Happy Birthday, Anna

You would have been fifty today. We were ten years apart, a decade of differences that we managed to bridge because we both cared about the same things.  I've been remembering how we talked about this magical transformation then, about the party you would have, the places it would be held, the people you would invite. If you were the kind of person who suddenly overnight decided you liked parties. But I think you would have made an exception for your 50th.

It's interesting to me, as a devout Atheist, how strong your presence is in the last few weeks. I will not insult your memory by calling your presence angel or god or any of those imaginary hallucinations you detested and blamed for all the ills of the world. I completely agreed with you then and now, which is why I'm more inclined to believe I reshaped you from your ashes because I needed the purity of who you were to keep me company in what has been a confusing time for me.

Or maybe it's because Lydia's choice was taken away from her, because she wasn't allowed to exit gracefully as she planned. I wanted to fight for her. I wanted to bring up the explicit instructions she left. But in the end, I couldn't do it. I gave in to the grief of others who were with her, who spent their lives loving her. There are moments when I feel as if I betrayed her by not sticking up for her wishes. And there are other times when I think, well, maybe she waited too long on purpose. It could have been her choice at any time. Who am I to say it didn't end exactly as she wanted it to?

Maybe that's why I feel you so strongly. It's not just the whole milestone birthday thing. It's remembering how passionate you were about the right to choose anything and everything. The whole idea of someone making decisions for you was an impossibility you refused to allow into your life. I respected you for that because at the time I was still looking for my strength as a person. I was still letting others define me and my life. It was a confusing time, just like now.

You hated rich people. I always thought that was funny since you came from a very wealthy family. It seemed strange to me that you would feel so strongly about it. I envied you at times, being able to travel, to buy anything you wanted, to be able to help people and not think that feeding the hungry meant you couldn't pay the power bill. Those weren't choices I didn't think you ever had to make.

But I was wrong about you. I didn't know until your brother told me, that you had given away most of your money, that the truth was you had less than I did at the time. I didn't know the grant you said funded your project came from your own pocket, that you spent everything you had to tell the stories of war victims. I didn't know it was your money that bought all the equipment we used, all the clothing we bought for the refugees, all the deposits and rents and food supplies we filled their rented apartments with. I just didn't know.

I do remember you telling me it was a good thing I didn't have extra in my life because I would just give it away to the first person with a sad story. I wondered how you knew me so well. Now I know. You gave all yours away to a whole lot of people with sad stories. You used what you had to help a small piece of the world heal.

Maybe that's why you're so much with me now. I look around at the appalling selfishness of the wealthy, of the whiny little complaints of the privileged little divas too many of my friends raised because they thought if they gave their kids everything they wanted, they wouldn't turn on them as teenagers, that everyone would be pals forever. Now it's my friends who want to turn on their kids and are ashamed of their selfishness, of their shallowness. And all of us look to their children, the grandchildren we would have had if we had children,  instead, the ones who started the Occupy Wall Street movement, the ones who really are unselfish and altruistic and truly care about the planet more than themselves and their own needs.

But it's how we were too. We rebelled against our parents and embraced the wisdom of our grandparents. You told me once that the grandchildren would save the world and I didn't really know what you meant. I do now. Sadly, I do now. But at the same time I have hope. Yes, my dear and closest friends have children they love but don't like. It's the relationship you had with your parents and my parents had with me. It takes skipping a generation to be understood. It makes old people relevant again at a time when we start to feel like useless burdens on society. Maybe that's why my friends appreciate their grandchildren so much. They know in them is the planet's salvation. As we both often said, altruists aren't born; we need something to object to, something so foul it awakens the humanist in us and propels us to act.

I think back on one of the last conversations we had. My father had just died. You knew we weren't close, that I had run as far away from his violence as I could without leaving the country. You knew how his abuse turned me into a fearful creature who was always afraid of upsetting people because my life taught me that upset people inflict pain. We talked a lot about that, about the people I chose to surround myself with, the users, abusers, and as you said, the ones with hearts like parking meters. Those were the ones you told me to look out for because until I learned that I wasn't a bad person who didn't deserve better just because I'd spent a life time getting that message, didn't mean I couldn't one day find my strength and walk upright.

You would enjoy my uprightness these days. I still have my moments. I still don't fully trust people. But I'm working on it. I let more of my friends in than I work at keeping them out. And I've done the necessary pruning you long ago suggested would improve my life considerably. I grew strong just from that one decision.  I thank you for maybe not planting the seed, but at least providing the nourishment that helped it grow.

So happy birthday, dear Anna. I've known some amazing women in my life and you're at the top of the list. And your work lives on. You'd be happy to know that. The people you chose to take it over for you did a fantastic job. Your wish that world peace would grow from the money that came to you from sources you considered too evil to spend on yourself, have been scattered as many small seeds and they've taken root. The world benefitted from your life. That's more than many people can ever say.

Rose Bud by northwest_photograph
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Happy Birthday, Anna

Karmic debts and memories

I remembered a conversation I had a few years ago with my friend Anna. She was working on a project that involved dealing with a lot of emotionally abused humans who probably would never be okay again. Day after day she absorbed their pain as she listened to the most horrible descriptions of what kind of savagery war inflicts on human beings. My involvement with them was not as intense as hers but after a few minutes of trying to transcribe what they were telling her, I couldn't see through my tears well enough to type anymore. But she kept going, letting me cry as she kept asking question after question. I managed to get their words down without having to see what I was typing.

Later as we drank a bottle of wine and then opened another one because we really needed to get drunk, I asked her how she could do what she did, day after day, without it all leaving permanent wounds. She told me she was paying off a karmic debt and that emotions were insignificant next to that. I wanted to know what she had done that was so horrible and she said "I survived where they did not."

Those words burned a permanent place in my tissue. The interesting thing to me after all this time has passed between the day I had that conversation with Anna and the long list of people who have died since, is they gave me a strength to help others in a way I never knew I was capable of doing. I've always been able to help people on an intellectual level. I've always been really good at finding resources for people who need them.

 But I never felt adequate enough to do what Anna did. I never felt I was that strong. I'm also, as I choose to call it, willfully naive. If people choose to lie, to manipulate, to take advantage of my friendship, it's on them, not me. To be any less is to become them. I'm convinced that is how bad people are created. Those who are hurt, used, abused, manipulated, whatever you want to call it, become the person who did those things to them. I've always felt that was beneath me in dignity and it was up to them to come up to where I was and not allow myself to sink down to where they were.

It's led to some, shall we say, interesting dilemmas in my life. Some perceived my reactions or lack of them as indifference, guilt, judgement, all the things that were in their own heads. It was never about me as those things never are about anyone but the person doing them. So why let them turn you into them? Anna would like that reasoning very much. It was her.

I've found that what works for me, what allows me to be emotionally available for someone like Lydia day after day as she progressed through her dying, was that kindness and compassion truly are strengths. I would be less than I am without those traits as would most of us. I don't think we would even have the right to call ourselves humans if we didn't at least try and nurture them in ourselves. And they lead to amazing rewards. What I gained from my interactions with Lydia can never be duplicated by any other means. I came out of it more whole, more alive, more aware of how precious our time is on this planet. I had conversations I would never have had. I became more human and that makes it all worth it. I think that is a lot of what Anna was trying to tell me that day and finally I understand.

People like Anna exist in our lives so we can remember her words years later and see how they managed to have an impact on us. So when people ask me now how come I feel this need to help those who are dying, those who are in horrible dark places in their lives, those who feel alone and lost, I know it's because I survived where they did not. I've been there in all their manifestations and I'm still here. It's my karmic debt and as far as I can see, it's a lifetime one and one I don't mind paying.

Porcelain Pig by northwest_photograph
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Karmic debts and memories

Life Of Flowers

Life Of Flowers

Journey is Complete

Lydia died early this morning. Good bye my friend. You lived well.

