothing more unfair than a power whore abusing those weaker and more desperate than him or herself. The average preacher claims to be a servant or emissary of god, often using the same language as other historical mass indoctrinators of human consciousness  used those words to raise armies in the service of their own special friends.

My main objection to religions is that every one of them has its blood all over wars using some mythical deity as an excuse for the pillaging and slaughter.  One of the many reasons I don't believe in god is that if one existed then he/she/it would have smacked the holy shit out of these morons starting wars and killing people using him/her/it as an excuse. And if I am wrong, then what kind of human being would I  be if I allowed myself to get sucked into these mass murder cults that demand blood and hate as some sort of twisted homage? I couldn't live with myself if I gave up my humanity that easily and for so little. What kind of evil monster would demand such horrid obedience from me that I would literally turn over all that is loving and kind about myself to him/her/it so they could kill and destroy even more?

But every day I see people who do this, people who are so insecure, so afraid of the perceived demons inside themselves that they march sheeplike to the cadence of their masters. This is what war truly is, the strong manipulating the weak and frightened so the powerful may grow richer and more powerful. The only god they're fighting for is money and power. And they use religion to keep people from noticing their hands picking the pockets of the people as they make others die for their own personal enrichment.

This has always been the story of war. It has nothing to do with honor, with glory, with democracy or saving souls. It has everything to do with powermongers who sell weapons to everyone, no matter what their politics or religion. It has everything to do with politicians who are so willing to use the lives of others to score points in some demented game of human chess, they don't even consider the casualities worthy of being referred to as human beings. It has everything to do with land grabs, with historical grievances, with family feuds among the rich and powerful. And religion is the noose they drape around the neck of the sheep so they will die willingly and ask no questions.

But it all doesn't happen so easily. To convince the sheep to enter the slaughterhouse, they use their evil minions, the purveyors of hate and propaganda. They use the lowest of the common denominators to instill hatred and rage because that way they can control the masses. Those who love are beyond the control of evil masters, but those who hate already have one hand on the leash and are ready to hand the other end of it to the first hater who stirs up the venom in their hearts.

As human beings who have the responsibility of passing on a whole and healthy planet to the next generation, we have to understand that love is the only thing that will save us and preserve something worth passing on. Love is the only way we can move forward in a time where hate is a prison waiting to enslave us all. We need to speak up. We need to make some noise. We need to understand if we don't use our own power to create a peaceful world, then it will be taken from us and turned into a weapon of hate that will be used against us. We need to reject hate. We need to reject the cultish behavior that leads to mental imprisonment. We need to stand up and very clearly state: there's a better way of going through life and we are that way.

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Godless Damned Degenerate for Peace