Journey is Complete

This thing called LIFE

During one of those conversations we have in our lives and then set aside in the memory banks until it's time to make use of them, I remember an elderly woman telling me the worst thing about getting older was not the deterioration of the body, nor the shock of realizing you have less years left then you've already lived. It was saying goodbye to those you loved and cherished, over and over again until there was no one left but you.

I was young enough when she told me this to feel sadness for her but I had no way of understanding what she was saying. I thought it was about loneliness. I thought it was about having no friends or family left. I thought it was about being alone and not having a choice about it.

It was none of those things. It was instead something I can barely put into words but that anyone who has experienced the continual loss of friends and family understands all too clearly. The closest I felt to anything like this before was in the 80's where it seemed I spent most of my life going to funerals and memorial services for people my age who died of AIDS.

It sounds horrible to say, but part of you does become numb after the first dozen deaths. It doesn't mean I or anyone else loved or cared any less for those that died. It was just that after so many a part of you begins to shut down as a self-preservation mechanism so you don't go throwing yourself off a cliff from the unbearable grief.

And now after losing so many friends to illnesses and so close to losing yet another one, I find myself retreating emotionally into that safe place of numbness. But I pull myself back because I don't want to be that elderly woman so many years ago who tugged at my heart with what I thought then was loneliness but was instead just overwhelming despair at being the last one left.

I think of that. Being the last one left. I have so many people I love. I am surrounded by people I love. Just the thought of losing one is too much. I can't imagine losing them all. It's just too horrible to contemplate. But being old makes you contemplate it. You see the age and the sickness on the faces and bodies of those you love and it's the most horrible feeling in the world. And each time you have to let go, you have to make yourself strong to endure it one more time. And through it all, you have to stay whole and sentient and honor the meaning of the word "alive."

For me, part of the healing process is writing about the person I lost. Tonight I'm writing about Lydia. She's still physically present but we said goodbye several days ago because we both understood it was time. There's a point where even typing becomes an effort, where someone has to hold your head up so you can read the words sent in return, and it starts to seem ludicrous. She still managed to overwhelm me with her courage, her wisdom, and her compassion, but I sense it took all the strength she had left to write the words she did to me. I will cherish them because I know how important they were for her to say them to me.

She was the youngest of our writing group, the most emotionally scarred of the group of women who met once a month to camp out in the Sierras and write together and try to heal something in ourselves and each other. No experience in my life will ever come close to matching what that did for me, and no friendships will match the depths we all explored in each other.

There were fifteen of us, with three or four who were occasional participants. We are down to five and soon, much too soon, we will be down to four. And yet, even grief is a measured thing, even sorrow is something that becomes small and selfish when measured against far larger griefs. Our time in the Sierras was a way to try and understand, to put into words what happens when the world we think we know, becomes a world we are horrified exists.

We were children of war, born in countries that suffered from the tyranny of a small but powerful few. Lydia and her mother were the sole survivors on her mother's side of the family. I still remember the horror I felt when she read a poem to our group about trying to grow a garden and finding pieces of clothing,  long forgotten household goods, a pair of broken eyeglasses, a child's toy stained with blood.

Both our grandmothers were Yugoslavian when it was something they saw grow from a desire to live in peace as one people, but both moved away before the dream came crashing down: mine to Trieste, and Lydia's to a small community just over the border in Slovenia. Both our mothers married Americans and came here with us. Both of us grew up and became writers in the adopted language of our mothers. Both of us created art and poetry and spent hours and days and years dreaming of that magical world we knew was possible if only human beings woke up and discovered their similarities instead of their differences.

The first day we met, we recognized all that in each other without having to say a word in explanation. It was in our eyes, in the words we wrote, in the way we sat in a beam of sunlight and listened to the creek's song high in the Emigrant Wilderness of the Sierras. We knew each other. We knew what it meant to be exiled in body and spirit and that was and will always be our bond.

Last December when Lydia learned she had Inflammatory Breast Cancer and that it was terminal, I was the one who fell apart. I walked around like a zombie for days, cursing everything I could think of, yelling at life for doing this, for the unfairness of taking away my one friend who knew my soul almost as well as I did. I was angry. I was depressed. As someone who rarely experiences mood swings, this was a new thing for me, and I didn't deal with it well. I retreated. I didn't want to talk to anyone but Lydia.

And for months we've exchanged hundreds of emails of the kind two crazy writer women exchange. They went on and on and on and covered everything we could think of: stories we remembered from the writer's group, the strange man who was hired to be our guide through the unfamiliar canyons and trails and who kept to himself, the husband of one of the women who was so stunningly attractive we all stared at him like silly little giggling girls, and the many hours of lives translated into words by women who were all raised speaking a language other than English. Our words were in one language and our memories in another.

But we also shared uniquely American experiences, ones that we learned to laugh about but at the time drove us mad with the insanity of it all. We talked fondly of our mutual success story, a woman who lived two blocks from Lydia in the huge apartment complex. We knew she was abused, that the bruises on her face were from her husband, and that she was terrified.  It took weeks but Lydia slowly gained her trust and together we managed to get her away and into a shelter. Since it was a time in our lives when we were both fairly poor, we hit up everyone we knew for money and furniture and household furnishings to give her a new start. When she graduated first from High School at the age of 41 and then completed college just short of her 50th birthday, both Lydia and I felt like proud parents.

And then we talked about her evil twin, the woman who used both of us with her sad story. We believed her. We once again raised money and found furniture and a place to live. But this time the story was completely made up and we fell for it. But in one of our conversations a couple months again, we laughed about it, at how easily she managed to find the soft spot in our careful armor. But at the same time, we knew that one bad experience was worth all the women we helped in our lives. We may be suckers for a good story, but so what? There are worse things to be and when one of our success stories wrote a lovely note to share with those who helped her, we both cried because two years before that the same woman was illiterate. Life evens out that way.

I promised Lydia I would write my memories of our conversations so her daughters would one day know that side of her. I've been doing that. It's been hard. I cry a lot. I curse at the world a lot. And I hug my friends a lot.

And now as Lydia lies in that place of half here and half already making the transition, I think of what she taught me that will carry me forward with her passing and that of all the passings to come: I always make new friends. I always find room in my life and heart for more people. I've grown increasingly picky, but I do add to the assortment of fruits and nuts periodically. It's my insurance, my comfort to know there are people out there who I have yet to meet who will one day be my friends. It's how life works or none of us would be able to get out of bed in the morning.

So to my dear Lydia. Thank you. And may your transition be easy. You've earned the right to have it be easy. I love and cherish you and bless the day we met. It changed me in a way nothing else could. Thank you so very very much.

Sunset Clouds by northwest_photograph
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This thing called LIFE

Ten Years

Ten years and we're more divided as a nation than we've been in a long time. In ten years we went from a moment of common skin to one where we allowed the politicians and their handlers to erase that precious lapse into temporary humanity. They filled that quickly emptied hole, with our help, yes our stupid and blindly obedient help, with hatred and judgement and division based on the stupidest of reasons: political ideology.

And of course, religion. Let us not forget the last refuge of the damned, their precious and overwhelmingly destructive weapon called religion. Would there even have been a 9/11 without religion? Would there have been the horrible polarization of one people against each other without the evil and wretched pulpit poundings by the holy hatemongers?

When life is turned upside down and humans are at their most vulnerable, there are always the sick and twisted voices in the crowd sensing the perfect moment to inject their hatred into the open wounds. There are always the behind the scenes puppet masters exploiting the moment for personal gain to start a profitable war, a dirty and secret arms deal, a private army paid for with taxpayer blinded-by-ideology dollars. There are always the politicians waiting with their hands out to profit from the corporate greed of the warmongering wealthy who never miss a chance to make a buck from human misery. And worst of all, far worse because they pretend they are doing good instead of the same evil, are the churches who spread fear and terror and obedience so they have a ready crop of willing idiots to do the bidding of the wealthy and morally-deficient.

This is what the other terrorists have accomplished in ten years as they ripped into the horror of raw wounds with the ferocity of savage beasts blinded by their own blood lust:

1. A terrified and beaten down populace whose only source of information comes from turning the remote to "on" and ingesting what comes from the screens and the radios without question, with the same blind and unquestioning obedience they were taught  in church.

2. An increasingly ignorant and brainwashed populace who believe unions that their grandparents were beaten to a bloody pulp forming so their grandchildren could work decent hours for decent pay without being exploited by the corrupt and the wealthy, are somehow the enemy.

3. The elevation of the most bigoted and ignorant mouth breathing knuckledraggers into the face America presents to the world.

4. A completely programmed population who takes to the street to support the right of mega-insurance and pharmaceutical corporate lobbyists to deny them basic health care, and if they lose their homes, their loved ones, their ability to live as a functioning human being, that it's somehow their fault for not being good enough to afford a decent health plan.

5. The horrible and completely religion fed outright hatred of anyone "different." It's a hatred that creates reasons and makes up lies to justify hate. It hatefully interprets bible quotations into an excuse to hate gays, brown people, black people, non-christian people, non-religious people...anyone different. It creates justification to invade women's bodies with theology and misogyny. It invites the bigots to crawl out from under their rocks and think they have the right to dictate what goes on in other people's bedrooms and lives. It allows the racists to walk around without their white sheets because it's open season on anyone different, especially a Black President.

6. The destruction of any functional education system by demonizing teachers, because after all, there is only one real cure for ignorance and that is education. It's why the tyrants always burn the books first but always leave the Bibles intact.

7. A government that doesn't even pretend to work for the people anymore. They know if they're not re-elected, their wealthy donors will give them plush jobs for life as a reward for the millions they made for them while in office. And the corporate lobbyists know they can easily replace the politicians if they don't win their elections because the American people will never hold them accountable, never make them work for their vote.

8. Demonizing anyone and anything that could really make a difference in the average Americans life. Any politician who accidentally slips through the net and tries to work for the people is soon caught up in some exaggerated scandal to discredit him or her until they're no longer effective. Any journalist, any writer, any news anchor who dares to break from the pack is soon reduced to braying jackass for the corporate masters. For every hate mongering gasbag like Rush Limbaugh, there are hundreds of ethically challenged and greedy wannabes waiting for him to mess up so they can replace him as the voice of the terminally stupid.

9. Allowing greed to define every aspect of American life to the point where fraud and outright theft of the country's wealth and resources became acceptable because greed became acceptable. But in order to steal outright, the people had to be convinced by corporate windbags like Limbaugh and the Fox News Presstitutes, that all regulations preventing them from taking whatever they wanted had to be thrown out. No limits on the amount of pollution companies could spew into the air or dump into the drinking water or leave behind in an oily infested mess were promoted as a necessary thing if they, the almighty corporations were to continue to thrive, to thieve at will.

10. And after the outright theft, the busting of the unions, the elimination of health care plans, the theft of what little income was left was taken so the rich wouldn't have to pay any taxes on their stolen gains, those who were desperate enough provided what every desperate society has provided: a volunteer army eager for a miserable paycheck so the wealthy could enrich themselves with endless wars fought over religion.

I'd say in light of these accomplishments, Bin Laden won. He really did destroy America and every day we remain divided, we reward him for doing so.

We The Sheeple by godless_heathen
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Ten Years

We like bland, crazy weiners.

After days of inane chitter chatter and tittering over Weiner's weiner, the wave of mediocrity moved to the "this or that moron for President" debate. I tried to watch. I really did. I figured if anything would wash away the image of one of my favorite shit-stirring politicians suddenly turn into an annoying frat boy tweeting dick shots to the world, it would be rousing debate between dumb, dumber, dumbest, and oh my fucking gawd what a moron Republican dick fest calling itself a debate.

But instead I felt as if I'd stumbled onto a private funeral where everyone was standing around awkwardly pretending they hadn't done nasty things to the corpse at some time in its previous existence.

You had the plastic ken doll being shoved into the face of Mr. Nasty Googler while everyone dared him to touch him again n the bad place.

You had the tin foil racist trying to bottom feed off the leftover crazies the others, in spite of their love of crazies, realized were just too crazy for them. That must have been some sorting process, the crazies deciding who would earn the title, kind of like a combination of cooties and Lord Of  The Flies.

You had the blingmaster who was there hawking something or other to pay off his jewelry bill so he could afford to buy a newer, younger intern-wife.

You had that guy with the corn meal mush sounding name who devoted his life to keeping Al Franken from ever becoming a senator.

You had the guy who made it his mission in life to deny poor black children the right to eat his crappy pizza because their neighborhood sucked.

And finally you had she of the crazy eyes who was last seen hiring a helicopter so she could take out half the cows in Minnesota from the air. She has something against cows. I think they said naughty things to her.

So, when the combined candidates were asked if they preferred, bland or crazy, they pulled down their pants, whipped out their cameras, and tweeted their answers.

And America slopped it up as if they were pigs at a trough, but not as smart as the pigs and refusing to eat the slop unless it was first doused in religion and corn syrup.

More than anything, the debate taught me that we are doomed as a species if this is what rises to the top of life's big toilet bowl.

Will someone please flush before the combined stench of stupidity, greed, thievery, and just plain fuck-headedness makes us all choke in disgust of what we've become?

Religious Crazies by godless_heathen
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We like bland, crazy weiners.

Religion as Sheeple Control

Now that the latest crapture scare has been postponed until October so Harold Camping can collect  millions of more dollars, it's time to focus on those he used his fear mongering tactics on to accumulate wealth. They are feeling betrayed, disappointed, scared, and left behind. They want to know why only their bank accounts got raptured. Others see a potential gold mine of fools that still have the potential to be milked even more for jesus.

We're not talking about ordinary people here. These are the dumbest of the dumb, the ones that religion prepared from an early age to be unquestioning, idiotic, cult-leader following morons. They're the first ones stepping up to be used whether it's by a church, a cult, a political party, or anyone with an agenda needing lots of unquestioning obedient bodies to create the illusion of grassroots.

It's about the Republicans, the Koch Brothers, The Chamber of Commerce, and Karl Rove spending millions and millions of dollars to create an illusion the Tea Party is a people movement instead of a backroom deal among rich assholes. It's like Farmville, only you populate it with idiots instead of cows.

None of this would work without a ready supply of less than intelligent sheeple who have already been programmed by their churches to never question authority, to follow each other obediently off a cliff because jesus told them to, and to empty their pockets in the name of salvation to make  saviors like Harold Camping, Dick Cheney,  and Karl Rove even wealthier than they already are.

For those who are shaking their heads as they read this and think religion is not that bad, especially their own,  show me a country that is formed and shaped by its religion and I'll show you a country that is going backwards instead of moving forward toward the next century.

Examine the history of your own church, the politics it promotes, and the money it collects from you to promote that political agenda, and then tell me your church is only about spiritual growth and belongingness. And I'll tell you again that the first thing that tyrants do when they want to control a country is to bring god and religion to the forefront of their politics and get people like you to pay for it all.

"In 1956, the nation was suffering through the height of the cold war, and the McCarthy communist witch hunt. Partly in reaction to these factors, the 84^th Congress passed a joint resolution to replace the existing motto with "In God we Trust." The president signed the resolution into law on 1956-JUL-30.  The change was partly motivated by a desire to differentiate between communism, which promotes Atheism, and Western capitalistic democracies, which were at least nominally Christian."

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For those who are unfamiliar with the McCarthy witch hunts (mostly those of you reading dumbed down history books forced on you by religion-infected schoolboards), it was about decent people who committed no crimes other than daring to think for themselves, who were labeled as ATHEIST Communists simply because they didn't belong to the correct church or promote the party line of a particular religion-based political party.

Setting aside the reality that most Atheists in America are not now nor have they ever been a large bloc of Communist Party members (even Atheists like to buy lots of cheap crap at Wal-Mart and eat crappy fast food), the painting of one with the brush of the other is yet another trick employed by those wishing to use religion as a noose around the necks of the idiotocracy.

I'll even go so far as to say it wasn't the fear of Communism that scared the power mongers, but the lack of religion. After all, Communism, like any ism, depends on groups of followers all believing the same thing and marching in unified brain and boot to destroy the unbelievers.

This is no different than religion which demands the same blind obedience, or Fascism which allows no dissenting opinions, or the current Republican party with its teahadist minions wanting to destroy everyone and anything that doesn't buy into their Randroid selfish cruelty and paranoia.

There is no difference between religion and Communism, religion and totalitarianism, religion and mental slavery, religion and Fascism, religion and mind control, religion and lemmings walking blindly off a cliff because their "leader" ordered them to do so.

Religion has been and always will be a tool used by the rich and powerful to control the weak and stupid, and scam artists like Harold Camping will be sipping Pina Coladas on some sunny beach with all the money he raptured from the dumb ass sheep as long as religion is so intertwined with politics they are no longer separate entities.

There's a reason our forefathers were so concerned that churches and government remain separate entities. They knew the potential for abuse and were trying to prevent it from happening to the new United States of America. But they forgot about the all-consuming greed of politicians and the wealthy who saw religion as a very useful tool for controlling the masses and making them do their bidding.

And never in their lives could they have imagined the kind of idiots that religion created in a couple short centuries, the kind of people who forgot the sacrifices made so its people could live in freedom from the oppressive yoke of religion.

If they came back to life and saw what this country has become in the name of imaginary playmates and evil puppet masters caring only about wealth and power, they'd abandon it to its own stupidity and look for more intelligent life elsewhere, because seriously, the lives they gave simply weren't worth the ignorance that grew from those sacrifices. In fact, it's a slap in their faces that will resound for centuries and will eventually destroy what they fought so hard to build.

One Night Stand Jesus by godless_heathen
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Religion as Sheeple Control

The death of Osama Bin Laden

Someone asked me today why I haven't written anything about Bin Laden's death. I've been thinking all day about what to say in return. As far as I know I haven't directly lost anyone he  killed. Yes, I experienced the horror and cried for days over 9/11.  I still tear up when I see the towers burning. I still feel anger and sadness over the senseless loss of life.

I have lived under the totalitarian fearmongering opportunistic politicians inflicted on this country, while they used Bin Laden as an excuse to do what they wanted to do all along. I have experienced the rage, the despair, the disgust over how brown-skinned Americans were made to pay for the crimes of someone they didn't even know, and more than likely didn't even agree with. For that alone, I am glad he is gone.

I share a similar sentiment with Jon Stewart who on last night's Daily Show said that while he was alive Osama Bin Laden was the face of Islam instead of the young people trying to make a better world for themselves in Egypt, Libya, Syria and other Middle East countries. As someone who had to live under the Bush regime, I know what it's like to finally be free of the world's perception that we are all like that dumb ass piece of jingoistic crap. For this reason alone, his death is important. It gives a new face to people who didn't wear the old one very well.

But I am a pacifist. I can't condone killing. And yet I know the world we live in. I know how desperate the Republicans are to make Obama fail, and so I celebrate that they have to eat at least a bit of their own shit as they are forced to congratulate their nemesis for taking out their symbolic reason for keeping this country under their oppressive thumbs. I'm not so pure that I don't enjoy that part of it immensely.

I suppose for me it all depends on what comes after. Now that Bin Laden is dead, will the fearmongers finally lose their talisman or will they find another one to take its place? As I told someone who expressed optimism that finally the Republicans/Teabaggers will accept Obama as their President now that he showed courage, determination and took the risk in spite of the political peril--not likely as he's still black, no matter how many Bin Ladens he kills. We can't change that about our country. It still has its racist snake pits in Dumbfuckistan and there's not much we can do about that other than live as opposite examples of what they believe.

Maybe that is my hope with this death, that maybe, just maybe we can come together as one people and realize the wedges between us were artificially created by the Karl Roves and Dick Cheneys whose definition of terrorism is a united America. Maybe we can realize our own best interest is to be found in coming together as one people and finally put those heartless and greedy political asshats behind us.

But it's hard to be optimistic when I see that the Republican/Teabagger trolls are still out there promoting their stupid sthit. They still earn their pennies by doing their masters' bidding. They still post their ridiculous talking points, mindlessly, stupidly, without thought of how they are the rot destroying the country from within for people who care nothing about them, who care only about power, about money, about using everyone for their own purposes.

In this sense, Bin Laden's death means nothing. It is just another dead body, another excuse to cover the airways with nonsense as filler in betweeen the real purpose of selling us more stuff we don't need but are told we must have. The mainstream news media went from covering a wedding between two figureheads that are meaningless to most Americans, to covering a symbol used to oppress us for the last ten years.

But if there is a good side of this it is that President Obama, who I perceive to be a decent man fighting against a machine fed on wealth and power, will rise a few points in the polls and will probably be elected because of it. When you consider the options on the Republican side, the mean-spirited, corporate-owned slime who want to destroy him so they can take over again, then Bin Laden's death is a very good thing.

And truly, in the end what it means to me is meaningless because to the people who lost loved ones on 9/11, to a country that was forever change by that event, his death is a long overdue symbolic act that gives us all a chance of moving forward.

Out of Afghanistan by orsobear
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The death of Osama Bin Laden

The Religion Virus

As I was going through the bizarre offerings on YouTube to find a video to update my Atheist Blog, I once again was struck by the similarity of the religion-infected sheeple. They're all so certain there is only one way to wherever it is they think they're going, and if you aren't along for the ride, well...let's just say things like inquisitions and burnings at the stake seem like reasonable solutions to them.

But through the hilarity, disgust, and mind-boggling astonishment over what some people believe, there was also a sense of familiarity. I've seen that same glow of the true believer sense of rightness, that same fervor of my way or you suck attitude, that same we're going to get your ass for being different threat,  in people who don't believe the fairy tales the sheeple embrace in their pathetic ignorance, but they have adopted the same means to promote their own agendas. They just don't refer to it as "religion."

Let me be clear here. I'm not talking about Fascists or other moronic cults. I'm talking about so-called average people, those who even define themselves as alternative thinkers, as free spirits, as spiritual new age believers in rainbows and pretty ponies dancing with unicorns for the benefit of humankind. The kind of people who are appalled by religious propaganda and hate mongering, yet fail to recognize how it infected them and how they perpetuate their own version of it.

From several decades of interacting with different groups, populations, and classes, I can always tell when someone was raised in a "religious" household, no matter how adeptly they think they've managed to run from it. Throughout my life as an unwavering Atheist, I often explored what else was out there just to make sure I wasn't being just another sheeple embracing another cult called "Atheism." And also because I'm endlessly fascinated by the world I live in and I want to know as much as possible about it.

Due to this insatiable curiosity, I submitted myself to various groups in order to gain a better understanding of my place on the planet. For varying amounts of time and involvement, I was part of groups who embraced Shamanic rituals, New Age woo-hoo-ness,  Arteeste communities,  political movements, The Joy of Hippies, antisocial geekiness, both serious and tragically funny writers, hardcore and wannabe Scientists, spiritual seekers and lost souls who enjoyed not knowing where the hell they were going.

Unlike the religious sheeple, I subjected what I believed to input from other people's beliefs. In my life, I've read the Bible--both old and new testaments, the Book of Mormon, the Koran, and various Buddhist and Zen treatises. I talked to people about what they believed and why. I took part in their circles, their prayers, their dances, their spiritual endeavors. 

And I came through the other side still an Atheist, probably even more of one as a result of those experiences. I also came though the other side vastly disillusioned with these groups because it was rare for any of them to exhibit any curiosity, other than judgement or condemnation for what I believed or didn't believe. I was there to be converted, to embrace what they believed one hundred and ten percent or nothing. It didn't matter if they were Christians or New Age Hippies. The dogma smelled the same.

I also learned that no matter how one tries to run from their religious upbringing, it hangs on them for life. It's a deadly, infective virus nearly impossible to eradicate because most people don't know they are carriers. Here's some examples of how it infected some of the so-called escapees:

They made a religion out of everything. I'm talking about people who formed circles to worship nature and then made a whole list of rules on how to go about it and you didn't dare deviate from that list. They justified it by saying things like "rituals are important" and other things lifted straight from their early religious training. I knew my time around these kinds of  folks were at an end when I found myself moving rocks and sticks around on their altars just to fuck with them.

People who grow up with authority-based religions are easy prey for anyone with an agenda they wish to inflict upon others. All they have to do is frame it in updated terms that make it seem they can help "save" someone or something from an unspeakable--and defined by others, evil. They make someone or something the enemy and then everyone bonds around the idea of destroying the enemy (devil).

I've seen this most often in divorces where sides are formed and you're either for or against one or the other--and you'd better be for or against the 'right' side or you become the enemy, the other, the bad guy. It's religious wars reduced down to the personal. It's people believing the only way they can show loyalty to a friend is by trashing their soon to be ex partner, just like one religion does to the others. Who needs those kind of friends or cultish beliefs? I ran from them the same way I ran from the religious cultists as they felt and behaved the same.

The most frightening and disgusting thing I saw that was a direct result of infectious early religion were the "morality" gangs who were so convinced their point of view was the correct one, they were willing to destroy people, careers, friendships just to inflict it on everyone else.

But they never did the dirty deeds themselves. Priests, Gurus, and Political heroes always make sure their own hands remain clean so they recruit those willing to blindly believe and whisper scary words to them and call it truth. They then send these recruited minions to do the dirty work with disgustingly malicious gossip as their versions of  god's word, just like in the good old inquisition days when gossip was the rule of law used to sentence people to death.

And by assigning it to a whole like "morality," "the greater good," "justice," and other high and mighty sounding terms, they never had to blame their behavior on their own individual biases and issues. They never had to allow a  chance of rebuttal, an opportunity to interject facts and truths into the stream of endless shit coming from the holy center. There was no other side. It was their one way or not at all, just like any other inflexible religious cult.

Over and over again, these groups who thought they had left religion behind, created situations where you were either for or against, or you were ostracized by all sides.

And nothing was too repulsive to the Borg mind. In one situation I had a couple true believers pretend they were interested in my friendship just to gather ammunition against one of my acquaintances for someone else's personal vendetta. No matter what I said, what topic of conversation I brought up, they awkwardly and annoyingly steered the discussion back to that person, just like those crazed bible thumpers who keep quoting bible verses no matter what the subject. They were on a mission and the facts were inconvenient things that got in the way of their beliefs.

I think back on those people and others and I see something else they had in common with religious cultists: nothing was ever their fault and whatever they had to do was justified by the greater mission. They learned that from religion, that no matter what they did, no matter what evil they committed, it was justified by their version of god/deity/mentor/authority figure's teachings on what was good and what was evil. That made it okay to lie, to use, to spread horrible gossip, to destroy the infidels who weren't part of their cultish cliques.

And like good little religious cultists, they excelled at handing out punishment by shunning and ostracizing those who believed differently or who behaved in manners that didn't fit their rigid set of communally defined rules. They did this because at the heart of who they were, at the complete core of their beings was the ultimate truth: they were and are control freaks.

I'm convinced that is what makes people turn to religion and other clannish/cultish behavior. They're control freaks who suddenly find themselves with the ultimate weapon to inflct on others: dogmatic truth with not a speck of breathing room for any variations. And guess who's in charge of defining and handing out the punishment? Why, them of course, the true believers, the religiously tethered, the moralistic punishment squad, the judgement police.

And they never have to take a bit of responsibility for their actions, they never have to apologize, they never even have to consider the pathetic and pitiful excuse for human beings they are, because they always have their version of god/goddess/spirituality/religion to blame it on. Having religion means never having to say you're sorry for being a total asshat dickwad to another human being.

That's the gift of religion that keeps on giving long after most people thought they escaped from it, and that's why I will fight against it until the day I die and become ash on the wind. I consider it my obligation to helping make a healthy planet for future generations.

Cthulhu Died by godless_heathen
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The Religion Virus

When is enough ENOUGH!

If it wasn't for the mainstream media's obsessive need to make news entertaining and spectacular instead of informative and educational, a hate-filled whack job hiding under the cover of christian preacher  never would have had a world-wide audience for his Koran burning.

The talking heads and their handlers in the media that elevated him to a household name have the same amount of blood on their hands, if not more, than he does. Without them, he would simply not exist outside his own small, hate-filled little universe.

But then, neither would the equally despicable and hateful Westboro creeps. Without the media they'd cease to exist outside their weekly hate fests held in a double-wide church in some farmer's cow pasture.

And let's not forget more of the media-created cretins whose fifteen minutes are ticking down at a faster rate than they can spout radio-induced talking points: the teabaggers and their mind boggling stupidity that allows them to be used by unethical douche bags like the Koch Brothers.

They are a completely media-created phenomenon funded by the unethical and immoral greedy bottom feeders who figured out a long time ago that a person who hates is an easily controlled tool. So all they had to do was appeal to the lowest of the racists, bigots, christian crazies, and knuckle dragging jerks and before they knew it the Teabaggers were born.

But they're on minute 14 and one half. Less than 200 turned out for their latest rally, compared to nearly 100 thousand who turned out in a snowstorm to protest a teabagger governor in Wisconsin a couple weeks ago. Soon, the Republicans who used their stupid asses to get elected will tell them to sit down and shut the fuck up. Their fifteen minutes are over. Even the most idiotic of TV viewers eventually gets tired of badly spelled signs and grown men in three-quarter pants who want the guvmint to keep its hands off their Medicare.

And let us not forget the ultimate media created shallow excuse for a human being: Sarah Palin. Ever since her target over the state of Arizona got a bunch of people hurt and killed, the media is running from her like some one-night stand who keeps sending slutty, unwanted text messages they delete unread. OMG, they don't heart you anymore!

In spite of the short shelf-life of useful idiots like Palin and the baggers, they manage to do quite a bit of damage in their brief period of time. People die because of them and their hateful rhetoric. People get hurt because of their lack of awareness of their own stupidity. If you think there's only so far dumb asses like this can go, I have two words for you: President Bush.

One excellent way to minimize the damage is to quit giving them a stage. The big lie we are told is that Palin and the teabaggers represent a very large part of the country. They don't. They are a small sect that is amplified by those who have an interest in making them seem bigger than they are.

Palin is too stupid to realize how completely she was used and then discarded once she became embarrassing instead of merely a useful idiot. But it evens out because she was only in it for the money and she got what she wanted. It's too bad that some good people in Arizona paid the price for her shameless greed.

Anyone who has spent any time talking with the kind of people who have a We the People sign stuck in their front yard knows that logic and common sense will never work on them. That's the weak point of educated people. We tend to think if only people have enough facts they will come to their senses.

Guess what? Most of these people are still angry over losing the civil war and having to share public drinking fountains. They live in a world where ignorance is prized and intellect is suspect. You'd be afraid of smart, educated people too if you couldn't read or write beyond the third grade level. Someone could say or write nasty things about you and you'd never know it or be able to fight back against it. That's how ignorance breeds with itself and infects future generations.

And the lack of education leaves them ripe for using by those who know how easily they are programmed. It isn't that big a step from having religion slammed down your throat week after week, and being told over and over again that insurance companies and banks really do care about you and only dirty filthy liberals believe otherwise.

If the news media were truly interested in being the kind of respected journalistic outlet that exists in most of the world's countries, then they'd let the ignorant wallow in their ignorance and focus on reporting news that was geared toward adults instead of simple-minded cretins.

But they're not interested because the media exists only to sell us shit. They know that old white men watch the evening news so they advertise boner pills and adult diapers to them. And interviews with teabaggers. And Republican talking heads. And war criminals who have found Jeezus and a new scam to run and need to address the sheep directly to put it into effect.

And it all works because most of the country is more concerned with the sex lives of celebutantes, the  hidden peek into the homes of wealthy douche bags who would sic the dogs on them if they ever got within a mile of their compounds, and what the latest status symbol are to make up for the empty, meaningless existence they so desperately need to escape.

War On Women by godless_heathen
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When is enough ENOUGH!

The Softness of Being Human

It's been a rough week for a lot of the world. I tried to limit how much of the Japan catastrophe I let in, but there's that side of us humans, that side that feels its own mortality too keenly and so we are drawn to death and dying in a strange sort of relief that it wasn't our turn this time. But the scope of it is beyond us to take in all at once.

We can imagine it on a personal level when we see ourselves in the desperate faces hoping against all truth that a loved one survived. We grab our own loved ones tighter and try to look away, try not to see that it ends the same for us all, that the only difference is timing and how many of ourselves we leave behind to mourn.

I wasn't surprised to hear I wasn't the only one who was too numb to cry, too horrified by the magnitude of the triple disasters to let ourselves cry. I suspect it's  because there were simply too many dead to mourn them properly, to give them the tears they deserved. So we held it all back out of respect for the ones that would be missed if we cried for just a few.

But when this photograph appeared on numerous websites, I lost it completely. I cried for everyone I had ever lost because of a small, helpless dog who couldn't understand what had happened to his world. I knew, his human knew, everyone around him knew. But all that poor little dog knew was that something horrible had happened and now his human was there to love and comfort him, that it was going to be alright. It was the simplicity of it that got to me as it did to everyone who saw this photograph.

And then there's the horror of Libya. Like many people I have mixed feelings. I can't support war. I can't support killing. I'm the kind of person who picks up spiders and puts them outside. I don't want death anywhere near my hands. And yet, here's a cruel and ruthless dictator savagely murdering his own people. As horrible as that is, as much as I want there to be some other way to make him stop, as much as I want him to wake up and decide to be a decent human being, I know that's not going to happen.

I want to believe this is different somehow, these missiles are different than the ones that were launched in Iraq over oil, using the same language of justification, a dictator killing his own people. I'm jaded at the mercy missions of governments because I know there's oil in Libya too and the gluttony of the world for it makes killing more likely than if the country was nothing but olive trees and geckos.

Altruism always comes wrapped in bloody, oil-drenched rags and we wipe up our guilt by saying we're taking out a bad person instead of saying a lot of innocent people are dying too. How is our killing any different than his? Because it's for a better reason, a more noble cause? It is still death. It is still dying. It is still bombs and missiles and oil fields that mean much more than they should. Maybe a small dog caught in the rubble of a building brought down by a missile launched for "humanitarian" reasons would allow us to cry over the solution being as awful as the problem.

Anger is also a reprieve from the tears I'm sure would flow for days if I didn't have it as a valve to keep them in check. I'm angry at the photographs of elderly people fending for themselves in the rubble, the hardship they face simply because they are too old to get out and start over. I'm used to America not giving a shit about its old people. It's a selfish country and one obsessed with youth. All you have to do is listen to politicians talk about Social Security, Medicare, and other programs to know if a similar disaster hit here it would be the young and powerful first and the old could rot in the streets for all they would care.

But to see Japan inflicted with this lack of respect for its elderly is equally as devastating as the wreckage all around them. I want to yell at the TV loud enough that they will hear me: get out there and save the old people you selfish fucks! But I know the young are suffering too and so the old are expendable. Life is for those with years ahead of them, not behind them. It's another form of missiles being dropped to save lives.

My anger is also for nuclear reactors that were old and needed to be replaced, updated, modernized, but because Japan seems to have adopted the most disgusting of American greed, these ticking time bombs were left to decay so the shareholders, the investors, the powerful rich and wealthy could increase their profit margins.

It points out clearer than ever that if this could happen in Japan, a country devastated once before by the worst of nuclear power, then what hope have we in America of ever having a safe form of energy? What kind of safety considerations would the Enrons, the Exxons, the Koch Brothers, the Massey Mine owners, BP's and Halliburtons feel worth spending money on? I wouldn't trust them as far as I can spit, but here they are in charge of our energy sources, with nothing but their endless greed as a guarantee that money means more to them than human lives.

And today I received an email from Lydia. She wants to give her kids one more Christmas. She struggles through chemotherapy, radiation, all kinds of horrible medications just to drag out a few more months just so her children can have another Christmas.

Like I said, it's been a rough week.

Reflecting Pond by northwest_photograph
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The Softness of Being Human

Flinging Poo at the Monkeys

Ever since the earthquake and tsunami hit I've been watching the coverage from various sources, both online and on television. I rarely watch TV, especially for news, and the crap that passes for coverage on American network and cable news is appalling when you compare it with international sources. Before I could find the cable station with straight from Japan coverage, I had to wade through an embarrassment of faux-journalism that was painful to watch.

First of all, it has never been more obvious that the talking heads on television are not journalists but merely actors paid to read lines written by someone else. They're so used to handing off the story of the day to whatever propaganda spouting figure the network has provided for them that they are helpless when it comes to any in depth reporting done on the fly.

They fumble, stumble, and end up repeating inane phrases over and over again, as they desperately try and pass the story off to the expert who isn't there because there's no party line to push when it's a tragedy that happens somewhere else.

Give them a few days. I'm sure the experts will show up soon to promote more oil drilling in our backyards and less regulations in order to free up the supplies. How can the Corporate Borg resist such a natural disaster opportunity to promote their slash, burn, and get stinking rich policies?

But until then there's always "the man/woman on the street" who is asked how they feel so they can blather on in mindless fashion like some idiot wind-up toy until they're mercifully cut off for yet another commercial. And when the talking heads return after a slew of totally inappropriate perky ads, there's always a near feeding frenzy over some poor unfortunate fool who claims a friend of a friend of a cousin three times removed who knows someone who may have been in Japan AT THE VERY MOMENT THE DISASTER HIT!

All this pales when measured against the bigger shame, and that is how the news actors, when they finally get their new scripts and no longer have to try and improvise, talk down to the viewers. They know that most of their audience probably consists of knuckle-draggers and geriatric viewers who haven't quite figured out that new-fangled internet thing so they're forced to watch TV News. They know their audience's knowledge of Science probably came from visiting the Creation Museum, and watching the Jesus was an Alien channel that ignores any history older than 6000 years.

They know they have to explain the simplest concepts such as what is an earthquake and did god do it or is it more of that global warming (snicker snicker) nonsense?  If they don't simplify it to barely breathing level, they know their audience will go back to watching Jesus's spaceship land on the pyramids, or some gossip station that talks breathlessly of people they've neve met but knos more about than members of their own families.

I joke but I was shocked at how simple the concepts were that they're forced to explain to what is probably the most uneducated and unsophisticaed audience on the planet. "There are two kinds of earthquakes; shallow ones and deep ones." It's obvious they're assuming their audience slept through the third grade, and they're probably right.

Meanwhile, online you can get live coverage with real experts who actually study earthquakes, who know something about tsunamis other than surfing jokes, who have no agenda to push other than letting you know the facts of what happened. You have journalists on the ground following leads such as nuclear plants that are about to explode, instead of American TV who uses the potential tragedy as an opportunity to promote coal mining and oil drilling and only covers the nuclear plant by saying horrid things like "the Japanese have a lot more reason than we do to fear nukes." Seriously. This came out of the mouth of an American news actor.

What is lost in all this simplistic reporting of monumental events is that when you have a news source such as Al-Jazeera English ,the Guardian, the BBC, and online blogs that carry live twitter feeds from people on the ground, you have an audience that expects a certain level of reporting. This expectation creates a literate and educated journalistic pool more interested in bringing you the story than creating or slanting it to fit a particular advertiser or network owner.

American news,  instead of reporting the facts, repeatedly slants the story to create the propaganda they're pushing. The talking heads are interchangeable and do little but act as set decorations with moving lips. Instead of in depth reporting, the American audience gets Joe Doofus on the street talking stupid shit that is supposed to be average, but instead comes off sounding totally idiotic and nonsensical.

 It beats having to cover the story and it sure beats educating the audience beyond the point where simple Scientific concepts are too difficult for them to grasp. Because if the viewers get too smart, then they won't buy the stupid, meaningless crap that takes up most of the half hour anyway. And that's what American TV really exists for: to sell stuff. They could care less about the news, about the audience, about the idiocy of the viewing public. All they care is that you buy enough of the advertised crap so they can keep their job reading propaganda written by their overlords to pass on to viewing morons.

The Daily Lies by orsobear
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Flinging Poo at the Monkeys

To the Next Generation

I had an interesting discussion with a woman close to my age today. She wrote to me after I posted a comment on a facebook discussion about needing to step up the fight against the Republican Party's War On Women. I said that while I would continue to actively play a role in the battle, it was no longer my generation's fight, and that it was up to each generation to choose their battles.

At the risk of sounding like one of those tedious old folks blathering on about young whippersnappers who just don't understand the sacrifices we made for them, I still feel it's important to do a bit of generational back slapping for what we did accomplish and explain how all of that is at risk now.

As archaic as it may sound, I grew up in a time when birth control was limited and not very affective. For women who don't even think twice about filling their prescriptions for the varieties of protection available out there, here's something to think about.

When the pill first came out, women couldn't just go and get a pack or two for themselves. They had to be married and in far too many cases, had to have their husband's permission to get a prescription. No, this wasn't the dark ages. This was the late 60's, early 70's. We wrote notes for each other pretending to be each other's husbands saying yes, we give our permission for our property to get something to put in their bodies.

Can any of you imagine doing that today? But we did and we also began to object, to protest, to demand the right to get our own prescriptions, to take charge of our own bodies. It wasn't easy and yes, some of us lost our jobs over it, were considered no better than prostitutes if discovered that we had a prescription without being married. And today, any woman has the right to get any kind of birth control she wants. It's so easy, most women just take it for granted and ignore there's politicians in office right now who consider birth control as a form of abortion.

And speaking of that topic that is guaranteed to stir up heat in any discussion, try this one on. Women of my generation and before either gave themselves abortions that often killed them or left them torn up so bad many of them never had to deal with an unwanted pregnancy again. Or they went to some backroom butcher that did the same thing, only he/she charged them lots of money to do so.

Or they did as my mother did and went to Mexico to some dirty little clinic just over the border that was a short bus ride there and what can only be described as an horrendous bus ride back. I was about nine or ten when a cab pulled up to the house (an unheard of luxury as they were expensive and rare) and the driver half carried my mother to the porch and left her there bleeding. She wouldn't let us call an ambulance because she'd probably end up in jail for having an illegal abortion. I became pro-choice that day and along with other women of my generation, fought hard for the right for women to have safe and legal abortions.

And now we live in a time when women can find a safe abortion, even though they may have to travel to another state. They really don't think about how they may not be able to get one, or that they can't afford it, or that it could kill them or leave them seriously infected or butchered.  Thanks to my generation they know they will not have their insides ripped up, infected, destroyed, and then left bleeding on a doorstep.

But we also live in a time when immoral bastards on Fox News and hate radio promote the active killing of Abortion doctors. If this doesn't get women's attention and compel them to action, then maybe it's time they woke up because those same crazy politicians that consider birth control as a form of abortion, want to classify  abortion as murder. So the next time you pop that pill in your mouth, remember that some vicious little tyrant is plotting on how to charge you with murder.

And even though racism and discrimination against women, gays, and minorities exists, it was our generation who took to the streets and demanded change, who protested and got ourselves arrested, and walked arm and arm with each other until equality for all people is the norm instead of the exception.

But we aren't there yet. There are still far too many people who use all kinds of blatantly transparent bullshit to cover up their racist hatred of Obama. There are still parts of this country where Gays and Lesbians get beat up and murdered just for being born homosexuals. There are still places in this country where women are second and third class citizens and who are routinely beat up, raped, and killed.

And far too many people look to their friends of color, their Gay and Lesbian friends, the women who hold public office and positions of authority and think not much has to be done anymore. This is where my new email friend said she felt like we did almost too good a job in changing the mindset of our culture away from racism and bigotry and toward tolerance. Because it's no longer so blatant, it no longer seems like such an important thing to fight.

But even as I write this there are people in power who are working to find ways to take away the equal rights we fought so hard to make ordinary. There are people fighting to roll back all the work we marched in the streets for, made phone calls to politicians for, wrote books for, composed music for, made art for so that equality and tolerance and acceptance of each other as human beings would seem ordinary.

Which brings me to my biggest complaint, my biggest whine as a 60 year old aging activist: how dare you not vote! I get really angry when people tell me there is no difference between the two parties, that they don't even bother voting anymore. To these people I say they need to go read up on the women who took to the streets, who got beat up, who got shunned and had their families destroyed so you unappreciative little shits could say voting was meaningless. And oh yeah, it wasn't exactly ancient history. Women in America got the right to vote in 1920. It's a good chance your grandmothers had baseball bats taken to their heads so you could stay home on election day.

And finally on that there's no difference between the parties crap...it's not the Democrats who are trying to take away the rights my generation fought so hard to make sure you could take for granted. Educate yourself and find out who the real dangerous party is right now in America and get off your ass and vote them out or everything my generation worked so hard for will disappear.

But as I told my friend, maybe that's the way the cycles move. Maybe you don't want those rights. Maybe they mean less to you than other things. Maybe the concern with the state of our planet is so dire that you can't afford to take time to fight any other battles. I have to admit I partly agree with you on this. It is a battle that must be fought.

You also have to continue the work we put into peace because it sure didn't work out too well. We still have stupid wars, stupid bought and paid for by defense contractors politicians, and too many ways the wealthy get even richer from war.

So yes, I can see there's a lot to choose from but I'd sure hate for all the work the women of my generation put in to go to waste. It's much more valuable than that and hopefully you will realize that and fight to keep it for the next generation to take for granted.

Fight For Rights by orsobear
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To the Next Generation

The Bozo Creed

In the 1970's a group of friends united by a common love of humor, philosophizing, alcohol, assorted drugs, and the college student lifestyle that enabled  them to camp out around wilderness campfires through most of their University years, got together and wrote down some principles to live by...or not.

For several decades this tract put together from various hallucinatory visions and most excellent conversations, was lost. It made a brief appearance in a student magazine sometime in the mid 80's at a college near the extreme border from which it first emerged.

Then it disappeared once more when the institution funding the publication decided they didn't want to pay for as much free speech as they ordered. So upon discovering their hunger was more easily satisfied with soft food and compliant and officially sanctioned "civil" disobedience,  said institution heaped the first shovel of invisible cloaking dirt over its much too honest carcass.

But like the lovable zombie of fond youthful memories, it rose up again at the celebration of one of its members officially entering the age of geezerhood, where it was shared to an audience appreciation of disobedience that wasn't civil.

In honor of that special occasion, please help spread its message far and wide in as many languages as possible to share the true meaning of its words. Or not.


The Bozo Creed

1. All bozos, by the very fact of the bozoness, have the option of creating our own creed.

2. A bozo is only one bozo, regardless of how many followers we profess to have. We can never be more or less than one bozo.

3. A bozo is only a bozo when we recognize we are a bozo. Before or after such a recognition, we are still only a bozo; only a bozo in this sense can be said to be in a state of bozo bozoness.

4. A bozo is no better and no worse than any other bozo. We have no labels, descriptions, or definitions, so we can only be a bozo like all other bozos. There are no superior or inferior bozos because the essence of bozoness does not take into consideration anything other than pure bozoness.

5. A bozo has no past or future as such things only serve as crutches on which others walk when they cannot accept what they see in front of their eyes. To give a bozo past or future is to label us with your own personal bozo biases. Every bozo has been born with the right to begin our life from whichever point we feel most comfortable with. If the point does not exist, so much the better, for each bozo is born with, and is proud of our madness.

6. Whatever a bozo has to say, no matter how outrageous it may seem, should be taken in the same manner as if it made perfect sense, for if we start to judge what is sane and what is not sane, we deny the essence of bozoness within ourselves.

7. Each bozo, by the fact of our bozoness, does not involve ourselves with debilitating manias such as: responsibility, common sense, maturity, or social obligations. By our bozoness, we are protected from having to become involved in status games or prestige occupations, as bozoness is all the assurance we need to survive authentically.

8. A bozo accepts that which touches the spirit and remains detached from that which does not. A bozo cannot, without betraying our bozoness, become involved in issues which do not touch the soul deeply and personally. A bozo cannot even become involved in those things which do touch us, as a bozo cannot place ourselves in the position of being judge to any action without expecting our actions to judge us in return.

9. As bozos, we accept our madness. If we cannot, we must leave it alone and not attempt to tamper with its absurdity, for the day will come when we must accept it or die.

10. A bozo laughs with life because we realize that as long as our own eyes are open, that is enough. We cannot expect more or less.

11. A bozo expects nothing and is prepared for everything.

Clown Motel by northwest_photograph
make your own greeting card on zazzle

The Bozo Creed

Creeping up on Sixty

In a few days I'll be sixty years old. I've never been shy about examining the inner stew that I am, but there's something about that milestone that seems to require not only a closer look, but also a categorizing of it. There's a bizarre necessity to write about it all as if it were something that can prepare others as they embark upon the same precipice, or maybe warn them that there be monsters beyond a certain age. So here's a few entertaining monsters I stumbled across in the last few months leading up to this point.

1. The past becomes endlessly more fascinating than when we lived it.

People I knew decades ago suddenly came back into my mental present time. It wasn't so much a desire to reconnect with them as it was curiousity. I wanted to know how closely or how far apart the different paths we took from the same point actually took us. So I used this internet tubes thing and googly googled a few of them. I didn't find the ones I was looking for (isn't that always the truth?), but I did stumble upon a few of them by accident while searching for something else.

For example, I found one of my old art professors while I was using an image search tool to find someone else's work. It was a brain cramp moment when I saw the similarities that probably neither of them would see because it's their art, after all, but I could see because I was the outside observer to both of them. So of course I wrote him an email and said hello.

The next one was even more bizarre. A friend who was going to visit the Los Angeles area wanted to find a Vegan restaurant to eat at while she was there. I offered to be the friendly neighborhood googler and come up with the perfect place. I found it, a few blocks from where her conference was going to be held and as I was reading the website, a very distinctive name leaped out at me. I had exactly three friends in High School and she was one of them. We weren't blood friends or even the kind of friends who swore to name each other's first born after them. But I was grateful to her, for the memory of her because I could say for the rest of my life that I knew three people in High School who didn't suck. That was worth at least an email.

2. Change is not always inevitable.

I also reconnected with a goodly amount of ghosts from the past who seemed happy to hear from me. We exchanged a few emails and then let the silence between us grow again as the same reasons we did so in the first place were still there.

The most disturbing in a holy calcification batman sort of way was someone I really admired when I was in my twenties. He was an amazing writer who seemed to have such a phenomenal and perceptive way of looking at and writing about life. He was easy to find as he had self-published enough books, pamphlets, treatises, and manuals to level a fairly large forest.

But in all that copious amount of self-flagellation there was barely anything new that reflected decades of life. He was writing about the same things, in the same language, with the same passion as he did forty years ago. It was as if nothing of life had touched him in any way. He was literally the same man he was then. I was sad for him.

And I knew I could write whatever I wanted to about him because  he would never read this blog.  He has a disdain for the internet, for the social aspect of it. He said it distracted him from real life and he only used it to take orders for his books and answer book related emails. It explained the time warp that claimed his soul in the late 70's and never gave it back.

But the saddest for me were some of the women. They're the kind of women who always bring me a sense of deep sorrow when I read their obituaries, the women who lived and died within a few miles of where they were born. The obituaries are always filled with the children they birthed, the gardens they grew, the things they did for others. And how they never left home, neither physically or metaphorically.

But for a few short years when we were in college together, they had dreams we shared over wine, weed, and eternal blooming hope. These same women were going to travel the world, they were going to write the great novel, paint the masterpiece, find the cure for cancer, become the first woman President. Instead, their obituaries will say they lived and died a few miles from where they were born, and will describe the children they birthed, the gardens they grew, the things they did for others. I wanted to ask them why they gave up so easily but I knew they would never see themselves as having given up so there was no point in asking, no point in trying to recreate a past that died the day they graduated and took the path right in front of them instead of venturing out a bit to see what else was out there.

In the end, all the searching and googling and writing ended up with the same result: the good people were still good, the bad people were still bad, the boring were still boring, and the interesting ones had all disappeared into a world where they couldn't be found so they could go on being interesting without others expectations of what interesting was supposed to mean.

3. Expectations are like assholes, no matter how much we deny it.

The most surprising thing I discovered was that some of the people I connected with had expectations I'd be a certain this or that and were disappointed that I went my own way. They weren't interested in what I had done with my life, in the new paths I had carved through resistant wildnernesses, in the way I had managed to live a life of honor, ethics, integrity and love, and still survive on my own terms, by my own wits, and with no one telling me what to do but me.

Yes, I'm surprised that I make my living with art created digitally with cameras, computers, and scanned hand-drawn and created images. Yes, I'm surprised that I make my living writing about what I do, that I've channeled my passion for words into something that gives me pleasure, that allows me to share some of what I believe and most of who I am with people all over the world. Yes, I'm surprised that I've sold things with my art in just about every country in the world, all the provinces in Canada, and every state in America. Yes, I'm surprised that I've written to and shared dreams, philosophies, world views, visions, hopes, despairs, sadness, joy, sorrow, and love with people all over the world.

So I'm surprised when people I connected with again always said they thought I'd be a writer or an artist or an activist, but they never thought I'd be doing what I'm doing. It makes me wonder why they expected me to limit myself to one thing when there were so many options. It makes me sad that they see me as unusual and different and an exception to how they thought I should live.

I want to say to them that all I really wanted was to make a difference. I didn't want to go through life without leaving my mark on it. I figured with so many options available to me that I had no choice but to exercise them all if I was truly going to make a difference by having lived. So far, I think I'm accomplishing what I set out to do.

4. Some wounds don't heal.

Of course there are people I think about, people I loved, people I trusted, people I let into my life too easily and by the time I noticed they were bad people it was too late to shut the door. They are me as much as any of my art or my words or my actions. But the deep wounds don't heal. I can still feel sad, angry, upset, afraid when I remember them. I can let myself love them even after they hurt me. But there are some paths you can't walk backwards on and the path of wounds is one of them. I leave them alone, let them remain as lessons, as reminders that no matter how many good and decent people you know in life and call friend, the biggest assholes will always be the ones whom you loved the most. Age and time doesn't seem to even that out any. I hoped it would, but it seems some wounds are timeless and are meant to be with us in that shape and form for life. Maybe in the next decade I'll figure that one out to where I can explain it better.

Winter Pond by northwest_photograph
Large format printing by Zazzle

Creeping up on Sixty